Chapter 4
“Who are you?” Chloe demanded as she began to back away. “What are you?” Her voice rose in panic as she came up against the cold stone of the wall behind her and couldn’t get any farther away in the confined space.
Chloe’s was an age-old question, Nathaniel acknowledged wearily. He also knew the truth was likely to send even this feisty woman into more of a panic than she obviously already was at being kept here against her will.
He’d removed his sunglasses when he came into the castle, but as Chloe was thrown over his shoulder at the time, she wouldn’t have seen that. Her reaction now told him his eyes must be glowing.
Because carrying Chloe, her close proximity and scent, meant he was still aroused.
Her hair had come loose as he carried her, and it now spilled about her shoulders in that spectrum of colors from red to gold. Her eyes were a dark blue, no doubt due to the fear she was trying to hide. Her cheeks were pale, but she nevertheless held her chin high with a defiant I’m-not-afraid-of-you attitude.
He turned away. “I’ll bring you some food and water down shortly—”
“You’ll answer my fucking question before you leave!”
Nathaniel came to an abrupt halt, his back having stiffened at what he was sure was a deliberate move on Chloe’s part to antagonize him by swearing at him again. She really didn’t have a self-preservation bone in her shapely body.
Because she didn’t know what he really was, he reminded himself. Chloe believed he and his brothers were drug or arms smugglers. The truth was, human drugs had no more effect on them than alcohol did. Nor did Nathaniel need a gun, or anything else, to enable him to destroy an enemy.
Damn it, he had tried being reasonable with this woman.
Mine.
All while fighting the increasing demand of his dragon to take and claim.
It was a battle Nathaniel knew he had lost as his gaze narrowed, pinpointed on Chloe’s curvaceous form.
Chloe barely registered Nathaniel moving before he was pressing her back up against the cold cell wall with the heat of his body, both her hands held captive above her head by one of his.
A very angry and very aroused Nathaniel.
The former was evident in those eerily glowing green eyes, the latter in the hard ridge of a very large cock pressing against her abdomen.
Note to self: in future do not piss off the man holding me prisoner in an actual dungeon.
That glowing green gaze moved down to Chloe’s lips, and she realized she was running the tip of her tongue nervously across them.
If anything, his eyes glowed even brighter.
Chloe had never seen anyone’s eyes do that before. Any human eyes, that was.
What the hell…?
She was letting her imagination run away with her. Of course Nathaniel was human. Wasn’t everyone? Well, maybe not some of her ex-boyfriends, who she was sure were aliens from another planet, including Keith, but—
She was becoming hysterical.
Of course she was becoming hysterical!
Deryk’s behavior and comments earlier had scared the hell out of her. He had sniffed her, for God’s sake. Now she was being held prisoner in a dungeon. By two men with eyes that glowed. Nathaniel should think himself lucky she hadn’t screamed more of those obscenities he seemed to take such exception to.
Remembering the way he had spanked her for swearing at him made her cheeks burn, and not just those on her face. “What are you, Neanderthal man?” She tried to brave out a situation that had suddenly turned from scary to outright dangerous.
The overwhelming heat of Nathaniel’s body also thrummed with tension, a mocking smile curving his lips as he caged her against the wall with his arms and torso. “Not even close. Would you like to know what you are?”
Chloe told herself his tone couldn’t really sound as if he was growling. His voice was deep and gravelly, yes, but so were a lot of other men’s.
What about the underlying compulsion she could hear in that deep voice? How did she explain that away?
He settled the hardness of his hips more comfortably against her softer ones when she didn’t answer him. “You’re the woman who is asking to be fucked within an inch of your life,” he informed her as if he had just told her the weather was nice for this time of year.
Chloe’s stomach clenched before it did some sort of flip-flop, half in fear of the intent she could now see in Nathaniel’s eyes, half in anticipation of the feel and taste of those sculpted lips against her own.
Sick. She was sick. This man and his equally as weird brother were not only keeping her a prisoner, but now Nathaniel had become as dangerous as his brother. Maybe more so, as he was holding her body immobile against the wall and her captive hands stretched high above her head.
Because he is dangerous, you twit. He’s a crook who makes a living out of other people’s misery.
The bloody man was also almost twice the size she was, and strong enough to do whatever he wanted to and with her, without exerting himself in the slightest.
She had gone about this the wrong way, Chloe realized. She should have played the poor-scared-little-woman card rather than the ballsy I’m-not-taking-any-shit-from-you-or-your-brother one.
She forced herself to relax her body and lowered her chin from its challenging angle. “I told you, I’m…uncomfortable in small, dark places.”
Nathaniel didn’t seem to hear her as he stared down at her for several long seconds. “I want a taste,” he finally muttered as if to himself. “Just one taste,” he groaned.
A taste of— Oh.
Every thought fled Chloe’s head as Nathaniel lowered his head and his lips came down gently on hers. If he had been aggressive or demanding, she would have fought him, but his gentleness totally disarmed her. His lips felt hot against hers as they sipped and tasted, coaxing her into responding.
Chloe didn’t stand a chance of resisting. Her lips parted beneath the persuasive heat of his, and she groaned softly as the tip of his tongue ventured inside her mouth, stroking hers and causing a tremulous answering warmth between her thighs.
She had no idea when he had released her hands. Only that her arms were now over his shoulders, her fingers entangled in the dark hair at his nape as she stood on tiptoe to allow the kiss to deepen and become more desperate.
It was as if they couldn’t get enough of each other. As if Nathaniel was claiming her with only his lips and the heat of his tongue. It felt to Chloe as if she was trying to climb inside that red-hot skin with him, to become a part of him and never let him go.
Which was…stupid. Stupid and dangerous.
This man and his brother wanted to have sex with her, together, after which they would probably dispose of her body somewhere no one would ever find it.
Was Nathaniel softening her up for the main event? Was he showing her that he would be the “good cop” while his brother was the “bad cop”? Did the two of them get off on this?
Wrenching her head sideways was the only way Chloe had of breaking the kiss when Nathaniel’s body was melded to hers from breasts to thighs. “Get off me.” Her voice sounded shrill even to her own ears.
He slowly raised his head to look at her, revealing those green eyes were slightly unfocused and glowing even more than they had been before.
“Get away from me!” Her hands pushed desperately against his rock-hard chest in an effort to push him away.
Nathaniel felt as if he was waking from a dream, his thoughts incoherent, his vision slightly blurred, all of his senses saturated with the feel of Chloe and the perfume of her arousal.
Mine, mine, mine.
Nathaniel’s vision snapped back into focus, his head clearing and allowing him to think as he fought his dragon’s claim. He had to get away from this woman. Fast. Before he did something they would both regret.
He kept his gaze fixed on her as he stepped back and away from her. “I’ll leave the lights on, and I’ll bring down the food and water soon.” He picked up her things from the floor to take with him.
“What about trips to the bathroom?”
He glanced toward a rusty bucket in the corner of the cell.
“Now you really have to be kidding me,” she muttered disgustedly. “I’m not going to pee in that.”
Nathaniel breathed shallowly, not wanting to draw in any more of her scent, knowing at the moment he was as dangerous to Chloe as Deryk was. More so, in fact.
Because he hadn’t wanted to let her go. Hadn’t wanted to stop kissing her. What he had wanted was to throw her down on the dirty mattress, rip all her clothes from her body, and plunge his cock so deep inside her, he became a part of her and she became a part of him.
He’d bedded more women that he cared to think about during the last fifteen hundred years. But Chloe… She did something to his insides no other woman ever had. Something he didn’t understand and wasn’t sure he wanted to either.
A fated mate?
Hell, no. There was no such bloody thing. There never had been. Their mothers had told them that, and it was nothing more than a fairy tale. The same mothers who hadn’t told them they would never be able to get back into Annwn once they entered the human realm.
This was it for them. There were no fated mates. Just this never-ending existence until, one by one, they became completely dragon and had to be destroyed by their own brothers.
They had discussed this between them many times, knew exactly what had to happen. After killing the last of his brothers, the final brother would kill himself before he turned feral and let loose his dragon on the world.
In the meantime, Nathaniel would get Chloe out of this situation somehow—although he wasn’t sure quite how yet. If he consulted Grigor and his other brothers, they might agree with Deryk that she should be eliminated. Nathaniel couldn’t allow that to happen.
Take her to our cave.
Nathaniel gave a snort. If Chloe thought the amenities in the dungeon were primitive, then she really would think she had returned to the time of Neanderthal man if Nathaniel took her to his cave.
It was the place he went to when he wanted to be dragon for more than a few hours. A huge cavernous place in the volcanic mountains of Iceland, far away from the nearest civilization. He had a nest there, of sorts, and some of his treasures. A dragon could never be completely separated from all its treasures.
But his cave had none of the comforts Chloe was used to, including heat. His natural temperature was always a few degrees higher than a human’s, anyway, but in dragon form, he had a thick hide that kept him at a temperature that would most likely kill a human. His vision was also sharper as dragon. All his senses were.
He also doubted Chloe would be interested in eating raw fish, as he did when he spent time at his nest. Humans went to supermarkets and bought their fish and meat in sterile little packets rather than snatching up a fish or small animal in their claws and taking it back to their cave to gorge on its blood, flesh, and bones.
No, he couldn’t take Chloe to his cave.
“Then don’t,” he answered her abruptly.
“I have to pee somewhere.” The more they talked about the subject, the more Chloe felt as if she needed to pee now.
She was still a little shaken from kissing Nathaniel and being kissed by him. Nor was there any excuse for her behavior. It was certainly far too early in her captivity to be suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Besides, she’d been attracted to Nathaniel before he made her a prisoner.
“Do you have CCTV cameras down here?” She squinted up at each wall in turn, looking for a hidden camera. “Do you and your sick brother get off on watching and humiliating a woman? By forcing her to pee in a bucket? Does it give you a little thrill to catch a glimpse of her pus—”
“Chloe!”
“Whoa!” Her head tilted back instinctively as Nathaniel’s voice boomed so loudly it seemed to bounce and reverberate off the rock walls.
His eyes had become green slits as he scowled down at her. “You will cease this shrewish behavior and foul language. At once.”
Her brows rose. “Or what?”
His hands were clenched into ham-like fists at his sides. “Or that spanking you had earlier will seem like a playful tap,” he grated.
Chloe had been trying not to think of the tingling and stinging of her ass cheeks, but Nathaniel’s comment brought it all back with a vengeance. It was going to be painful to sit down, that was for sure.
Her mouth tightened. “If you leave me here alone, I’m going to scream the place down.”
Some of his tension eased. “And no one will hear you. We’re twenty feet below the surface, and as you can see, the walls are solid rock,” he mocked as he strode toward the cell doorway. “Feel free to scream as much as you want.”
“Nathaniel!” Chloe called out to him desperately as she could see he was going to pull the metal door closed behind him, locking her alone inside the cell. “I really don’t like dark, enclosed spaces.”
He didn’t even glance back at her. “I’ve said I’ll leave the lights on.” The door clanged shut, followed by the turning and pocketing of the key, before Nathaniel walked away.
Chloe watched him until he disappeared and then she listened to the echo of his footsteps going up the stairs, heard a door close above. Followed by a complete and eerie silence.