Dragon Joined by Rebecca Royce Page A

her to sleep, that was what she did until Princess said the time
to wake up had come.
    Sex with Dean had let her break from her prison once. It
would work again. The only problem was that she couldn’t conjure Dean from thin
air and force him to come and have sex with her unconscious body. She shuddered
at the idea. It would be a little bit like making love to a corpse. Somehow,
she suspected Dean would object even if she were to ask for such a thing.
    “So I can’t exactly get him in here to have sex with me.”
    But maybe she could think about it and that would do it for
her. She lay down on the ground and tried to picture Dean in her mind.
    He’d been so handsome when she’d been a child, even if she
hadn’t known it then. Her parents had disliked him immensely, but then strong
personalities frequently came to blows. When Dean had objected to her parents’
illegal and not accidental pregnancy, they’d taken their first chance to
skedaddle in the middle of the night.
    Her parents had been right about their babies. But she knew
from what Dean had told her years later that he would eventually have calmed
down—nothing would have happened to the kids. Watching him bluster with
Princess, she knew he could bark as loud as any dog. But his kisses were
tender. He had a big heart in his perfectly sculpted chest.
    Her parents had never given him the chance to take back his
anger.
    Not thinking at all about what could happen to them in the
wilderness on their own, they’d moved around constantly—farther and farther
from New Strauss. It had seemed like a great adventure until the reality of
starvation and danger had set in. She’d asked to go back many times in the
beginning. How bad could mean Dean Andrews be? He’d always been nice to the
kids around the township.
    She hadn’t seen him again until the day she’d stolen the
bread, gotten caught and been kidnapped by the dragons. Yet he’d still raised
her brother and sister.
    Amanda closed her eyes. And hell’s bells, his fucking body. She
could still remember the way his skin had felt under the pads of her fingers. It
had been rough. The man worked outside, spent his days in defense of his people.
He didn’t feel as if he spent a lot of time worrying about whether he’d
moisturized and exfoliated his skin as the men were made to do here.
    In her imagination she could still feel him with her. The
way his four o’clock shadow had rubbed against her. She shivered.
    Alone in her dreams, she could do as she wished. Who would
ever know? And even if someone found out, she didn’t really care. This
existence trapped in her own head constituted her whole life.
    Unzipping her khaki shorts, she let her finger find her
clit. Dean had played her like a finely tuned instrument. She’d been touched
before, but never like that. Could she manage to do the same to herself? Living
with Princess inside her head hadn’t left a lot of time for self-gratification.
    Dean had found her clit much faster than she was able to,
which made her roll her eyes. How out of touch with her body did that make her?
Or how experienced did that make him?
    She tossed out the idea of Dean with other women. Those
weren’t the images she wanted in her head. He’d only had eyes for her when they
were together. That was how he’d look at her now.
    As she rubbed and stroked the bundle of nerves responsible
for so much pleasure, she saw his fingers doing it instead of hers.
    “You okay?” he whispered in her ear. The scene unfolded
before her. Instead of the beach, they were alone in a bedroom. Darkness
provided a cover for them. Outside, the sounds of the desert filled the evening
air. A coyote howled his evening prayer and she shuddered.
    “I’m better now that you’re here.” He’d been gone for hours.
“I miss you when you go on runs.”
    “I’d rather not go but you know how it is.”
    “I do.”
    He slipped his finger inside her and she moaned. “You’re so
damn wet for me. I’m not