Page 55 of Claimed By the Sinful Dragon
Wait a moment. Scales? Claws?
I looked down at myself, blinking one reptilian eye as my gaze roved over my magnificent gray-green scaled body. I twisted my long neck and peered at the wings on my side. I had wings. I was a…dragon.Badass.
A snarl ripped through my amazement and I spun in time to see Uther lunging at Rook again. At…my true mate. I felt it now.
I loosed a bellow of sheer rage and my horned head snapped forward. I threw myself between them, rising up onto my back legs from under Uther to clamp my jaws around his throat. He roared in pain as my jaws closed tight…and then he was silent, a heavy weight in my maw—either unconscious or dead. I tossed him aside as though he was nothing.
Fury pumped through my body and I stalked closer to where he’d landed, intent on making sure he was the latter. He’d attempted to kill my mate. I bellowed my fury again. He’dhurtmy mate.
Panic lanced through my chest. He’d hurt my mate. He’d savaged Rook. I spun round to where the dragon shifter—theotherdragon shifter—lay on the floor in a pool of his own blood. Shit. Hands. I needed hands.
My claws blurred and changed shape, and my body shrank back to its former size as effortlessly as blinking. I didn’t waste time dwelling on it, instead throwing myself onto my knees next to Rook’s prone form. He blinked up at me, his body shimmering and blurring, then shrank back into his human form. I gasped as I took in the wounds all over it. They all looked horrific, but the one in his chest looked lethal.
“Are you okay?” he croaked.
“Shut up, you idiot,” I said, grabbing his hands and clamping them over the gaping wound in his chest. “That’s my line.”
He chuckled and then grimaced in pain.
“What do I do?” I demanded, looking helplessly at the blood pumping from between his fingers. The wound was worse than I’d thought. He was dying.
“Nothing,” he murmured.
I snarled. “Not acceptable. Tell me what to do, you bastard. You dragged me out here and made me feel things for you, so now you can stick around and deal with the consequences.”
He blinked in surprise. “Bite me.”
“Pretty sure that’s my line, too.”
A flicker of amusement passed over his lips. His beautiful, perfect lips that made my body feel things I couldn’t even have imagined, and that were already losing their color.
“You feel it, too,” he said, searching my face for confirmation. “The mate bond?”
Our mate, the voice repeated in my head insistently. Mydragon’svoice. I nodded numbly. Yeah, I felt it. Maybe I always had, and it had been buried as deep as my beast.
“Then claim me. Your beast will strengthen mine, and mine yours. A…” He broke off and sucked in a sharp breath of pain. “A true partnership. Claim me…or let me die.”
Fuck. If there’d even been a question about spending my life with this arrogant asshole who drove me crazy and still managed to occupy my every thought, the roar inside my head would have drowned it out. But there was never any doubt. It had just taken me a while to see it. Driven by instinct, I bent my head forward, parted my lips over the point where his neck met his shoulders, and sank my dragon’s fangs into his flesh.
“Mine.”
Chapter 28
Rook
Five Days Later
We should beby our mate’s side,my dragon rumbled in my head, its voice loaded with frustration.
Business first, pleasure later. Anyway, maybe if you’d actuallytoldme she was our mate…
He grunted noncommittally. I suspected that, like me, he hadn’t felt the mate bond snap into place until we’d seen our mate in her true form. But in truth, she’d claimed my heart long before she’d claimed my body and saved my life with her bite. The mate bond? It just confirmed what I’d known for a long time: Kaylee was mine.
The flight back from Gaheris’s territory took longer than my patience could tolerate, and I pushed myself harder. After he’d napped through the end of the fight and left my mate exposed to danger, Ishouldhave taken his throat. But it was hard to be angry with him while the mate bond swirled in my chest, and when he’d played an admittedly significant part in my mate’s rescue—prior to get himself knocked out like a hatchling. Then I’d wanted to take his throat all over again when the asshole had knelt before me and called me ‘king’. Like I had any use for petty titles, or time to waste ruling vindictive dragons. I planned to return to my estate, and stay there—with my mate. And if we left, it would only be because she wanted to explore the world that had been hidden away from her for her entire existence. But if the last two days in my—our—room were anything to go by, we’d be too busy for the next decade or two to be travelling. So insteadof giving Gaheris an ass-kicking, I gave him a crown and called the job done. He’d always had a better head for politics than me.
We would have ruled better than him.
And, so far as I knew, he wasn’t hampered by an annoying voice that second guessed all of his decisions.
