“What did you think I was going to tell you?”
She covered her face with her hands. “It’s too embarrassing.”
He reached forward and pried her hands away. “Lucy. Tell me.”
She looked down at the covers and played with them absentmindedly. “I guess I thought that you were gonna tell me that I was your true mate.”
Either his chest constricted or his heart grew. He wasn’t sure. But he had to kiss the sweetness off of her lips. He gently brought her face to his and rolled them over so that she was pinned underneath him.
“Lucy, you’re missing the most important part of the title ‘true mate’. It’s ‘mate’. You couldn’t be my true mate unless you got pregnant by me.”
She looked up at him. An emotion crossing her face that he couldn’t read. Wanted desperately to be able to, but couldn’t.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lucy woke up alone the next morning. And for every morning for the next month. She knew she would. Each night, Amos would sneak into her room. He’d make intense, holy love to her and sneak out before the morning.
Lucy had never been so happy and so sad in her entire life. Her days were filled with drab monotonous pretending. Pretending she wasn’t completely disgusted by King Dalyer. Pretending she was faithful to him. Pretending she was getting used to being counted among his wives. She dreaded it with her whole soul. Her days were marked only by her prayers for them to go faster.
But her nights were marked by intense, ecstatic pleasure. And safety. And wild love.
The love part she’d only begun to admit to herself. She felt that it was utterly useless to deny. She could feel it coursing off of her in waves toward him, even when he stood forty feet away in the King’s chambers. Even though they were good at hiding it, it was a miracle to her that other people couldn’t sense the intensity between them.
She wondered if the other wives might suspect something. Especially Zara, whom Lucy had come to know as incredibly smart and observant. The other two wives, Beatrix and Sara, were much less interested in Lucy. In fact, they’d barely acknowledged her for the first two weeks they were forced to coexist.
Lucy assumed it was because of the bias that so many dragon shifters had against humans, but Zara had corrected her on that.
“No,” Zara had said. “It’s not because you’re a human, it’s because they don’t want to get attached to you. There have been other wives. Ones King Dalyer has been less patient with than me and Beatrix and Sara. It’s always really hard when he decides he’s done with them.”
“Done with them?” Lucy had asked, feeling sick.
“Yes. King Dalyer is merciful though. He always executes very quickly.”
In a way, Lucy hated any extra information she ever got about King Dalyer. It made her days with him so much harder. It was almost impossible not to flinch away from him. But she knew it was even harder for Amos to watch the King paw at her. She could feel Amos’s fiery, furious energy anytime the King even spoke to her.
And their sex had become more and more intense in response. Any day that the King had touched her, Amos would wash her that night. He was always so thorough. His hands touching every part of her body, he’d wash away any memory of the King. But once he was inside her, the gentleness would disappear.
“Mine,” he’d chant in her ear, tugging on her nipples and riding her into orgasm. She would lose count of the number of times he’d make her come every night. She came on his hands, on his face, on his cock. They had sex on every surface of her room. Sometimes falling asleep on the floor, in the bathtub, sitting up against the door.
But every morning she’d wake up tucked into her bed. And she’d know he stood outside of her door, pretending he’d just arrived for his morning shift.
This particular morning, Lucy wasn’t dreading the day quite as much as she usually did. It was Sunday. The one day of the week that the King didn’t require the wives to sit dutifully at his knee. They were allowed to take care of their affairs and do as they wished around the fortress.
Lucy and Zara had taken to spending those Sundays together. Usually going up to the roof where Amos had taken her before. Zara’s dragon form was so beautiful and Lucy loved to watch her shift. To watch her dip and fly among the clouds.
“What you need is a saddle,” Lucy said to Zara as she sat in the sun next to her.
“A saddle? Like, those things humans use on horses?” Zara asked, confused.
“Yeah, you need a dragon saddle. And then I could ride on your back.”
Zara flopped down and laughed. “Uh, no thanks, human. I’ll pass on being your horse.”