Red Hot Dragons Steamy 10 Book Collection

by Lisa Daniels

  Narrowing his eyes, Janus clasped his hands together. “Sounds easy enough for even you to get.”

  A nervous giggle followed his statement, out of place from the otherwise wise-looking Verran. “In theory, it shouldn’t be that difficult. But right now, the Conclave have complete control of the area. And those who are… taken by the wild magic tend to join the Conclave. So it’s been somewhat of an embarrassing issue on our behalf.”

  “I’d say,” Janus said, smelling a proposition on the wind. They needed the foreigners for something that the natives couldn’t do. No wonder this guy had been so keen to address them. “So you want us to do something about it? Go into the extremely dangerous area by ourselves and see if we can do what they can’t?”

  “Not quite like that, no,” Verran said with a wry smile. “We’ll help prepare you a group to go with you. We have people all over Leavenport falling ill as well. We’re, to put it bluntly, desperate to find the cure. And the Red Woman’s Mausoleum has been the only place we’ve ever known to have the cure. You can’t grow it anywhere else, and if you strip the entire crop, well, it’ll never grow again.”

  “Interesting,” Janus said. “So… if we agree to go with this… I’d like to make a preposition back.”

  The group of Zamorkans looked baffled, and Verran frowned. “What kind?”

  “Trade,” Janus said. “I run a trading business, and we don’t have any trade lines to Zamorka. Everyone’s half convinced they’ll die of some horrible curse if they make it here. We can offer Jarithan spices and herbs, exotic animals, furs… and freshly grown hoverstones.”

  Verran’s face split into a wide smile. “Well, if you do agree and survive your journey to the wild magic, then perhaps we can arrange something.”

  “Oh, yes, that reminds me. Who was responsible for the storm we encountered? Our air witches couldn’t control the direction of our skyship.”

  Several of the Zamorkans muttered, and Verran grimaced. “The wild magic can sometimes flare out tropical storms of that nature. We actually have storm calendars to track the surges. If you don’t know when a surge is coming, and get caught in a wildstorm… usually it ends in your death.”

  Shifting in his seat, Janus tried not to betray more of his excitement. This was the answer! This was the riding mystery behind the shroud of Zamorka—and the strange storms that formed over the seas. If they gained access to calendar records… then he could open trade.

  He’d be the first person to officially facilitate trade between the Six Isles and Zamorka. His mother and father would be bursting with fierce pride at such an achievement.

  And he’d likely have a monopoly on the market for quite some time, since people wouldn’t shake off their prejudice of Zamorka that easily to begin their own trading attempts.

  Great. Just required them walking into death for yet another dodgy magic session. He bit his lip, wondering if he could somehow leave Evelyn out of it. She’d want to come. She’d likely be enraged if he just went up to her and told her to stay away, unless he came up with a good excuse, like they needed at least one air witch to remain safe to take all of them back across the sea.

  “Do we have a deal, dragon-shifter?” Verran asked, cocking his head expectantly for an answer.

  “We do.”

  “Then we will assemble our team. It will take us at least two weeks.”

  “Two weeks?” We might not be able to afford to wait!

  “We want to time it so that you will enter the forest once a wildstorm has petered out. That way, the wild magic will be at its lowest ebb, and hopefully, all witches will be able to resist the call of… whatever it is in the magic that affects them. We will do this properly. I have no interest in losing more decent men and women than we already have.”

  Janus gnashed his teeth, but couldn’t think of a way out of it. It’d be suicide to go alone. Which was what we were intending, anyway, when we first set out upon this trip. And the locals clearly had some sense of decorum and laws that might be violated if they made any hasty moves.

  The best course of action really did seem to be to stay put.

  At least I’ll have more time to persuade Evelyn to stay away, I suppose. And figure out just what exactly is going on between me and her.

  It was something.

  * * *

  “Who do you think you are?” Evelyn posed the question to him, during another one of their city walks. Playing the waiting game grated on all of their nerves, and the locals didn’t want them stepping onto the Elegant, just in case any of them reneged on their plans and flew away. Others treated them with marked hostility, perhaps not fully believing they had nothing to do with the recent spout of murders—but others still enthusiastically showed their goods and many-hued robes. “When you’re not being presented to the court, and living up to your family’s expectations?”

  He gave a small shrug. “Exactly what you see. A person who can shift into a dragon, wearing a nice suit, attempting something called a date. Handsome, I hope, too.”

  A short sigh of irritation greeted his words. “I’m trying something serious. A little more than surface level talk, if you know what I mean. Let’s sit here...” She pointed at a small park bench, one of many, where other people sat feeding ducks which had waddled out of the park lake, hopeful for food. Janus and Evelyn took up the entire bench, and Janus felt a kind of unease building up in him, though he couldn’t quite put it into words.

  “Do we have to talk about this now? I’d rather enjoy our time exploring.”

  She gave him a rather peculiar look. “Why must you assume that doing some talking won’t be enjoyable?”

  “It’s…” He paused. “It’s just… I’m a man. I don’t do what you women do. Sit around and talk feelings. There’s better things for us to do.”

  “I’m sure,” she said, with a bite of annoyance in her voice now. “You do realize, though, that you do have feelings, right? That being a man doesn’t suddenly exempt you from them?”

  I don’t want to anger her further, he thought, but he also felt that shifty impatience inside, that impulse to try and change the topic. “Of course not.” He paused again, unsure what she wanted. “It’s not really expected.”

  “How do you think a relationship between a man and a woman goes?” She folded her arms, lips pursed in a calculating manner. Her wild, dark hair got a lot of attention from the Zamorkans walking past, since all of them had far lighter shades and less chaotic strands. “That it’s all about buying gifts, having sex, and popping out babies? You know they also talk about feelings, too?”

  “What? Where’s this coming from?”

  “You. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since… when we did what we did.”

  “The sex?”

  “Yes, that,” she said, smirking in spite of herself when one passing couple appeared positively mortified at the word being said aloud. “You have quite the reputation with traders in the skies. They see you as someone to be reckoned with. Your family is seen as strict misers who hoard gold and squeeze it out of every unfortunate soul to come their way. You were raised up in a kind of environment where if you didn’t work hard, you didn’t get fed. So you learned that emotions got in the way, I think. If you spent too much time being angry or upset or sad, that also meant a rumbling stomach. So I suppose you learned from there that your emotions would do nothing but get in the way.”

  He didn’t respond at first. He merely stared at her, both in partial annoyance and exasperation with the emotion talk. However, a small part of him wanted her to continue, to hear what else she had to say. Just how she assessed him.

  And see if it made sense. “You get all that from what I said about working hard?”

  “Mm, no. You came from another family before the Ruthes took you in. A family that had very different values from the Ruthes, right?”

  The silence this time was even longer. The background noise faded into nothing for Janus, as he considered the words, and the blot of emotions with
in that wanted him to both change the subject and get her to keep talking. “Yes. They… did. Not that I remember too much about it...”

  Just that I was very sad to lose them. That they wanted me to stay away from them when they were infected. That they… He closed his eyes. “I don’t think I want to talk about this, Evelyn.”

  “Could you try? For me?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to know you,” she said simply. “I don’t want Janus Ruthe, member of a family people fear or hate, or Janus Ruthe, the person I’ve had some conversation with, and shared a bet with. I want… the person that’s hidden inside all of that. If this ever becomes something more. Will it be something more?”

  He saw the way she sat nervously, chewing her bottom lip, and realized, in a rush of understanding so powerful that it left him a little dizzy, that it was a big risk for her as well, to pry into this. How easy would it be for someone like him just to dismiss this? To tell her to shut up, that she was making him feel bad?

  No. He had to do better than that. “You can know me if I can know you,” he replied, though the words seemed oddly difficult to convey. “I don’t see it as fair if you’re going to be asking all about me, but I don’t get to hear about you.”

  Besides, he wasn’t entirely sure if the Ruthe family was a great judge of romantic relationships. They had a marriage of convenience that worked out, but they didn’t necessarily… ooze affection from their pores. That might be an issue when it came down to things.

  “That’s fair,” she said. “It probably wouldn’t work if only one of us was answering questions the whole time.”

  “Okay. Let’s start this easy. I don’t know who I am.” He shrugged at her small twinge of disappointment. “If I did, I’d tell you. I know I only vaguely remember my first parents, but I miss them. My second set, the Ruthes… I... I’m pissed they went. Pissed I have to take over everything before I’m completely ready, and pissed off that I can’t find a cure for the Creeping Rot. It took all of them, and I’m here repeating the same life.”

  Evelyn nodded, eyes soft in understanding. “At least until you ended up on a skyship to Zamorka.” She grasped his hand, and he squeezed it briefly. “Guess there is a heart underneath all that ice after all.”

  “It’s a lot of ice,” he said defensively. “You haven’t lost anyone yourself, have you?”

  “Some of my classmates to the Creeping Rot. But nothing as extreme as yours. My family’s about as non-magical as you can be, so they won’t be first targeted by the disease.”

  “It might spread to them.”

  “Maybe.” She glanced around the park, to the green and gray ducks, and the plainer females waddling around the other benches for food. Briefly, Janus considered how the male birds were always more colorful than their female counterparts. For humans, they went the opposite in some ways. Females were more colorful, more vibrant. Males showed off their value in other ways, such as muscles, confidence, wealth. “You ever feel like you’re expected to be one thing, but sometimes you look at yourself and realize you don’t fit into that expectation at all?”

  Still holding hands, he felt the heat rise to an uncomfortable point, and let go. It was like that. Despite his age, he felt like a boy playing dress-up with his more skilled parents’ job. So far he’d been doing a great job, but that was also because they’d already set things up for him to succeed. He didn’t need to make new connections because they long since introduced him to all of theirs. The main conflict came from what he did now. Risking everything for a long-distance trip, leaving a trusted servant in charge of operations back home. He was childless, had no woman, had no real contingency plan if something went wrong here.

  Yet, a part of him did want something to go wrong. A horrible, irrational part that just wanted him to shred the Ruthe finances and disappear into the winds. He kept that part under control enough to do this.

  And then Evelyn started teasing into his thoughts, until he now sat here wondering how he’d allowed one single woman to gain so much influence over him. Sky curse it—he’d made that deal, he followed her with his eyes when she came in close proximity… he tried to answer her questions. Even with the rude way she spoke to him at the start of their trip, it hadn’t been enough to completely push her out of his mind.

  Screw it. He leaned forward, just as she was about to say something, and cut off her words with a long, lingering kiss. She stiffened under his touch, before relaxing into it and kissing back, hands threading in his hair.

  “You lose,” she whispered against his lips.

  “I wanted to,” he whispered back.

  Besides, clinging to her like this was a good way of ensuring that some of the swirling emotion inside him came to a rest. Emotions—he didn’t deal well with them. Didn’t have the first clue about what those stabs in his stomach and chest and brain meant, really. But this helped with them.

  It helped a lot.

  Chapter Nine – Evelyn

  All they needed to do was go into some creepy tomb. Easy. Except, apparently it involved a Zamorkan team of about twenty people, and all the magic users from their skyship were encouraged to come as well. The ordinary crew members and scholars were to stay put and continue experiencing the sprawling culture of Leavenport, all of them followed by bodyguards to make sure that there were no more attempts to frame them, or get them killed.

  Wonderful. Evelyn now waded in deep jungle with Rukia and Janus on either side of her. They’d traveled some of the way in a series of small hover boats, but now they needed to walk the rest of the way.

  “Why is this tomb even in the wild magic area anyway?” Evelyn said, feeling a horrible, clammy sensation steal over her body, as if the magic in the atmosphere was cloying on her skin. They left about an hour before the last wildstorm ended. If this was what the wild magic felt like at low power, Evelyn shuddered to think what kind of pressure it exerted at full.

  None of the Zamorkans answered. Perhaps they didn’t have an answer. They just pushed through dark green foliage, tapered bark and vines and thick, leafy bushes. To their right towered mangroves, with their roots slick in swamp water. The air had a stifling quality to it, which made Evelyn keep sucking in deep breaths, trying to grab air that didn’t feel saturated with magic, and failing. She could even taste it upon her tongue. Rukia had absently started scratching at her bare arms, and Janus’ expression appeared pained.

  “I like flying in skyships for a reason,” Rukia said, glaring at an offending vine dangling above them like a noose. “I dislike walking around. I also dislike walking around in areas that might just get us killed.”

  “Yes,” Evelyn said. “That’s exactly why we choose to steer skyships. So we don’t have to do all of that pesky walking.”

  “Exactly.” Rukia’s attention shifted to Alex, who was ahead of the group. A side profile caught a stony expression. “She’s been a bundle of joy the past two weeks. Even with her boyfriend there to cheer things up.”

  “She’s taking it hard that she failed to save someone,” Evelyn said, reaching to tie back her slick hair yet again, because some of it was teasing loose and sticking to her head. “It’s not her fault, and she grabbed the guy as fast as possible. He was just dead before he hit the ground, I think. But she’s kicking herself for it.”

  “That’s pointless,” Janus said, lacking sympathy. “She has no reason to blame herself.”

  “I don’t think ‘reason’ has anything to do with it,” Evelyn replied wryly. “Sometimes, people just want to punish themselves. And she’s doing it pretty bad.”

  Evelyn’s boots slid through a wet mud patch, causing blobs of dark brown to splotch over her pants. She grimaced, seeing others lose their balance and one unfortunate witch go flat on their face, which prompted some laughter.

  “Wonder if people back home will believe us when we tell them what happened here?” Rukia grinned. She was far more dainty compared to the other trekkers, paying attention to the ground. For a person who
claimed to hate walking, she did seem very assured of her own movements, like she was a master tracker or something. It made Evelyn wonder about her background.

  With a smirk, Janus said, “I’m sure they would. We nearly crashed our ship and entered Leavenport, and then after some of the witches tried to frame us for someone’s death, other witches demanded our help in entering a mausoleum in the middle of a cursed forest. Turns out only parts of Zamorka are cursed. That’ll reassure the home crowd.”

  “Better than the whole place being cursed, though, isn’t it?” Rukia helped Evelyn before she ended up falling flat. “Still, I wish we were allowed to use our magic now...”

  “Only when it’s necessary,” Evelyn echoed the expedition leader’s words with a sigh. “Because sometimes the wild magic goes crazy if someone starts using powers in it. You’d think they just needed to send ordinary people if we weren’t allowed to use powers.”

  “They wanted Meridas and me, though,” Janus said. “Presumably being a dragon helps.”

  “You’d think so, right? Someone pissing you off… just turn into a dragon and breathe fire at them. You do breathe fire?” Rukia asked.

  “No. Why would I breathe fire?” Janus drew closer to Evelyn and laced his hand in hers, sending a thrill through her body. She imagined for a moment his passionate kiss on the bench over a week ago, and the other kisses they’d shared since then. She was glad he lost the bet, because she’d been entertaining the idea more and more of just kissing him herself, finding the terms of the bet less binding than before.

  It was all in the head, anyway. An excuse to be closer to one another. A way to acknowledge one another.

  Her mother would probably have a heart attack if she brought back Janus Ruthe to the home. Her father would be absolutely desperate to make some trade deal or get a discount on something. The rest of her family would flock like vultures, trying to grab the best scraps of meat due to her choice of partner.