The Dragon's Captive (Dragon Brides Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Additional Books in the Dragon Brides Series

  More Stormy Night Books by Loki Renard

  Loki Renard Links

  The Dragon’s Captive

  By

  Loki Renard

  Copyright © 2017 by Stormy Night Publications and Loki Renard

  Copyright © 2017 by Stormy Night Publications and Loki Renard

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Stormy Night Publications and Design, LLC.

  www.StormyNightPublications.com

  Renard, Loki

  The Dragon’s Captive

  Cover Design by Korey Mae Johnson

  Images by 123RF/cocozero003, Shutterstock/Fotokostic, and Bigstock/chesterf

  This book is intended for adults only . Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults.

  Prologue

  “I will have you, human.”

  The dragon’s hot breath traced fiery heat over the virgin’s skin, her pale curves arching in unconstrained ecstasy as the very concept of resistance fled her body. There were little jeweled beads of sweat dotted over her belly and upper thighs, remnants of the struggle she had entered into against her own instincts and desires when the dragon had taken her, stripped her of the clothing that had formed an artificial barrier between their bodies, and feasted his hungry eyes upon her. Now, like the resistance they represented, they were being erased, shimmering and evaporating as the dragon blew gently against her body, his lips mere inches from her bare flesh as his large, muscular body moved over hers.

  She had arrived unannounced and uninvited, a delicious morsel of a woman he had wasted no time in claiming. Now he was thoroughly exploring the innocent who had wandered between the worlds without thought or care for consequence.

  This was what the dragon had desired for so very long, a human woman, with all the softness and vulnerability that entailed. He could see the blue veins tracing beneath her skin, her pulse throbbing in her throat. Everything about her was intoxicating and sweet, from the bright copper falls of her hair to the tips of her toes, which curled in response to his touch. Her red lips parted as she drew breath to speak, her emerald gaze welling with feminine desire.

  “You must let me go,” she moaned.

  The dragon answered in a deep masculine rumble that made the little hairs on her body react, goosebumps forming over her delectable skin. “Let you go? This is what you wanted, is it not? This is what you crossed the divide between worlds to obtain. You came to mate.”

  “I came to study…”

  “Study? Ha!” His white teeth flashed as he let out a dark chuckle. “Young virgins do not come to a dragon’s lair to study. They come to be deflowered and made virginal no longer.”

  His fingers teased her in the spot no man had touched before, finding her wet and soft and hot. “This barrier between your thighs, this little scrap of skin. It is all that stands between you and the full realization of your womanhood. It is mine. I will take it, and you, as my own.”

  The dragon’s captive whimpered as those long, skillful digits continued to strum and tease, making her writhe with pleasure. Her squirming served no purpose but to make her strain against the leash wound about the dragon’s hand, a leash that led directly to the collar at her throat, a mark of total ownership.

  She had come from a civilized world, but there was nothing civilized about the creature that had captured her, the man who was also dragon. His golden gaze swept over her form with unyielding lust, the kind of need that would not be denied. His instinct was to command, to consume, to make her his own in every way possible, and that possession was just beginning…

  Chapter One

  Earlier that day…

  Moving furtively, her long copper hair hidden under a dark hooded sweater, Kate swiped her pass card and walked into the building. Her reflection was briefly caught in the double glazing: wide hazel-green eyes in a round face, bow-shaped lips, and a smattering of redhead freckles over the bridge of her nose and the tops of her full cheeks.

  It was three a.m. and nobody, not even the campus cops, was around. This was the time she did her best work, her most important work. She wasn’t supposed to be there, of course, but Kate had gotten used to skirting the rules in the name of getting what she wanted and needed. She was toting a big backpack that contained a bunch of items technically belonging to the college, stuff she took between her apartment and the lab so she could work on it wherever she was. The lab did have a few toys she didn’t have at home though, hence the late-night visit.

  Technically what she was doing was stealing. Technically it was also breaking several federal restrictions on research. Technically… she’d be in a hell of a lot of trouble if she got caught. Fortunately, Kate was able to put all those technicalities aside and focus on the task at hand. She didn’t feel bad about breaking the law. She practically considered it her duty.

  Real work, real science, that didn’t take place during daylight hours. It never had. Not since the fathers of science had begun their explorations of the physical world had their work been entirely legal. That was what Kate comforted herself with anyway. As an accelerated post-grad student, she had a lot of leeway and access, but the work she was truly passionate about was banned, hence the sneaking.

  As she moved toward the lab, she clutched her notebook to her chest. None of her work was on a computer. It was all contained in the simple dog-eared exercise book that she never let out of her sight. Not even when she was showering. Then it went in a plastic bag and sat on a ledge above the water spray. Some people would have called that obsessive, but Kate knew it was necessary. If any of her peers saw what was in those pages, she’d be in deep trouble.

  Thus far, she’d been lucky. She’d managed to avoid both detection and even any kind of suspicion. During the day she maintained a certain blandness that made her sort of sink into the background. Her appearance wasn’t too noteworthy in either direction, which helped. To others she appeared to be a curvy young woman with long copper hair usually tied back in a ponytail. Her dress was almost always a hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers. She thought of herself as cute, when she had time to think about what she looked like, which wasn’t all that often.

  “Hey there! What the hell are you doing?”

  Kate jumped nearly out of her skin as a flashlight rounded the corner and the beam landed on her. She’d been wrong about the campus police. At least one of them was around, and had just found her.

  “This is a restricted area.” The guard’s voice boomed down the hall forcefully, making her recoil.

  “I know!” She tucked her notebook under her arm and held her hands up as best she could, as if the man with the loud voice and the torch was actual police—
which he absolutely wasn’t. “I’m allowed here. Sort of. I mean, I have permission for…”

  “Oh, it’s you again,” the guard said, shining the light in her eyes, temporarily blinding her. Almost simultaneously, they realized that this was not the first time they’d run into one another. The security guard’s name was Ben or Burt or…

  “Brian,” she said, catching a glance of his name tag. “Sorry, I just forgot something, and I really need it for my assignment…”

  “It’s Saturday night,” the man behind the flashlight snorted, as if she might not be aware of the calendar week. “You should be at a party or something, shouldn’t you? Get yourself a boyfriend before it’s too late. Got to look after your love life. Now go on, get out of here.”

  “You won’t report me?”

  “Why would I bother?” The guard shrugged. “It’s not like they pay attention to anything I say. Go on and get home—or just plain out!”

  “I just need to get a couple of things,” Kate stammered. “I have this project due and…”

  “Fine,” the guard sighed. “Get what you need, then get out of here.”

  “Thank you!”

  She went into the lab and pulled a couple of pieces of equipment from her nook. This was definitely not allowed, but she needed them to perform her final trial—her first real run. She didn’t need to take too many things, just a small amount of radioactive material and a couple of decent-sized electromagnets, plus a little more material to transform them—along with the bits and pieces she already had set up back home—into something extraordinary.

  As she worked to gather the necessary materials, the guard’s words about a love life made her smirk to herself. “Love life? Hah.”

  She’d never had anything remotely resembling a love life. There hadn’t been time. She had her sights set on more than any man could offer her. The biggest scientific breakthrough of a generation had happened when she was months from graduating high school—the discovery of a parallel world, full of sentient dragons.

  It had sounded ridiculous, until you saw the footage for yourself. The Mojave was still marked with the scars of the facility where the first and thus far only portal opened by humans had once stood. She’d watched, stunned from her little home in the Mid-West as the California power station that had been heralded as the answer to humanity’s energy crisis melted down the moment it was activated. In doing so, it had ripped a hole in the sky. That had been horrific enough—but then the dragons had come, pouring through the aperture that linked the human realm to the realm of humanity’s nightmares. California was still rebuilding from the damage that had been done by those sentient lizards, creatures that not only had fearsome animal forms, but which could allegedly take a human form as well.

  The world was still reeling from the events of those days, and though the war was over, the dragons vanquished, the portal closed, the fear remained. There was a lot of research going on around the accident, but it was absolutely, highly, incredibly, federal prison illegal to attempt to open any kind of portal again.

  And that was precisely what Kate was preparing to do tonight.

  It wouldn’t be like the first portal though. That had been a giant, uncontrolled accident. She was certain that she could do it under controlled, repeatable circumstances that would not enlarge into great tears in the fabric of time and space, but would function more like doorways between the realms. Her math was solid, but even the most elegant equations could turn to chaos when translated into reality. Reality had a way of twisting at the very last second, turning and biting a scientist in the butt. That had happened in a spectacular and devastating way with the power plant, so Kate was exercising a fair bit of caution with her experiments.

  She could still remember the hour and the day on which she had started down the path she now found herself at the end of.

  As part of the attempt to clean up California, the government had started running tours around the remains of the power plant. Kate was the only teenage girl there on the day she went. She’d saved up money for her plane tickets, and the tour itself, working double shifts at the grocery store.

  Having lost both her parents young, Kate had come up through the foster care system, bouncing between homes several times before her eighteenth birthday. Fortunately she was smart enough to be able to bury herself in her study and not pay too much attention to the emotional deficits all around her. Being quiet, studious, and determined were qualities that had saved her a thousand times over. Her hard work had paid off to the tune of a full ride to NYU. She’d been accepted to several other colleges, some of them with more cachet, but NYU was in New York and she wouldn’t have to do another shift at the grocery store as long as she was there. She’d worked in the dining hall instead all through undergrad, until finally getting a tutoring position. Really, her journey had started a hundred times in a hundred different ways, but she’d known for certain what she wanted to do when she had found herself walking where the portal had once been, on the very land across which dragons had once soared.

  She had stood there in the ruins of the power station, wearing a radiation suit and listening to the guide’s voice coming through the speakers in the headset. The guide had a Texas twang and a real enthusiasm for his subject. He was a veteran of the dragon war, had flown planes against them and was full of stories, but what had caught Kate’s attention most was when he talked about the dragon realm, and the reason humans couldn’t survive there. A very particular type of radiation, native to that realm, was highly dangerous to humans.

  “Radiation shreds DNA. Burns right through it. At first you don’t know you’ve been exposed. Then the sores break out. Then everything in your body breaks down bit by bit, because the cells can’t replicate anymore, you see? You can’t get near that realm unless you have some kind of protection. The dragons have a resistance to it.”

  The guide had talked in a rough, no-nonsense sort of way, designed to shock the tour group. It had stayed with Kate and it had informed her courses of study. There was an inescapable chain of cause and effect from that moment to this one. Some might have called it destiny, but Kate was not inclined to think or speak that way. Her world view had no room for fate. She and she alone would decide her future.

  Then eighteen-year-old Kate had left the invasion site with two missions for that future. One: she was going to enter the dragon realm. Two: she was going to survive it. Of course, she’d had to work on mission two before mission one, and throughout her undergrad she’d not been able to even get close to a solution. The breakthrough hadn’t happened until the first few months of postgrad study, when her supervisor had let her in on a well-guarded little secret: the college had dragon tissue samples recovered from dragon bodies that had fallen in the final battle. They weren’t supposed to. Technically it was illegal. Only the government was alleged to have access to dragon tissue, but there was a fair bit of overlap between high-level academics and government research and so a few hundred grams of deceased dragon had made its way into the laboratory freezer, where it sat looking entirely unassuming in an old ice cream container.

  Kate had managed to take a little of the material and after several months of research, isolate a compound she believed capable of catching and binding radiation, rendering it harmless. Initial testing had indicated that it worked, to some degree at least. The radiation of the dragon realm was not quite like Earth radiation, so it would be a trial by fire when she did step beyond the barrier of her realm.

  It was surprising to her that nobody else had done it as yet, but perhaps they had and were keeping it quiet. Or maybe they just hadn’t stumbled onto the secret as yet. Science was a strange thing; as much as hard work and advanced mathematics made it possible, there was the spark of almost divine revelation that accompanied so many major discoveries. Kate had felt it when she developed her formula, and she was feeling it again now.

  She could hardly stop herself from giggling with excitement as she stashed the equipment in her bag
and left the lab. In the next few hours, everything was going to change. She could feel it in the air, a sense of destiny that had kept her going through all the hard times when it would have been easier to give up and just let the world crush her. Even as a small girl, Kate had known that she was capable of great things. It was an attitude a lot of foster siblings had picked on her for, so it had hidden itself deep inside her, but she’d never lost sight of it and now it seemed to surround her, like a force field, or an invisible cloak, keeping her safe no matter what.

  She scuttled back to her apartment, several blocks away from the college. It was a tiny little one-room place, but that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for New York. She paid quite a premium to have the place to herself, but it was worth it for what she was about to do.

  There was almost nothing nice about the place, but Kate had gotten used to ignoring her immediate surroundings in favor of concentrating on her work anyway. She could have lived somewhere nicer if she’d had roommates, but that never seemed to go well. She kept odd hours and did odd things and she absolutely couldn’t risk having her plans discovered by someone else. Living with other people always seemed to arouse suspicion, if not outright hostility.

  The apartment had a little galley kitchen next to the bathroom, and it was there that Kate set up her equipment, hastily wiping down the counters where her precious creation was going to sit. The kitchen was perfect for it, thanks to the counters on either side, which provided two stationary points for the mass of wires and the heavy electromagnets and field generators to sit.

  It took several more hours to get everything situated. The sun was shining through the grime of her windows as Kate rubbed her hands together, her eyes searching the wiring to make sure everything was perfect.