Whatever affected him, it wasn’t a dragon. At least, not one he could identify, and Ari knew of every dragon shifter in the city, including those that fell into the just-visiting category.
It was his business.
And just-visiting dragon shifters—like the dragon from up the coast, Kellan Donovan, whose mess Ari currently had the pleasure of dealing with—had a habit of causing all sorts of trouble.
Kellan was a great bloke, and a good friend, but damn, he’d left a bit of a mess in Sydney the last time he’d been here. Of course, being hunted by a brutal Extraho Venator father-and-son team hadn’t helped much.
Nor did the fact that the father of said father-son team had been one of Kellan’s work—
The invisible tug on Ari’s gut, in his groin, intensified to almost physical pull, tearing a groan from him. An itch bloomed into prickling life between his shoulder blades, up the back of his neck, and across his scalp. Every hair on his body stood on end.
Holding the handgrips of his Harley tighter, Ari sucked in a deep breath.
Watched. Someone watched him.
Right now.
Colin? Or someone else? Something else?
His cock throbbed, straining against the leather of his pants.
His heart beating faster, Ari narrowed his eyes and ground his teeth. He didn’t like this. He was all for sexual pleasure and getting his rocks off with a willing partner, but getting hard when he didn’t know why? It was beginning to freak him out. And piss him—
A car horn blasted behind him.
Jumping at the jarring noise, Ari swung a look over his shoulder at the vehicle behind him.
An elderly woman in a shiny white Tesla waved her hand at him in a hurry-up gesture before stabbing her finger toward the traffic lights.
Ari turned back to the light.
Green. Huh. When had that happened?
The horn sounded again, double-tap style.
He twisted on his seat and grinned at the old woman. “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, tipping an invisible hat to her. “Keep your panties on.”
She hit her horn again, and flipped him the bird.
“I respect your feistiness, love.” He dropped her a wink, and turned back toward the traffic lights, skimming his gaze over the apartment building beside him as he did so.
A woman watched him from one of the building’s windows.
Sexual hunger unlike any Ari had experienced before gushed through him at the sight of her. An inferno of pleasure devoured him. His body seemed to ignite with need and urgency and want.
Curves. Curves and dips and hips and breasts and thighs…
Lust raced through him anew, carnal and potent and demanding. His hands burned, branded by the mere thought of cupping and squeezing the unknown woman’s breasts and hips and arse. His cock pulsed. His mind whirled.
His dragon—the base, ancient creature—roared inside his mind, lunging for release. Craving the woman. Craving…
Curves. And hips. And…and…
He stared up at her, incapable of moving. Frozen by her existence even as his body burned with sexual want.
Their eyes clashed over the distance.
His heightened vision locked on hers, and his heart beat faster.
Green. Her eyes were green. Hazel green and framed by thick auburn lashes. Green and full of a hunger as powerful as his. Hunger and confusion and—
She jerked away from the window, gone from his sight.
His dragon roared, furious at being denied. Ari’s body reacted the same, the hungry lust burning through him growing hotter, more demanding. A rain of icy pinpricks washed over him, followed by a tsunami of heat.
Behind him, the elderly woman leaned on horn again, longer this time.
“Fuck,” Ari muttered, flinging his Harley, full-throttle, forward. Through the intersection.
The pull on his gut, his groin, his very existence, deepened. Turned painful. His croi seemed to swell, charged with timeless magic and fate.
Grinding his teeth, Ari scanned the busy street for a place to pull over.
He understood now, the powerful, impossible-to-deny draw to Harper Street and its reaction on his body. He knew what it meant.
Fire Mate. He’d found the woman destined by ancient magic to be his partner for the rest of his life.
There were many things a dragon shifter could control, and many things a dragon shifter could manipulate, but the power of the mating fire was not one of them.
Dragons could lose their sanity trying. Ari had more than once cleaned up the mess left by those foolish enough to believe they could deny the force of the fated mating.
When a dragon shifter finally encountered their fated mate, when the mating fire began—a twelve-hour period of intense sexual frenzy—well, trying to refuse it, ignore it, ended in pain. Sometimes insanity.
Sometimes death.
Ignoring the mating fire long enough caused a dragon shifter to transform into their dragon form regardless of where they were. If that happened, in the throes of the fire’s heat…
A shudder of cold dread rocked Ari. It threaded through the lust searing his lungs, his veins.
Mating fire. The early stages of the mating fire consumed him, claimed him.
Fuck.
He was in the mating fire and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
All he could do was find the woman and surrender to the magic and lust of their joining. Find her and make her his until neither of them had the strength to stand.
And hope to hell Colin didn’t find them while they were at it.
Did you enjoy this sample of Dragon, Interrupted (Fire Mates, Book Five)?
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About Lexxie Couper
Lexxie Couper started writing when she was six and hasn’t stopped since. She’s not a deviant, but she does have a deviant’s imagination and a desire to entertain readers with her words. Add the two together and you get erotic romances that can make you laugh, cry, shake with fear or tremble with desire. Sometimes all at once.
When she’s not submerged in the worlds she creates, Lexxie’s life revolves around her family, a husband who thinks she’s insane, an indoor cat who likes to stalk shadows, and her daughters, who both utterly captured her heart and changed her life forever.
Lexxie lives by two simple rules – measure your success not by how much money you have, but by how often you laugh, and always try everything at least once. As a consequence, she’s laughed her way through many an eyebrow raising adventure.
You can find details of her writing at
www.LexxieCouper.com
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