Releasing the Dragon
Page 23
“She loves us though,” Liv said reassuringly. “And she can see things we can’t. This will all work out according to her will—you’ll see.”
“I certainly hope you’re right.” Kat sighed and put down her knitting needles. “Okay, who’s tried of knitting and wants cupcakes? Lauren brought some fresh ones this morning.”
“Lauren is our cousin—she’s also a genius baker,” Liv explained to Annie. “In fact, she was supposed to be here with us for girl’s day but unfortunately, she had a needing spell and had to run off to find her hubby.”
“Xairn has probably got her chained to the bed even as we speak,” Kat remarked conversationally. “Oh, he’s Scourge so they’re into BDSM,” she explained to the rather shocked Annie. “But at least she brought us cupcakes first. So who wants one?”
“I do—oh!” Sophie put a hand to the side of her head. “Sylvan just bespoke me. He said there’s a group of scientists going on an expedition to find an antidote. A special team of three.”
“Really?” Liv frowned. “Who are they? Maybe I’ve seen them at the med center.”
“Hang on…” Sophie concentrated for a moment, clearly bespeaking her husband, and then answered. “There’s Dr. Bron, who’s a Beast Kindred microbiologist, Dr. Sorin, a Blood Kindred virologist, and Dr. Kayla Smith, a xenobiologist and chemist.”
“Oh, I know Kayla—she’s awesome!” Liv exclaimed. “And so smart! She’s got a genius-level IQ but she’s not one of those super-smart people you can’t relate to. She’s still down to Earth, if you know what I mean.”
“Well, it’s good to know Sylvan is putting our smartest people on it,” Kat remarked. “So which of the other two scientists is she mated to? Or is she married to someone else altogether?”
“Oh, you know what…she’s single.” Liv put a hand to her mouth, her eyes widening. “I wonder which of them she was with when the needing started?”
“Hang on…” Sophie concentrated, bespeaking Sylvan again, and her green eyes went wide. “Oh no! She was with…both of them.”
“What?” A Blood Kindred and a Beast Kindred?” Kat demanded. “Those two will rip her in two like two dogs fighting over a bone! Everybody knows how territorial Beast Kindred and Blood Kindred are.”
“That’s true—it’s not like they could share her like Twin Kindred could,” Sophie said doubtfully.
“Oh, poor Kayla!” Liv looked distressed. “I wonder if I should go see her and say anything?”
“According to Sylvan, she’s going to go with Dr. Bron and Dr. Sorin to try and find the antidote as soon as possible,” Sophie remarked. “So I’m guessing the situation will work itself out.”
“It’ll have to,” Kat said grimly. “She’s going to have to pick one of them—and odds are, the other one will end up dead.”
“That’s terrible!” Annie exclaimed. She had been listening with wide eyes but she couldn’t hold back anymore. “What is she going to do?”
“We don’t know, hon.” Liv patted her hand gently. “All we can do is pray for her and put her in the hands of the Goddess—it’s the safest place to be.”
Annie hoped her friend was right. But even though she didn’t know Kayla, she couldn’t help being worried about the poor girl who was caught between two huge Kindred warriors with no way out.
The End?
Of course not!
There is always more Kindred to come. I confess, I had some serious writer’s block in the middle of this book—mostly due to trouble with my son’s school. (Don’t you hate when RL gets in the way of a good story?) But I’m really pleased with how it ended because it presents so many options for new Kindred Tales, which is really becoming its own series, along with my main Brides of the Kindred line. I want to explore what happens to Kayla and Bron and Sorin, and I want to tell Lizabeth and Lone’s story as well. And then there is the dastardly Zar’ren who got the Mother Ship into this mess in the first place. What is his past and why does he hate the Kindred so much? What will he do next—something tells me we may find out at sometime in the future. And of course, I still want to tell Malik the Volt Kindred’s story in Brides of the Kindred 23. So many stories for my muse to tell and never enough time to write, it seems like! If you’d like to tell me which ones you’d like to hear next, come find me on Facebook or drop me a line at my website, www.evangelineanderson.com. I love to hear from readers!
Hugs and Happy Reading to you All!
Evangeline (September 2018)
If you have enjoyed Releasing the Dragon, please consider leaving a review or a rating. Good reviews are like gold for an author—they let other readers know it's okay to take a chance on a new series. Plus, they give me the Warm Fuzzies. Thanks for being such an awesome reader! : ) Evangeline
Now here's a sneak peek at the next Kindred Tales Novel—Sharing a Mate, coming November 2018.
Sharing a Mate
A Kindred Tales Novel
A Beast Kindred who will not share a female
A Blood Kindred who feels the same
A woman forced to turn to both of them for help
Will Bron and Sorin learn to share Kayla?
Or will Sharing a Mate tear the three of them apart?
Dr. Kayla Smith is a strong, independent woman with several prestigious degrees in Xenobiology and Chemistry. She lives and works on the Mother Ship and shares a lab with her two best friends, Dr. Bron—a huge Beast Kindred who is also a decorated microbiologist and Dr. Sorin, a Blood Kindred and award-winning virologist. The three of them work and play together but Kayla is afraid to act on her feelings for either Kindred because she knows that picking one means losing the other.
Then comes the Great Needing.
When Xi-46, a virulent aphrodisiac, is introduced into the Kindred Mother Ship through the air vents, Kayla is one of the women affected. Her desperate need can only be slaked with the help of a male and she gets help from both of her friends. Afterwards, they expect her to choose between them...but Kayla can't—she loves them both.
Now they must go on a desperate mission to find the source of Xi-46 and try to create an antidote. But the further they go, the more Kayla realizes she needs both men in her life...and they need each other as well, though neither one wants to admit it.
Can Bron and Sorin learn to share a mate?
Can Kayla convince them that the three of them belong together?
Or will the horrors they suffer at the house of Mother Pain tear them apart?
Read Sharing a Mate to find out...
An Excerpt
Doctor Kayla Smith wished she was dead.
She was a renowned xenobiologist and chemist with several prestigious degrees to her name. She had a bright future, living and working on the Mother Ship, studying alien samples from the other planets the Kindred visited. As a member of an elite, three-person team, she was breaking all kinds of scientific boundaries and making amazing new discoveries every day. In short, she had everything she could want in her personal and professional life.
And right now, she wanted to die.
“Oh God, how could I let myself do that? How? How?” she whispered, pulling her knees up to her chest as hot water dripped down her nose. She was sitting in the shower stall in her suite in the Mother Ship, taking what had to be her twentieth shower in two days. She wished she had a bathing pool in her suite but those were only for mated couples and she most definitely was not mated.
She didn’t want to be mated, either, Kayla told herself. She wanted to stay single and be married to her work. Unlike a lot of single women who came up to the Mother Ship from Earth, she hadn’t come with the intention of finding a husband or earning her “Mrs. degree” as her Auntie Feenie jokingly put it.
“I’m a respected scientist,” Kayla whispered to herself, pushing one of her long black box braids behind her ear. Her hand was trembling as she did so—she hadn’t eaten in days. Not since…the incident. “Or I was a respected scientist, anyway.”
But it wasn’t t
he respect of the wider scientific community she was worried about losing—it was the respect of the other two members of her team. The two Kindred warriors she worked with.
Bron was a huge, muscular Beast Kindred with shaggy black hair and a black mustache and goatee he wore braided and bound with a silver band—a symbol of the wild tribe he had come from on his home planet of Rageron. He had the molten gold eyes of his kind and a deep, growling voice to match. What Kayla liked most about him was his loud, funny sense of humor and his tendency to say “fuck” a lot or curse in his native dialect when he got upset. He was also one of the finest microbiologists she had ever met.
Then there was Sorin, an award-winning virologist and the other member of their team. He was a Blood Kindred with sleek, silver-blonde hair and pale blue eyes that Kayla sometimes felt could see directly into her soul. She loved Sorin’s quiet, quick wit and his way of whispering sly comments to her and Bron when they were out in public that cracked them both up. He had been raised on Tranq Prime, the Blood Kindred home world, in what he dryly described as a “repressed family,” though he wouldn’t say much more about his past.
The two of them—Sorin and Bron—were best friends and had been long before Kayla had come along. But the moment she had walked into the Mother Ship’s science department Christmas party the year before, the three of them had just “clicked.” The two big males had fit her into their life and it wasn’t even a month before the three of them were working on a group project and sharing a private lab, just big enough for three.
That had been almost a year ago and since then, Kayla had grown closer to both Kindred. They ate meals together, went out to see movies and plays together, and of course, the weekly Wednesday night poker games at Bron’s suite were a must. They took trips to other alien worlds to collect specimens to study. Kayla had even taken the two of them back to Earth with her to give them a taste of Earth culture—and a little of her Auntie Feenie’s soul food.
“Girl, when are you going to pick one of those fine men and get me some great-grandbabies?” her aunt had demanded, after pulling her aside to talk in the kitchen. Since Kayla’s grandmother had passed on, Auntie Feenie—who was actually Kayla’s great aunt—had stepped in to take her place.
Kayla had shaken her head and laughed.
“Never, Auntie Feenie. These two are a matched set—I can’t break them up. Besides, we’re all just good friends and colleagues.”
“You might say that, Kay-kay,” but I see the way their eyes follow you around the room.” Auntie Feenie had made a two-fingered gesture towards her own eyes and nodded solemnly. “You might just be thinking of them as friends but they’re thinking a whole lot more about you than that. You better believe it.”
Kayla had felt her cheeks get warm. It was true that she had sometimes sensed her guys, as she thought of them, were watching her in a shall-we-say less than professional way. But she also knew that neither Sorin nor Bron would ever act on any kind of attraction they might have towards her.
Because if she started sleeping with one of them, the other would be excluded. Their perfect trio would become a duo and a single—unacceptable to any of them—especially Kayla. She respected their friendship too much to be their Yoko. But that didn’t stop her from enjoying her time with her guys.
“I see the way the three of you are around each other,” one of her friends aboard the Mother Ship had said. “You’re always fooling around and hugging and massaging each other—if those two were Twin Kindred, you’d all be mated by now.”
But they weren’t Twin Kindred, Kayla thought sadly. And everyone knew that Blood Kindred and most especially Beast Kindred didn’t share mates with anyone. Besides, Bron was as quick to pull Sorin into one of his crushing hugs as he was to hug Kayla and Sorin was just as willing to massage the kinks out of Bron’s thick neck and broad shoulders as he was to work his long-fingered magic on Kayla when she had a crick in her neck.
So the attraction between them remained unspoken and anything other than friendly physical affection—bear hugs from Bron or neck rubs from Sorin—stayed strictly in the realm of her often erotic dreams.
Until the incident.
“Don’t think of it,” Kayla ordered herself, pushing another long, black braid out of her face. She was shivering now, even though the water pouring down on her was still hot. Shivering and sick with shame and regret over what she’d done. But it had seemed like she couldn’t help it. At the time, it had seemed like she would die if she didn’t do it…
“Don’t think about it,” she said again…but then she went and did it anyway. She couldn’t help it.
Want more? Of course you do! Be sure to look for SHARING A MATE in November 2018 and check out this Pinterest board for pictures that inspired me while writing the two heroes, Bron and Sorin.
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Also by Evangeline Anderson
Below you'll find a list of available and upcoming titles. But depending on when you read this list, new books will have come out by then that are not listed here. Make sure to check my website for the latest releases and better yet, sign up for my newsletter to never miss a new book again.
Brides of the Kindred series
(Sci-Fi / Action-Adventure Romance)
CLAIMED (Also available in Audio)
HUNTED (Also available in Audio)
SOUGHT (Also Available in Audio)
FOUND (Also Available in Audio )
REVEALED (Also Available in Audio)
PURSUED (Also Available in Audio)
EXILED (Also Available in Audio)
SHADOWED (Also Available in Audio)
CHAINED (Also Available in Audio)
DIVIDED (Coming soon to Audio)
DEVOURED
ENHANCED
CURSED
ENSLAVED
TARGETED
FORGOTTEN
SWITCHED
UNCHARTED
UNBOUND
SURRENDERED
VANISHED
IMPRISONED
BRIDES OF THE KINDRED VOLUME ONE
Contains Claimed, Hunted, Sought and Found
BRIDES OF THE KINDRED VOLUME TWO
Contains Revealed, Pursued and Exiled
BRIDES OF THE KINDRED VOLUME THREE
Contains Shadowed, Chained and Divided
BRIDES OF THE KINDRED VOLUME FOUR
Contains Devoured, Enhanced and Cursed
BRIDES OF THE KINDRED VOLUME FIVE
Contains Enslaved, Targeted and Forgotten
BRIDES OF THE KINDRED VOLUME SIX
Contains Switched, Uncharted and Unbound
All Kindred novels are now available in PRINT.
* * *
Also, all Kindred novels are on their way to Audio, join my Audiobook Newsletter to be notified when they come out.
Kindred Tales
The Kindred Tales are side stories in the Brides of the Kindred series which stand alone outside the main story arc.
These can be read as STAND ALONE novels.
MASTERING THE MIS
TRESS
BONDING WITH THE BEAST (Also Available in Audio)
SEEING WITH THE HEART
FREEING THE PRISONER
HEALING THE BROKEN (a Kindred Christmas novel)
TAMING THE GIANT
BRIDGING THE DISTANCE
LOVING A STRANGER
FINDING THE JEWEL
BONDED BY ACCIDENT
RELEASING THE DRAGON
SHARING A MATE (Coming November 2018)
Born to Darkness series
(Paranormal / Action-Adventure Romance)
CRIMSON DEBT (Also available in Audio)
SCARLET HEAT (Also available in Audio)
RUBY SHADOWS (Also available in Audio)
CARDINAL SINS (coming soon)
DESSERT (short novella following Scarlet Heat)
(Also in Audio)
BORN TO DARKNESS BOX SET
Contains Crimson Debt, Scarlet Heat, and Ruby Shadows all in one volume
Alien Mate Index series
(Sci-Fi / Action-Adventure Romance)
ABDUCTED (Also available in Audio)
PROTECTED (Also available in Audio)
DESCENDED (Also available in Audio)
SEVERED (Also available in Audio)
ALIEN MATE INDEX VOLUME ONE
Contains Abducted, Protected, Descended and Severed all in one volume
* * *
All Alien Mate novels are now available in PRINT.