And how bloodydarehe mock Aster right then? Indignation and worry and fear and reluctant amusement all combined into an odd, giddy feeling he couldn’t name, and he wrapped his arms around Corin’s chest and grappled him.
“You bastard,” he panted, only half joking. Corin let out anoofof surprise as Aster rolled, trying to turn Corin to his back.
They struggled, and Aster thrashed about, got his legs around Corin’s hips and—actually succeeded in flipping him, landing on top and tugging his arms out from under Corin’s back. Corin had ended up sprawled crosswise on the bed with his legs hanging off the side, Aster straddling him with his ass resting in precisely the right place to feel Corin’s burgeoning erection. Corin gazed up at him with eyes half-lidded like a lazy predator, teeth gleaming white and very sharp.
It took Aster’s breath away. Corin had clearly stopped thinking about ham. Greatly daring, wondering if he’d be allowed to get away with it, he caught Corin’s wrists and put his hands up by his head, pinning them down. The way those strong fingers felt between his, interlaced, shouldn’t have been quite so overwhelmingly erotic. They were fingers. It meant nothing. But the stretch of Aster’s skin between each one sent a tremor along his nerves all the way down, his ass clenching on nothing.
He knew damn well Corin had let him win. Aster couldn’t have won a wrestling match between the two of them unless Corin had been drugged, tied up, and knocked over the head first, but he’d fought just enough that Aster had the heady thrill of triumph.
When Corin squeezed his hands, he nearly fainted as all the blood in his body rushed to his cock at once.
“Well, now you’ve turned the tables on your cruel captor, what are you going to do with me?” Corin asked, his voice a low, spine-shivering rumble.
Keep you forever. Lock the gate, forget the world exists, screw my family and their debts and their terrible marriage contracts, and beg you to never let me go.
“I’m not sure what I’m going to do with you,” Aster said instead, playing for time. He couldn’t help rocking back and forth a little bit, shamelessly pressing the crease of his ass down onto Corin’s cock, a terrifyingly large ridge in his trousers, the rough fabric a painful tease against the delicate skin behind Aster’s bollocks. Corin certainly felt like he might be amenable to… “Should I ride you again?”
“No,” Corin said, with a definitive emphasis. Aster’s heart dropped like a stone.
And then the world spun around him, and he landed hard on his back with Corin kneeling over him, eyes aflame and scales creeping up the sides of his face.
“Like this,” Corin breathed, a delicate tendril of smoke rising up from his mouth. “Flat on your back and spread open. Just like this.”
Aster would be going, andit only remained to plan his exit from Corin’s tower and from his life. Corin would never need to see or hear from another Cezanne so long as he lived.
Beneath him, Aster moaned and spread his legs, head tipped back, flushed from his pert nipples up to his hairline.
The prospect of living a Cezanne-free life didn’t thrill him as much as he would have expected only a few days ago.
Did their family have some kind of seductive curse they could lay on any man, or dragon, foolish enough to come near? No one in his right mind would look at Belinda and Aster together and think they could have such a power in common. Belinda, yes. Aster, no.
And yet.
Belinda had made Corin into a fool, her idiot worshipper, too blind to realize she’d been fucking everyone at court except for him. He’d waited for her, pined for her, subsisted on a regimen of fucking his own hand while he fantasized about her lips and her tits and her laugh and the way she said his name.
And Aster…he’d waltzed in, unwanted and uninvited and previously completely overlooked. And within a day he’d been leading Corin around by his cock. Which throbbed against the constriction of his trousers, desperate and aching. His hand tightened on Aster’s hip.
“Are you going to stay where I put you if I don’t pin you down?” Corin asked.
The question felt larger than it purported to be. Aster would be leaving. He wouldn’t stay where Corin had put him. He’d be leaving, and doing so with some man who’d take him and fuck him and marry him and bloody well own him, and Corin wouldn’t have any right to tear that motherfucker’s head off of his shoulders and roast him alive and crack his skull between his massive jaws like a fucking walnut, possibly not in that order.
Distantly, he realized that he’d only felt it necessary to give Belinda’s lover a disfiguring but entirely not-at-all-life-threatening wound. Aster’s magic must be stronger, unlikely as it seemed.
Fuck, he needed to get his clothes off before he spontaneously combusted from the force of his raging internal fire, and while dragons had quite a few special powers, they only had two arms like anyone else. He couldn’t hold Aster down at the same time.
“I’m your captive, remember?” Aster said breathlessly. “Until—oh, God, we’ll talk about that later. But I’m obliged to obey you, aren’t I?”
Obey him? When he’d have had Corin panting after him, begging pathetically for anything he had to offer, if he’d teased and refused instead. Just like his sister had.
Except that Aster, in the process of putting Corin under his spell, had yielded so sweetly and so generously that Corin couldn’t possibly demand anything more.
Until.And they’d talk about it later.
Fuck.
Corin let Aster go long enough to sit up on his heels and yank off his shirt, but his trousers—fuck it, fuck it sideways, he’d spend an hour sewing buttons back on all of his ruined pants once Aster fell asleep—he simply tore those down the front, buttons pinging to the floor, and let his cock have some breathing room at last.
Aster’s eyes went wide, fixed on Corin’s cock, and his mouth dropped open gratifyingly. Corin burned to fuck him senseless, but he also wanted to kiss those parted lips and nuzzle into his throat and whisper in his ear how beautiful he was, and he had to be under a curse—no other explanation seemed sufficient.
