The Warrior King (Inferno Rising) by Owen, Abigail (online e book reading txt) 📗

against his, and had to fight his mind and the crazy idea looming larger by the second. His dragon side wanted to curl around her. This time, instead of the sensation of walking through water and a doorway, his field of vision shrank and narrowed, like walking through a circular tunnel. Good thing he didn’t suffer from claustrophobia.

“Jump,” her muffled voice commanded.

Into what? All he could see was a smaller bent image of her in a field, blue sky behind her, and blackness around the edges. Nothing.

“Trust me,” she called.

Samael jumped.

The world hurtled toward him, the same way the earth did when he tucked his wings in tight and dropped straight down, rushing up at him with each passing millisecond. His feet hit solid ground and his body hit Meira, tumbling them both to the ground. Samael didn’t have time to flip so that he took the brunt of the impact, but he did manage to get a hand under her head.

The world solidified to the right size half a second later, and he found himself nose to nose with her, gazing into eyes slowly turning whiter.

My mate.

Immediately, his body stirred to the feel of her under him, her soft hair against his hand, her scent filling his lungs.

But gods above, she smelled amazing. “You smell…”

He cut himself off before he could say the wrong thing. Like how she smelled of heaven and ambrosia.

Wariness gazed back at him. “I do?” She wrinkled her nose as he left the sentence hanging.

“Not bad, just…” He stared at her dumbly, even as a voice in the back of his head told him to get up. Get off her. “My mother used to grow vines of jasmine in our cave using a system of trellises and aiming the mirrored lighting at the plants, filling our home with the scent when they bloomed.”

Meira tipped her head, her silky hair winding more around the fingers still cradling the back of her skull. She searched his face and almost seemed to relax beneath him, wariness peeling away, leaving curiosity. “Why?”

Didn’t the woman have any self-preservation instincts? She shouldn’t be lying beneath a dragon. One quickly becoming aroused, his hard length pressing into her belly.

I should stand up. Move away.

He didn’t, and she watched him with that gaze that was a combination of curious and assessing and waited for an answer.

Samael shrugged. “She’d said it reminded her of the family and life she’d willingly left behind.”

“I can’t imagine being a human dragon mate,” she murmured. “To have to leave behind everything you know. Everything you thought you were.”

“For love the fates have bound together since the time of your birth.” He couldn’t help the way his gaze dropped to her lips.

He knew how she tasted now, and the taste was becoming a craving. A fire in his belly.

Again, she wrinkled her nose. “I’ve always wondered if those stories are made up to influence those same human women into believing they have no choice.”

“I believe the bursting-into-fire thing makes them believe that,” he said drily.

“So, you’d have no trouble taking a reluctant mate?”

Was she trying to relay some sort of subtle message? Or was she really lying here beneath him debating this? With Meira, he suspected the latter.

He toyed with the soft strands of her hair, letting the tresses slide through his fingers. “I don’t think it’s like that. I think a dragon shifter’s need to protect his fated mate, at all costs, would keep him from hurting her in any way. It would make him not only want to make her happy… It would be a…compulsion.”

That’s what he’d seen with his own parents. His grandparents, too. Every mated pair in his clan, come to think of it.

It’s what he felt for her.

Meira smiled slowly, though her eyes reflected a sadness that ran as deep and dark as an underground river. She lifted a hand and whispered her fingertips over his jaw, that damn curiosity in her eyes growing, but at the same time, clear to him that she wasn’t really aware of her actions, just following a compulsion. “I hope that’s true. I never got to see it with my own parents.”

The sudden impulse to chase that sadness from Meira’s eyes about blindsided him, and he did his best to take every emotion he was feeling and shove it into a box in his mind.

Now’s not the time, jackass.

Forcing himself to unwind her hair from his fist, he pushed to his feet and offered her a hand, helping her up.

“Where are we again?” She’d said home, but whose? He looked around them at the new location. “And what the hell did we come through?”

Turning, he discovered a silver orb set atop a pedestal. Some sort of seeing-eye object? Perhaps a magical ward?

“We came through lawn art.” Meira’s voice held a not-so-secret laugh.

“Lawn art,” Samael echoed slowly.

A choked sound had him jerking around to find her holding back laughter, a hand covering her mouth. At his raised brows, she lowered her hand to reveal a full grin, and the dimples that had him clenching against the urge to tumble her back under him.

“Lawn art is something humans do in parts of the world. Decorations in their yard. Only I think Mother put it there on purpose—”

The twinkle in her eyes doused like a candle snuffed out by a sudden gust of wind, her smile a falling star, fading away to nothing.

“Oh gods,” she whimpered. “Mama.”

Then she turned away and, almost like a wraith walking a graveyard, pushed through a gate in the metal fencing that appeared to be constructed of some kind of ineffective chain mail, and moved through the tall, spring-green grasses beyond.

Keeping his mouth shut as well as his distance, Samael followed until they reached a spot near a charred tree, the blackened bark reaching into the blue sky in spikes. The ground here was equally green, but beneath, he could see the evidence of fire. He could also detect the distinctive scent on the air, though