The Dragon Claims His Treasure (Starcrossed Dating Agency)

by Georgette St. Clair

  The Dragon Claims His Treasure

  Copyright 2017 by Georgette St. Clair

  This book is intended for readers 18 and older only, due to adult content. It is a work of fiction. All characters and locations in this book are products of the imagination of the author. No shifters were harmed during the creation of this book.

  License Statement

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  Chapter One

  Earth Year 2017, Galactic Federation Year 32,050

  “Rosamund, this is Talia. You are going to go to work today. You are going to do a fantastic job. You are not going to let anyone push you around. I have faith in you, and I’m never wrong, because I’m brilliant. And so are you. Oof. Sorry. Babies tap-dancing on my bladder – I’ve got to go pee again, damn it. I can’t even get up by myself; I’m a beached whale. Lukan! Come help me! Rosamund, call me later and tell me how it went. I want all the deets. Unless I’m giving birth, then I won’t answer.”

  Rosamund heaved a deep sigh and looked around.

  She was standing on the plaza in front of Starcrossed Tower, desperately trying to come up with a reason not to report to work.

  The city of Agora, on the planet of Agora, was awake and ready for business. Silver skimmers did their intricate sky-dance, gracefully dodging each other as they delivered citizens and visitors to their destinations throughout the vast marketplace. The triple moons were still visible in the pale pink sky, as was the giant white orb of the sun.

  It was breathtakingly beautiful. It was exotic and otherworldly.

  And Rosamund Linberg, who’d only found out that life existed on other planets a mere three weeks before, wanted nothing more than to take a sick day.

  Her boss, Darfan, owner of Starcrossed Dating Agency’s newly opened branch on Agora, wouldn’t like it. Fine. She didn’t like him – he was a crabby jerk.

  With a sigh, she pressed the button on her wrist-comm. The wrist-comm looked like a golden bracelet with half a dozen jewels which were really buttons that did various things, like make calls and translate alien languages into English.

  “Replay message,” she said. She needed moral support.

  After listening to Talia’s message for the fifth time that morning, Rosamund couldn’t help but smile. Talia was massively pregnant, and she and her pair-bond Lukan were at the birthing center on the planet Ilyria, waiting for the birth of their two little miracles…but she had cared enough to call Rosamund and give her a pep talk.

  So Rosamund couldn’t let her down. She had to go to work this morning.

  And she had to…fire a client.

  Too bad it was a sexy, terrifying, deadly client named Kodran Sky-Reign, who could literally fire her right back because he was a member of a species called the Draell. The Draell were dragon shifters.

  Rosamund hadn’t actually exchanged a single word with Kodran yet, but her encounters with him were turning out to be hazardous to her self-esteem. She wanted to avoid him at all costs.

  She’d first spotted him across the room during a singles’ mixer a few days ago. There had been easily a hundred people there – Earth women mingling with humanoid aliens who were looking for a human mate.

  Kodran had stood out among them all. Seven feet tall. Blue-black hair and a strong jaw. Glowing green eyes. He had red scales on his forehead, along the hairline, even when he was in human form. The sharp angles of his cheekbones and the intensity of his eyes were softened just a little by a short scruff of beard that made him look heartstoppingly manly but a little less perfect; a little more human. Except, of course, he wasn’t human. Rosamund had found her thoughts drifting to what it would be like to feel the scratch of that coarse hair against her skin as he kissed her, or scraping over her nipple as he explored the contours of her body, or abrading the tender flesh on the insides of her thighs… He’d been wearing the traditional garb of the Draell – a silky black shirt and black trousers tucked into knee-high black leather boots. He had the shoulders of a linebacker, but somehow, despite his height and bulk, he moved with the sinuous grace of a panther.

  All eyes had been on him, but he hadn’t seemed to be particularly interested in any of the women who kept “accidentally” brushing up against him, trying to get his attention. He’d been looking around the room, bored, when Rosamund had accidentally locked eyes with him.

  She’d suddenly forgotten how feet worked, and she’d tripped and fallen on her well-padded rear.

  Several girls had rushed over to help her get up, and when she’d looked around, he’d been gone. Vanished. Without even a goodbye. Not that there had been any reason for him to say goodbye to her, because they’d never even met, but it had still somehow annoyed her.

  Then she’d spotted him again yesterday. She’d been touring the market area in downtown Agora, scouting out places to take newly arrived Earth visitors to lunch.

  This time he’d been standing on a street corner, yelling at a male lion shifter. She’d been able to tell the guy was a lion shifter because he had rounded, tufted ears, a thick, matted yellow mane instead of hair, and a long, swishing tail emerging from a vent in the back of his pants.

  There had been a dozen men with Kodran, big and muscular and scaled like him, all clad in similar garb. They’d stood behind Kodran as he shouted abuse at the lion shifter. What a jerk.

  The lion shifter had cringed away from Kodran, tucked his tail between his legs, and run.

  Then, as if he’d somehow sensed her presence, Kodran had looked around, locked eyes with Rosamund and…smiled. And winked. And it had distracted her so badly that it had made her spill her hot cup of MarKaffa down the front of her dress.

  She’d fled in shame and hidden in a store full of alien fruit that hissed and snapped at her until she was sure that Kodran was long gone.

  And now, even though last time she saw him she’d wanted to walk over and shove him in his stupid chest for being such a bully – his stupid, sexy, muscled, mouthwatering chest – she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Several times that day when she should have been concentrating on work, she’d found herself gawping at nothing, daydreaming about Kodran’s intense green eyes and the leashed power in his big body. Thinking of him made her panties embarrassingly damp and, worse, made a funny little yearning ache start up in her chest. The whole thing made her feel…well, incredibly turned on. But more than that, it annoyed her. She was being stupid. Twice now this unwanted attraction to him had caused her to make a complete idiot of herself.

  And now she was going to have to sit across a table from him and tell him that Starcrossed would no longer be working with him, without babbling, lapsing into tongue-tied silence, or scrambling over the table, hauling him towards her by his lapels and kissing the breath out of him.

  Rosamund wasn’t entirely clear on why the agency was firing him. Darfan had at first claimed that Kodran was abusive and rude to his dates. When she’d checked with the girls, they’d described him a
s just being indifferent. He’d taken them out to expensive dinners in the luxury district of Agora, barely spoken to them, and then dropped them off back at the Starcrossed suites without so much as trying to kiss them goodnight.

  When she’d asked Darfan for clarification, he’d just muttered that he was getting some worrying reports from the Draell’s Lord High Commander, Sekari. Kodran was the leader of the Sky-Reign clan, but most Draell clans were under Sekari’s rule. Sekari had, supposedly, said something about Kodran being an unsuitable match.

  So why hadn’t Darfan just said that in the first place?

  And why had she ever thought that going to work halfway across the galaxy from Earth was a good idea?

  Maybe she could just try again tomorrow. If she called in sick, Darfan would probably just get someone else to tell Kodran his contract was terminated.

  Then she wouldn’t have to look into those amazing green eyes and tell him “Thanks but no thanks” when what she really wanted to say was “Oh god, yes please.”

  Maybe he had some exotic intergalactic pheromones that turned women into gibbering, needy puddles of goo.

  It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing she’d seen since Talia had introduced her to Starcrossed’s secret. She still wasn’t sure she was cut out for the job of personal assistant at an alien dating agency, on another planet.

  Back on Earth, she’d been a Jill of all trades at Starcrossed Dating Agency, working as web designer and photographer and blogger and whatever else for her best friend Talia, and Talia’s husband Lukan.

  Then, a few weeks ago, she’d found out the truth – Lukan was an alien wolf shifter called a Vulfan. He took some kind of drug that suppressed his shifter tendencies when he was visiting Earth.

  Rosamund and Lukan used something called a transporter to instantaneously send them to Lukan’s home planet most nights and weekends. They only maintained the agency on Earth because they needed to recruit human females for their dating agency.

  The reason they needed human females was because of something called the Population War. The war had been started by rogue cyborgs who, decades ago, had created a virus that had killed off most of the females of dozens of shifter species. Their goal had been to wipe out life on other planets, so they could take them for themselves.

  The cyborgs had been beaten back and now lived in space, and the surviving species on the planets they had decimated were struggling to repopulate. Females were in desperately short supply.

  Since all humanoid species were descended from common ancestors, human females could successfully mate with shifter species. When the Earth women became pregnant, they genetically mutated into the species of the child they were bearing.

  Why had Talia told her all this after keeping it secret for all that time? Well, there was a brand new branch of Starcrossed on a planet called Agora, and Talia was too pregnant to go and help out there, so she needed Rosamund to step in.

  And not only that, Talia hoped that Rosamund might make a love connection with a sexy alien herself.

  “Ha,” Rosamund muttered. “As if.”

  Her love life on Earth had been bad enough; she had been born with an unfailing asshole detector that led her to the worst possible guys, every time. Men who cheated, vanished without explanation, or emptied her bank account. How could she hope for love with someone from another species when she couldn’t even understand human men?

  Also, her sister Alison was still on Earth, finishing up nursing school. However, Talia had insisted that wouldn’t be a problem. Rosamund could travel back to Earth any time she wanted, as long as she kept the existence of alien life a secret…or she could encourage Alison to join the dating agency and find a sexy alien of her own.

  A vision of Kodran flashed before her, huge and terrifying and alluring. Again. She tried to ignore the butterflies in her stomach – chaos butterflies; the kind that flap their wings and create a furious storm half a world away – and give herself a stern talking-to. She had a job to do, and the sooner she could erase the big scaly jerk from her brain, the better off she’d be.

  She thought about the soft, pink curve of his lips and groaned.

  Screw this. Darfan could just get off his furry ass and go fire Kodran himself.

  She turned around to head back to the walkway that would return her to the tower where she was staying. When Starcrossed had opened their new branch on Agora a month ago, they’d rented a tower full of suites where their employees and clients stayed.

  As she turned, she almost bumped into a silver-skinned female robot. She looked young, like a teenager, and had a flared poodle skirt and curly metal hair. She was of the style they called a “retrobot”, because they looked like 1950s Earth humans. Except for being made out of silvery metal from head to toe. They were frequently fairly glitchy, and were known for having minds of their own.

  This one, in fact, looked as if she had lost her mind.

  The female robot spread her arms to block Talia’s path. “You are not going anywhere,” she growled, her tone menacing. Her eyes glowed red, and her fingertips crackled, shooting out little lightning bolts.

  Chapter Two

  Rosamund gasped and took a step back.

  “Did I scare you?” the robot asked eagerly.

  The robot had been more startling than scary, but it seemed important to her, so Rosamund nodded. “Yep. I was terrified,” she assured her.

  “I knew it!” the robot said happily. “I am not too young to be out on my own! Hello. My name is Dot-R. Talia sent me to Agora to tell you that you should not, as she put it, wuss out.”

  Rosamund looked at her more closely.

  “I know where I recognize you from. You look like Mar-ee,” she said. “And no, I am not going to wuss out.”

  Mar-ee was Talia’s robot best friend. She was so human-like, she’d even formed a romance with a robot named Far-ex.

  Dot-R rolled her eyes in a gesture recognizable to anyone who’d ever had to deal with a teenager, anywhere in the universe. “Mar-ee is my maternal unit. She and Far-ex built me. I’m nothing like them, though. I am far lower in temperature.”

  “Lower in temperature? Oh, you mean cooler.” Rosamund laughed. “Dot-R, like daughter – I like it. And Talia sent you? Wow, she’s really going all out.”

  Dot-R shrugged. “Actually, she is just really convinced that you will not go enflame the person that you are supposed to enflame.”

  “Fire him?” Rosamund was the one who got enflamed every time she ran into the big, handsome dragon.

  “That is what I just said, yes.”

  Rosamund scowled at her. “Shows what she knows. I will so.” Great, now she sounded like a toddler throwing a tantrum.

  She tapped her wrist communicator.

  “Call Darfan,” she said.

  His haughty, disapproving voice crackled over the communicator a moment later. “Hello, Rosamund. You are five minutes late. Have you fired Kodran yet?”

  She grimaced. She knew that Darfan was a distant cousin of Lukan’s, and Lukan had hired him out of family obligation. She personally couldn’t stand Darfan. Where Lukan was strong and commanding, Darfan just came off as bossy and abrasive.

  “No, I don’t even know where to find him. And why do you want me to do it in person? Wouldn’t it be easier if I just called him from the office, or sent him a holo-message?”

  “He is not answering any of our calls,” Darfan said. “He is expected to show up at the mixer tonight, but we would prefer it if you could find him now and terminate our business relationship before that. The Lord High Commander of the Draell wants to speak to him as well. Kodran has been refusing his calls. When you fire Kodran, you will also tell him to call Lord Sekari. I have just received word that Kodran is downtown in the marketplace.”

  Rosamund sighed. Why did she have to be caught up in interstellar politics?

  “The marketplace is huge,” she said. “It’s most of the city. Anywhere in particular that I should start looking?”
/>   “Downtown.” Darfan’s voice had an edge to it now. “As I just said.”

  Dot-R raised a metal eyebrow. “This person is a buttocks rectum,” she said.

  “What did you call me?” Darfan’s voice rose in outrage. Rosamund stifled a groan and slapped at Dot-R, who quietly snickered behind her hand.

  “Nothing! That wasn’t me! It was just somebody walking by!”

  Rosamund stifled a surge of exasperation. She needed to make this work, at least until Talia had her babies. She didn’t want to stress Talia out or burden her with work problems right now.

  “Anyway, downtown doesn’t narrow it down much,” she continued. “It’s like a hundred square city blocks.”

  “He’s seven feet tall and he travels with a retinue. He can’t be that hard to find,” Darfan said, in tones that dripped with disdain. “You’ve got the company credit chip in your bracelet – go to the marketplace and do some shopping until you spot him. The credit line is wide open.”

  “Jeez, you should have led with that.”

  Rosamund cheered up considerably. She did like to shop, especially in downtown Agora, where everything was so utterly alien and fascinating. Of course, sometimes it was dangerous, too, like when she’d bought a scarf that tried to strangle her, because it turned out she’d actually purchased a species of snake that looked like a scarf.

  Or when she’d leaned in to smell some flowers at a flower shop, and one of them had bitten her on the nose.

  How was she to know that she’d just stuck her face right into the face of the Glarfleerara ambassador? She’d thought the tall, swaying flowers were merchandise, not customers. They’d been in pots, for heaven’s sake.

  She glanced over at Dot-R. “Can you warn me of any dangerous merchandise that’s being sold by the stores in downtown Agora?” she asked. “Like, say, if I bought a Rarbeelian and tried to wear it as a scarf?”

  Dot-R looked at her askance. “Why would you buy a reptile to wear as a scarf? That seems ill-advised. They subdue their prey by asphyxiating them.”