Mate Of A Dragon Villain (Skeleton Key)
Page 1
Mate of a Dragon Villain
Mandy Rosko
Skeleton Key
Contents
Freebie Starter Library
Title Page
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
Freebie Starter Library
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Other Books by Mandy Rosko
Copyright
About the Author
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Chapter 1
Amanda Roberts was going to lose her fucking mind if she didn’t find her trusty red pen, and instead of opening her desk drawer to find it—the kind with the nice fountain ink she’d purchased from JetPens after switching apartments—she saw a skeleton key.
Usually, whenever Amanda lost anything, she got all OCD about it and couldn’t rest unless she found it. Thank God for the Internet when it came to losing her phone. All she had to do was go to a website that would call her phone for her, but pens didn’t have ringers that could be called from her laptop or iPad. Especially not her good luck expensive red writing pens.
Amanda had once turned her apartment upside down looking for the damned thing, and now…
“Where did you come from?”
Now that she held this key in her hands, she almost forgot all about it. She no longer wanted to scratch out another missed deadline on her calendar that stared at her on her kitchen wall, and she didn’t want to sort through the stack of papers on her desk that were waiting for the long, smooth lines of that red pen to edit them before she made the corrections on their digital copies and sent them off to her publisher.
The key was heavy. It looked to be made of glass, and true to the name of skeleton key, there was a skull on the handle.
Amanda squinted at it. She could kind of see her warped reflection in that wide smile all skulls seemed to have.
Amanda twisted her head back to her desk. Dragon King Eldric and Queen Jane weren’t going to finish writing their epic romance for her. She had to do it, and the final chapter was due last week. She just couldn’t seem to say goodbye, or get the characters to behave.
They’d always fought with her; throughout all five books, they’d misbehaved and struggled against her plot twists and awesome ideas, especially the love scenes. Amanda wasn’t good at writing loves scenes, at least she didn’t think she was based on how much she struggled to churn them out, but her readers didn’t seem to mind.
It was her bestselling series. Not that it put her on any bestselling lists, but it paid the rent and allowed her to get a two-bedroom apartment instead of a one bedroom, so she had an office now!
And each book had been harder to write than the last. Now that this was her last one and she was at the finish line, she should have been relieved, but she didn’t want to let them go. She couldn’t let them go. Things didn’t seem right, and even her lucky red editing pen wasn’t helping her.
She was stressed, on about two and a half hours of sleep with a week’s worth of dishes piling over the top of her sink and gathering in her dishwasher, dirty clothes in every corner, and she was avoiding calls from her publisher for the first time since she’d been picked up, and yet…
It all melted away. The key probably should have been cold in her hands, but it was warm. It was calming. Maybe it was part of the design, but it looked like something was churning inside the glass. Like storm clouds.
Pretty.
Maybe it was one of those powered by the electricity of the human body sort of things. Amanda had seen those before.
It didn’t feel like a plastic toy, though. This felt like real glass.
And what the hell was it doing in her desk?
Amanda felt a chill shuddering down her spine. She looked back at her desk.
It was also new. Sort of. She’d found it at an antique shop that was getting rid of it for a song, and she couldn’t resist. Everything about that cherry wood with the tiny scratches on it just screamed respectable writer, professional, and she’d had to have it. She’d grinned like an idiot every time she’d sat down at that desk for over a week, proud of herself for owning the thing.
No. It wasn’t possible that someone could have put it in there without her knowing. Amanda’s last boyfriend had been before she’d bought the desk, and that hadn’t lasted long. He’d only come into her apartment twice.
That meant the key had to have been in that drawer this entire time and she’d never noticed it.
Which was strange because she’d searched that desk top to bottom for any hidden treasures and had come up with nothing.
It must have been in the back of the drawer where she couldn’t see it. It must have jarred loose and rolled to the front after opening and closing the drawer so many times.
Yeah, that made sense.
Amanda went back to the desk to search. It was an old desk, so it had older style locks on it. She checked them all to see if the skeleton key would fit any of them.
She hadn’t been given any keys with the desk. That was one of the things that had been missing, so she couldn’t lock any of the drawers or cupboards, but that had been fine at the time, if a little disappointing.
She checked every single keyhole. The skeleton key was too big for each of those brass locks, and somehow, she was starting to get the feeling the key wasn’t made for this desk anyway.
Amanda’s phone rang, the vibration from the cell making it fall off the desk. She didn’t reach out to grab it off the floor, or answer it. She stared at the key. All her focus, all her attention and energy, was on the object in her hands. It was…so beautiful.
It might make a pretty good paperweight, but that thought, as fleeting as it was, seemed blasphemous in her mind when she stared at the crystalline work.
And that thing that called to her, from within the key, and from somewhere else, got stronger.
A cool breeze fluttered across her cheek. There were no windows open in her office. Or in her apartment. It was late November, and the air was too cold for open windows.
Amanda turned towards the spot where that breeze had come from. The closet door.
As she faced it, another waft of air hit her, as if it was pushing through the cracks around the doorframe. There should have been nothing in there but the crafting supplies she’d used to make her buttons and bracelets for the giveaways she’d taken part in last year. That and her winter coats and spare shoes.
But a whoosh of air and a whistling noise told her there was something else.
Distantly, she thought she heard her neighbor shout something. She rarely heard them make a peep, but this sounded almost like a war cry.
Amanda approached the door. There should not have been a key hole beneath the plastic gold-colored doorknob. That door was cheap and thin and shouldn’t have had something like that on it. But it was there. The rim looked almost silver as it glittered.
No, not silver, that same crystalline glass as the skeleton key in her hand.
Her phone rang again.
Amanda looked down. The screen was face up. It was her editor. Probably wanting to know if she was on schedule this time, how the finale of Eldric was coming, if he had finally vanquished and killed the villain, Hargreave.
She wasn’t on schedule and Hargreave was still alive. Amanda wasn’t going to answer.
Another distant shout, and this time a clang of metal, as if someone had hit two frying pans together.
It wasn’t coming from any of her neighbors. It was coming from the other side of that door.
Her curiosity, and whatever that pull was that came from the key itself, drove her to step forward. The skull of the skeleton key was clenched tight in her right hand, the pin and bit pointed towards that lock.
Amanda stopped herself for just a brief half second, then sucked back a sharp breath and pushed the tip of the key into the lock.
It was a smooth, inward slide. There was no resistance, no jiggling or testing or fighting with the key and lock. She turned it, one hand on the doorknob, twisting and pushing the door open.
As if gravity itself had suddenly changed and twisted on its side, Amanda was pulled into the closet, and she shrieked to high heaven as she fell down, down, down, through the grey clouds and through the vast nothingness, as if she had been thrown out of a flying plane thousands of feet in the air without a parachute.
Chapter 2
“This time, I will cut your fucking head off!”
King Eldric swooped in, blue wings tipped with the blood of the men he’d cut out of the sky, his sword raised to come down.
Prince Hargreave Kendrick readied his spear. This was the thing he’d been waiting for. For that fool to lose his temper and fly down at him so Hargreave could stab his spear right through that idiot’s throat.
His black wings shuddered. He wanted to fly back at the man coming down at him. He wanted to rush at him as though they were in a race to kill each other, but he held still in the sky, knowing the kill would be better if he let Eldric come to him. Then the fool would have no one to blame for his death but himself.
Eldric had his sword raised so high Hargreave would have more than enough warning, more than enough time, to thrust his spear forward and gut him before the king could slice at his wing.
A shriek caught his attention. It was a fool thing to do, but he took his eyes from the king for a breath of a second, and only because the noise was so odd in a battlefield full of roaring men.
A woman. A woman with blue hair fell from the sky. A human, if the lack of wings was anything to go by.
Blue hair…
Hargreave recalled where his attention should have been, and he returned it to where it was supposed to be just in time to keep his head from being taken off, as Eldric really wanted.
Hargreave grunted as the edge of that heavy blade cut through the leather armor at his shoulder, slicing him deep enough to notice, to be more than a nuisance. To be painful.
That was fine. Eldric hadn’t gotten his wings or his head, and the momentum the king flew downward at prevented him from getting another swing in at him.
Fuck! Blast it all to the fires of hell! What a stupid—
“The woman!”
He shouted it out loud as he flapped his wings hard, cutting through the air and propelling himself towards his target.
Her body was out of control, spinning, arms flapping, though the screaming had stopped.
Hargreave’s body crashed into hers, two hundred feet above the rocks that would have splattered her blood like the fragile thing she was.
He nearly had to drop his spear, but he knew better than to do such a thing in a place like this.
She wasn’t unconscious, as he thought she would be. Water flew from her eyes and down her cheeks. She blinked blearily, as though trying to discern where she was and what was happening.
Hargreave clenched his jaw. He should have known Eldric would attempt to distract him by tossing innocent women from the sky. He looked around, wondering why there were not more of them. Could she be the only one? Unlikely, but he could see no others falling from the storm clouds that rushed quickly across the plains.
Eventually, the woman found her strength. She reached forward, slinging one arm around Hargreave’s neck, and the other clutched at his bloody shoulder.
He grunted. She didn’t seem to notice the pain he was in. “Wh-what happened? What’s going on?”
“Quiet, woman!” Hargreave snapped, searching for a place to land to deposit her.
A battle cry from above, Hargreave looked up as Alger, Eldric’s second in command, fell down upon him, wings drawn in to use the weight of his body better, his sword pointed at Hargreave’s face.
The woman saw this warrior coming, held him tighter, and screamed again as Hargreave twisted himself around, angling his face and neck just as the sword came down upon him, close enough to cut his nose off, so close he could smell the dried blood that crusted on the edge of the steel as he spun around in the air.
Then Alger was beneath him, spreading his wings to slow his fall.
Hargreave raised his spear, unable to stab from this angle and because of the woman he held, so he smashed the blunt side down on Alger’s head.
He went limp and fell. Hargreave hoped he would die like he deserved.
He glanced around. No other warriors coming that he could see had their attention on him. Eldric was in the air, hovering, searching around, probably for Hargreave, but his men were keeping the king preoccupied. He might as well land here. It was as good a place as any and the woman could hide in the rocks until he could return for her.
Hargreave landed. He sent one withering glance to Alger’s body. He wasn’t moving. Good. He was dead. Eldric would mourn him for decades. Hargreave hoped he mourned the man for the rest of his natural life.
The woman with the blue-tipped hair stared at him, her arms still around his neck. “You…you’re…”
Hargreave rushed to the rocks and set the woman down. He didn’t want to leave her here. Anything could still happen, but he had to. The enemy was still flying above, and it would take but a single glance downward before they noticed the leader of their enemy was on the ground.
“Stay here. Do not move out into the open. Do you understand me?”
The woman trembled. She didn’t answer.
He gripped her arms. “Do you understand?”
She jumped, a gasp escaping her, her eyes flying wide as she stared at him, right into him.
Grey eyes, the color of those storm clouds above them right now. The blue rims surrounding that grey cold were like the sky on a clear day. The sky above his ruined home.
And he realized why she looked so familiar, why she looked like a woman he’d seen before.
Because he had seen her before. This same mouse-brown hair tipped with blue and teal, the color of his enemy, her nose slim and pert, with those eyes that felt like home… He’d dreamed of this, thought it nothing at the time, a fool’s wish for something better.
He’d dreamed of this woman as his queen. Hargreave’s heart slammed loud and heavy in his chest, as loud as it had done that day he’d discovered his parents nailed to those crosses in front of his castle, as hard and desperate as the day he’d been taken as a small boy, as the day when Eldric’s father had razed his lands, stealing cattle and crops before setting everything else on fire and salting the land.
His desperation increased. The need to see to her safety, to take her away with him and be gone with her before Eldric could find her and ruin her the way Eldric’s father had ruined Ludolvic.
The woman blinked at him several times. Those grey eyes moved to his shoulder, then to the blood on her hand. “You’re hurt.”
He didn’t have time for this. “Those men up there will kill you. Stay here until I return for you.”
“Are you Hargreave?”
She sounded in awe of him, the way his enemies sounded startled or shocked to realize they were in his presence. He normally liked that, but with her, he couldn’t
figure out what her shock really meant. He could be confusing it for terror.
In that moment, there was nothing that terrified him more than returning to find her dead. “Do not move from this spot. I will not say it again.”
He leaned in, because he had to, had to show her that she now belonged to him.
Hargreave wasn’t normally a man who took pleasure in stealing kisses, but in this case, he took great pleasure in it.
It had been so long since he’d enjoyed the soft pleasure of a woman’s lips, or the soft gasp and warm sensation of licking in her mouth, and perhaps it was because of that reason that this felt so wonderfully good.
It was a chore to pull away, and had his life, and hers, not depended on it, he wouldn’t have. He would have taken her right then and there and let the world know he’d found his queen.
Hargreave gasped for breath when his mouth was separate from hers. He’d been flying and fighting all day, but this was something…different.
He tightened his grip on his spear. “I’ll come back for you.”
Eyes still wide, his woman nodded as though in a daze. Hargreave spread his black wings and launched himself into the sky to return to the fight.
Maybe she was still dreaming. That was the only explanation for it because there was no way in hell this could actually be real. This couldn’t be happening and…did that guy way up there just get his wing chopped off? How did he have wings?
Amanda was sleeping. That’s right. She never woke up this morning and she was still in bed.
Except the tiny rocks beneath her knees felt real enough. The blood that was now sticky on her hand felt real, and when she put her hand to her nose, it smelled of blood, too. She had blood on her, and that man who had caught her, who had the black wings tipped in red—not from blood, but with scales—and those bright red irises she’d imagined again and again as she wrote her stories…
That was Hargreave. She’d said his name, and he hadn’t acted like a man who would be confused at hearing such a strange sounding name. Amanda had chosen it for him because it sounded like Heathcliff, one of her favorite literary characters.