Dragon Destined
Prince of the Otherworlds
Kara Lockharte
Cassie Alexander
Copyright © 2020 by Erin Cashier and Kara Lockharte
Cover design by Croco Designs
All rights reserved.
Note: This book is a work of fiction. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
About the Authors
Kara Lockharte is the daughter of immigrants and an author of the best selling Dragon Lovers series and the Space Shifter Chronicles. She loves writing romances with sexy alpha alien shifters and strong heroines while acting as mom-chauffeur to her crazy little kids. A NYC to CA transplant, she misses decent bagels but is definitely enjoying the strawberries and sunshine.
Follow Kara on Facebook, www.facebook.com/karalockharte or get a free book at her website, www.karalockharte.com/signup
Cassie Alexander is a registered nurse and the author of the Edie Spence urban fantasy series, Sleeping with Monsters and Dark Ink Tattoo. She lives in the Bay Area in the middle of a succulent garden with a highly supportive husband and two judgmental cats.
Follow Cassie on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/cactinaut_Cassie_Alexander/, or get a free book at her website, www.cassiealexander.com
To Cassie’s fellow healthcare workers
About DRAGON DESTINED
I did NOT fall for a hot mysterious billionaire who is actually a dragon.
Nope. Not at all. Not in the least.
Night nurse Andi Ngo is back to her mundanely real life - finding her stupid brother who went on the lam the moment she bailed him from jail.
But she can't forget her date with the Damian Blackwood, not because he's cut like her hottest dream, not because he's a billionaire, and not even because he's secretly a dragon.
For just a few delicious moments, Damian made her feel like she mattered, like he actually cared, like she could be his…
No, better not to think those thoughts.
But when dangerous magic threatens her patients, Andi doesn't know who else to turn to.
A girl can walk free from a dragon once, but twice?
Andi's only mortal after all…
Author note: This is part of a slow burn paranormal romance series featuring a hot dragonshifter hero: heck yes, explicit scenes are in here but you’ll have to be patient for the HEA to come.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Prince of the Other Worlds Series
Also by Kara Lockharte
Also by Cassie Alexander
Prologue
The last time Damian had been in the Grand Ballroom was for his father’s funeral—and his stepmother’s immediate subsequent coronation. It was as immense as he remembered, big enough to make even a dragon feel small, with tableaus from his family’s history carved, painted, and inlaid with jewels on all the walls and ceiling. There was a throng of people dancing inside, and some of them—with prior permission—were even exerting gentle magics to dance upon the walls and ceiling.
He stood in the main doorway, observing what had once been his home, in its very complicated glory. Other beings passed by—male, female, agendered, all genders—dressed in whatever was currently high fashion. A slender man wearing a dress that flowed around him like waves because it was actually made of water, a rotund woman whose muchness was covered by the scintillating wings of a thousand living butterflies, a being about whom he wasn’t entirely sure wearing rose pink fur or feathers that covered all of its body except for their face and hands. Each one of the people present was talking and dancing and drinking small cordials being passed around by the innumerable waiters who hovered omnipresently at the edges of the crowd. Some of them he recognized, others he had no idea about, and luckily for him in this dream, absolutely no one seemed to remember him.
He realized he was leaning against the wall—his bed, of course—and looked down at himself to find he was dressed in military finery. His father’s decision, not his. It was dapper but ridiculous; he’d never led any men. The only army he’d ever commanded was embodied inside himself, as the strength of a dragon was equal to at least a hundred soldiers.
But as dreams go, this could be worse, he distantly remembered thinking, and then he saw her.
At least, he thought it was her. The shimmer of a blue streak in her black hair and the turn of a delicate wrist as someone else spun her away from him. He startled up and moved forward into the crowd. He couldn’t see her anymore, only the man who was carrying her away from him, dancing at speed, until he rounded him, and…she was gone. He sank back, deflated, but then he caught sight of her hips and ass as a woman grabbed her and made her sway—although her torso was camouflaged by the woman’s peacock feathered wings that arced up to hide her in an embrace. He raced after her, but she whirled and was lost to him again.
It went on for what seemed like hours, separated from her by crowds of impolite people he couldn’t make part, spotting her through flurries of feathers, sequins, and light until he finally reached his limit.
“Enough!” he shouted and reached for his dragon inside him like it was a sword.
It unfurled, the change even faster in dream-time, and then he was towering over everyone who danced below, seeing them through his dragon’s slitted eyes. At that moment, Andi looked up.
“Damian!” she shouted, throwing an arm up to him, asking for him to save her.
Mine! his dragon echoed in his mind and roared out loud in a wordless challenge. Its wings flexed, neck arched, and it thundered toward her. Courtiers dove for cover, people screamed, and the man who’d been pulling Andi away from him quailed and fell to the floor, bowing obsequiously. Damian’s dragon snaked this way and that, demanding silence and subservience, scenting blood in the air and not caring whose it was as long as it wasn’t Andi’s.
His dragon lowered his head to look at her, both he and his dragon knowing this had to be a dream—yet she was utterly delectable. Her black hair fell free about her shoulders, and she was dressed in the Realm’s finest, a dress made only of raindrops frozen in time to look like diamonds, barely hiding any of her body. His dragon picked her up with one paw.
It was only a small matter of dragon fire to burn through the ornately silvered ceiling—stained glass set with monstrous jewels to let in light and look like the sky—and then they were free. His dragon clutched Andi to its chest, safe in both paws, soaring wildly. In his dreams, he frequently got to fly like he was never safely able to do on Earth, and it was magnificent each time. His dragon swung out in a wide arc, with the third moon’s opalescent light shimmering overhead, and then he came back to his family’s castle, to alight on the turret right next to the statue of a dragon there his father had erected to commemorate his first changing. He carefully released her onto th
e stone before falling into a man again—completely naked behind her.
“Finally,” she whispered, turning to take him in. “I thought I would never see you again.”
“And I never thought I would see you here.” He wasn’t going to begrudge himself the chance to be with her—dream or not. He snapped his fingers with intent, and all the raindrops covering her became animated, tracing like rain down her body. She gasped, either at the sudden nudity or the sudden chill, he wasn’t sure.
But he did know he needed her. Now.
“Come here,” he commanded.
Anyone else in the Realms would’ve done what he’d requested instantly. He’d grown up with families who wanted to raise their position by throwing their daughters into his path with hope.
Only the Andi of his dreams would ask him, “Why?” and it was so true to her, it made him laugh.
“Why do you think?” he asked.
A mischievous smile fluttered over her lips, her only clothing under the moonlit night. “Because you want to braid my hair.”
“I don’t think I have that skill.” Damian chuckled, looking her up and down again. This memory of her was divine. He didn’t have to look down to know that he was growing hard. “But I do want to run my fingers through it when I’m inside you.”
“Is that what you think I’ll let you do?” She took a step toward him, putting a finger on his collarbone and tracing it across his chest as she paced a measured circle around him. “On this cold, cold night?”
“Yes,” he said. He tracked her with his eyes, appreciating the way she moved—smooth and steady like a cat—and reached out for her, caressing his hand around her neck to pull her in. “I can keep you warm.”
A wind swept across the turret, and as he brought her toward him to protect her from it, his wings flared. Massive arches of shining gold, surrounding them, hiding them both from sight. He had a moment of surprise. He’d never partially changed before—not even in his dreams—but it made sense now, to shield her from the Realms, and then his dragon started pushing up.
Scales over scales, claws over claws, out of the internal cage that Damian kept him hidden in, freed by the dreamscape they both shared. Andi stroked his wing in awe, and nerves of his that had never known fire before sparked as if summoning the beast inside.
“Don’t,” he whispered.
“Why not?” she asked him, her hand mere seconds from touching him again. If she kept doing that—interacting with the things that made him draconic—he knew he might lose control, and what then?
“Because you don’t know what you’re doing to me,” he told her, as her hand touched his wing, fearlessly stroking it with her fingertips. He shivered at her touch and felt his monster’s blood surge and pulse inside him. “Andi,” he warned her.
She twisted to smile impishly at him. “Damian,” she mocked and pouted. He reached for her to stroke the pout off her lips with his thumb. She danced back and then stumbled. His wings swooped in to catch her instinctively, and through them, he could feel the weight of her body, the heat of its curves. The small O of surprise her mouth made as she realized she was being cradled by him, framed in his gold, was too perfect for him to bear. He used his wings to bring her closer without thinking and caught her face in his hands to kiss her, back to feeling her with his human senses as her body pressed against his, pinning his erect cock between them with the slight rise of her belly.
In the Realms, in his dreams, there was nothing to stop him from indulging all his fantasies—and he’d had a hundred thousand of them since he’d seen her last. Andi worshipful, Andi proud, tied up, tied down, enthusiastic, feigning reluctance. “The things you make me want to do to you,” he whispered, coming up for air, and he could both hear and feel her heart flutter in her breast beneath his hand.
“Like what?” she asked, not innocent at all.
He opened his mouth to tell her, and his dragon chose then to breech. It was like it stepped forward into his body, becoming the man that he had been pushing Damian back to watch. Damian cursed, forgetting himself, and started to wrestle with the beast inside.
Don’t, he warned it, thrashing against his new confinement, thinking about snow, baseball, anything he could do to regain control and cool his fire. Dragon…stop…or else…
It is my turn, his dragon told him, catching one of Andi’s hands and bringing it to his waist. Quiet, or I will make you disappear.
While Damian was fairly certain that couldn’t happen in the real world, in this dreamscape, it possibly could. He struggled harder to free himself, but as he saw his dragon touching her through his eyes and felt her touching him, he realized his dragon wanted her, the same as he did—and his dragon was a part of him. If he couldn’t take her here, where nothing was real, then when?
“And now you’re quiet?” Andi asked, looking up into his eyes. Damian wondered what she saw there. Was it his own gold or the dragon’s now, his round pupils changed to reptilian slits? His dragon didn’t answer, but it kissed her hard again. His wings pressed against her body, loving the feel of her there, using them to hold her close as his hands began to roam, tracing patterns on her skin that Damian recognized had meaning, yet was unable to decipher.
Watching things through his dragon’s eyes, it was just like when the beast was fighting—it was happening to him, but he was unable to control it, and he couldn’t always predict what would come next. Even when he shared his soul with his dragon, it could still surprise him. So, when his dragon picked her up, he had no idea where they were going. He only knew that they were rearranging his wings around her, folding them in on one another beneath her, so that when he set her back down, she was standing on the leather of his wings instead of the cold stone ground.
“Thank you,” she said, smiling up and moving her hands back down his chest again. She leaned against him bodily, rising up on her tiptoes to kiss underneath his jaw, his hands at her waist and ass. And as one of her hands found the smooth skin of his shaft between them and stroked, Damian shuddered—the same as the beast now owning his body did.
His dragon picked her up while Damian watched helplessly from inside, and it took her to the statue his father had made of him, before setting her down again. Her eyes flickered from the attacking statue to him, and her mouth was opening to ask a question when his dragon wrenched the statue up and hurled it over the side of the castle.
Damian knew what it was like to feel strong as a dragon and strong in general, but while inside his human body, he’d never felt that draconically strong before. He heard the statue tumbling down the outside of the turret’s stone. The thing was made of solid bronze, and even though this was a dream, his own strength gave him pause.
His hesitation did not stop his dragon, however. It turned back to Andi.
“Was that…you?” she asked. “Is that…you? Now?”
His dragon didn’t answer her. It only picked her up again and put her on the pedestal where the statue had been, giving her an extra three feet of height, to hold her inside his wings again. He swept them forward, catching her off guard, bringing her toward his waiting arms and mouth and tongue.
Andi was at the perfect height for him, and using his wings to hold her freed up all other parts of him. He started kissing her neck and breasts, feeling her hair swirl around him as one of his hands cupped between her legs and found her wet.
She moaned as one of his fingers traced the outline of her pussy without pushing in, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling his mouth against her breast so tightly. She rose on her tiptoes, taller now thanks to the statue’s base, and arched back to show more of herself to him, trusting in his wings to hold her.
His dragon snarled a note of appreciation and then started kissing, licking lower, as his hands spread her thighs, and one of her hands curled against his shoulder in anticipation. And then he met her there, his tongue playing against her warm folds, pulling up underneath her hood to taste her clit. Damian felt her whole body shudder again
st his dragon’s wings—like a spider might feel a web-trapped fly—and it only made both him and his dragon hungrier.
“Yes,” she whispered, giving more of herself over. His dragon grabbed one of her legs and set it over his shoulder—so gently, compared to his possible strength, Damian knew—and then the other, making her lose her balance with a squeak as she slid down inside his wings until he caught her with his hands, keeping her at the perfect height for his mouth. Knowing she was safe, her ankles laced around him, and she arched back, hair swirling now against his wings, where everything she touched burnished fire in him—his wings as sensitive to her touch as they were to air—as she thrashed and roiled, making small noises with each swipe of his tongue and suck of his lips. She was so close, teetering on the edge, and Damian wasn’t sure whether his dragon wanted to keep her there or push her off and make her fly alone.
Use your fingers, Damian pressed, urging his beast to reach in her pussy and rub her spot. Had the beast forgotten he had Damian’s fingers now, instead of claws?
No. Not yet, his dragon said, letting his tongue continue its onslaught.
But you’re…you’re tormenting her, Damian told it. And me, he added truthfully. He knew he wasn’t the only one feeling it. His dragon was hard, his cock low-slung and ready, hidden from Andi by his sweep of wings.
Dragon Destined: Billionaire Dragon Shifter Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds) Page 1