Kim Harrison - Hotter Than Hell

She was touching him, caressing him now, and she wasn’t afraid. How long had it been since he’d experienced such a gift? Too long. A century, at least, since his last clear memory of human contact.

He swallowed, every muscle of his body growing tense as her fingers continued their exploration. His mind spun back to the evening before, when he’d watched her writhing in pleasure and imagined her touching more than his arm, stroking him with lust more than mere inquisitiveness.

“It really was you,” she whispered, the words breathy and low as she lifted her head and met his gaze.

Her fingers continued to move in slow circles over the roughened flesh of his forearm, sending streaks of longing straight to his groin.

“Last night. Every night. It really was you in my dreams.”

Laura didn’t think she imagined that they both stopped breathing at the same time. The entire situation was incredible to her. He was incredible to her.

He was real. The man who had been plaguing her…and pleasuring her…in her dreams for so long was real, and solid, and standing right in front of her.

Despite his appearance and the cruel reaction he seemed to expect from her, he was beautiful. Not something to be hidden away or scorned, but to be admired and celebrated.

The same colorful tattoo of scales that marked his arms circled his neck and fell in patches over his face. And his eyes…his eyes were like nothing she’d ever seen before. A bright, glowing green with black, almost serpentine pupils at their centers.

A shiver ran down her spine, but not from fear, from delight.

It was him. The man she’d been dreaming of for what felt like forever. The man who had touched her, held her, done unspeakably satisfying things to her body night after night.

She’d nearly convinced herself that he was some strange, erotic figment of her untamed imagination, but even she hadn’t truly believed her subconscious could concoct someone with eyes and skin just like his.

He was even hot to the touch, the same as he’d been in the dream.

It was startling, amazing, and though he was standing directly in front of her, with her hands resting gently on his arms, she still had a hard time wrapping her mind around the fact that fantasy had just become reality, and she had finally found the man she’d been dreaming of, the one at the center of so many of the stories her family told and the legends passed down from generation to generation.

“You…dreamt about me?” he asked, no longer looking as though he was desperate to get away from her. His voice was low and deep, and tinged with the Scottish brogue she was just beginning to get used to.

“Last night,” she responded with a small nod. “So many nights. I thought I was going crazy, but then…I remembered the stories I was told as a little girl, of the man my great-grandmother cursed to live as a beast, and I started to wonder. I’ve been looking for you.”

Confiding that to anyone else would have made Laura feel like a fool. But with Dougal, she felt completely comfortable, as if she’d known him for years. And though they were only fantasies that came to her in the darkest hours of the night, she’d had him inside of her too many times to count. If that didn’t build a certain level of familiarity, she didn’t know what would.

His lips twisted into a snarl and the rough timbre of his voice grew even rougher. “Your grandmother did this to me?” he asked—the words part statement, part question, all accusation.

Beneath her fingers, his muscles tensed, growing rock hard and hot to the touch.

“I’m afraid so. Will you tell me why and how?”

She knew the stories, knew what her family said had happened, but she wanted to hear it from him, hear his opinion and his telling of the tale.

Momentarily releasing him, she moved to the small table in the center of the room and set down her camera and tote. Reaching into the bag, she pulled out a couple of energy bars and cans of soda.

“Here,” she said, holding one of each out to him like a peace offering. “We can sit and have a bite to eat while you tell me what happened, why my grandmother felt the need to do this to you.”

He made a sound low in his throat, but followed her when she moved to the far wall and sat amongst the blankets and rags that made up his sleeping pallet. Taking a spot beside her, close but not touching, he opened the bar she’d given him and began to chew, slowly and methodically.

The minutes ticked by while she did the same, throwing them into an eerie but relaxed silence. When she’d finished her bar and sipped half the soda, she shifted slightly in his direction, once again meeting his dark, intense gaze.

“Tell me,” she pressed when he showed no signs of speaking, once again letting the tips of her fingers slide over the scaled flesh of his forearm. “Please, I really do need to know.”

Dougal finished off the chunk of granola Laura had handed him and tossed the wrapper aside. His lips pursed as he considered how much to tell her.

She was a stranger, yet she claimed to be a descendant of the woman who had damned him to this unending life of hell on earth. He had spent the last hundred years alone, in hiding, with only himself for company, yet the pain of that isolation was quickly giving way to the desire to speak, to share, to take advantage of the opportunity to converse with another human being.

And if he understood her earlier remark correctly, at the same time he’d been watching her—watching her pleasure herself while he, in turn, pleasured himself—she’d been dreaming of him, as well.

She’d never seen him before, had certainly never seen his markings and disfigurement, yet her subconscious had apparently caused her to dream of him in a most erotic manner. Not once, but multiple times.

Like a match tip flaring to life, heat raced through his body, bringing his shaft to rock-hard attention. His blood boiled with want and need and memory, and a sense of possibility he hadn’t experienced in a century.

Swallowing hard, he drew his attention back to her face, even as his mind lingered on thoughts of yanking down her trousers and having his way with her, pinning her to the wall and taking her until every ounce of pent-up passion and desire poured out of him.

“I was young,” he began. “Young and arrogant and foolish. I was the firstborn son of the great Laird MacKay, and I thought I had the right.” How wrong he had been. But then, with age came wisdom, and though his physical body showed no signs of the span of his life, he certainly had the years to claim great insight.

The wild yearning humming in his veins slowed to a low simmer as he spoke, and he expected the second, less pleasant memory he was being forced to recall to begin a sour roil in his gut and burn his tongue like acid. But a hundred years had apparently dulled the pain and degradation of that moment, for he felt himself relating the story as though it was just that—a story, an unfortunate incident that had occurred to someone else.

“It was a harsh winter that year, with little food to be found, and when I discovered a band of gypsies…” he cocked his head and met her eye, “your ancestors, I presume…hunting on my family’s land, I tried to drive them off. One of the old women—your great-grandmother—was not impressed by my grandiose behavior or my threat to remove them bodily if they refused to leave of their own free will. She cursed me. Threw a bottle of some thick, amber liquid at my chest, which she claimed were dragon’s tears. It soaked immediately through my clothes and onto my skin, not burning, but tingling. I could feel it seeping into my pores, spreading through my body.

“That was when she began to chant. A language I couldn’t comprehend at first, followed by one that I could. She told me I would be forever hunted, trapped in a form between man and beast, the bodies of man and dragon becoming one until I learned the gifts of kindness and generosity, of putting others’ needs before my own.