asked desperately. “I did not think you would want to stand in front of each other without any clothes.”
A flash of red flew at her and she jerked back. A robe, she realized, as it billowed and floated to the floor. His Grace kept his back to her as she pulled it on. She firmly fastened the belt and knotted it.
She had to get this over with. Keeping her eyes downcast, she moved to the bed. She would lift the covers and get in. Surely, he would then join her. She was shaking at the thought of what would happen once he got into bed with her. His naked body would rest over hers. She would open her legs. And he would go inside her. She knew that much of this business. She would close her eyes and not think of what was happening to her. She’d overheard the maids in her home whisper about sex. They said for some men, the act did not last long. Only minutes. Hopefully the duke would be such a man.
Before she reached the bed, he turned. Lucy sensed it out of the corner of her eye and she looked at him. She saw the firm, taut plane of his stomach, the bulge of his chest muscles, the taut indents of his haunches. His hair was gold and spilled to his shoulders, the way men had worn their hair decades before. Her gaze went down, where it should not go, and fixed on the wobble of his erection as he moved toward her.
Really the dark would have been much better. She could have faced this if they were beneath covers in a shadowy room. Tears burned at the corners of her eyes—tears of frustration over her predicament, of anger over her brother’s stupidity.
The duke prowled across the bedroom and this time she couldn’t look away.
His erection was so ... astonishing. It was long, thick, topped with a acorn-shaped head. It was flushed as much as she was sure her cheeks were. Pronounced veins twined along it. Golden hair curled above it and his large testicles dangled below. It was a primitive-looking thing. It looked so ... odd on the smooth, sculpted planes of his body. Yet it was intriguing, and a strange ache shot from her belly to the place between her legs. She clutched the belt of the robe.
Fear. Anger. Nerves. And illicit, forbidden, wrong physical desire. How could she feel so many different things at once?
Lucy had been supposed to marry four years ago, just after she had turned eighteen. Her father had brought him to the house as a suitor from the Drako family. Allan Ferrars. He had been handsome, charming. Dragons had to marry dragons, her father had said.
But Mr. Ferrars had hidden his true person behind a gentleman’s gloss. He was rough. Cruel. She had caught him attacking one of the maids. She had rescued the girl by shifting to dragon-shape. Forgetting Mr. Ferrars could change, too. He had thrown her across the room, had swiped her stomach with his brutal claws. As she’d struggled to her feet to attack him in return, she had realized Allan Ferrars didn’t love her at all. Then Jack had caught them... . Jack, her brother, had shifted shape and had fought Mr. Ferrars. They had been forced to destroy Ferrars to survive... .
She mustn’t think about that. Not now. But she would never forget that moment when she’d realized she could have married such a man. She could have blindly gone to her wedding night without any idea she had wed a vicious brute.
It had scared her. It had made her vow never to marry. And here, now, she felt the old fears surging up. She was going to be intimate with this man, this stranger, and she was ... terrified to know what it would be like.
“Look up for a moment, my dear.” The duke’s baritone voice was gentle in the quiet room.
She jerked her gaze up, her cheeks burning as hot as dragon fire, but her blood felt ice-cold.
He smiled, and lines bracketed his full, firm lips. He was a handsome man. Mr. Ferrars had been terribly good-looking too. That was what she had learned. Beautiful men believed they could get away with anything.
“I know you are nervous, my dear,” he said softly. “I promise I will be very gentle. I will make this good for you.”
How could it be, when she’d been forced to do this by the actions of the brother she had always adored, by his debts? And by the arrogance of the duke? She stalked to the head of the bed and pulled back the covers. “I just want to get on with it.”
“All right, then, we shall.”
She didn’t look at him. She clambered onto the bed and slid beneath the sheets still wearing the robe. Her toes touched something hot—a bed warmer—and she squeaked.
A low, seductive laugh made her scowl. Her fiancé had possessed the same sort of deep, sensual laugh. It used to make her heart beat fast. It had made her blood hot and her skin feel too tight. Now, hearing it on the duke, it screamed a warning in her head.
How had she thought she could do this?
She must do it. Lucy nudged the warming pan aside with her toe and slid further under the covers in this strange, unfamiliar bed.
But she had changed. She used to tremble with girlish desire at a deep, masculine laugh. She used to look at a handsome man and feel desire. She had dreamed of kisses. Of more ... of pleasure and sex and intimacy.
Allan Ferrars had changed her. He had ruined everything for her. She didn’t feel those things anymore. She was only two and twenty, but after his attack upon her, she’d felt so much older. So wary. So cynical. She had been afraid of love after that, afraid of any stirring of desire. Certainly, her heart would never be touched—unless by a man she knew she could trust completely.
Sinking her teeth firmly into her lower lip, Lucy looked up at the duke, who stood at the foot of the bed. She could not trust this man at all—he had carelessly, cruelly ruined her brother, and by extension that meant he had ruined her family. Her heart hammered like the thunder of dragons running. “Stop laughing and come and ravish me. I cannot stay out all night. I simply cannot.”
The duke sighed. So loudly she could hear it. “My dear Lady Lucy, I do not approach sex as you seem to think I do. I’m not just going to get on top of you and plow you while you grit your teeth and shut your eyes. You will enjoy this or I will not consider it payment for your brother’s debts.”
Sinjin folded his arms over his chest. Lady Lucy Drake, who lay beneath his sheets, grimaced as though she was about to take foul-tasting medicine.
He scratched his jaw, his fingertips grazing over his smooth skin. After he had become a vampire, unlike others, he had never grown stubble again.
Lady Lucy had come to him. She had offered her body. Why did he feel as though he was the villain, about to ravish a terrified and unwilling victim?
Worse, his mind was urging him to do it. He drank blood, but while he was the type of vampire that fed on blood, consuming the fluid didn’t satisfy him unless he could also drink in the powerful emotions of his prey. It was his victim’s desire, or fear, anger, horror—along with coppery-tasting blood—that satisfied his undead body.
Emotions rolled off Lady Lucy like fog pouring down London’s twining streets. She would be a feast for a vampire like him. And she was a dragon. He should feel no pity for her. Had dragons felt anything for him when they had murdered his family? Had those dragons showed a scrap of pity when they had killed his younger brother and sisters?
Anger. In him, it drove his sexual desire instead of quelling it. It washed away pity and sympathy. It hardened his heart. It brought ice flooding through him. Ice gave him the hardness to slay dragons.
He was going to pleasure Lady Lucy Drake. He was going
