EMBER shoved open the door to the penthouse and sprinted inside. “Cai? Cai!”
Behind her, Bethany and Willow leaned through the elevator doors, peering inside at the dark red, velvet drapes around the vestibule and bouquet of hydrangeas and lilies on the center table.
Willow said, “Huh, different colors. Arawn’s was blue and silver.”
Bethany still held her all-access keycard in her hand. “Is he here?”
“I don’t know.” Ember slammed open doors as she walked around the antechamber and looked inside the half-bathroom and sitting room. “Cai, where are you!”
Willow ventured in behind her. “Cai? Cai Wyvern?”
Ember pushed open the bedroom door.
Cai lay on the bed, his strong, bare back visible above the sheet and his arm dangling off the side toward where his phone rested on the floor.
“Cai!” She ran and grabbed his shoulders, turning him onto his back.
He barely opened his eyes, but his fingers reached toward her face. “No, Ember. Don’t see me like this.”
Bethany and Willow hovered near the open door.
Ember kissed Cai’s heated temple. “You’re sick. You’re so sick. Why didn’t you tell me you were sick?”
He whispered, “Sometimes mating fever can be hard.”
“Ah,” she heard Bethany say from the doorway. “Ember, honey? If you need back-up or if there’s a real problem, call us. We’ll stay in the hotel. We can be here in two minutes. But this is something you guys need to discuss in private.”
She closed the bedroom door, and their footsteps faded outside the door.
Ember pressed her hand to his forehead, and Cai’s skin was so hot that it nearly burned her palm and fingers. The air above his flesh felt like an open oven. “Cai, I think we need to take you to a hospital. Please, please don’t die.”
He sighed, seeming in relief, and dragonfire trickled out of the corner of his mouth but dissipated before it set the pillow on fire. He pressed her hand more firmly against his burning skin. He whispered, “Touch me.”
“I think you need to go to a hospital, Cai. Please, sugar, please. Please don’t die.”
“Just touch me,” he whispered.
“Are you going to die?” she asked, her voice rising in panic.
“At least I’m in your arms,” he said.
She brushed her lips over his cheekbone, and his eyes fluttered open with his soft gasp.
The green irises of his eyes, usually such brilliant green, were almost entirely engulfed by darkness. “Cai!”
“Do it again,” he whispered. “Please.”
Ember pressed her lips to his temple, and he curled around her, drawing her down into the sheets, whispering, “My love. My life.”
Her phone in her hip pocket buzzed.
She twisted around and plucked it out, her torso leaning against him for balance.
Cai held her closer. “So cool.”
She peered at the icon on the top of her screen and swiped down. The list showed Cai’s name and phone number. “Did you leave a message?”
“Touch me,” he whispered.
Ember thumbed her phone while she wrapped her arms and legs around him. His body vibrated in her limbs, and his muscles jumped like he was trying to escape sudden jabs of pain.
His voice muttered from her phone, and Ember pressed it to her ear. She listened to the message, her eyes tearing up, as Cai whispered, —I love you, and I’m sorry I can’t see you anymore. I’m sorry I have to go. I love you. Know that I loved you. Goodbye, Ember.
“Where are you going?” she asked him as she clicked her phone off.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Why did you kept running away from me?”
He chuckled, but he winced as he did. “The mating fever came upon me like being hit by a shotgun blast. It barreled into me and changed me until I was yours in an instant. I can’t imagine my life any other way now. I can’t imagine living without you. But it was more than I could imagine at the beginning. It’s a vulnerability for a dragon shifter. My father died when my mother left him because she severed the mating bond.”
“Oh, no. My mom just went religion-crazy when my dad left. At least, I still had her.”
“When I first saw that my eyes had changed, I thought I could escape it. By the time I knew I couldn’t stop it, I didn’t know how to talk to you. I love you more than everything else in the world, but I don’t know how you feel about me. I still don’t.”
Ember swallowed hard and held Cai tightly. “I love you. Every time you ran away, it killed me.”
His limbs tangled through hers. “I’m so sorry.”
It didn’t feel real. “Tell me again.”
“I love you, my good witch. I love you more than I have ever imagined loving anyone. I am a hollow shell at the thought of a life without you.”
“You do?” she asked him.
His hands stroked the bare flesh of her arms below her shirt sleeves. He said, “Of course, I love you. I loved you from the moment I saw you. That very first minute in the HR office, I was lost. It just took me a while to realize what that meant.”
“But if you don’t want to be—” she said.
“I do. I want to spend my life with you, but it’s too late.”
“It’s not too late.”
He brushed his lips over her cheek. “I feel gone. I want to fade away.”
“Are you telling me this mating thing is going to kill you?” she shrieked.
His voice was so faint as he whispered near her ear, “If a dragon shifter has mating fever and doesn’t mate, he goes into senescence. Senescence can kill us, and we can definitely let it take us down. It’s one of the drawbacks of being a dragon shifter.”
“We can’t let this kill you.” Ember pushed him away and sat up. “I won’t let this kill you. I’ll call my coven’s witch healer. She can do something. She can always do something for magical ailments.”
“She can’t do anything about this. It’s too late. If we had mated even a few hours ago, I might have had a chance.”
“A chance to do what?”
“To be mated. For you to be my dragonmate, and for us to live our lives together.”
“Why is it too late? You’re still alive. I’m still alive. Why is it too late?”
“The senescence has taken hold. I feel riddled with death.”
“No. No, Cai. I won’t let it happen. I need you. You can’t leave me. I finally found someone I love and who loves me back, and I won’t let you die.”
“Touch me. It makes me feel better.”
She kissed him, and when her lips left his, he inhaled more deeply. His eyes slitted open.
Darkness had almost entirely covered the green.
“Your eyes are so dark,” she told him. “I can hardly see any green left.”
His eyes moved under his lids to look at her. “Hardly?”
“There’s just a little bit of green fire near the centers, right around your pupils.”
He blinked. “There’s some green left?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not too late.”
“Please!” Ember grabbed him. “Mate with me. Marry me. Whatever you call it. Don’t you die on me, Cai Wyvern!”
“You’re sure? If we don’t, you’ll have your normal life. You’ll find someone else.”
“I don’t want to. I want you.”
“Marry me, my love,” Cai said, his hands threading into her hair. A smile ghosted over his lips. “Be my mate. Be my duchess and my love and my life.”
“Yes,” Ember said. “How do we do this? How do I mate with you? Do we need a dragon priest or something?”
He showed her.
Cai’s arms wrapped around her shoulders and waist, and he rolled her over on her back.
She said, “I thought you couldn’t move.”
“You’re my life,” he whispered. “Your soul restores me. Touch me.”
Ember slipped her arm under his tee shirt and around his waist. His skin there was burning up, too.
His eyes closed for a moment, and his lips parted. “Ah.”
“It still feels like you have a raging fever.”
“The dragonfire from my dragon animus expands during the mating fever. It’s filling my body. I’m being burned alive from the inside. Your skin feels cool. Where you touch me, I am quenched.”
Ember shimmied her blouse up a little, baring her stomach, and yanked his shirt up around his chest, too.
When their skin connected, Cai gasped, and he dove to kiss her, hard, his tongue invading her mouth.
She opened her lips for the heat of his tongue and mouth. The warmth from him was like taking a deep breath on a hot, Mojave Desert afternoon. “Cai.”
“Dragon Lords, yes.” He moved down her body, kissing her throat and shoulders until he wrestled her blouse over her head. Rivulets of warmth trickled down the back of her neck. She popped her bra off while Cai shucked his shirt, revealing the deep striations of his abdominals and pectorals.
Ember couldn’t help herself and reached to run her fingers up the bricks of his stomach.
Cai dropped his head back as she did, closing his eyes and groaning.
When he lowered himself and their skin touched from their navels to their shoulders, he bowed his head and kissed her throat, panting. “Gods, Ember.”
She wrapped her legs around him, grabbing him to her.
His body bowed in her arms as if energy had filled him, and he scrambled backward to drag her slacks down her legs and then pushed his pants off and flung them to the floor.
Wow, he had that pointed vee over his hips that drove women wild, and Ember loved looking at it. The taut lines of his lower abs were carved into his stomach, and his skin looked like it was painted over the heavy muscles of his strong back, broad shoulders, and the inverted triangle of his torso. The black dragon tattoo over his ribs on his side expanded as he breathed.
Ember was not in such great shape, and she grabbed for the sheet to cover herself up.
Cai grabbed the bedsheet before she could and stared at her, hunger in his dark eyes. “You are so beautiful, Ember. Let me look at you.”
He sank onto the bed beside her.
He said, “Let me touch you.”
His huge hands roved her sides and the swell of her hips and breasts.
“Let me taste you.”
He kissed her again, and their naked bodies intertwined, limbs and tongues tangling.
“Are you still hurting?” she murmured to him.
“I don’t care. You’re my whole world and my soul. Let me touch you.”
When Cai didn’t run away, he really ratcheted up his talking game.
He moved between her legs, his thick member rubbing between her thighs, and pressed her back against the bed. That mirror was still bolted to the canopy of the bed above them, and Ember was dark lines and curves on the white sheets until his tanned form eclipsed her.
Ember arched under him, pushing her hips up.
“Not yet, my love,” he whispered in her ear, and then he crawled down her body, kissing a trail down her belly.
“Cai, you don’t have to. Please, I don’t want you to hurt anymore.”
He kissed the top of her folds and licked her, slowly. “I can wait a few minutes. Besides, you know the legend about how dragons love to devour fair maidens.”
“I’m not fair,” she gasped, but she couldn’t argue with the other one for a few more minutes.
“I should have said beautiful maidens,” he whispered between strokes of his tongue sending waves of pleasure up her body. “I should have said beautiful and good and lovely maidens.”
Ember stroked his hair as he plundered her with his tongue and lips, sucking on her with his hot mouth and tongue until she writhed around him, crying out his name.
Just as she thought she might slip over the edge, Cai backed off, kissing her more lightly while she balanced, floating and gasping.
He kissed her again, covering her mouth with his, as she begged for him to touch her, to take her. She knew it was going to hurt. She just needed more, more, more of him. She needed every touch of his body on every inch of her skin.
“I have to bite you,” he whispered.
“Wha-at?”
“It will amplify everything. You’ll like it. You’ll like it a lot.”
She remembered something Bethany and Willow had said about dragon shifters’ bites. “Please, touch me. Please, Cai.”
“It will hurt a little, at first,” he told her, his voice rough. “But it will heal almost instantly, leaving no mark, not even a bruise. And then you’ll like it.”
“Please,” she pleaded with him.
He pressed his lips to hers and then worked his way to her shoulder, where he opened his mouth.
Ember grabbed his body, holding his burly form against herself. She was starving for him. She was dying without him taking her.
His teeth scraped her skin, the sting of his bite making her more frantic for him. Her head spun like she’d downed a whole bottle of champagne and the effervescence was bursting in her brain, but her mind was clear other than wanting him so badly that she was grabbing at him, clawing his back, and keening into his neck and hair.
He kept biting, chewing on her neck. Hot venom flowed into her muscle and ran through her veins, setting her on fire for him, and then his tongue laved her skin until she was crying for him.
When he pushed himself up on his arms and gazed down at her, darkness was crowding the edges of her vision such that she could see his face—the chiseled square of his jaw and the slashes of his cheekbones—and the blackness invading his eyes but for the tiny ring of green fire around his pupils. “In a few weeks, my love, when you’re used to me, I’ll take you like that, but not for your first time.”
He held her in his arms and bit her other shoulder, too, driving his venom deeper into her flesh, and she pressed his head and his mouth against her shoulder as she cried out for more.
“Say yes,” he whispered in her ear as blood roared through her body. “Will you be my love and my dragonmate all our lives?”
“Yes!” she cried out.
Cai pressed his knee between Ember’s legs and sank inside her body.
She was filled with him, her body and soul and her mind, and her body rose in his arms with her cry.
He opened his mouth on her shoulder again. Warmth flowed over her shoulder, and then her chest, and then into her heart, and then it burned deeper into her flesh.
Her body bonded with his, a deep tethering that reached into her soul and the source of her magic and rooted. She reached for the cord growing between them and held on, clinging to it. His love poured through the nexus, finding her longing and need for him, and transformed into a union that joined them irrevocably, impossibly, and forever.
As the cord between them finished binding them together, the magic fed back into Ember, and everything became pulsing light.