Forbidden Embers (21 page)

“You’re a virgin?”

C
ecily froze at his incredulous question, and Logan swore that the top of his head was going to blow off. Closing his eyes, he tried to deal with the disbelief racing through his system.

She couldn’t be a virgin.

She could not be a virgin.

She. Could. Not. Be. A. Virgin!

But the look on her face said that the thoughts he’d overheard as they’d been making love were right on. Cecily had never had a lover.

How was that even possible? Especially at her age, when she had to have gone through at least two heats by now, and in the dragon shifter community, where sex was incredibly common—not to mention how they found their mates. How on earth could she possibly be a virgin?

It made no sense.

At the same time, it made perfect sense. Especially if he took into consideration the easy way she blushed and the way she had such a hard time vocalizing her sexual needs. He had put it down to shyness, or gentility based on her royal heritage. It had never occurred to him that both had been due to total and complete sexual inexperience.

And he’d just come at her like a sexual steamroller, riding right over any questions or objections or concerns she might have had.
Jesus.
He was a bigger asshole than he’d ever imagined.

Opening his eyes, he found Cecily still poised above him, eyes wide and lower lip sucked between her teeth. She looked incredibly uncomfortable, like she’d rather be anywhere else but on his lap at the moment, and he wondered why she hadn’t gotten up. And then he realized his fingers still had a death grip on her hips.

He let go so fast that she lost her balance and ended up splayed flat on her back.
Terrific.
Now he wasn’t just insensitive, he was also a total bastard. It was exactly what he’d always aspired to be.

She scrambled to her feet, her arms crossed in front of her body, and he realized, with a blank sort of shock, that she was suddenly embarrassed of her body in front of him. He sprang up, then picked up the sleeping bag they’d both been lying on. He held it out to her.

She took it, wrapped it around herself. She was so short that the thing actually covered everything vital. It also made her look like she was wearing an extra-wide tire, but he figured now wasn’t the time to point that out.

They stared at each other for a full minute, the silence between them so awkward that he had as much trouble holding her gaze as she had holding his. Especially when he thought of all the things he’d done to her body, both last night and tonight. Was it any wonder she looked like she was on the verge of passing out? Both times he’d taken her up and over so quickly that she’d barely had time to figure out what was going on.

Shit.
If he could reach his own ass, he would kick it. Hard.

“So, umm, I’m going to go,” she said, inching toward the other side of the clearing.

He paused before answering, certain he hadn’t heard her right. “You’re going to
what
?”

“I need to go. I have things that need to be taken care of back at home.”

“You’re just going to take off? Before we even talk about this?” Holy shit, had those words just come out of his mouth? When the fuck had he turned into a teenage girl? The next thing he knew, he was going to end up whining about . . . whatever it was teenage girls whined about these days.

“I think it would probably be best.”

“For whom?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who would it be best for? I think we should at least work through this, don’t you?” Jesus, he was in worse shape than he’d thought.
Let it go already, man.

But he couldn’t let it go, not when he could still taste her, and his dick was still hard enough to pound nails.

A spark of temper lit those fabulous violet eyes, burning away the bruised look that had been there since she’d scrambled to her feet. “What’s there to talk about? You found out I was a virgin and couldn’t get away fast enough. I think that pretty much sums it up.”

He stared at her in shock. “Are you insane? You think that’s why I stopped?”

“Well, what other reason could there be? I was more than willing, in case you missed that.”

He allowed himself one brutal, frustrated yell, then did his best to rein himself back in. “I feel like we’re in the middle of a bad farce.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re amused.”

She turned to go and he rushed after her, using the superfast speed that made him such a good sentry. He knew if he let Cecily walk away right now, he’d never see her again, and that was completely unacceptable. On a number of levels.

He grabbed her elbow. She turned on him and shoved him hard. She was dragon strong, so he definitely felt the blow, but it wasn’t enough to move him—or to make him let her go.

“Don’t touch me there!” she exploded, nearly wrenching her arm out of the socket in an effort to get away from him. “I’m so sick of men who think they have the right to manhandle me just because they want to.”

He dropped her arm, insulted. Took a few giant steps back. “Manhandle? I wanted to make sure you were all right—that’s all.”

“It’s not your business if I’m all right. I’m not your business at all. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Who the hell am I? I’m the man who just gave you three orgasms.”

“Well, whoop-de-do!” She twirled her finger like a merry-go-round. “Am I supposed to thank you for them?”

She was furious now, her face alight with the thrill of battle as she advanced on him. All that gorgeous hair of hers was streaming behind her in a tangled mess, and the sleeping bag had slipped so that one perfect breast was peeking out from above the black fabric. She looked amazing. Passionate. Gorgeous. As different from the picture he’d had in his mind of the Wyvernmoon princess before coming to South Dakota as she could get.

His dick hardened all over again—not like it had ever completely gone down—and for a second, all he could think about was how to get her over him again. Or under him, if that would make her first time easier. He liked to think he was a flexible man.

“No. But I don’t think that means you should attack me, either!”

“Attack you? Attack you?” She all but leaped across the last few yards separating them. “You want me to attack you?”

“I don’t, no,” he said. But it was too late. She shoved him again, and this time he let her move him a few feet, hoping it would calm her down if she thought she’d actually been able to inflict some damage.

It didn’t work.

Not sure what to do to relax her, but knowing he needed to do something or she was going to fly away from him as fast as her wings could carry her, he reached out to her. Tried to get inside her mind. But she was locked up tight, so tight that he couldn’t help wondering if she had some psychic abilities of her own.

He wouldn’t be able to get inside her head unless he dropped all his shields, and he didn’t want to risk that, in case she did indeed have some psychic talent. He hadn’t been able to pick up on any, but he didn’t want to end up with a brain the consistency of oatmeal, either. And he had been wrong before. Obviously, or Cecily wouldn’t be standing in front of him, looking like she wanted to smite him.

Pissed off that he couldn’t use his abilities to figure out what the hell was wrong with her, he lost it when she shoved him a third time. Gently grabbing her arms, he twisted her so that her back was resting against his chest. She struggled against him, but he kept her arms pinned over her chest so that she couldn’t move.

“Stop it!” she said, twisting and turning in an effort to get away. “You’re hurting me.”

“No, I’m not.” But he loosened his grip a little, just to make absolutely certain that he wasn’t.

“Logan, I’m serious. Get away from me!” Her dragon’s talons punched out through her fingertips and clawed him. He cursed but kept his grip on her, even after he had started to bleed.

Pissed off himself now, he allowed his beast one really loud roar. It didn’t so much as make Cecily blink, but, then, with the way she was going at him, he hadn’t really expected it to.
So much for the shy, retiring type.

Furious, frustrated, at his wit’s end, he let her go abruptly. She stumbled, would have fallen if he hadn’t reached out and caught her. He let go as soon as she was steady and the sleeping bag fell to the ground between them. Suddenly, it felt like they were right back where they’d started before everything had gone to shit around them.

“Come on, Cecily.” He sighed in exhaustion. “This is stupid. Is it really so much easier to fight with me than it is to just tell me what’s got you so upset? Please? How am I supposed to fix it if I don’t have a clue what I did to piss you off this badly?”

The fight suddenly went out of her, the light inside her dying at the same time her shoulders slumped. It made him feel like an even bigger asshole than he already did. “Or not. If you want to leave, I won’t try to stop you again.”

Unsure what else to do, he turned around and started back across the clearing toward his stuff, more than aware that if she flew away, she took his best access to the Wyvernmoons with her. It took a minute, but she followed him, the sleeping bag once again wrapped around her.

“Why did you stop?” she asked his back.

He turned around. “What?”

She was bright red again, and he was filled with a strange and dangerous tenderness for her, one that he couldn’t afford to feel but somehow couldn’t stop. Before he knew what he was doing, he held out an arm to her. She walked straight into it and he pulled her against his body. She was so short that her head nestled against his chest, and he brought a hand up to stroke her hair.

“You stopped when you found out I was a virgin,” she repeated, and though her words were muffled against his chest, he heard her perfectly. “Why?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” He pulled away, tilted her chin up so that he could look at her beautiful face. “What kind of an asshole do you think I am?”

“One who left me more aroused and sexually frustrated than I’ve ever been in my life,” she retorted.

“Is that what this is all about?
Your
sexual frustration?”

“You just left me like that!”

“How the hell did you think I felt?” He gestured to his still-blatant arousal.

“That’s your own fault. I was more than willing—”

“We were going way too fast. I was going to hurt you, and I didn’t want to do that. If you’d told me sooner, I would have done things completely different.”

“Oh.” She paused. “It didn’t hurt. I kept expecting it to, but it didn’t.”

“That’s because we hadn’t gotten very far. I promise you, if you’d given it a couple more minutes—or a couple more inches—it would have hurt like hell.”

Her lips twitched. “So you weren’t stopping completely?”

He laughed. “Are you kidding me? We’ve been fighting for twenty minutes, and still the only thing I can think about is getting you back on top of that damn sleeping bag. There was no way I was going to stop for good. I just needed to take a breather, to calm down a little bit.”

“Oh,” she said again. “Well, then, I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too. I probably could have explained a little better, but between the shock and the fact that I was about two seconds from slamming myself inside you, I wasn’t exactly at my most coherent.” It was his turn to pause, and then—because he couldn’t help himself—he asked, “Why are you still a virgin?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a lot harder to get rid of it than one might imagine.”

“Bullshit.” He pulled her into his arms. “My reaction notwithstanding . . .”

She shrugged, looked away like it was too hard to say what she needed to if she could see his face. “My dad liked to use me as an enticement so others would see things his way. He’d promise me to one of his business allies or his
factionnaires
, pitting them against each other to get what he wanted. But it only worked if I never actually had a chance to
be
with any of them.”

Shock kept him quiet for long seconds. When he was finally able to wrap his mind around what she was saying, he asked, “Your father used you as a bargaining chip? What the hell is this, the Middle Ages?”

“Don’t look so shocked. It happens to rich young women all the time.”

“Yeah, but not to dragons—at least none that I’ve heard of before this. I thought we were more civilized.” But as soon as he spoke, bloody images flashed through his mind of Dragonstar clan members dying of the virus manufactured on the Wyvernmoon compound, a virus he was pretty damn sure had been invented—or at least heavily invested in—by her father. If a man was willing to kill his own species in such a horrible manner, why should Logan be surprised that he had no compunction about using his daughter any way he could to get what he wanted?

Her thoughts must have been running along similar lines, because she whispered, “You’d be surprised what one dragon will do to another.”