by Ophelia Bell
“Who was she?”
Without answering, Ked gently took her hand and led her up the path to a carved stone bench that rested in the shade of a large tree. They sat, and Ked’s grip on her hand tightened.
“She is just a woman, his latest bride. If this one fails to bear him a son, he’ll execute her. It’s been the same, year after year. Sometimes he succeeds, but the child dies when he attempts to feed him your blood. Normal humans can’t survive a taste of immortal blood. They go mad to the point of suicide. Some can accept a lesser dragon’s blood, and those are the ones who follow him now.”
“She looked like me,” Belah whispered. She lifted her hand to her chest, wishing she could dispel the ache that had taken root there, burning like a hot coal.
“They always do. Sometimes he succeeds in capturing a blue dragon, as well. He does the same to them, but as you know he cannot breed a dragon without being marked by her.”
“The skulls…”
Ked nodded and looked at her gravely. “He and his soldiers actively hunt us now. They have killed hundreds of our kind. The only way to make him stop is to return you to him, or so he claims, but we refused.”
“You should never have taken me from him, Ked. We were in love. I trusted him.”
“I protect what I love,” Ked said hotly. A swift surge of darkness surrounded them, blotting out the idyllic garden along with every emotion Belah was experiencing save one: her shame. Shame for being so weak in the presence of a human man, for allowing him to overpower her so often. She hated her brother in that moment for holding the mirror up to her the way he did. As much as she had loved every moment of her time with Nikhil, she had let this happen.
“We must kill him. It’s the only way,” she said with forced conviction. As much as the idea destroyed her, Belah knew it had to be done.
“I wish it were so simple,” Ked said. “Your fire is the only thing that has a chance of succeeding. I tried burning him the day I took you away. Our brothers and I have combined our three fires into one, but we weren’t even able to subdue him. He can’t harm us, but neither can we harm him. He’s become too strong, but that’s not the worst of it.”
“So, I will go back there and take care of it. Now.” She stood and prepared to shift.
“No.” Ked grabbed her arm and pulled her back down.
Belah turned to look at her brother for the first time since they’d arrived here. Ked’s brow was knit, his lips pursed. The expression alarmed her because for the first time in her life, he looked truly worried.
“Why not? What aren’t you telling me?”
“Because he has our children, Belah. If we kill him, we will never find them.”
“I have no children. None of us have any living children.” Except for one son who their mother had hidden away. The son Belah wished she could find but knew better than to try searching for.
Ked’s expression softened and he reached up to cup her cheek. He gave her a sad smile.
“You have two children, Belah. The son we made together, and the daughter Nikhil gave you. Your blood must have acted as a mark once he ingested it, allowing you conceive his child. She was born while you slept, and Mother promised her safekeeping. We didn’t believe him when he said he’d found them, and we have no idea how it happened. I confronted Mother about it, and she confirmed his story. They were hidden away in hibernation. Mother said only a pair of Blessed humans should have been capable of discovering where they slumbered, and only twins, at that. Such a thing would be so rare as the be nonexistent.”
Belah’s eyesight dimmed and her world spun. Blood rushed to her head, causing a steady, painful throb at her temples.
Blessed twins. Sweet Mother, not Naaz and Neela.
She swallowed the lump in her throat and forced words out. “His soldiers… you said he has soldiers. They’re just humans who follow him, right?”
“Mostly, yes, but there are two who are stronger than the others. The two are elites who are somehow able to lure any dragon and strong enough to kill them. I have never met them myself, but the tales I hear are of a brother and a sister who do Nikhil’s bidding.”
Belah crumpled against her brother, sobbing into his shoulder. The two precious children she’d cherished had been corrupted. This was all her doing—her cravings for an escape had left them vulnerable, had left her entire race vulnerable, and the very man who had granted her that escape upon the promise that she mark him had been the one to turn on them.
“Oh, Sweet Mother, what have I done?”
Once upon a time, she had been burdened by the responsibility of a slew of illustrious titles. Belah the Queen. Belah the Empress. Belah the Goddess.
She had lost the honor of any of those burdens.
Belah the Betrayer—that was the title that fit.
Coming soon:
DRAGON BLUES
One of only six immortal dragons, Blue Dragon Belah seeks one more chance at love after a heartbreaking mistake that took millennia to recover from. Wary of venturing into the world again, she takes the chance, leaving her sanctuary to find a worthy mate among one of the dragons’ three sister races.
If she can find the perfect mate and conceive a child with him, she might find redemption and turn the tide against the old lover who became her race’s mortal enemy.
Lukas and Iszak North have managed to stick to the fringes of the world for two hundred years. They would gladly leave the true work up to the dragons, and let their own race of falcon shifters have their peace. Tortured after their enemy murdered their sister decades earlier, they finally hope to find happiness when when a beautiful female dragon walks into the jazz club Lukas’s band has a gig at. Dragons are renowned for their sexual appetites, and she’s apparently set her sights on them.
It doesn’t take long for them to learn who she really is—the dragon who was single-handedly responsible for unleashing an enemy on the world that’s tormented their race for more than a millennium, and their own family in very recent history. Centuries of buried animosity blaze forth when they learns Belah’s secrets, threatening to ruin the first true love they’ve found in several lifetimes of searching.
Only the truth can set them free.
If you’re curious about the dragons’ origins, please check out:
SLEEPING DRAGONS
Erika’s spent her entire post-graduate career searching for it. The elusive dragon stronghold her archaeologist professors scoffed at as being only a myth. Now she has the perfect team and has led them into the deepest reaches of the Sumatran jungle. At the edge of the discovery of the century, she’s finally about to prove to everyone how wrong they were.
But when the seven intrepid explorers pass through the doors, they’re barely prepared for the conflict of lust versus logic they’re faced with on the inside. Ages-old magic lingers in the stronghold, dictating that they perform a ritual to awaken the long-slumbering beasts within. And beasts that beautiful only awaken to one thing: the unbridled release of humans in the throes of ecstasy.
The Sleeping Dragons Omnibus is a series of six novelettes. It includes all kinds of fun kinks involving shapeshifting mythical beasts who breathe magic smoke and have very long, prehensile tongues. The book is intended for adult audiences.
Read on for an excerpt, or buy now.
Animus
Sleeping Dragons, Book One
Excerpt
All Eben wanted to do was shove his hot cock into something and the urge drove him mad. Frustrated with his inability to orgasm, he threw off his sleeping bag and decided to go exploring to distract himself. There were doorways that they hadn’t opened yet. Lots of them. There were the ones behind the throne that he knew Erika was laser focused on. But there were others, too, all locked. Maybe he could find a way to open some of those locked doors and earn a few points with Erika.
Camille’s pretty ass
waited out there somewhere for him to open, too. He shouldn’t go looking for her, but her bedroll was empty so he did anyway. He was worried, he told himself. I wanted to make sure you were okay, he heard himself rehearsing in his head. Not I really want to go down on you. That was an understatement. He wanted to shove his tongue into every single orifice she possessed.
Camille had featured in his fantasies since he’d first met her when Erika assembled their team. But, over the course of the weeks they’d traveled together, he’d become more and more enamored of her—a detail he could never properly articulate to Erika without sounding like a complete pussy. In spite of a generally healthy level of self-confidence around women, he’d been hesitant to approach Camille. Each time he tried, she looked at him like she had earlier that day—like he might just be crazy. He supposed the thing with the dragon statue’s cock might have been too much, but damn, she was so beautiful when she blushed like that.
So he kept going back to Erika. Erika wasn’t just his oldest friend, she was also the perfect casual fuck buddy.
He wondered if Camille would like having her asshole licked the way Erika did. Fuck, he’d love to do that to her. Even though the mere image of making love to her could satisfy him most nights, for some reason tonight he couldn’t stop imagining her in the naughtiest positions. Not just bent over displaying her perfect ass to him, but sometimes doing that with her thighs spread on either side of his face with her pussy poised above his tongue and her sweet mouth wrapped around his cock, or riding him face-to-face with her full breasts rubbing against his chest. The vivid image of his dick buried hilt-deep in her ass flashed through his head, making his balls ache almost painfully. Maybe he should just find Erika instead. She might at least be good for a blow job if he promised to return the favor.
He got as far as the stone dais and stopped, momentarily dazed by the image before him. Camille lay in the center just before the huge green jade throne, sound asleep. She was on her side, her cheek resting on one arm, and her pretty braid draped over her shoulder. Her top had ridden up, and she clenched one breast in her sleep. Her other breast was bare, the fabric of her tank top shoved up above the pink tip of her hard nipple that just begged to be sucked. Christ, he’d do it if he could without feeling like a complete perv. She was too good for him, so pure and naïve and virginal, but with an ass that could halt time. What he wouldn’t give to be able just once to bury his face between those round cheeks and go to town until she screamed his name.
Just a touch, he thought. One touch—she’d never know. His mouth watered and his cock throbbed when he quietly crouched beside her and reached out. The hard pink flesh of her exposed nipple beckoned, the aureole a perfect pebbled circle of vermilion, about the size of a quarter, perched atop the creamy mound of her full breast.
“Eben, I need you.”
He jerked his hand back like he’d come too close to a flame and shoved it in his pocket. He stood and turned abruptly in response to the voice behind him.
“Fuck, Erika. You scared the shit out of me.” He tried not to look like a guilty fool when he turned to face her. Erika glanced at Camille’s half-naked sleeping body and eyed him with apparent suspicion.
“You were about to molest Camille, weren’t you? You perverted bastard.”
“I… what? No, it’s just that… Fuck, I’m horny as hell and you pretty much disappeared tonight.” It was as likely an excuse as any.
She stepped quietly across the dais and surveyed Camille where she slept. Once by the other woman’s side, she bent and carefully tugged Camille’s shirt down to cover her breasts, then gently extracted Camille’s notebook from beneath the sleeping woman’s cheek.
Her eyes scanned the pages of penciled scrawl quickly. “Holy shit, Kris wasn’t lying. Eben… this place is a lot more important than we thought it was.” She looked up into his eyes, her pretty face beseeching. “We have to wake them up.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Wake who up?”
Erika laid the notebook back down and grabbed his hand. Her dark eyes were wide and excited. She was more excited than he’d ever seen her. With a brief glance he realized how disheveled she was, but it just served to make her sexier. Women like Erika were so good at wearing their fixations like a badge that just made men like him gravitate toward them. Her hair was a tangled mess, her dirty shirt half undone and wrinkled, her breasts almost spilling out from her low-cut tank top, and her nipples were hard little circles pressing against the fabric.
“Dragons, my dear. They are fucking real. That statue you were so crudely fondling earlier? Real. Living but asleep. I’ve been walking for the last three hours probably, just trying to figure it all out, but this is the answer. We are going to wake them up.”
“I think lack of sex has made you a crazy woman.”
“Sweetie, I’m just as horny as you are, but apparently that’s by design. Kris gave me the scoop. We can’t orgasm unless we’re touching one of them.”
“Ah… one of what?”
“One of the dragons.”
Images of shoving his cock into a stone hole made him crease his brow with worry. “I’m not fucking a rock.”
“I don’t know how it works with the female dragons, but we’ll figure it out. Maybe all they need are facials.”
“Right.” He laughed. “And the idea of screwing a reptile turns you on? I admit I’m as kinky as the next guy, but bestiality? Not gonna go there.”
“They’re not beasts. They’re mythical creatures who actually aren’t so mythical after all. Come on.”
“Can’t she come too?” he asked, gesturing to Camille. “I’m sure she’d want us to wake her up to see.”
“No, honey, this is a two-man job. She’s not ready for this, I promise you.”
Books by Ophelia Bell
Sleeping Dragons Series
Animus
Tabula Rasa
Gemini
Shadows
Nexus
Ascend
Rising Dragons Series
Night Fire
Breath of Destiny
Breath of Memory
Breath of Innocence
Breath of Desire
Breath of Love
Breath of Flame and Shadow
Breath of Fate
Sisters of Flame
Immortal Dragons Series
Dragon Betrayed
Dragon Blues
Dragon Void
Standalone Erotic Tales
After You
Out of the Cold
Ophelia Bell Taboo
Burying His Desires
•
Blackmailing Benjamin
Betraying Benjamin
Belonging to Benjamin
•
Casey’s Secrets
Casey’s Discovery
Casey’s Surrender
About Ophelia Bell
From fantasy erotica to sci-fi and contemporary, exploring the baser urges of the human psyche is what gets Ophelia Bell going. There’s nothing more beautiful than two people (or three, or four… or more!) lost in the throes of ecstasy. Skin on skin, urgent whispered pleas, the scent of sex and the salty taste of sweat. Nothing is more yummy than a good, juicy erotic story. If you have the same mindset you’ll love reading these books as much as she loves writing them.
Ophelia Bell spends her time in sunny Southern California with her very supportive husband and sixty-nine attention-whoring cats. (Just kidding, there are only six, and one of them is orange.)
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Dragon Betrayed
Copyright © 2016 Ophelia Bell
Cover Art Designed by Dawné Dominique
Photograph Copyright © PeriodImages.com
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This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used.
Published by Ophelia Bell
UNITED STATES