Belonging to the Dragon: Lick of Fire (Dragon Lovers Book 2) Read online

  Belonging to the Dragon

  The Lick of Fire Collection: Dragon Lovers 2

  Kara Lockharte

  About BELONGING TO THE DRAGON

  Lick of Fire is a mini-series collection from twelve best selling authors. Enter this supernatural world of fire and heat, magic and adventure, and get lost in everything DARK, delicious and FIRE.

  BELONGING TO THE DRAGON is the SECOND in Kara Lockharte’s DRAGON LOVERS mini-series. It can be read as a stand-alone, though for fuller enjoyment it is recommended that you start with BETROTHED TO THE DRAGON.

  My name is Lana Rodriguez and I am DONE with dragons.

  Especially my childhood friend, rich boy Lucas Randall, who claims I’m his mate.

  So what if he’s more than six feet of stupefying ripped muscle and bedroom-I-know-you-Lana eyes.

  I’m not the housekeeper’s daughter anymore.

  No Randall is going to dictate my life again.

  Not even if every atom in my messed up body wants him.

  I’ve got secrets he can’t ever find out.

  To mate the dragon is to condemn him to death. Lucas doesn’t know what I am. But he will if he’s around me much longer.

  I won’t let that happen.

  Because I’m a monster now too.

  Note: This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real life dragon shifter billionaires or anything else else is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Also by Kara Lockharte

  Series Starters from the Lick of Fire Collection

  1

  I twisted the cheap silver ring around my finger, the one my friend Val had given me a long time ago. She was missing now, and it was up to me to find her.

  There was a chime on the intercom, and on the linked app on my phone, an image popped up. My stomach fluttered at the sight of the last man I thought I would see.

  He gazed at me with those blue eyes I crushed on as a teenager. The ones I had tried to forget. The ones which now haunted my dreams. “I know you’re in there, Lana. Open up.”

  Three months ago, I tried to stab those baby blues with a magical dagger. To be fair, he had been trying to cut off my head at the time, but we were both under the control of a monster from another world. Even so, some things were hard to get over.

  I tapped the green button on my phone’s screen, allowing him entrance.

  I only had moments before the elevator would arrive at my floor. I kicked my five-inch heels under the couch, grabbed a bathrobe, and threw it on over my gold curve-hugging dress. Then I made a quick stop in the bathroom to wipe off my lipstick while I ran my fingers through my hair.

  A knock sounded, and I took a deep breath and opened the door.

  You’d think at this point, after knowing him since he was a chubby little eight-year-old, I’d be immune to his charms.

  But this was the all-grown-up version of rich boy Lucas Randall. He was a towering vision of aggressively ripped don’t-fuck-with-me masculine perfection. Mountainous shoulders threatened to explode out of the short-sleeved gray Einstein T-shirt he was wearing; even though it was mid-November in New York City.

  Those laser-blue eyes focused down on me, and belatedly I realized I still had on eye shadow and mascara.

  Shit. Still, no choice but to keep going and hope he didn’t notice.

  He leaned forward, taking up almost all the space in the door frame, holding up his phone so I could see the screen.

  It was the picture I had posted on SparkMe, a one-night-stand kind of dating app. Well, it was only part of me—my body without a face. It should have been anonymous, but there was that tell-tale birthmark on my hip in the shape of a star. He must have seen it at some point when we were younger. How would he even remember?

  Apparently, he had.

  His nostrils flared. Pupils darkened, he asked, “Are you soliciting anonymous sex from strangers?”

  A thousand potential replies flashed through my mind, including what the hell he had been doing swiping through pics on an app for casual sex. But I had no claim to him, nor he to me. I settled on casual disregard and disdain, even as my heart fluttered in my chest. I folded my arms, drawing my bathrobe closed, as if I were trying to hide my heartbeat. “After so many months, this is what you come here to ask me? In case you’ve forgotten, I don’t answer to you.”

  A golden flame flickered in his eyes. If I hadn’t known what he was, I would have called it a trick of the light.

  But I knew his secret.

  And I couldn’t let him find out mine.

  He leaned further across the threshold, and with my heightened senses I could smell him, all sweet smoke and musk. His words were gravel. “You stink of perfume. You’ve got eye makeup on. Your nails are done. Tell me you’re not doing what I think you’re doing.”

  I almost wanted to take a step back from his invasion of my space, but I held my ground. I could stop him. I had that power now.

  But if he knew what I could do, it would raise questions that I didn’t have time, nor the desire to answer. “Notice I’m not asking you what you were doing on SparkMe. Because it’s none of my business. Just like my life is not your business. I’m not your employee, Lucas.”

  He moved forward again, as though he were trying to intimidate me into compliance.

  I felt a strange exasperation mixed with regret. Just like a Randall. Some things never changed. My mother had been his nanny and housekeeper. We’d grown up together, in a strange kind of way. I once thought we were friends, but looking back with the distance and knowledge of adulthood, I realized I had been just…convenient.

  A thick vein popped in relief from his neck, and he looked about to roar like the beast he truly was. “I never thought you were. I just want to know: Why?”

  There were a million reasons why. Because I felt like it. Because I had nothing else now, now that I had lost my job. Because there was something bizarre and strange inside me that enjoyed the hunt. But more importantly, I had a promise to keep.

  None of which were reasons I owed him.

  So, I used the most potent weapon I had—guilt.

  I went to close the door on him. “Go away, Lucas. You almost killed me last time. I lost my job because of what I did for you and your friends. I’m done with dragons, magic, fairy princesses, and immortal monsters. Leave me alone to my normal human life.”

  The attack worked better than I’d expected. My words were like water thrown onto his rage, melting it away to a stony expression. To my surprise, he actually let me close the door.

  I locked the knob, the deadbolt, and braced my back against the door, as if that would stop him. If he were truly intent on pressing the issue, he could break it down with a sneeze.

  I listened for footsteps and heard him walk away. Double-checking the security app on my phone revealed him actually leaving the building.

  That was easier than I thought. Was it a residual effect of the armor?

  I pulled up one of my robe’s sleeves and looked at my smooth brown skin. For a moment, it remained the same. I concentrated, and my skin began to itch. Then black scales rippled forth.

  I stared at them, shining, almost metallic.

  Once, they had horrified me.

  Now, for better or worse, th
ey were a part of me, to be accepted like my brown skin, curly hair, and behind that was far rounder than I would have liked.

  Months ago, I had agreed to help some old childhood friends. Like Lucas, they were also dragons—actually, they were his cousins—but unlike Lucas, they had actually made an attempt to keep in touch with me as we’d grown up. We liked and commented on each other’s social media posts and had deep, if rare, chats over random things like the violent and tender nature of humanity and the best organic fertilizer for a container garden. I was still positive Daniel was using magic for his cherry tomatoes.

  We had been captured by what I now understood to be literally an alien monster hell-bent on hunting and eating all magical creatures of Earth, of which there weren’t many left. For some reason, the monster had placed mind-control bands on Lucas and I and forced us try to kill one another.

  The monster had also forced something else on me—a power that had given me odd, inhuman abilities.

  Yet the witch Chloe, whom they had charged with my care after escaping from the Devourer’s zoo, had said that I was free and clear of the monster’s magic.

  The scales along my arm flickered, responding to my thought of the Devourer with a visceral hate that at times felt more solid than the ground I stood on.

  It was that hate that, strangely enough, made me feel safe about letting it live inside me.

  From the images it had shown me, I knew this much: It was a symbiotic lifeform that had been a weapon of the dragons in their old world. It remembered being deployed against the Devourer when the dragons were fleeing to Earth. Its original bearer, a grizzly old bearded warrior whose favorite weapon was a massive axe bigger than my coffee table, had died when the Devourer destroyed the original dragon home world, but somehow, it had survived.

  I couldn’t get much else out of it. It otherwise expressed itself in feelings like rage and hunger.

  It was the blood hunger that was most troubling.

  Perhaps one day I would have to show someone what had happened to me.

  But not right now. Not while Val was in trouble.

  I dropped my arm, the sleeve falling and covering my scales.

  Cursed I might be, but right now, I needed the monster’s magic.

  I had a serial killer to track down and a friend to save.

  The line to the club was out the door and wrapped around the corner. As I walked up in my four-inch golden heels, the music thumped in to the street, the rapper chanting between the beats of bass, “Damn, girl. You got it, girl; you got it, girl.”

  It wasn’t like I didn’t have any experience hunting criminals. I had worked for the FBI after all. Not as an agent, but from behind screens, whiteboards, and closed doors. I was one of the many contract data analysts the bureau had employed until budget cuts killed the obscure department where I’d worked.

  Of course, having Daniel turn in a resignation letter when I’d been in a traumatized coma hadn’t helped the job situation either.

  Lucas, covered with blood, screaming my name, as I swung a sword at his head.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, slapping the side of my head as if I could knock the memory away.

  The scales underneath my skin itched at the thought of the Devourer.

  I took a deep breath, opened my eyes, and centered myself in the present.

  Damn, girl. You got it, girl; you got it, girl.

  I strutted up to Jamal, the bouncer at the front. He was a big brown bald monolith of a man, standing there, arms folded with a look designed to mean business.

  “Hey,” I said, with a smile. “Got some room in there for me?”

  Jamal unhooked the velvet rope. I had helped his girlfriend out of a sticky situation with some crooked cops not too long ago. “For you? Always.”

  I ignored the cold, jealous stares of the others in line as I entered through the doors into a universe of swirling flashing neon lights and a bass beat that reverberated in my core.

  Damn, girl. You got it, girl; you got it, girl.

  I wasn’t much of a club goer, but I was here because this was the last place anyone had seen Val. We had taken different paths, but a long time ago, were the only two brown girls in Oakwood Elementary. In kindergarten, she got in a fight with Tommy Warner, the mayor’s son, after he’d broken my glasses on purpose and told me to go back to my own country.

  I wished I could say that she had been my best friend from that day on.

  But that’s not the way things worked out.

  Damn, girl. You got it, girl; you got it, girl.

  Some guy with a backward baseball cap and his sneakers way too white made his way toward me, cup of beer sloshing in his hand. He planted himself in front of me and yelled. "Is your name Wi-Fi? Because I’m feeling a connection!"

  I turned, and he put his hand on my left breast and squeezed. I glared at him in disbelief.

  He shrugged with an unabashed grin. “You can’t be wearing a dress like that and not expect to be touched.”

  I briefly checked the space behind him. All clear.

  I smiled, put my hand in the middle of his chest, and shoved.

  He went flying, crashing into empty barstools behind him as I put my best “whoops” face on, before disappearing into the crowd.

  Shit, I was underestimating my strength.

  I returned to dancing, shimmying and shaking my shoulders into the mess of people and letting the music come over me. I put my hands up.

  Prey.

  Once in a while, the armor spoke in my head, always when it was hungry, always when it sensed food nearby.

  Something tingled in my head, indicating where the prey was. There was a momentary green shimmer around the man, a totally unremarkable guy with ash-blond hair. Average height, short hair, a black collared shirt, and he surveyed the crowd from behind a drink like any number of other people watchers.

  I caught his gaze and smiled as I shimmied and turned.

  That was something I had never understood about clubs—all the people who came to sit and drink and watch people dance without being part of the dance themselves.

  Prey.

  Damn, girl. You got it, girl; you got it, girl.

  I danced my way through the crowd toward him. Once more, I made brief eye contact with him and smiled. And then I turned my back and ignored him for a few minutes.

  Hunger erupted inside me, so empty, so dry, craving the taste of fresh warm blood.

  My own horror blossomed alongside it, the human part of me that knew this feeling wasn’t right, wasn’t normal.

  And just as quickly, the gaping maw of hunger was gone, as if it had severed the connection between us.

  Then just the simple word again.

  Prey.

  When I caught the quarry’s eye again, he gestured to the empty seat next to him.

  I turned away and danced a little more, making sure to shake my ass at him and letting the lights play over my shimmering gold dress.

  In a few minutes, I made my way to the bar and casually stood next to him. I ordered a drink, something expensive, and looked at him.

  “Put her drink on my tab,” he said, his stare glued to my exaggerated and exposed cleavage. If the neckline were any lower, I’d be showing nipple. “Those were some nice moves."

  At least it wasn’t another Wi-Fi pick-up line, though he got no points for originality. “Thanks.”

  He opened his jacket and handed me a card. “I run an agency of sorts. I have some prestigious clients who I think would be very interested in you.”

  He thought I was an escort. Perfect. “I’m not for sale.”

  “I wasn’t implying that you were.” Underneath the clashing club scents of smoke, and pot, liquor, and sweat, and perfume, and cologne, I suddenly scented him… Bleach and acid.

  Just like the other serial killers I had found.

  2

  “I’m not easy to handle,” I said, playing with the umbrella in my drink.

  His hand snaked to my waist. I want
ed to chop it off and leave him with a bleeding stump. The blood hunger from the armor agreed. “Maybe you just need the right master.”

  “Master?” I arched my carefully contoured eyebrow as sexily as I could and fluttered my fake eyelashes at him. “And you think you’re up to the challenge?”

  He leaned close, reeking of alcohol. “I’m up for any challenge involving you.”

  I wanted to let my forearm scales emerge into a blade and pierce him in the gut, feel his warm, delicious blood in my hands. I forced myself to put my hand on his groin, and I felt his semi-hard cock go instantly flaccid at my touch.

  Serial killers who targeted women didn’t like it when women took control. And their dislike which turned to anger at my insolence was the perfect way of making sure that I would be their next target.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  He grabbed my wrist, and I followed him out of club.

  His cold hands were clammy, and I resisted the urge to break his grip on my ass, to wipe my palm off on my dress, and spray it with hand-sanitizer.

  “Do you like fast cars?”

  I pulled away, unable to bear his touch any longer. “I don’t know,” I said in a deliberately teasing tone. “I’m particular about my ride.”

  The valet lady pulled up in a Maserati.

  I remembered I was supposed to be feeling seductive. “That will do,” I said, pretending to be impressed.

  We got in, and the engine thrummed to life as he said, “I’ve got a place out on Long Island.”

  What was it with Long Island and serial killers? This was like the fourth serial killer on Long Island I had found.

  I brushed an imaginary speck of lint off his shoulder, even as I imagined slicing a red line along his throat. “As long as you give me a ride back to the city.”