Hidden Embers (27 page)

“But I don’t want—” He chose that moment to suck her nipple deeply into his mouth, and she forgot all her concerns, forgot everything but the need to orgasm, which rose sharply with each pull of his mouth on her breast. Her body spun out of control, her need for him overwhelming everything else.

Moaning, sighing, she pressed her breast more firmly against his mouth, relishing the feel of his tongue around her areola. Loving the occasional nip of his teeth against her rock-hard nipple.

“Quinn, please,” she begged, spreading her legs and pressing her lower body against the hardness of his thigh. She needed him against her, inside her, like she’d never imagined needing anything.

With a groan, he gave her just a little of what she craved. Sliding his thigh between hers, he let her ride him until she was nearly insane with the need to come. She was wet—hot and aching—and so ready for him that one touch of his finger on her clit would send her soaring into the stratosphere.

But he was so much better at holding off than she, and he pulled away from her just as the climax started swelling within. Just as her body was one thrust away from ecstasy.

Jasmine whimpered, tried to follow him, but he held her in place with one hand against her stomach while the other anchored her wrists. “What are you…?” She couldn’t finish the question, her need ruining any hope for coherent thought.

“Say you belong to me.” Quinn whispered the words as he licked from the valley between her breasts to the hollow of her throat.

“What?” she asked, her entire body straining for completion.

“Tell me that you belong to me. That you’re mine.” His teeth sunk into her shoulder, hard, and she screamed as pleasure shot through her. “That no other man will touch you while you belong to me.”

“Quinn!”

“Jasmine,” he prompted, his tongue tenderly licking away the bite marks. “If you want to come, you know what you need to say.”

“Fuck you!”

“You wish.” He nibbled his way down her throat, licked along her collarbone.

“Come on,” she pleaded. “Don’t make me say it.”

His eyes met hers, and once again she saw the dragon in him. The beast was wild. “I need this, Jasmine.” His voice was barely human. “I need to hear you say it, if only for tonight.”

Hearing him admit that, listening to him expose his own vulnerabilities, made it so much easier for her to admit her own. “You do things to me no one else ever has or ever will,” she whispered. “I belong to you, Quinn.”

Abruptly, he lifted his head, stared at her with eyes that glowed electric green. “Thank you.”

Before she could figure out how to answer, the hand resting on her stomach moved. Slid inside the waistband of her yoga pants and found her sex warm and ready for him.

“Fuck, sweetheart.” He slipped one long finger inside her, curved it so he touched her G-spot with the first stroke. Then pulled back and did it again. And again. On the third stroke of his finger she started to come, wave after wave of sensation swamping her.

He moved his thumb, circled it around her throbbing clit. Once, twice. She glanced up and into his dragon eyes and shot over a higher, steeper edge, her body completely out of her control as ecstasy whipped through her nerve endings. Her muscles spasmed, clutched at him, wanting to take him deeper and deeper inside her until the pleasure was all-consuming, never-ending.

Quinn held her through it, swallowing her cries with his mouth as his fingers continued to stroke her, prolonging her climax. Taking her higher. When she couldn’t take it anymore, when her body was so sensitive that she was almost at the breaking point, Jasmine yanked her mouth from his. She rested her forehead on his broad chest and pleaded, “Stop, Quinn. Please stop. I can’t take any more.”

“There’s always more, Jasmine.” But he slid his finger slowly out of her, pausing to stroke her labia once, twice. She whimpered, arched against him, so exhausted and shaken that she could barely move. Had she really pleaded with him to take her? Had she really told him, of all people, that she belonged to him? She could barely wrap her head around it.

And yet the panic she expected didn’t set in. Maybe she was too relaxed, too satisfied. She didn’t know, and for the moment, she didn’t care. There would be time enough later to worry and wonder about this night. For now, she just wanted to enjoy it. To enjoy Quinn.

As if he could read her mind, Quinn murmured, “Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’ve got you.”

A part of her wanted to argue, to say that she didn’t need his help, but any protest she made would sound pretty hollow as his arms were the only things keeping her ass from hitting the ground. God knew her legs didn’t stand a chance of supporting her.

“Let’s go,” he whispered, running a hand across the back of her neck. “Let me love you.”

A million arguments entered her mind, a million reasons why going home with him was a bad idea. But she had already made her decision, and there was no use second-guessing herself now. Quinn deserved better than that—and so did she.

“How far away is your place?” she finally answered.

He could have taken her to his house and probably should have. Only a few blocks from the lab, it was close, convenient, and human-friendly.

Quinn knew it was the right choice even as he steered her back to the lab parking lot and into the SUV he kept in the corner of the lot. Knew it was the right choice even as he passed his housing complex and headed out of town. Knew it was the right choice even as he turned off the highway and onto the black desert sand. And still he didn’t make it.

He glanced at Jasmine out of the corner of his eye, expecting her to protest—or at least to ask where they were going. In the few days he’d known her, he’d learned that curiosity was definitely her middle name, and it seemed completely out of character that she was so passive now.

He wasn’t sure he liked it. Sure, when he’d been younger, he’d always assumed his future mate would trust him to do what was right for her. He’d wanted that, wanted a woman who was content to let him take care of her. Not an automaton, certainly, but not a woman who went haring off into the back of beyond to chase contagious diseases either. Not a woman who risked her life on a daily basis in countries that were politically and economically unstable, not to mention deathtraps of famine and disease.

That was before he’d met Jasmine. Before he’d held her in his arms. Before he’d seen her reach, without hesitation, into his friend’s broken body and do her best to heal him. To think about his ideal mate now that he had Jasmine, now that he’d made love to her and listened to her unravel some of the mysteries of the disease that was ravaging his people, seemed not just wrong but blasphemous. She deserved so much better than that.

He reached over and brushed a lock of hair off her forehead so he could get a better look at those crazy purple eyes of hers. “Hey, you doing all right?”

Her smile was relaxed and dreamy. “I’m doing just fine. Why?”

“You’re awfully quiet.”

She laughed. “And that’s not like me?”

“Not really, no.”

“I was just looking out at the sky and thinking how incredibly beautiful it is out here. I’ve been all over the world, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt about another place the way I feel about this desert.”

His heart pounded a little more quickly at that revelation. “How do you feel about it?”

“It feels like home. Isn’t that strange? I’ve never really had a home, never had a place where I felt completely safe or comfortable. And yet—”

“Not even as a child?” he interrupted.

“God, no. Especially not then.” She sighed, laid her head on his shoulder. “My dad wasn’t exactly the nurturing sort.”

Quinn’s whole body went rigid at the studied casualness in her voice. “Did he hurt you?”

“I survived.”

“That’s not what I asked.” His hands clenched the steering wheel.

“He controlled me—and my mother. Every little thing we did, from what clothes we wore to what we ate to what time I was allowed to take a shower. His word was law and his punishments when I messed up were…creative.”

Quinn felt his dragon awaken, the beast raising its head as much because of what she’d left unsaid. “Did your mother leave him?” he asked.

“Not quite.” Jasmine laughed, but the sound lacked the warm humor he was used to hearing from her. He tensed, anger welling up inside.

“My mom isn’t exactly what you’d call a liberated woman. She spent her entire life trying to please my dad, trying to be perfect so he wouldn’t beat her. It didn’t work, of course. Because no matter how perfect she was, there was always something that set him off. Something she didn’t do right. Potatoes for dinner when he wanted rice. Ivory soap in the bathroom instead of Dial. Buying the wrong kind of beer, even if it was the same beer he’d been drinking for years. She should have known without him having to tell her that he wanted a change.”

She turned and looked out the window, but not before he glimpsed the sorrow and shame she was trying so hard to hide. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“It’s okay.” His voice was lower, darker than usual, but he couldn’t stop it. Not when his head was filled with images of Jasmine and her mother at the mercy of a monster. “God knows, I’ve dumped on you since we met.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Sure it is.” He paused, tried to figure out what to say to make her pain better. The scent of it permeated the car, and it was driving both his dragon and his human half crazy. “How did you get out? College?”

“Something like that.” Her tone said there was a lot more to it.

“Come on, Jazz. Talk to me.”

She shrugged, and the silence stretched between them as he took the SUV deeper and deeper into the desert. Each second that passed stretched his control, so that he was hanging by a thread—imagining all kinds of atrocities—by the time she finally started to speak.

“By the time I was a teenager, my mom was completely worn out. My father broke her bones so often he took her to different hospitals to throw suspicion away from himself.

“I hated seeing her like that, scared and in pain all the time. I started provoking him so he’d take his temper out on me instead. I was faster, so he didn’t get as many licks in, and healthier, so my bones didn’t break as easily. One day he came home from work and I wasn’t around—I was at school working on some biology project or something. He’d spent all afternoon drinking at the corner bar and had worked himself into a hell of a rage by the time he got home.

“She told me later that he started on her as soon as he’d walked through the door. She didn’t tell me what he did, but then, she didn’t have to. By the time I got home she was half dead, crumpled on the kitchen floor in the fetal position, unable to get away as he whaled on her. I tried to stop him, tried to help her, and he turned on me. Broke my arm and four of my ribs.”

Quinn’s world exploded. Pure, unadulterated rage flashed through him like a lightning strike as his talons pushed at his fingertips. His wings started to punch through the muscles of his back, and the only thing that kept him from relinquishing control to the beast was the fact that he would scare Jasmine to death if he did.

Even knowing that, it was a close thing and he clung to control with battered, bloody fingertips. The idea that Jasmine had been hurt by some sadistic asshole was almost more than he could bear. The fact that it had happened while he was alive and more than capable of stopping it—if only he’d known it was going on—was somehow a million times worse.

He gritted his teeth, forced himself to keep it together as Jasmine’s voice broke. She swallowed convulsively, struggling to push the rest of the words out. “Anyway, by the time we’d started to heal up—it took a few weeks—I knew I had to get us out of there or we’d both end up dead. I’d been saving money up for college from my afternoon job—I had about six thousand dollars hidden at the back of my closet. Anyway, I waited for him to leave for work one day, and I packed a bag for both of us. Begged her to get in her car and leave with me.

“She wouldn’t do it. No matter what I said, she wouldn’t leave him. I knew if I stayed he’d end up killing me—I wasn’t very good at keeping my mouth shut even then—so I took off. Walked to the nearest bus station and caught a bus to the nearest college town. The rest is history.”

But it wasn’t. He could see that much in her unbending spine, in the hand that was trembling slightly against her thigh. He stared straight ahead, tried to concentrate on driving, but all the time he was wondering what he’d been doing as Jasmine was being tortured. What problems had he been trying to solve for his clan while his mate made her way in the world, young and battered and alone?

Nothing came to mind, except the knowledge that he’d failed her. He’d failed his mate as surely as he had failed his brothers, his parents, his clan. Goddamnit! He wanted to throw his head back and roar. Someone had hurt her and he had done nothing to stop it!

“Hey.” As she finished the story, she realized she’d pressed herself up against the car door in an effort to make herself as small as possible. She straightened up, not wanting to look vulnerable. “It’s not a big deal anymore.

“It still hurts you.” It was a growl, low and inhuman.

“Yeah, but not in the same way.”

“It never should have happened.” His shirt ripped as his back rippled with the need to change.

“Quinn, stop it. I’m fine. It was a long time ago.”

Not so long ago to him—less than one-twenty-fifth of his lifetime.

His talons shredded his shoes as they poked through the leather. Shit, he was losing it.

“I mean it, Quinn. Stop!”

It was too late—he was too far gone. His vision changed, became so much sharper, keener than it was while he was in human form. He slowed the car.

“Damn it, you’re scaring me!” Jasmine fumbled for the door.

He slammed on the brakes and reached over her to pull the door closed. Then laid his head against the seat, closed his eyes, and reached for his dragon. Second by second, breath by breath, he pulled the beast back in—conscious of Jasmine staring at him as he did.