by Kayla Wolf
Dragon’s Fake Mate
A Paranormal Romance
West Coast Water Dragons Book 4
Kayla Wolf
Copyright © 2019 by The Wolf Sisters Books.
All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of the book only. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form, including recording, without prior written permission from the publisher, except for brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Chapter 1 – Alice
Chapter 2 - Daniel
Chapter 3 - Alice
Chapter 4 – Daniel
Chapter 5 – Alice
Chapter 6 – Daniel
Chapter 7 - Alice
Chapter 8 - Daniel
Chapter 9 – Alice
Chapter 10 – Daniel
Chapter 11 – Alice
Chapter 12 – Daniel
Chapter 13 – Alice
Chapter 14 – Daniel
About the Author
Books by The Wolf Sisters
Chapter 1 – Alice
It had been a long, slow day. Alice gazed out of the little window in her office, where she could just see the foam-crested waves crashing on the beach—a tiny fragment of ocean visible around the bulk of a sand dune. She was always grateful for that little glimpse of the sea. Something about the ocean had always soothed her—kept her focused and grounded, ready to work. For as long as she could remember, she’d lived by the sea … ever since she and her twin brother were young, she had memories of the ocean being her constant companion, the steady roar keeping them both company as they grew up down in San Diego. Or the outskirts of it, anyway. Theirs hadn’t been the most traditional of family homes. And it had been a lot longer since her childhood than one would have supposed. Because although Alice looked all of twenty-five, even in her official-looking white coat with a stethoscope around her neck, the reality was that she’d been alive for a lot longer than that. As had her brother.
Because Alice and her brother James weren’t, strictly speaking, human—as much as they might usually resemble regular people. They were dragons, with the supernaturally long lifespans and deep, ocean-blue eyes common to their people. There wasn’t much else to give them away in their human forms—a certain physical resilience, maybe, a tendency towards being tall, strong, and fit, and a slightly higher temperature than the average human. But Alice’s human form wasn’t the body she’d been born in.
It was the one she spent most of her time in, though. Especially these days. When the loose-knit extended family of water dragons had first settled on this isolated peninsula in northern California a few decades ago, it had just been them—not a human being in sight for a hundred miles. There was nothing to stop them lounging on the beach in their true forms whenever they felt like it, or diving into the ocean, or going for long flights over the lush, verdant forest that covered the majority of the peninsula (save the tip upon which they’d built their settlement). But all that had changed a few years ago, when they’d made the decision to open up their home to human tourists as a way of making ends meet in a world that increasingly relied on money. Gone were the days of hunting for their food … they needed to fit into human society, as so many other shifters did.
But it came at a cost. Like having to be in her office all the time on beautiful spring days like this. She’d been telling Lachlan—the community’s unofficial leader—that they needed more medical staff for a long time. With just the dragons on the peninsula, she’d been able to handle the majority of the injuries that came up with relative ease. It helped that dragons didn’t get sick. But now, with human visitors often occupying the tourist accommodations on the peninsula, she needed to be available at all times in case of an emergency. It was beginning to stress her out considerably. After all, it had been a long time since med school. She’d had to quietly apply some white-out to the date on her diploma in case a particularly observant human patient wondered how a woman who looked all of twenty-five had graduated medical school a full four decades ago.
She kept herself busy, of course, during the long, sleepy days stuck inside the infirmary with nothing to do. There was always lots of reading to be done. Alice kept up to date with a few dozen medical publications around the world—it was important when you’d been practicing for as long as she had to keep up to date with new developments. And she had a few projects of her own going on, too. Medicine worked a little differently when it came to shifters, and she had several contacts around the country who were conducting specific—and necessarily clandestine—research about how shifters healed. As far as she knew, she was the only dragon, but she knew half a dozen wolves and even a couple of bears across the country who were trying to get a handle on what made shifters so different to humans when it came to resilience.
She was reading one such article now—or at least, she was half-reading it. It had been a long day, with very little to break up the monotony of medical journals … and as interesting as she found the subject, seven straight hours of staring at a screen was nobody’s idea of fun. She itched to take her laptop down to the beach, just for half an hour … but with her luck, the minute she left, someone would get stung by a wasp or something and file a formal complaint about the camp doctor being AWOL. She’d almost gotten caught out that morning, in fact—a brief excursion to grab some lunch had almost ended in disaster when she returned to her office just in time to catch a child with a scraped knee and his distraught mother.
Thirty minutes to go … thirty minutes, then the clock would hit six o’clock, and she’d be free to roam again. The countdown was agonizing. And it wouldn’t be real freedom, not exactly. The infirmary was fitted with a paging system—a button that guests could press that would send a page directly to Alice’s phone, which she was under strict instruction to have on her at all times. That way, even if something went wrong in the middle of the night, she could be summoned. It was a ‘just for now’ solution—but being on call for twenty-four hours a day wasn’t exactly Alice’s idea of a healthy work-life balance.
But Lachlan had promised her that once the cabins were up and running in earnest, they’d have the extra cash they needed to get someone in permanently to relieve Alice. The idea of having a co-worker was a little strange after working alone for so long. Would Lachlan hire a human doctor, she wondered? She’d have to be a lot more discrete about the strange research she was conducting.
Honestly, he wouldn’t even need to hire a doctor. A nurse would be able to handle the vast, vast majority of the problems that arose on the peninsula. Tourist injuries … sunburn, dehydration, scraped knees from hiking, that kind of thing. Maybe some cold and flu tablets, or meds for the unlucky ones who got travel-sick on their way down to the peninsula. The skills of a trained doctor were a little wasted here. Alice was okay with it because this here was her life, her home, her family … but to ask a human to come down here, far away from their friends and family, for such slow work?
Well, it was a non-issue right now—at least until they had the budget to pay someone. Until then, it was just her. Sitting on her laptop, staring out of the window, counting down the minutes before she could go and throw herself into the ocean for a well-earned late-afternoon swim. Early spring was perfect for swimming.
But those plans went awry the minute she heard the squeak of the door to the
infirmary. There were a few rooms in the little building—her little office was at the back, with a couple of consulting rooms that lay between the office and the waiting room. There was also a room with a bed in it, for the rare occasions when someone needed to stay overnight—but that had never been used by a guest.
And it wasn’t guests who were in her waiting room, she realized as she strode into it to see who was visiting her. It was three enormous men, talking and laughing with that sheepish energy that usually indicated that someone had done something very stupid. She put her hands on her hips as she stood in the doorway, her lips pursed in disapproval.
”Emerson, Harvey, Daniel. What have you done to yourselves now?”
It was Emerson who answered her first. Tall and slender with a very laissez-faire approach to posture, he always reminded her of a graceful old willow tree. He turned towards her now, a beseeching look in his blue eyes … and she gritted her teeth in dismay when she saw that the entire left-hand side of his face was streaked with bright red blood.
”In our defense,” he said, his eyes twinkling, “we really did think it was a good idea—”
”I tried to warn them,” Harvey said irritably. “I told them we should leave it until tomorrow, get some proper equipment in, but they just had to hoist the damn thing themselves.” He was holding his arm against his side with a distinctly aggrieved expression on his face. Even for Harvey, whose base state of being was one fraught with tension, he looked stressed. She could tell by the angle of his shoulder that something was pretty wrong. A dislocation, at least.
”We were trying to get the solar panels up on the roof of the new rec center,” explained the third man in their midst. Daniel—her brother James’s best friend. You could recognize him at a hundred paces from his shock of red hair, quite a rarity among dragons … and quite a vanity of his. “But while we were lifting the last one, it—slipped.”
”Clocked me on the head, wrenched Harvey’s arm out of its socket, then shattered,” Emerson said cheerfully through the blood that was leaking down the side of his face in earnest now. “They’re pretty heavy, hey? Good thing dragons don’t get concussions.”
”That’s not true,” Alice said, gritting her teeth irritably. “I’ve told you a hundred times you have to be more careful on the building site. Especially with humans around. What are they going to think if they see an injury like that that heals overnight?”
”They’ll think the doctor must be a miracle worker,” Daniel said brightly, tipping her a wink that she couldn’t quite manage to be annoyed by. She gritted her teeth. Alice hated being the bad guy—the serious one, the straight woman to the hijinks of the guys on the peninsula. But it was a role she often wound up in. Was it a gender thing, she wondered? Or was it just that she was still kind of an outsider? Her brother’s group of friends had been inseparable for decades—they’d lived a wild life on the road together before they settled down out here. She could have gone with her brother, she supposed … but she’d opted for med school in San Bernardino instead. She loved her work, but sometimes she regretted what she’d missed out on by not spending those years with her brother.
Speaking of … “Where’s James? I’m surprised he’s not involved in this stupidity.”
”He got out of the way in time,” Daniel said, a grin playing around his lips. “He’s pretty quick.”
”Right. Well. The three of you better not be expecting a lollypop,” she said, giving them all a narrow-eyed look as she decided how to deal with them. “Emerson, I’ll get you stitched up first. Then I’ll put that shoulder back in for you, Harvey. Daniel—what’s wrong with you, exactly? Or are you just here for moral support?”
Emerson stifled a chuckle. “Oh, no. He got caught.”
”I, uh.” Was that embarrassment on the usually all-too-confident Daniel’s face? “So, I tried to jump out of the way of the solar panel as it fell. But I didn’t realize I was on the edge of the rec room’s porch. So I kind of—”
”Fell flat on his ass on a pile of thorns,” Harvey interjected, clearly fighting back laughter.
Alice stared at him. “Seriously?”
”Yeah. I tried to—you know, sort it out myself, but I’m not flexible enough.” At least he had the good grace to look a little embarrassed. “Sorry, Alice.”
”You’re third,” she told him irritably. “Butt wounds are the lowest priority. Triage rules.”
She dragged Emerson by the wrist into one of the consultation rooms, forcing him down into a chair so she could actually see the top of his head. Dragons tended to be taller than the average human, but Emerson was an outlier even among dragons … and she didn’t much feel like getting a stepladder to bandage his head. She pushed his blonde hair back, rolling her eyes at the theatrical wincing.
”If you didn’t want a scalp wound, you should have worked more safely,” she told him sharply. “Now hold still while I disinfect it.”
It was strange, caring for dragon patients. In med school, and in the handful of hospitals she’d worked at across the country, she’d had exclusively human patients. Shifters tended to keep to themselves when injured ... and there was a good reason for that. For whatever reason, they had vastly accelerated healing properties—this held true regardless of species, from what she’d learned from her wolf and bear colleagues. A wound that would take a human weeks to recover from would only take a dragon a day or two, and an injury that would be life-threatening in a human was much less serious in a shifter. So Emerson’s scalp wound, which on a human would definitely need a dozen stitches at least, was about as easy to deal with as a scrape or a cut. She cleaned the wound out to encourage it to heal, applied some salve to ease the sting, then bandaged it. Emerson looked a bit wretched with a bandage holding the dressing in place, but she knew that by the next day, he’d be able to remove the dressing and see little more than a fading scar.
”Don’t drop any more solar panels on your head,” she warned him as she kicked him out of the room, giving him a stern look when she saw his eyes straying to the jar of candy she kept for her younger patients. “Candy’s for bravery, not stupidity.”
”Aren’t they the same thing?” Emerson challenged her. But he obediently left the room soon enough.
Harvey was next. He looked resolute. She’d worked on Harvey before—he was the kind of guy who tended to get hurt a lot. Their security liaison, he was always first into any fray, and his body was littered with the scars that proved it. And from the way he sat in the chair without being asked and presented his shoulder to her, she had a feeling he’d had a dislocated shoulder reset before. She cut away his shirt to get a closer look at the shoulder. Sure enough, textbook dislocation. Easy enough to reset … but not exactly comfortable.
”This is going to hurt,” she warned him.
”I know.”
”Ready? One, two …” And before she said ‘three’, she pulled the joint back into place with a deft, firm yank. Harvey’s breath hissed out through his teeth, but aside from that, he showed no sign of pain. “Now, I’m going to put it in a sling. Don’t use it for a few hours, okay? Just to be safe.” She pulled a sling out of a drawer. If Harvey had been human, he’d be in the sling for a couple of weeks. But she trusted his dragon anatomy to heal quickly.
”Yes, Doctor.” He gave her a stiff little nod. She’d always liked Harvey. He was a blunt guy, and could be rude when he wasn’t paying attention … but there was something refreshingly straightforward about him. You always knew where you stood with him.
Not like her next patient. Daniel slid into the room once she’d dismissed Harvey, a rueful grin on his face. She fought to maintain her composure, her heart beating irritatingly hard in her chest. Daniel was … Daniel was a difficult case. To her acute embarrassment, she’d been fighting a little crush on the guy almost since she’d met him. Her twin brother’s charismatic best friend … what was it about him that just caught her eye like that? He was funny, she supposed … and there was something about hi
s keen interest in other people, his extroversion, that was somehow deeply charming. Probably because it was genuine. For Alice, who was as introverted as anything, it was … strange. Interesting, she supposed. And he was easy on the eye. That bright red hair, those twinkling blue eyes, the smile that was always ready to break out over his face at a moment’s notice … he was like sunshine. That was what got her.
Not that she was ever going to say anything about it in a million years. Even if she’d been interested in any kind of romantic relationship, he wasn’t the one for her. Far too erratic, far too focused on his bad-boy lifestyle. He and James had been the worst womanizers in town for decades … always bragging about their conquests, the casual sex they had with women every weekend. It made her feel mildly ill. No, he wasn’t for her—though her silly crush, irritatingly enough, hadn’t seemed to have gotten the memo. She did her best to avoid him. And now, here he was, pulling his pants down around his ankles like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Fiercely hoping she wasn’t blushing and drawing on all the professional composure she’d built over decades of practicing medicine, she set about dealing with the contusions. Sure enough, there were some thorns lodged in the skin … he winced as she extracted them with a set of tweezers, and she was grateful he couldn’t see the look on her face.
“There,” she said finally, satisfied that his butt was clear of thorns. The little wounds were already healing over—there was no need to bandage such small abrasions, as they’d be gone without a trace in a few hours.
”Is it gonna leave a scar, Doc? Will my beautiful butt be forever tarnished?”
”No,” she said irritably, fighting a blush and wishing she had a quicker wit. “Just—try not to be stupid again, alright?”
”Thanks, Doc.” He pulled his pants back on, and as he headed for the doorway, he turned back over his shoulder to wink at her. “Thanks for the gentle touch.”