Licking Fire
A Howls Romance (Stop Dragon My Heart Around)
Mandy M. Roth
Raven Happy Hour, LLC
Licking Fire: A Howls Romance (Stop Dragon My Heart Around) © Copyright 2017, Mandy M. Roth
Cover art by Clarissa Yeo, © Copyright 2013
First Electronic Printing Oct 2017, Mandy M. Roth
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
All books copyrighted to the author and may not be resold or given away without written permission from the author, Mandy M. Roth.
This novel is a work of fiction. Any and all characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or events or places is merely coincidence. This title is intended for adults only.
Contents
Stop Dragon My Heart Around Series World
Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
About the Author
Stop Dragon My Heart Around Series World
Stop Dragon My Heart Around Series World Stories by Mandy M. Roth
Tipping the Scales
Licking Fire
And more to come! Check each author’s website for details.
Stop Dragon My Heart Around Series World Stories by Michelle M. Pillow
Romancing the Recluse
And more to come! Check each author’s website for details.
Blurb
Licking Fire (Stop Dragon My Heart Around)
Dragon shifter Rayer Drackos of the Dracodomus clan is happy to hide out in his penthouse, away from the world. It beats hoarding treasure in a cave like some of his extended family members have been known to do. The problem is, being a billionaire recluse isn’t helping him find his one true mate. And if he doesn’t mate soon, he’ll succumb to an ancient curse, forever stealing his chance at happiness, ensuring he’ll be forever alone.
Can he find true love before the clock runs out? Are the scales of fate tipped in his favor?
Chapter One
Rayer Drackos of the Dracodomus clan stepped onto one of the penthouse balconies of his high-rise and surveyed the city night as he held an envelope—and the invitation that had been within—in one hand, and a glass of wine in the other. He sipped the red wine, snow falling gently upon him as he clutched the envelope as if it were a lifeline of some sort.
Perhaps it was.
With each passing day, he felt himself becoming more and more like so many of his older clansmen—detached. Removed from it all despite having made a point to move to one of the biggest cities in the world.
Lost in a crowd.
The way I used to prefer it.
Once, he’d strongly disliked city living, enduring it only because it beat staying tucked away forever, hiding in outlying areas that mankind had not bothered with in centuries, places mankind could often not even reach with any sort of ease. He had a large number of relatives who still resided in those remote reaches.
A solitary life was not a wise choice. Not with the length of time in which his kind lived. Immortals who did not bother with human interaction tended to become the monsters from which stories were born—the big bad uglies that laid siege to entire towns before burning them to the ground.
Dragon shifters were notorious for such actions, documented through legends and fairy tales of burning many a man and town. Despite knowing how quickly their kind could lose control after a life of solitude, it was all too easy to become a recluse.
Rayer had seen others of his kind do as much—tuck themselves away from the world and from human interactions. Several of his own clan had not ventured anywhere near a human since before the advent of the locomotive. To them, this was but a blink of the eye.
The Dracodomus Dragon Clan was not always big on change. Perhaps that was why a curse was upon them. The details on the curse and how it came to be were fuzzy. He had never been able to get anything close to a straight answer out of his elders about the curse’s origin, and he’d been alive nearly six hundred years.
Some said it wasn’t a curse, but a blessing that had been laid upon their clan. Of course, those who said that were each happily mated to their chosen one—a special person the Fates preordained long ago would be with them.
He’d never heard any of the males who were older than six hundred and not mated refer to the affliction their clan suffered from as anything more than a curse.
Rayer grunted, having once bought into all of the stories of finding the one. He was no longer a fledging who believed all he was told and who clung to fairy tales. No. He was an immortal who had seen and done far too much in his long life to be anything but jaded.
Something he excelled at.
He trusted very few people outside of his own family. He had men who worked for him who were loyal, and who knew the truth of what he was, but they were supernaturals themselves.
Not human.
He had befriended a human decades ago, sharing with him secrets of the dragon shifters. Samuel had loved knowledge, and had a great deal of respect and trust for his kind, only wanting to unravel life’s mysteries for himself. Not to share with the world. And when several of Samuel’s journals had become public without his consent, he’d taken one for the team, letting the world of academia think him mad rather than try to convince his peers that men could shift into dragons.
It had cost the man dearly, but he’d never faltered.
Rayer thought more on Samuel, realizing it had been just over fifty years since he’d last spoken with the man. While that was nothing to Rayer, he did understand how fragile and short human lifespans were. Sadness came over him, and he made a mental note to have his assistant search for Samuel soon. With the holidays upon them, it would be nice to visit with his old friend again.
Samuel would be in his mid-seventies now. And if he knew his old friend, the man was probably digging around in a tomb in Egypt, hoping to discover long-buried secrets from history. As the thought of humans’ frailty settled over him, he found concern moving through him.
Was Samuel well?
Was he even still alive?
Samuel’s letters had stopped coming so long ago that he might not be around anymore. He may have perished, and Rayer hadn’t noticed. He was so used to long periods of time going between speaking to his own kind that it was all too easy to forget what short lifespans humans had.
Humans are far too frail.
Never before had Rayer needed to worry about time and an end drawing near. Though, with his six-hundredth birthday looming, he had been giving the passage of time a great deal of consideration.
He thought back to one of his uncles telling him of their clan’s curse—if any male of their kind did not find his mate by the dawn of his six-hundredth year, he would lose his ability to have sex. He would never sire sons. He would never do anything sexually again. His will for sex would die.
His uncle had explained it all as one would to a child, and then told him that without the one, the clan would cease to exist. That without matings, there would be no more dragon shifters to speak of, and the curse was there to be sure their species survived.
He leaned against the railing, looking out at the night sky, thinking harder upon it all. The need to find his chosen one had weighed heavy upon him in recent years, as he neared his six-hundredth year—the year his cock would stop working if he wasn’t mated. The year he would lose any ability to father childre
n. Children he didn’t use to think he’d even want. He’d been perfectly happy to go through life without settling down. And he would have been happy to do it for another six hundred years, but that wasn’t to be. Now, he wished he’d spent time looking for his chosen mate. That he’d bothered to hunt for her at all.
Maybe the stories of old had it wrong. Maybe his mated uncle had been right. Maybe it wasn’t a curse after all, but a means to be sure their clan didn’t end.
Who knew?
All he knew for certain was, some of his relatives were not so easy to pull into modern times. A few were fine, and had fully embraced all of what the human world had to offer. Some were making strides and living among humans. Some were also living in small groups. Some were getting their feet wet with the idea of joining society, and others simply refused to even try.
He laughed softly to himself, remembering his attempt to explain the finer points of television to one of his uncles when the technology had been new. His uncle was convinced the humans had shrunk themselves magically to fit within the “small box,” and also taken the color out of themselves. His uncle thought humans quite mad for agreeing to be bleached out to shades of gray for the sake of entertainment.
No amount of talking would convince his uncle otherwise. Rayer shuddered to think what his uncle would do the next time he surfaced and learned of the information superhighway.
Rayer didn’t mind technology. Change had served him well enough in his long life. It was how he had accumulated a good deal of his fortune. He adapted with varying trends and times, doing what he must to reinvent himself every so many decades to avoid raising suspicions. It wasn’t very difficult, especially not with the wealth he’d managed to amass in his lifetime. He had bought shares in the railroad when it was new; he’d invested in automobiles when they’d surfaced; likewise with radio, television, and the internet. He liked to put his hand into the mix when possible. It paid well.
He was so rich even he wasn’t sure of his net worth. His clan might disown him should they learn he didn’t sit around and count his riches all day. He laughed at the idea.
Dragon lore was steeped in some truth—such as dragons liking gold, jewels, and money. Hoarding riches even. Rayer was guilty of this to an extent. Not as much as some though. Another of his uncles had yet to leave his cave and treasure. Rayer wondered if gold coins had permanently fused to his uncle’s scales—as the man stayed in shifted form to guard his loot. He’d heard several clansmen had once attempted to bathe the man. From Rayer’s understanding, that had been an epic failure. Somewhere, tucked away in an Eastern Europe cave, was a stinky but rich dragon.
The soft sound of holiday music filtered up from the street below, and Rayer looked in the direction it was coming from, taking another sip of his wine, noticing a small cluster of humans dressed in period clothing. He was adjusted enough with the times to recognize their actions as caroling, their attire period, their song choice considered a classic holiday tune.
Dragon shifters did not normally celebrate human holidays, though the invitation in his hand said otherwise. As a rule, dragon shifters had their own holidays and celebrations: Burning Day, where all gathered to see who could breathe fire the longest and farthest. Wingspan Day, where, as the name suggested, they compared wing size. Boiled down to its baser elements, it was much like the measuring of their cocks. Whoever had the biggest wingspan was deemed the manliest. Golden Feast Day, where they brought something prized from their collected treasures and the men competed in events to see who was the strongest, the fastest, the bravest, to the winner going the collected treasures.
They had no holidays for simply giving. No holidays to enjoy being around one another. It was always about who was the strongest, fastest, oldest, wealthiest. He snorted, sipping his wine once more. “We are a race of cock measurers.”
The carolers drew nearer, and even from his high location he could see them clearly, his dragon eyes far superior to those of a human. Rayer tipped his head back and forth to the rhythm of the song, finding some solace in it. He made a mental note to attempt roasting a chestnut once while he breathed fire to see if the smell held the same value the song seemed to place upon it.
The act would be a solitary one. As was most of what he did.
He had begun to feel the ache of loneliness recently, and strongly suspected it was the time of year. He had heard humans suffered from the holiday blues as well. Though he kept mostly to himself, he had a few human acquaintances, and they spoke more and more of their families this time of year. As dysfunctional as his clan was, they were family, and they saw each other so infrequently anymore. He hadn’t spoken to his brothers in decades and lacked the urge to reach out to them. The internet had made the world smaller, but not to his people. It had changed very little among them. Though advances in technology did mean his kind often had to pull on more of their natural-born magik to remain hidden.
Shifting into a giant dragon without the use of additional cloaking magiks could get you shot out of the sky by a group of jet fighters. His cousin Zarek had had a near miss once around twenty-five or so years ago. Rayer himself had had a close call in the past. And no one knew for certain, but his family had its suspicions that their cousin Klaus had met such a fate at the hands of the Russian government during the ’80s when the Cold War was still happening.
No one had admitted to shooting a dragon out of the sky; then again, not many would admit to such a thing. The rumor mill still talked of it, and Rayer had gotten his hands on reports from the United States on the incident. The code name for it had been Fever Rising. He had been close to Klaus and his twin brother Ladon when they were hatchlings. They’d felt much like brothers to him.
Ladon had entered the human world around the same time as Rayer, and they stayed in contact somewhat. Mostly through business dealings. If there was money to be made, they were both there.
Yes. A selfish race indeed.
Though humans were selfish too. They could be just as cruel as any dragon shifter. Sometimes even more so. There had been a time when their fear of his kind had left the dragons hunted to near extinction. The rebuilding of their race had been slow and secretive. No longer did they allow the truth of their kind to be known by all humans.
He hid what he was from humans, as was demanded of him, for humans and their tiny minds could not fathom a being such as he in his shifted form. They believed dragons to be nothing more than creatures from ancient myths. That was for the best. While the dragon numbers were better now, they were hardly thriving. A coming-out party would simply never do. They could not stand and fight against the humans, who would see them as foe rather than friend.
“There would be a bloodbath.”
Besides, his kind tended to have trouble living in close proximity to one another if unmated. It could be done, but it took care and ease. Also, a large area for fights to be settled, far from the sight and hearing range of humans. An overabundance of testosterone caused much in the way of fighting and posturing. Only the mated lucky few seemed to avoid suffering the dreaded temper tantrums his kind endured.
He was guilty of having a temper himself.
He sighed, the ache of loneliness biting at him once more. He did not like this weakness. It was one that had begun to creep up upon him within the last century, and it was one he could not seem to shake. As the sounds of the holiday caroling began to fade off into the distance, the loneliness set in deeper.
Closing his hand around the invitation to attend a holiday gathering hosted by his cousin and his cousin’s mate, Rayer shut his eyes, losing himself in a moment of happiness for his cousin—Zarek. It had been nearly a decade since Zarek had found his slice of heaven. His cousin was now mated; he had found the one—the woman created for him.
His perfect pairing.
His mate.
Had Zarek not met her in time, he would have been rendered impotent. The very idea of such a lasting punishment made Rayer shudder and nearly cup his ball sac. His co
ck was sacred to him, and in this, he doubted that he varied from other males, dragon shifters or not.
“You are not permitted to stop working,” he said, glancing downward, as if his cock had the ability to understand his words. He polished off the last of his wine.
Six hundred years was a long time to many, but to the men of the Dracodomus clan, it was but a blink of an eye. A flash before the end was near. The dreaded curse of his clan. Find the one before the night of your six-hundredth birthday or forever impotent.
Zarek had made it in under the wire. Rayer held little hope he would as well. His fate was sealed. He had a couple of months left, and then the nothingness would envelop him as well. Already he felt the stirrings. Felt it sneaking up on him with each passing day. He would stop feeling desire, and he would not be able to enjoy any type of sex or sexual stimulation. What a bleak world it would be for him.
“I shall end my existence,” he said with certainty, for he would not live such a life. He had already lived such a long full one that none would blame him. It was the honorable thing to do among his kind. “There is no way I’ll roam about with a limp dick.”
A cool night breeze blew past, and Rayer’s body was quick to warm. Had he been in shifted form, the results would have been much different. In shifted form, his body matched the environment. It had been too long since he’d last afforded himself the freedom of shifting to dragon, and the dragon in him was most displeased.
He pivoted and entered his expansive home. It was elegant and professionally decorated. Nothing but the best for him.
He opened his palm and stared at the handwritten parchment from his cousin. Longing burned deep within him. He didn’t want to be jealous. He should be joyous for Zarek. Instead, the green-eyed monster bit him, and he couldn’t help but be envious. Yes, he bedded many women. There was never a shortage of willing bed partners in the city. But none filled the emptiness within him. None was the one.
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