"Muse Misu, I am your dragon Guardian. How may I serve you?"

I jumped, and a little meep of surprise escaped me. A man knelt on one knee in the flowers not more than two feet away from me, but I hadn't even seen him approach me. I stared into his face, and my belly did a slow, swoopy roll of excitement, warmth suddenly pooling between my legs. My nipples hardened, and pleasure slid down my spine. Images and ideas suddenly burned white hot across my brain, and my mouth opened in an oh of recognition.

His face was the face of the man who fuelled me mentally so that I could share my gift of erotica with others. He was, quite literally, the man of my dreams and was the person I'd been in love with for centuries. I had elaborate, highly detailed, erotic fantasies of the man in my head. As far as I was concerned, I'd been in a close, loving relationship with him for ages.

As I stared in wonder at him, I noticed things that made him not human and slightly different from what my dream man looked like. His hair was bright lime green, and he appeared to have styled so that it stuck up in a fan of soft spikes at the back of his head while the rest of it was smooth. I took a wild guess that he did it to make himself look bigger than he was, sort of like when a cat puffed up its fur when startled. His eyes had slit pupils and were the colour of sand, rimmed in a green so dark it almost looked black. He had some light green and bronze scales on his cheekbones and his skin was a bit paler than mine.

The rest of him looked human enough down to his knees. Below the cuffs of the knee-length shorts he wore, he was most definitely not human. Powerful dragon legs covered in green and bronze scales took the place of human legs. Instead of human feet, he had dragon feet tipped with wickedly sharp looking bronze-coloured claws; two at the front and one at the back.

He was utterly beautiful to me, and I'd never in my wildest imaginations thought he was actually real.

I reached out a hand and touched his hair, startled at the baby-fine softness of it. He remained kneeling, watching me as if he had all the patience in the world. I traced a finger over the scales on his cheek finding them slightly smoother than his skin. I couldn't have stopped myself from gliding a finger over his lips if I'd tried. Surprise and confusion at my very forward and intimate touching flashed through his eyes, but he didn't pull away from my touch.

"What's your name?" I asked softly, my hand sliding down the side of his neck.

I leaned forward slightly to continue running my hand over his shoulder and down to the firm muscles of his arms. My god, he was perfectly beautiful, and I could hardly wait to explore his body as I'd done so many times in my imagination.

"You couldn't pronounce it," he answered in a low voice that did wonderfully sinful things to my libido.

I smiled. "Try me. My Dragon isn't too horribly bad." My other hand joined the first in learning the muscles of his arms and chest.

A hissing cough with a soft roar was what I heard. My Dragon was passable at best, and when it was ancient Dragon, the less said about my understanding the better. I did catch that his name had something to do with being a warrior, but that was all I understood. He was right in that I'd never be able to pronounce his Dragon name properly, and I wasn't about to insult him by butchering it.

He needed a name I could pronounce.

Excitement and nerves made me feel like I'd just swallowed a cloud of butterflies hopped up on Red Bull. Naming was very important and told the dragon that he'd been accepted as a Guardian. It was one of the first things my mother had told me about the relationship between a Muse and a dragon. I'd never named a dragon before. I tilted my head to the side and waited for my Guardian's name to slide into my head. My hands still travelled gently over his upper body, the feel of him, even through his shirt, sending arousal fizzing through my veins. I smiled again as a name I could pronounce and that was close to the meaning of his Dragon name floated through my mind. I leaned forward and brushed my lips over his forehead.

"Gunari," I said softly, gifting him with a name and declaring that I'd accepted him as my Guardian.