Naked Dragon Read online

  Ciarra’s love radiated from her in warm, soothing waves, and McKenna slept again.

  She and Bastian stayed at the cave until late the next morning, because she loved spending time with the matriarch of their clan, learning family history, about the hanging times, how Ciarra survived, and Bastian waited patiently as they talked.

  “No one came looking for you in the night,” Ciarra said. “You are safe.”

  McKenna felt herself welling up. “I wish I could hug you.”

  “I feel your embrace and return it.”

  McKenna nodded. “Good-bye.” She didn’t look back. She couldn’t. Loss did not need to be confirmed. She knew it well.

  Bastian squeezed her hand. An altogether sublime night, McKenna thought as they walked toward the house.

  Goddess help her, she didn’t want to go back to life before Bastian. Alone. Lonely. How long did a former dragon stay with his heart mate?

  Their night together had been perfect, her and the man she loved, placing full trust in each other.

  As they made their way to the house, her cramps returned, but she went right to the truck. “Let’s get that slimy shingle to Vivica.”

  The ride took no more than a few minutes. Works Like Magick had barely opened, but Vivica stood in her office, watching as they approached. “I knew you were coming,” she said. “My psychic visions have been running rampant. You met Ciarra, you lucky girl. What I wouldn’t give.” Vivica turned to Bastian. “You have evidence?”

  He gave her the shingle.

  Vivica accepted it. “I’ll get this into the right hands. McKenna, about your suspicions. The building inspector never played cards with Elliott Huntley. He doesn’t know him, so you have an honest chance of succeeding. I sensed that to warn Huntley away would cause you more trouble, so he’s still a loose cannon, though he isn’t aware that you know he was bluffing about knowing the building inspector.”

  “I trust your instincts,” McKenna said.

  “This doesn’t mean you’ll have an easy road, but the surface is pitched evenly now. Just don’t forget that Huntley probably owns the road.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Vivica kissed them both before they left.

  In the car on the way home, McKenna realized how badly she needed to shower. She wasn’t ready, either, to bare her body to Bastian in daylight, yet. “Suppose we take separate showers and meet in my bed afterward?”

  His grin swelled her heart and other places, too. Horny hardly described her anticipation.

  The shower didn’t help her shake her lethargy, discomfort, or fuzzy head, though. Her hands, she saw when she toweled off, were swollen. As she was bloated. What day was it, damn it?

  She checked her calendar. Bingo! Just her luck.

  From her bed, she heard Bastian’s moan before he appeared in her doorway.

  “I think I am dying,” he said. “Something must have broken when I fell that I did not heal. I am bleeding internally, I am sure of it. I will not live out the day, I tell you.”

  “Are you one of those guys looking for equal sympathy? The kind who has to feel lousy because their significant other does?”

  “Are you admitting to being my significant other? Wait. Do you not feel well, my Kenna?” He crawled into her bed behind her and spooned her, his arms coming around her in a protective gesture. “Perhaps Killian’s counter spell during my transformation is slowly killing me. I am done for, McKenna. One cannot feel this kind of pain and live.”

  She turned to face him and rest her head on his chest. “Tell me your symptoms.”

  “I am tired after a good night’s sleep, edgy and uncomfortable in my skin. I had a fight with the shower curtain, and it won! I am swelling. Look at my hands, my ankles; touch my puffy stomach. No, don’t. It is cramping. I miss my brother dragons—how foolish is that with you beside me? My head aches, and I am craving a mound of very salty French fries. This is very weird, McKenna.”

  She got up and went to her bathroom.

  “Where are you going? How can you leave me in my hour of need?”

  When she got back to her bedroom, she found him in the fetal position, holding his stomach. “I must be dying,” he whispered.

  “I have the perfect medicine for you,” she said.

  “No medicine could cure this. I am done for. I would prefer sword thrusts, battle-axes, or dragon claws to this all-over misery.”

  “You’re not dying,” she said.

  “I am, I tell you.”

  “Midol’s the cure.” She wiggled a glass of water and showed him a pill in the open palm of her hand. “As soon as I take this, you’ll begin to feel better.”

  “As soon as you take it? You mean that I am feeling your pain? Poor Kenna.”

  “I guess this puts period to your ‘pain is nothing to me’ theory?”

  “There is no pain like this, not in the Roman army nor as a dragon warrior.”

  “I’m almost glad to hear a man say that. Fact is, I go through this every month. I promise, it won’t kill you.”

  “Every month! Who could live with this?”

  “Every woman on earth,” she said, to his slack-jawed dismay. “I always suspected that PMS could debilitate a man.” She chuckled. “Fortunately for you, as soon as I feel better, you will, too. I’m calling Lizzie to tell her we’re not up to working today.”

  “Bless you.”

  After she telephoned Lizzie, she plugged in a heating pad, which they shared, belly to belly.

  Bastian rubbed her brow to soothe her head.

  She smiled and they napped side by side.

  When she woke, Bastian needed more pampering and she needed another Midol. “This is going to be a detriment to our making use of your dragon lance any day soon. A woman can’t . . .” Dare she say make love? No, of course not. “You do remember that a woman can’t mate when in this condition?”

  “Condition? What condition? Remember from when? I looked up the Roman invasion of Britain. It took place in 43 AD. Vivica told me that I am now in the twenty-first century. What would you remember this many centuries later if you had stopped being human for that length of time?”

  “Not much. Do you remember nothing of women?”

  “I am ashamed to admit that I remember what I dreamed about as a dragon: the pleasure of dipping my lance into a woman. Before you, I might have said, ‘What else is there?’ but I know better now, because there are so many facets to our relationship. Still, please explain why women cannot mate with this malaise, besides the fact that it must lessen their pleasure. And forgive me for skipping the lesson on a woman’s reproductive cycle. I am afraid that I jumped straight to men and sex.”

  “You and every man out there.” McKenna explained in detail what happened to women once a month.

  “You bleed for days and do not die? I am glad you survive, but what you describe sounds like science fiction.”

  McKenna chuckled. “This from a Roman warrior turned dragon, who breached the veil from a parallel plane of existence.”

  Bastian shook his head. “Stick to the point, McKenna. Are you saying that I will feel like this once a month? Always?”

  He was thinking they’d be together always? A thrill ran through her, but she cautioned herself to take it slow. A good word, always. It smacked of commitment. She wondered if Bastian knew that. “If you stay, you will feel this way once a month until I’m old and gray, or unless I’m pregnant.” Let’s see if that scared him away.

  “Like Lizzie is, you mean? I am afraid that I skipped that lesson, too. The pregnancy and birth lesson was bundled up with a woman’s reproductive cycle. Why would you not bleed if you were pregnant?”

  “Because the growing baby would need it for protection inside me. You can look it up on the ’Net for the proper terms.”

  “I will borrow the lesson from Vivica,” he said. “It sounds like something I should learn.”

  McKenna bit the side of her lip. “If I were pregnant, we would have morning sickness.”


  “Define morning sickness.”

  She’d barely started when he sat straight up. “You mean like we barfed the night you drank too much wine? Quelle horreur.”

  “Are you taking French lessons?”

  “I have already mastered English.”

  “Sure you have.” She raised the setting on the heating pad. “Anyway, most men think that having sex during this time of the month is fine, but it’s uncomfortable and messy, and not at all romantic.”

  “Who could blame you? I would never put you through such discomfort.”

  “Bastian, you may well be the most understanding man on earth.”

  “How long does this affliction last?”

  “Three to five days. Sometimes longer.”

  “You suffer every month for one or two babies in a lifetime? It sounds like an inefficient system to me.”

  “Doesn’t it, though? But them’s the facts.”

  Bastian groaned and fell back against her pillows. “The unending brutality of it. I am used to healing quickly, you understand. But with this, I have no choice, no control.”

  “Welcome to my world.” She lay beside him, hiding her smile, and he gave her the heating pad, pulled her into the crook of his neck, and stroked her tummy over the pad, because . . . let’s face it . . . the sooner she felt better, the sooner he would, too.

  She pampered him for three days—Lizzie was sure she was, to quote her friend, “getting laid”—but to be fair, McKenna got her share of pampering, as well, until their touches turned to kisses and explorations of the most titillating nature.

  Once her period started, and their PMS abated, they left her bed to work on the house, and every time Bastian saw her, he wanted to hold her. “I am so glad that I cannot bleed for days on end,” he whispered. “I do not care about PMS pain any longer, as long as I do not have to—”

  “I get it.”

  “I am here if you need me.”

  “I need you. The clock is ticking. Forty days until the house gets inspected and is mine for good, or not, and forty-one until my guests check in, unless I get a booking for the week before. Either way, we have to hustle.”

  They met Lizzie and Steve downtown to go shopping for bargain paint. Steve brought the house plans so he could tell them how much paint any specific section needed. Bastian’s eye for color paid off. She ended up getting her paint for a fraction of the expected cost.

  When McKenna woke up the morning after their paint shopping expedition, the blistered paint had been scraped clean. “Bastian, do you have something to tell me?”

  “Yes,” he said, looking proudly up at the house. “I torched the blistered paint during the night, dragon style, no heat gun or scraping needed.”

  When Steve and Lizzie arrived a short while later, Steve whistled. “Hey, the house is ready to paint. That’s what you two have been up to for the past week. See, Lizzie, they weren’t—”

  His wife shoved his arm.

  “Ouch,” Steve said. “You know; I mean, they were scraping the house.”

  “Hard work,” Bastian said with a nod.

  “Yeah,” McKenna said, thinking of Bastian’s lance. “Hard.”

  Once they began, the kids painted the lowest levels. Lizzie painted wherever she could reach from an office chair that moved up and down. Mostly, however, she cooked and directed the children.

  Vivica came on Saturday with boxes of pizza and friends from her employment agency.

  Days later, when the house looked like a Victorian confection, in lavenders and greens, with hints of purple, blue, and mauve, the most enchanting house McKenna could imagine, they took pictures to replace the black-and-whites on her website.

  “With the outside finished,” she told Bastian, after Lizzie and Steve left one night, “we can put all our efforts into getting the inside up to code. We have thirty days.”

  “We made a good start on the inside,” Bastian said as he directed her to her bedroom with a hand to her back. He sat on her bed first, pulled her down on his lap, and kissed her with enthusiastic skill. They had practiced foreplay a lot during PMS week.

  This, however, was a trouser-friendly kiss. Yes, his dragon lance was getting antsy. “Your period is finished?”

  She nodded. “Period finished.”

  “You are well after painting the house?”

  “Well and up for a celebration.” She stroked him through his jeans.

  “I hope the sight will not send you screaming into the night.”

  “There’s one way to find out. I finally get to see you with your boxers off. Take it out. Take it out. No, I changed my mind. Let me take it out.”

  “You will not scream and run from me?”

  “Wait!” McKenna raised a brow. “That was a joke, right, that silly thing you said once about your lance being prehensile and fire breathing?”

  Bastian set his jaw. “It does not breathe fire.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  More than anything, McKenna wanted to get naked with this man—no, correct that; in a perfect world, he would get naked while she stayed under wraps.

  Maybe if she took charge, made it into a game, and relaxed, she could enjoy herself. Sex, pure and unadulterated.

  She sat on her bed, but that wasn’t right, so she raised herself to her knees on the mattress, then she backed up to her headboard, gave an imperious but silent command with her hand, the king of Siam gesturing his subjects forward . . . or in her case, to make her come, damn it. “So get naked, already. Naked, naked, naked!”

  “Should we not be taking each other’s clothes off?”

  “We can play by your rules tomorrow,” she said, still not sure there’d be a tomorrow once he saw the bare truth. She put a hand out to stop him as he started to kneel on the bed.

  “No kissing, no foreplay?” he asked.

  McKenna couldn’t stop her grin. “I remember how good you are at foreplay. Thank you for your patience for the past week and a half.”

  “I have liked holding you in sleep.”

  “Your lance has been impatient.”

  He nodded. “It has a mind of its own.”

  “Right, a zipper brain. Did you say you studied sex?”

  “I studied it often.”

  “Did it require practice?”

  “Solo practice, which made my other lessons pale in comparison.”

  “Yet you thought you didn’t know how to pleasure a woman.”

  “I have no memory of doing so, but since I dreamed for years about having sex with a woman, I imagine that I did have some experience. I became a dragon at the age I seem now.”

  “This discussion is not foreplay; you know that, right?”

  “Andra never told me that my heart mate would be officious.”

  “I am the boss.”

  “And I was the alpha dragon. The leader of my kind.”

  “So, you were like the Lizard of Oz?”

  “Joke, right? But dragons are not lizards, McKenna. To dragons, lizards are like popcorn.”

  “Hey, I just realized, there’s a dragon in my bed.”

  His lids lowered over his hot, smoldering bedroom eyes. “A naughty dragon.”

  “How bold of you to admit it. Pretend, then, that I’m your plaything and you’re my . . . pool boy—”

  “Please tell me that you do not wish to mate with a water creature.”

  “No, I wish to mate with you.” McKenna clapped a hand over her mouth. “Did I say that out loud?”

  His eyes turned the deepest violet she’d seen yet. They nearly glowed.

  “Forget the pool boy,” she said. “Be my dragon boy and obey me at all times, especially now, when, judging by the activity beneath your jeans, your lance wants out, and bad. Have I told you how much I admire your package?” She nodded toward his zipper—be still her heart.

  “Often, actually.” He bowed like a loyal subject, as if he’d had practice. In the Roman army, maybe.

  McKenna uncoiled, or that was how she felt
when she moved from kneeling to sitting against her headboard, hands behind her head, ankles crossed. “I could get used to playing the royal in the bedroom.”

  “I will adore you, my queen, with every inch of my body, and I have many inches.” His rough voice promised heaven while his look turned her into a useless puddle of need.

  “Take off your pants.”

  “If I must get naked without your help,” he said, “I will remove my clothing in the order I choose. If you wish to come and take matters into your own hands”—he winked—“feel free.”

  She sat forward on the bed, glad to have an equal playing field despite her royal commands. “Should we have music? I’ve never had my own personal stripper before, which means: he who strips away his clothes.” She raised a royal finger. “Strip, strip, strip!”

  He started with his shirt buttons and slowly revealed his scarred but perfect chest.

  “Do you exercise those muscles?”

  “I flew around the Island of Stars, above its endless lava sea, until the heat of it scorched my scales. I should think that carrying one’s enormous weight on one’s wings strengthens one’s chest muscles.”

  “Are you putting me on?”

  “Soon, I will wear you like a glove.”

  A sizzling streak of liquid heat rushed through her as he turned his back to unzip his jeans.

  “Hey, no fair,” she said, raising herself on her knees. “Face me. I want to see that puppy.”

  “I’d prefer you get the full view all at once.”

  “Wait, what is that on your back?”

  “On my shoulder? The dragon tat. You saw that.”

  “I don’t mean the tat, though it’s gorgeous in the light. I mean at the base of your spine.” She knelt forward to trace the curved areas. “They’re curved,” she said, explaining the indentations. “Like parentheses about ten inches long.”

  Bastian looked puzzled, so she brought one of his hands around to trace an indentation with his own fingers.

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s where my wings were connected, where they emerge when my inner beast is winning, and into which they withdraw when I ultimately win.”

  That knowledge, more than anything, jarred McKenna. A dragon . . . with wings. She lowered herself to sit on the bed because her prickling legs would no longer hold her. Pinpricks attacked her arms as well. “Will you always ultimately win, Bastian?”