Chapter 8
Gayle couldn’t believe this was happening to her. That any of this was happening to her. “How can I have disobeyed you when you didn’t tell me I couldn’t leave the castle?”
“Do not play word games with me,” Grigor growled. “You knew you were not supposed to leave.”
“Knowing and telling are two— Oh my God!” Gayle’s body arched in pleasure as the rough rasp of Grigor’s tongue swept from the wetness of her labia up to her clit. “That is so— Oh God…” Her body became boneless as that tongue—surely longer and thicker than a human tongue?—now licked and probed beneath the protective hood to her clit before centering on that throbbing nubbin.
Having Grigor’s mouth on her was exquisite, beyond anything Gayle had ever imagined as she pleasured herself late at night in her single bed thinking of some imaginary hottie. Except Grigor wasn’t a hottie; he was man personified. Handsome. Fierce. Possessive as hell. A relentless lover whose lips and tongue took her quickly to that pinnacle—
Before stopping.
“No!” Gayle protested desperately on behalf of her abandoned and aching clit.
“Yes,” he insisted, his lips forging a path of fire across her abdomen now, hands pushing up her T-shirt to bare her breasts covered in pink lace. “Pretty,” he murmured before easily snapping the inch of ribbon between the two lace cups and pushing them aside. “Prettier,” he approved gruffly before lowering his head and taking one aching and erect nipple into the enveloping heat of his mouth, while his fingers and thumb grasped its twin to roll and squeeze.
Gayle wondered if it was possible to come just from having her nipples sucked and caressed. It damn well felt like it as Grigor alternated his attention between her nipples, one minute his mouth sucking and teeth gently biting, the next that wetness being squeezed and pulled and his mouth capturing and suckling the other nipple.
Each time she felt herself on the brink of coming, Grigor would stop this dual assault to instead explore her shoulders and throat with lingering kisses and the lapping of his tongue before returning to begin the torture all over again.
Gayle lost track of time, of everything but the pleasure created by Grigor’s mouth and hands, aware of a voice that whimpered and pleaded in the background. A voice she recognized as her own.
Her nipples were bright red and aching by the time Grigor’s mouth returned to suck her clit into the moist heat of his mouth. Her back arched, hips pressing upward as she tried to force the friction she needed rather than having his fingers lightly tormenting her swollen labia. She sobbed in needy frustration when Grigor denied her release again by grasping her hips to hold her in position before the magical length of his tongue moved down to pierce and enter her channel.
“Grigor!” she groaned. “Please. Oh God, please. You said you would never hurt me!”
He raised his head slightly, lips glistening with her juices. “I am not hurting you.”
“You are!” she accused. “My body hurts and aches so much.”
His gaze softened. “Will you willfully disobey me again?”
“I wasn’t being willful the first time,” she defended. “I was—I was frightened, okay?” she admitted with a sob. “My body started to tremble and ache the moment I was alone in my bedroom, and it frightened the hell out of me when I realized it had to be the mating aphrodisiac. It made everything you’d told me all too real. I just wanted to get away for a while. To think.” Her voice broke on another sob. “I wasn’t running away from you, just… Please don’t… I can’t stand you being cruel to me,” she choked.
How could Grigor resist Gayle’s pleading eyes or the emotion he could hear in her voice? Punishing his mate was one thing, but hurting her in any way was unacceptable. Besides which, he knew Gayle well enough to know how much it had cost her to admit to being frightened of anything.
Had that added to the fear he had sensed in her earlier of being left alone and abandoned? Her plea for him not to be cruel to her certainly indicated that was the case.
His skittish mate needed his reassurance, affirmation of their relationship, not his punishment.
Grigor moved up Gayle’s body until his thighs were settled between hers and his face was only inches above her own. He took the weight of his chest onto his elbows, allowing his hands the freedom to cup the heat of her cheeks as he gazed down into her shadowed green eyes. “I am all yours now, Gayle,” he assured her gruffly. “I will never leave you, never betray you with another woman, will remain steadfast and true to only you for the rest of however long our lives together should last.”
She blinked. “You will?”
“I will.” Grigor made it a vow.
She swallowed. “Would you release my arms now?”
He tensed warily. “Why?”
Her cheeks blushed a fiery red. “So that I can put them around you.”
Grigor studied her face for any sign of trickery. All he saw was the intensity of her green eyes steadily meeting his gaze. The flush in her cheeks. The swell of her lips. The stubborn set of her chin. “You will not run away again?”
“No.”
“I have your word?” He began to untie her wrists.
“You do.”
He paused with only one of her wrists freed. “You said that too readily.”
She frowned her irritation. “Okay, so I was really only promising not to run away again right now. No woman in her right mind would,” she added derisively as she unfastened the second tie herself, “when she has a gorgeous man lying between her thighs, promising to give her unimagined pleasure!”
A smile played about Grigor’s lips. “You think I’m gorgeous?”
“Don’t let it go to your head,” she warned with her usual spirit. “I also think you’re stern, dictatorial, cold, and all-round bloody arrogant!”
He gave a shake of his head. “I’m not cold around you.”
Something Gayle could definitely attest to right now, when she could feel the hard and hot length of his cock pressing against the heat of her mound. “I notice you didn’t deny being stern, dictatorial or arrogant.”
He shrugged those impossibly wide and muscular shoulders. “I have already explained someone has to be in charge of the family.”
“And that someone is you.”
“That someone is definitely me.”
Of course it was Grigor. Eldest or otherwise, he was power and strength, loyalty and dedication to the health and happiness of his family. Of his mate. Of her.
For so long, Gayle had wanted, needed, to be the focus of someone’s single-minded attention. To be important to them. To be the center of their universe.
In the way Grigor was now promising to be that for her.
Could she believe him? Believe in the two of them being together?
They were so different. Grigor had lived for centuries, and his powerful and confident demeanor carried the knowledge and strength of having survived those centuries, whereas she… Since leaving university, Gayle knew she had hidden herself away in her bedroom at the apartment she shared with Holly, the outside world something she rarely ventured out into. Living her life through the internet was easier, the friendships she had on there with other hackers and computer nerds less intrusive than the real thing.
Besides, she knew from Chloe’s books that a dragon shifter’s mate was chosen for them, not by them. There was no love involved.
That wasn’t true. Gayle may have only been at the castle for a few days, but she had no doubt Nathaniel loved Chloe. Or that Deryk loved Izzy. Even grouchy Bryn melted into an emotional puddle when it came to his pregnant wife. As for Dylan and her sister Holly… Not only could the two of them not keep their hands off each other, but Gayle had absolutely no doubt of Dylan’s love for Holly and her sister’s love for Dylan. It was there in every glance and touch the two of them shared.
Would Grigor grow to love her in the same way?
Could she love Grigor?
She was already halfway there, Gayle realized a little dazedly. How could she not be falling in love with a man who promised her all of himself, to never leave her, never be unfaithful to her, to care for and protect her for the rest of his life?
The thought of having all Grigor’s strength and devotion directed solely toward her was overwhelming.
Something Gayle had hungered for all her life but never thought she would ever find. “I think perhaps I could be your mate after all.” She placed her hands invitingly on his shoulders.
Grigor drew in a sharp breath. “Perhaps and could are not definitive.”
She rolled her eyes. “You could become a pain in the ass very quickly, do you know that?”
His lips curved in a smile. “I thought I already was that to you?”
“Yeah,” Gayle sighed. “As for the mating thing, do we really have a choice when the alternative’s death?”
He shrugged. “I will happily die with my mate if that is her choice.”
“It isn’t,” she huffed. “Which means you had better get on with it.”
“On with it?”
“The mating thing.”
Grigor frowned. “You wish the two of us to complete our mating now?”
She gave a shrug. “Is there any point in waiting?”
Merely hearing Gayle say these words caused Grigor’s heart to jolt, his body to heat, and his cock to harden to steel inside his jeans. He wanted Gayle so intensely, it physically pained him not to be inside her, taking her, mating her, biting her, fucking her with the barb on his cock latched inside her channel for the days it would take to satiate the initial mating heat.
After waiting for her for so many years, there were no words to express how badly Grigor craved that connection with Gayle. A connection and need he knew would be there between them for however many centuries the two of them lived.
But it was also a mating he dare not begin in earnest until he knew Gayle’s safety was assured. The person spying on the castle might not be connected to Gayle at all, of course, but until Grigor knew for certain, he dare not allow the all-consuming heat of their mating to distract him.
“There is no rush,” he soothed. “We have time for you to know what you are getting yourself into. For us to get to know each other better before we mate.”
Gayle had watched the emotions flitting across Grigor’s face. The triumph. The heat. The possessive glitter in his eyes. Quickly followed by anger and frustration. Lastly, regret. “You don’t want to mate with me,” she said flatly.
“Of course I want to mate with you.”
Gayle couldn’t even look at him as her hands pushed against his shoulders. She wanted him off her. Away from her. “Get off me, Grigor,” she instructed coldly once she accepted she wasn’t going to be able to physically move him.
His eyes narrowed. “You will not tell me what to do.”
“As I’m not your mate yet—and might never be—I’ll do what I damn well please.” She glared her anger. “And right now, it would please me to have you get the fuck away from me!”
He drew his breath in sharply. “You do not really mean that.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What was unclear about get the fuck away from me?”
Grigor’s jaw clenched. “Your need to mate will become increasingly uncomfortable—”
“Then I’ll be fucking uncomfortable!”
“Dylan’s serum would help to dull the arousal to a manageable level.”
“Shove your serum.” She had offered this man her total surrender, her body, to become his mate, and he had rejected her. She wouldn’t make the same offer twice. “I’ll admit that for a few minutes, I was momentarily overwhelmed by arousal, but now I’m not.” She forced herself to look at him coldly, at the same time as she inwardly willed the tears not to fall. She would have plenty of time for tears later. “Now get off me so I can go back to my own bedroom.”
Grigor’s frown was pained. “I said you will be staying in here with me from now on.”
She shook her head. “Not happening.”
“Gayle—” Grigor broke off his appeal as a knock sounded on his bedroom door.
He rose to his feet with a roar. Someone had dared to interrupt him when he was with his mate. Again. In the past, he had always been available for whatever his family needed from him. Now Gayle always came first for him.
“Grigor,” Nathaniel called out. “We have a visitor.”
What the fuck did he care about a visitor when his mate was not only demanding he release her but pushing him away, physically and emotionally?
“It’s Nikolai Volkov,” Nathaniel added softly.
“My God, I can’t believe Nikolai’s here!” An excited smile lit Gayle’s face as she scrambled off the bed to hastily pull on and straighten her clothing.
Grigor frowned. He knew who Nikolai Volkov was, of course, but his mate’s pleasure in the arrival of Gregori Markovic’s second in the London bratva was unexpected. Admittedly, he knew the two of them had met in London a few days ago, but surely Volkov was a married man? With a child.
Gayle hurried toward the door. “I wonder if he brought Adam with him.”
Grigor held back another possessive roar at hearing his mate speak so warmly of yet another male.
A painful reminder that he hadn’t thought to ask Gayle if there was already a man in her life. A man she cared about, possibly loved.
If it transpired there was, then Grigor would have no choice but to kill him.
Gayle was his, damn it.
His!