by Celia Kyle
His Blazing Passion
Real Men of Wildridge
Celia Kyle
Marina Maddix
Contents
Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
About the Authors
Blurb
Dragons aren't all that fly when these two bounty hunters go head-to-head…there are sparks, too!
As the best damn bounty hunter in the country, Allon Wyvern always gets the bad guy. Unless the second-best bounty hunter beats him to it—which she does far too often for his taste. Even though they’ve never met, their rivalry is legendary in the shifter world. So far it's been friendly... until her interference allows the criminal to escape.
As the best damn fugitive recovery agent in the world, Chelle Calidi knows there’s more at stake with this case than one of the largest bounties she’s ever seen. The snake shifter she’s been chasing is one seriously evil dude, so when that arrogant dragon from Wildridge Security is about to screw up everything, she’s forced to step in.
After an intensely angry and mind-blowingly passionate first meeting, Allon and Chelle are forced to work together to capture their prey. Can they keep their hands off each other long enough to catch him? Or will temptation override good sense and see them both dead?
Chapter One
Finding a snake shifter in the grass was one thing. Finding one in the woods was another. But finding a snake shifter with a five-figure bounty behind his name after a string of violent bank robberies—two of which had body counts—when he knew he was being hunted in the grass in the woods?
That type of impossible search was right up Allon Wyvern’s alley.
As his massive dragon form dipped down out of the clouds over the forest below, he knew he was close. He kept his magic tight around his dragon-shape, hiding himself from the view of humans. No sense in violating shifter law by exposing his shifterness and bringing Othercross Judiciary down on him while he worked a bounty hunting job for them. That wouldn’t do at all, which was why his guard remained high as he closed in on his slippery prey.
His quarry, Danque Anguis, was a wiry little man pushing forty, with eyes as black as his hair and skin so pale that its faint green hue showed in good lighting. That’s what he looked like when he wasn’t a long, powerful mass of slithering scales, anyway. It wasn’t clear if he’d begun killing during his heists because he was getting sloppy or because his ego was getting too big. In truth, it was probably a little of both, but Allon only cared about which came first. That would tell him how much of a fight Danque would put up.
In that moment, Allon hoped Danque would be a tad spirited.
This neck of the woods not far outside of Los Angeles was just the latest and final leg of an investigation that made Allon particularly proud. In all fairness, he had been chomping at the bit for a tough job like this. Sure, the huge bounty on Danque was attractive, but he had other reasons for drawing on all of his resources to close in on his target like a steel bear trap.
One reason, actually, and her name was Chelle Calidi.
If Allon was Wildridge Security’s star fugitive recovery agent—fancy talk for a bounty hunter, as Allon liked to explain to his dates—then Chelle was his counterpart for Skypoint Security on the East Coast. Though they’d yet to meet face to face, they were better at tracking fugitives than anyone else in the country. Maybe the world. Naturally, they occasionally worked the same cases.
Four, to be exact. Those four cases were the most challenging Allon had ever worked, and in no small part due to Chelle’s skills and cunning. And it just so happened they were evenly tied—for now. Danque would break that tie. Allon smiled to himself, already thinking of the consolation prize he’d send Chelle—a lovingly wrapped box of four-day-old lobsters.
Chelle already had a stellar reputation when Allon joined Wildridge Security three years ago, and he’d jumped at the chance to swipe a bounty from under Skypoint’s nose. To the surprise of everyone, he’d succeeded. But his ego hadn’t been satisfied with simply winning. No, he had to rub her nose in it by sending her the crappiest bottle of sparkling wine his local corner market carried along with a generic box of Valentine chocolates. In September.
That had kicked off a little tradition. When Chelle brought her A-game to the next bounty and beat Allon by a hair, he’d received a sympathy card from her containing a $50 gift card for a local restaurant…which had been shut down three years earlier when a colony of rat shifters was discovered living in the kitchen walls. Allon won the third contest, for which he had cheerfully mailed her some gourmet salts to rub in her wounds.
Their last go-round had really pissed him off, though. It wasn’t the gift basket full of feminine hygiene products she’d had delivered to the office. It was how she’d tricked him out of the victory he had earned. If she wanted to play dirty, that was fine by Allon. Rotting lobsters it would be. They were currently “marinating” in some fish guts for good measure.
Because Allon wasn’t going to lose this time.
One of his more nefarious contacts in the LA shifter underworld had slipped him the location of Danque’s hideout. Being a skip tracer entailed befriending valuable, if despicable, people sometimes, even if that meant calling in a favor behind a sketchy club now and then in order to discover which “cozy, remote cabins” in the woods were actually safe houses for criminals.
Simply dipping below the clouds like he was doing was a risk because dragons were easy to spot—his innate magic only worked on humans, not other paranormal creatures—especially a dragon who cast as large a shadow as Allon. But he knew precisely where he was, and as he neared the small clearing, his heart jumped when he spied a dot of black hair by a pond.
It was Danque Anguis, no doubt about it. The slight man’s pale face looked up just as Allon passed over him. He was shirtless and appeared to be halfway through washing some clothes in the pond. The dripping wet shirt fell from his hands and his jaw dropped in surprise. Allon hugged his wings against his body to free fall toward the ground at the same time Danque’s body melted into the slender form of a snake.
Allon’s hideous maw curled into a grin. Charging toward earth at full speed, air howled around his furled leathery wings as he extended his foreclaws like an eagle to snatch his—
WHOOMP!
Something huge and airborne collided with Allon mid-air with the force of an out-of-control semi-truck, sending him into a death spiral. He released a gout of flame on reflex and shook his head as he recovered his balance and righted himself. He only got a brief view of the other dragon before it dive-bombed him again and thrust its—her—full weight onto him.
Chelle. He didn’t need to know what she looked like to know in his bones it was her.
Allon’s size as a dragon stayed proportional to his towering human stature, but even so, Chelle’s dragon was far larger than he’d expected. The two colossal dragons snarled and grappled with each other in the air as they tumbled together, jaws snapping and warning gouts of flame threatening to sear them the longer they stayed entangled. Chelle purposefully used her weight to try and drop them from the air, and her strategy worked.
But he wasn’t going to let her steal the mark out from under him this time!
He kicked her exposed unde
rbelly with his hind feet as they hit the tree line. She hissed but managed to spin him around to let him take the brunt of the impact as they crashed into Danque’s clearing. Chunks of grass and soft earth sprayed out a hundred feet as if a bomb had exploded, leaving them lying in a small crater of their own making.
Allon staggered to his feet, shaking his wings, which sent another shower of dirt and rocks flying. As he tried to make the wildly tilting world straighten up again, the sound of beating wings caught his attention. Chelle was trying to take flight again. Before he managed to get his breath back, he lunged and snapped his jaws around her tail, tugging her back to earth and flinging her into the tree line.
Her ear-splitting screech of fury sent any woodland creatures nearby scurrying for safety. The trees groaned with the impact, but she was back on her feet in an instant. Allon got his first full look at her as she snorted smoke, glaring at him as she pawed at the ground before launching herself at him once more. Before their skulls collided, Allon had been stunned by how…surprising her form was.
The shock was short-lived. They tumbled down their crater and back out the other side. Allon snapped at her with his jaws, but she thrust her hind legs out at just the right angle to get plenty of leverage and send him flying. Halfway through the air, he caught sight of Danque’s clothes, lying damp and useless on the ground. The snake was nowhere to be seen.
The bastard had escaped!
Allon tumbled across the clearing, but before he even finished rolling, he shifted back to his human form to call off the fight. He skidded to a stop and pushed himself to his feet. The fact that he didn’t get hit with a face full of tail told him Chelle must have noticed the situation too.
Naked, he stood to his full height and dusted the fresh earth and leaves off his rippling muscles, bulging after the exertion. Scanning the clearing for any sign of Danque, his gaze was arrested by the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen glaring at him.
Standing over six feet with a mop of wild red hair and brilliant jade-green eyes, Chelle’s impressive curves were mostly muscle. If ever a female dragon existed that could rival Allon’s stature, it was her. His appreciation only lasted a moment before righteous anger overrode it. Her little stunt may have prevented Allon from making the collar instead of her, but it also allowed a dangerous criminal to escape.
“Whose side are you on?” he bellowed.
“I’m on my own damn side, asshole!” Chelle bellowed back from across the clearing.
Southern California sunshine warmed her bare skin, and under other circumstances, she would have enjoyed being stark naked in the forest, even with her main competitor standing right in front of her. Maybe especially then. Let him check out every perfect, voluptuous curve of her body. He could follow the swoop of her snatched waist, the va-voom of her broad hips and her almost Amazonian thighs and know she was no pushover. She looked every bit the part of a goddess with her fiery red hair cascading messily over her shoulders and down her back. Her eyes flashed hot with a warning as she clenched her fists and held her chin up in defiance. Chelle Calidi was not the kind of woman to back down from a fight, not even against an opponent so panty-meltingly hot that he might as well be on fire.
It didn’t help her concentration that he was standing before her in all his glory. Even with her six-one stance, Allon towered over her by a good six inches. He looked more like a musclehead from Venice Beach than a law enforcement professional with his bulging upper body and tanned skin. Despite having just shifted to his human form, his sun-bleached blond hair lay perfectly mussed, like he just rolled out of bed. But what really set her body ablaze were his sparkling pale green eyes and, even though he was scowling at her, dimples so deep she thought she might get lost in them.
She had to literally shake the sudden attraction for this man from her head. It wasn’t lost on her that she was an intimidating woman in every sense of the word, a fact that she relished quite happily. It made her job a lot easier, with her long, muscular legs carrying her quickly across any kind of terrain and her core so tight and strong that she had more endurance than many of her competitors and certainly most of the low-down criminal bail jumpers she chased on a regular basis. Year after year, her colleagues lauded her as the best in the biz, and who was she to argue? With her enormous height, fierce determination, and dogged sense of competition, few in the industry could even come close to her.
Only one other fugitive recovery agent in the country—maybe the world—came close to giving her a run for her money, and she couldn’t stop glaring at him. Over the last couple of years, she’d imagined him to be some seedy, hunchbacked loser she could easily dismiss, but that was so not the case. Allon Wyvern was so blisteringly hot, her heart raced with the adrenaline pumping through her system. But he was also an arrogant ass. His “consolation gifts” were proof of that.
If she was completely honest, she rather enjoyed their little competition, for the most part. Even the gifts were fun. She’d rarely gone up against anyone with her strength and skills as a tracker, so the challenge motivated her more than she cared to admit. But now that she stood facing him, she couldn’t help feeling annoyed at how attractive he was. Why couldn’t he have turned out to be a troll? That would have made life so much simpler.
Whatever. Nothing would stop her from carrying out her mission to catch Danque Anguis and see justice done. After all, she’d been tracking the murderous bastard all the way across the country for weeks now, which both angered her and fueled her determination to capture him, no matter what. Shying away from danger and difficulty had never been her thing, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to start now. Not with so much at stake.
More than just about anything else—with the possible exception of a plate full of fresh crullers—Chelle loved the thrill of the chase, the feel of the wind rushing across her scales and the blood pounding in her ears as she closed in on her prey. The hefty bonuses from tracking high-earning targets certainly kept her coming back for more, but the thrill came from more than just money. It was primal, her latent dragon instincts propelling her to chase down the bad guy, to spread her wings and extend her talons to capture the worst of the worst.
And after weeks of chasing Danque, she’d be damned before she let Allon take the guy in. Besides, he didn’t have a clue what he was getting himself into with this particular villain. In all her years hunting fugitives, she’d never run across one quite so evil. But she wasn’t worried. She’d been training for this case almost since she was born.
Chelle hailed from an especially rough neighborhood of New York City, where trouble and crime were omnipresent. She grew up surrounded by criminals running down her street, desperate for places to hide. Skip tracers pounding down doors, forcibly searching the residences of otherwise innocent bystanders for any trace of a runaway. There was little rhyme or reason to temper the tumultuous atmosphere of her youth, but the one thing that imprinted on her most deeply was the total certainty that she alone could shape her own fate. She was determined not to ever let her humble beginnings determine her success as an adult in the world. She watched. She listened. She took it all in and drew her own conclusions, building up her own sense of right and wrong and all the gray shades in between. Chelle was totally sure of herself in every way, and that only made her more intimidating to others.
Being raised in such a tough place, not to mention growing up with three big brothers, she knew how to play dirty, and she had no qualms about doing so. Allon learned that the last time they went up against each other, and he’d learn it again this time. Chelle would do whatever it took to capture Danque and claim the full bounty for Skypoint Security.
“You’re a tricksy thing. Aren’t you?” Allon growled, taking a threatening step toward her.
She matched him with a step of her own. “You’re just figuring that out?”
“Oh, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the last time you tricked me,” he said, moving closer still.
Chelle threw her head back a
nd laughed, her hair swaying and bouncing around her shoulders in a way she knew would infuriate him. “That was pretty good. You have to admit.”
Allon balked, stalking a little closer. “Good? You totally screwed me.”
She had, too. He’d been one step ahead of her the whole time, and since they were tied at the time, she dug into her bag of dirty tricks to distract him. And all it took was one simple text:
I’m at Ye Ol Watering Hole in Phoenix and need your help to catch this asshole. We can split the bounty.
Of course, the criminal had been nowhere near that particular bar, so when she finally captured the guy, she made a point of snapping a selfie with him bound and gagged in the background and sent it to Allon, with the caption: You thought I needed YOUR help? LMAO!”
“You’re fucking crazy. You know that?” Allon snapped at her.
Chelle glowered with rage and stomped a few steps closer to him. Hey, it was a trigger.
“Crazy? Come over here, little man, and I’ll show you crazy!”
“Little man?” he scoffed, flexing every muscle he could to prove otherwise. “Pretty sure I have a few inches on you, if you haven’t noticed.
Chelle’s upper lip pulled back in a snarl. They were mere feet apart by this point in the argument, their hands clenched into white-knuckled fists and their eyes glowing with ferocity. She’d never been angrier—or more turned on.
“You’d better have more than a few inches, if you want to dance with me, pal.”
His nostrils flared at the insinuation the important parts of his body wouldn’t match the rest of his bulk and Chelle prepared herself for him to lunge at her. And he did, but not before he proved her wrong. Her eyes widened as she watched his cock thicken and stand at attention, distracting her for a split second. It was enough for him to take her by surprise. But instead of tackling her, he claimed her mouth with a kiss that nearly knocked her over.
