A soft sob left Rowan’s throat as she backed into a corner. “Wh-who…what…what…?”
Kane canted his head like an animal, his eyes glowing just as bright on the dark side of the room as they had on the light. “You really didn’t know?” He took a deliberate step closer to her, and she cowered in the corner, ducked her face away, gave him her neck. Kane was a monster. A monster just like her but worse. Kane could hide and pretend to be human. Run!
Kane’s limp was back as he squared up to her. He wrapped his hand around the back of her neck, and this was it. He was going to strangle her. He was going to kill her! Dragon!
But inside, her dragon was quiet and still. She was awed.
“Look at me, princess.”
Breath shaking, Rowan obeyed him, lifted her chin, and forced her eyes open. He didn’t look mad. He looked…sad. “I’m not going to hurt you, Bloodrunner.”
“You keep calling me that like you aren’t of my clan.”
“I’m not.”
“B-b-b—” Rowan squeezed her eyes closed and tried again. “Blackwing?”
“Blackwing Dragon,” he confirmed. But right when she thought he would shift his hand around her throat and choke her, his grip went gentle, and he pulled her against his chest. His arms slid around her shoulders, and he just stood there, holding her.
Rowan’s body went into shock. That’s the only thing that could explain her traitor hands sliding up the strong curves of his back and hugging him.
Softly he said, “I thought Damon sent you to kill me.”
“And you still helped me?”
Kane laughed a dark chuckle. “Well, I didn’t claim to be smart. And you lost your damn treasure. By the way, why the hell didn’t you put your treasure in your carry-on?”
“They wouldn’t let me. It was too big.”
“So everything you have told me is real. None of this is some fucked-up game to lure me into a trap?”
“No! God, I had no idea what you were talking about half the day. Fucking Blackwing Dragon. Are you going to kill me?”
Kane snorted. “Princess, you are perfectly safe from me. Trust me on that one.”
“Trust you? I just saw you play punchy-punchy murder on that guy’s face in there. Wait.” She eased back and moved his chin to the side, examining his split lip, which still looked like it needed stitches. “Why aren’t you healing? Why isn’t your dragon speeding this up?”
Kane made a tick sound behind his teeth and jerked his jaw out of her grip. “I’m not like you.”
“Okaaay,” she drawled, nodding like a bobble head. “I have about forty-five thousand questions.”
“I bet you do.” He slipped his hands from her shoulders, limped to the sink at the back of the room, and began filling the bowl of his hands with water. As he washed the blood off his face, his back muscles worked gracefully. His tattoos stretched from the knuckles of his left hand up his arm and over his shoulder, but his back was smooth and ink free. Delicious man.
Her sex pulsed once like it was a hungry little clam. Of course she would be sexually attracted to the one person on earth she couldn’t ever have. A fucking Blackwing Dragon! Their people were enemies. Had been for millennia. The war between Bloodrunners and Blackwings had annihilated the damn species.
But his ass looked so fucking firm, she wanted to bite it. She suddenly wanted to bite his bicep, too, and his shoulder, and those little indentations above his hips and maybe his bottom lip. Basically she wanted to eat him up like the psycho she’d apparently turned into.
With a slow, dazed blink, she said, “Question number one, do you always remove your shirt when you are pissed off?” If so, she would make a mental note to anger him often.
“There was blood on my shirt.”
“Oh.” She scrunched up her nose and sat on the edge of the bed. “Gross. Question number two, can I see your peg leg now?”
“What?” He shot her the dirtiest look she’d ever caught. “Fuck no. And it’s a prosthetic leg, not a peg leg. I’m not a damn pirate.”
“Come oooon,” she begged, laying on her side on the bed. “I’m going to be imagining it all night, probably dreaming about it, and it’ll be way worse than it actually is. My imagination is ridiculous.”
“Hell no. I haven’t shown it to anyone. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell your crew about this either. Or Damon.”
“Why not?”
“Because I already have to fight just to prove I’m strong. I’m challenged all the time. Telling the world I’m disabled isn’t going to help me. It’ll get every asshole who wanted to claim they bested a dragon picking fights with me.” He ran a towel over his face to dry it and turned around. The one light above him cast all his pretty muscles into deep, shadowed indentations. Now she wanted to lick him and bite him. What was wrong with her? She should be fleeing the Blackwing in terror. She’d heard rumor one still existed, and here she was, in the same tiny room with him.
Her survival instincts were broken.
“For the record, you sure as shit didn’t look disabled tonight. It took all of my strength to get you off that guy.” She cleared her throat delicately and picked at a long, loose thread on the comforter. “By the way, thanks for that. For defending me.”
“The guy tripped me,” he muttered.
“You were pissed off on my behalf before that, though. You told them to stop throwing stuff at me.”
“Yeah, why were you cowering to humans anyway? I don’t get it.” Kane crossed his arms over his chest and studied her. “I don’t get you.”
Those four words hurt like lashes. “Welcome to the club.” And no, she wasn’t going to get into why humans scared her more than shifters. She wasn’t about to share her deepest, darkest secrets with a Blackwing Dragon. She wasn’t a brainy girl, but she wasn’t dumb enough to sign her own death warrant either. Oh, she understood why he didn’t want others knowing he was down a leg. Any sign of weakness for a shifter could tip the balance of safety and death. She wasn’t exposing her weakness to him. Not tonight. Not ever. “I’ll show you my boobs.”
Kane’s face went slack. “What?”
“Show me your prosthetic leg, and I’ll take my shirt off.”
Kane’s eyes narrowed and dipped to her chest. Rowan grinned because he was actually considering it.
“Bra, too,” he negotiated.
“Naturally. Can’t see my boobs with my bra on. Do we have a deal?”
Kane was frowning hard and looked super suspicious. “Is this one of those things where you back out after I take my pants off—”
Rowan pulled her ripped-up shirt off her head, then peeled off her bra. She squealed, closed her eyes, and covered her boobs with her cupped hands. God, she couldn’t believe she was doing this.
When she opened her eyes again, Kane was smiling bigger than she’d ever seen. He was stunning. He strode forward a couple steps and unbuttoned the fly of his jeans, arched an eyebrow seductively, and jerked his chin at her hands.
“Maybe we should turn off that light.”
“Nooo, that wasn’t the deal, princess.” He flicked his fingers. “Nipples.”
She giggled and eased her hands away, then laid on her side and rested her cheek on her hand. “Now drop your pants, Blackwing, and show me that sexy bionic leg.”
Kane’s smile faded away, and he was now staring at her chest with an entranced look. She’d hypnotized him. Rowan jiggled her boobies around and laughed. He cleared his throat hard and looked down at his crotch with a frown. “Sooo, the leg looks rough.”
“Is it green?”
Kane snorted. “No, it’s not moldy, Rowan.”
“Does it have tentacles?”
“Okay, okay,” he said, that sexy smile returning. Kane pushed his pants down and stepped out of them.
She wanted to take all of him in, so Rowan sat up in bed and worked her gaze from top to bottom. His dark hair was tossed to the side, covering his right cheek, and his glowing eyes watched her
carefully. His muscular neck dipped down to defined pecks, and his perfect nipples were drawn up tight as if the cold air from the vent was getting to him. His arms were massive, like two sledge hammers ready to do some serious damage, and his abs flexed with every shallow breath he took. He wore briefs—black, sooo shocking—and one leg was powerful, big, and defined. But his other leg was thinner, tapered at the knee, and disappeared into the cradle of a metal prosthetic. On that leg, there were deep scars that stretched from his knee up his thigh, and they looked red, and painful.
“Does it hurt?”
Kane adjusted his massive erection and winked. “It doesn’t right now.”
Rowan giggled. Of course the man would find an innuendo at a time like this. “Is it from combat?”
Kane nodded once, slow. He made his way to the bed, and she was enamored with the way the leg moved with him. He had really good control of it, even though he limped. He sat down right beside her. “I haven’t ever come right out and showed this to anyone.”
Rowan brushed her finger up the metal. It was cold to the touch, the complete opposite of Kane’s dragon-heated skin. He flinched, as though he would pull away, but he held his ground.
“How did you sleep with women?”
“God, Rowan. Filter.”
“I’m serious. I’ve never met anyone who was missing a limb. How did you hide it when you were…you know…banging shifter groupies?”
Kane leaned back on his locked arms and stared up at the ceiling. “I left my clothes on.”
“Like you dry humped them?”
Kane let off a booming laugh, his abs flexing with it. “No, I didn’t dry hump them. I can fuck a girl just fine without taking my jeans all the way off. I just need them low enough to pull my dick out.”
“Sounds romantic.”
“Well, when I got desperate, it didn’t happen in the most romantic places.”
“Like where?”
“Uuuh, in a bar bathroom or out in the back of my Bronco. Up against the wall behind this pizza place in Bryson city. And then—”
“Okay, that’s good.” Her blood was starting to boil at the stupid pictures he was painting.
“Are you getting jealous?”
“No. I just don’t want to hear about the million women you fucked in every bathroom you encountered.” Rowan plopped onto her stomach to hide her breasts from him and buried her face against the mattress to try and purge the dumb mental images from her head.
Kane’s light touch brushed slowly down her spine, trailing fire where his fingertip met her skin. “It wasn’t millions,” he murmured. “It was six since I lost the leg. It was always after a fight, or when I was so fucking desperate to feel something…anything. And then afterward, I always had this awful, hollow feeling. It was like I was even emptier than before.”
Rowan rested her cheek on her arm and traced the deep scars on his injured leg. “I hurt someone I loved.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I thought I found my mate. He was human, lived down in Saratoga, so not too far from Damon’s Mountains. He worked at the newspaper. Brainy. Too smart for me, but he never made me feel dumb. He made me feel pretty, and I liked the person I was around him. But we got in a fight one day over something so stupid. I don’t even remember what. And he said he wanted to take a break. That I was too much for him. He didn’t like that I was a dragon and that I didn’t know who I was. He didn’t like that I couldn’t leave Damon’s Mountains. He said he didn’t understand me, and it made me so mad. Just…furious.”
“You Changed?”
Rowan ducked her chin once as a tear slid out of the corner of her eye. “Too close to him, and he almost died. And the first thing he did when he woke up in the hospital was file a restraining order. And I was deemed a dangerous shifter. It’s on my registration and everything. A permanent red mark that will follow me around for the rest of my life. I can’t get a shifter grant for land of my own, and it’s hard to find jobs. I barely finagled a plane ticket. So you see, I know what you mean by looking for something to fill you up, but being drained instead.”
“Is that why you never left Damon’s Mountains?”
“No. But I guess it’s part of it.”
Kane was still trailing his fingertip up and down her spine. God, it felt so good to be touched by someone who wouldn’t break. Someone who understood her. Who wrestled with his own inner monster.
“Kane?”
“Mm,” he grunted, pressing his palm against her back. His hand felt like fire there. Like he was burning his handprint into her skin, but she liked it.
“Who was your father?” She already knew, but she wanted Kane to tell her.
“Marcus.”
The admission of his lineage broke her heart. Marcus, the alpha of the Blackwings. Marcus, one of the last immortal dragons. Marcus, the murderer of Damon’s first mate, Feyadine. He’d ripped her eggs from her body and left her for Damon to find. And then he’d tried to burn the world. In an effort to save humanity from ashes, Damon had gone to war with Marcus hundreds of years ago. He’d thought him dead, but Marcus had only been badly hurt and gathering power, manipulating Feyadine’s bloodlines to lure Damon into his final death.
Kane had been right. His father would’ve been the end of the world, but Damon had been the one to kill him. Rowan’s great-grandfather had been the end of Kane’s father, and a union between Bloodrunner and Blackwing would be her damnation. Falling for Kane would be betrayal to her family and her ancient clan. All of their deaths, all of their suffering at the hands of Kane’s father, was too much for her to ignore.
But…
Even if Kane was a Blackwing, and there could be nothing between them tomorrow, it was nice to sit in this hotel room and pretend they were two normal people instead of two enemies on opposite sides of an eternal war.
It was nice to pretend Kane could be hers, if even for a little while.
Slowly, giving Kane plenty of time to retreat, she leaned her face toward his bad leg. His muscles didn’t even flinch when her lips pressed against a deep scar there, but he relaxed instead and brushed his fingers through her hair.
He let off a soft sigh and murmured, “You’re a strange one, Bloodrunner.”
“My friends call me Roe, remember?”
Kane huffed a breath, but at least this time he didn’t remind her they weren’t friends, and that, to her, was progress.
Kane laid back on the bed and ran his hands though his hair, let the heels of his palms rest on his forehead as he closed his eyes. He drew his good leg up, the epitome of relaxed, but he wasn’t fooling her. He was strung as tight as a bowstring again.
“Why are you stressed?” she asked, laying beside him.
“Because you’re going to be the death of me, and I like living.”
“I am not. I already told you I won’t hurt you.”
“Yeah? But you’re on a bed with me, tits out, and they’re fucking perfect, and you just kissed my leg. You kissed my damn ruined leg, Bloodrunner. There are things in my life I couldn’t believe happening to me, and that’s one of them. And my dick is aching to just take you hard, but Damon will bring fire to me if I make bad decisions here.”
“Gross. Let’s not talk about Damon while I’m trying to seduce you.”
Kane rolled his head against the mattress until he met her gaze. There, just slightly, was a smile in the curve of his lips. “You’re trying to seduce me?”
Rowan waggled her eyebrows and beamed. “You won’t even have to wear jeans.”
That deep, sexy chuckle vibrated up his throat, and he shook his head again. Kane linked his hands behind his head and grinned up at the ceiling. “I bet you were a wild child growing up.”
“You would bet wrong.” She gave him a cheeky grin and repeated his words, “But you’re on a bed with me, tits out—”
“Stop it,” he said, but his smile was so fucking stunning. Straight white teeth and dimples she could see even under his dark scr
uff.
“Just so you know, I don’t do this. I don’t seduce boys wherever I go. I’ve been stuck in Damon’s Mountains with the same silly guys I grew up with. And my ex and I broke up three years ago—”
“You mean you went dragon on his ass three years ago.”
Rowan swatted his arm and rolled over on her stomach right beside him. “It’s not funny to joke about that.”
“It’s kind of funny. So what you’re saying is you are super deprived and sexually frustrated, and you’ll take anything at this point.”
“No! Kane, that’s not what I’m saying at all.” She made a frustrated noise. “I was saying I don’t do this all the time. Ever really. I was trying to tell you that you feel…”
The smile disappeared from Kane’s lips, and his eyes blazed brighter. “That I feel what?”
“Never mind. You’ll just make fun of me.”
Embarrassed, Rowan moved to log roll away from him, but he caught her arm and held her in place, right beside him. “Say it, and I won’t make fun of you.”
His face was angled toward hers now, his lips only inches away, and her body was humming oddly from where his strong grip was wrapped around her upper arm. His blazing green eyes dipped to her lips. Kane was so big, so wide, taking up most of the bed already, and she’d never found a man more beautifully made than him. His pulse drummed against his muscular throat too fast, bum-bum, bum-bum, like hers.
“Tell me,” he whispered, and she knew she was gone. She knew she couldn’t deny him anything, but she couldn’t understand why. Dragon wanted him. She wanted to sink her teeth into him and claim him so that he would never get away. She wanted him to choose them, because who else would make a match like this? Who else could hold their own against her? Who else could survive her if she lost control and Changed again? Who else had a monster that matched hers? Who else was this damn beautiful, this damn alluring, this damn everything?
Kane was big and important.
Kane was…
Closing her eyes like a coward, Rowan whispered, “I was trying to say that you feel special. I’m supposed to be afraid of you, but you don’t feel scary. You’re good.”
“I’m not,” Kane murmured, pulling her palm onto his chest, right over his racing heart. “I’m really not good, Rowan.”