city of dragons 03 - fire magic Read Online Free

city of dragons 03 - fire magic
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considered. “I guess, yeah. But I’m not afraid of him. Wasn’t afraid of him, that is.”
    “You saying that I was?”
    “You’d have been crazy not to be.”
    “But not you?”
    “He took more from you than he could ever take from me. And you guys had that mating bond. Maybe you weren’t afraid of him exactly, but things were tense. And now things can go back to normal.”
    I stopped eating fries. Things weren’t going to be normal, but he didn’t know that. I should tell him, but I didn’t know how. I set the fries back on the coffee table.
    He picked them up. “Did I say something wrong?”
    “What? Of course not.”
    He plucked out a fry and stared at it. “Because you seem…” He leaned forward. “Listen, if you think that I meant we should be having sex again, I didn’t. I swear I have no interest in pressuring you—”
    “Good,” I said, smiling at him, happy that he had given me an excuse, something to blame my reaction on. I yawned. “But you can stay if you want. Do you want to?”
    He put the fry in his mouth. Chewed and then swallowed. “I would love to.”
    Later, with Lachlan’s warm, solid body wrapped around mine, I felt a soft longing radiating through my core. It had been so long since we’d been this close, and right now, my entire body seemed so, so sensitive.
    I put my lips against his.
    And he kissed me slowly, carefully, like he thought I would shatter.
    I wanted to wrap my legs around his hips, push his shirt up to bare his flat stomach.
    But he kissed me on the forehead and said, “I meant it. I’m tired, anyway.”
    So, I rolled over and let him spoon me. I was tired too. In seconds, I was fast asleep and dreaming.
    * * *
    I had forgotten about the weird pregnancy dreams. Something about all the hormones in a pregnant woman’s body makes her have insanely vivid dreams. That night, I dreamed that I had become the queen dragon in some weird medieval world, only there were cell phones and malls, and my dragon friends and I were alternating war strategies with calling each other and going clothes shopping.
    When I woke up, Lachlan was leaving. It was morning, and he had to go to work.
    I would have stayed in bed forever, but my stomach started growling, and I got that telltale nauseous feeling that told me I needed some protein stat.
    I wandered into the kitchen and got a Greek yogurt out of my refrigerator. Greek yogurt had tons of protein, and it was actually moderately appealing when I felt like vomiting. Moderately.
    I gulped it down, forcing myself to swallow, telling myself that once I had something in my stomach, I’d feel better.
    My first pregnancy, I hadn’t had any morning sickness at all. But I’d also lost the baby at ten weeks, and I’d come to believe—superstitiously—that morning sickness was a good sign. I’d had it with both of my other pregnancies. Not that it had mattered in the end.
    Felicity was convinced that Alastair’s beating me and the constant shifting I’d done from human to dragon form had an adverse affect on my pregnancies. When dragons shifted forms, we healed, so I was always shifting after a bad beating to heal myself up.
    Truthfully, she could have been right. I hadn’t really told the doctors about the fact that I was being abused by my husband or about all my shifting. But no dragon doctors had warned me not to shift during pregnancy.
    Even so, I hadn’t shifted since finding out about it, which meant that right now, I had no magic. Shifting into dragon form was how I recharged my magical batteries. To stay magical, I had to shift every two weeks or so.
    After eating my yogurt, I threw on some clothes and headed downstairs. I was going to to the Pink Flamingo Cafe for breakfast. It was just next door, and it was the place my guest went for a continental breakfast buffet. I had a deal with the owner, my friend Ophelia, who also happened to be a mage.
    But I didn’t even make it out of the lobby.
    There was a woman waiting for
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