by Jada Cox
The Dragon’s Mate
A paranormal Romance
Jada Cox
Copyright © 2020 by Jada Cox.
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.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
About Jada Cox
Chapter 1
The screams and clash of claw on claw echoed in my ears. When I felt the heat, I thought surely one of the fire dragons had come close enough to use its weapon on me. I thanked the Gods that I’d been born a water dragon, one with the ability to absorb and reflect fire.
But why was I still burning? And why were my arms and legs so heavy?
I opened my eyes slowly only to be greeted by a great burning orb in the sky above me. The sky above home, Nethuns, had no such offense to the senses. Our sun shone pale blue on good days, and white on days when the pollution clouded the air. It was a soothing color, not this harsh orange that made my eyes close against it.
I opened my eyes again, this time looking down my body. I saw, finally, why my arms and legs were so heavy. Copper chains lay wrapped over much of my naked body. I could feel the metal merging with my skin where the chain lay heaviest on my body. If they remained in contact long enough, my skin would absorb the copper, and I’d be pinned here, under that orange sun, for eternity.
I pulled against the chains and found them firmly attached to the ground beneath me. There was nothing I could do to free myself.
“Fine pickle you’ve gotten yourself into this time, your highness,” I muttered to myself.
“Hello? Is someone there?” a voice echoed against the rocks.
The voice was melodic and brushed over me with an almost physical sensuality, sending chills down my spine. The language tickled my brain with a feeling of familiarity. I’d heard the cadence before, the sounds clipped where I expected them to. If I could just get my brain to engage, I might be able to answer that beautiful voice in the same language.
“I heard a voice. Do you need help?”
It clicked suddenly, causing my body to jerk and a moan to escape my lips. That language, it was once spoken by a maid in the palace when I was a child. She’d been taken from a backwater planet as a captive and worked in the palace until her death a few years ago.
A fiery lick of hair appeared over the edge of a rock. It was soon followed by a lovely face with wide-set eyes, smooth shoulders, and a sensual body wrapped in some strange cloth that barely covered her flesh. She turned, putting her face in profile. By some trick of the light, that orange sun flared behind her, giving her a god-like glow that made my breath catch in my throat.
I knew the moment she saw me. Her eyes widened, and she stopped.
“What happened to you?” she asked, rounding the rock that had hidden her from my view and me from hers.
The words slowly organized themselves in my brain as it finally engaged and I began to decipher what she was saying.
I noticed that she carried a small bag and a collection of ropes over one shoulder. She approached and set the ropes and bag on the ground beside me.
“Are you all right? What can I do to help?”
“Can you cut the chains?” I asked.
She stared at me a moment before kneeling to look through the bag she’d set down beside me. I heard clanking, and metal on metal sounds before she stood up, a tool clutched in her hand.
“This should cut through them,” she said, holding up the tool. “I need you to stay perfectly still while I hammer on them, okay? I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I can and will be still, but please hurry. The longer the copper touches my flesh, the worse it will be to remove it.”
Her gasp when she saw the copper links embedded in my flesh touched me. She cared for a stranger. A naked stranger chained to a rock in the middle of nowhere. No demands for an explanation. No questions, just action. She was my kind of woman.
The women of my world would likely have fallen to pieces upon finding someone like me in this state. That I was naked would have been the most offensive part of this for them. We did not show our bodies to one another in our man and woman forms. Only in the privacy of our bedchambers and only among mated pairs.
This world must be very different. Or at least their women were. Where a Nethuns woman would be fainting at the sight of so much flesh, this woman merely stepped back, raised the tool, and brought it down on the chains.
Metal sang on metal and echoed through the surrounding land, and I felt the lessening of tension as the link she struck split and part of the chain fell away.
The woman put her tool down and looked to me.
“I’m Ella, by the way. Ella Hunt.”
“Emiliano Vollmer, Crown Prince of the Water.”
“Okay…” She stared at me for a moment before stooping to pick up her tool again. She brought the tool down on the chain, again and again, splitting the links until only those embedded in my flesh remained.
I sat up on the rock to which I’d been chained. I reached for the link embedded in the middle of my chest, braced myself and ripped it from my flesh.
A moan slipped from between my lips, and I sagged forward, curling my body around itself.
“Jesus, what’d you do that for?” Ella asked. “Don’t you want to go to a hospital? Let them pull those out for you?”
“You have healers on this planet?”
“Doctors? Sure. Let me take you to them, okay? Don’t rip any more of those things out, okay?”
“I’ll go to your healers if you think they’ll help. Do you have anything I might cover myself with?”
Ella nodded and dug further into her bag. She brought out a cloth and handed it to me. The rough texture would be agony on my flesh, but at least I’d be covered.
Chapter 2
He took the blanket from me, his distaste obvious in the way he handled the material.
“I’m sorry it’s not nicer. It’s an old blanket I keep in my climbing gear in case I get stuck and have to spend the night out here. Which I did last night. It gets cold after dark.”
“I appreciate your kindness,” he said. He wrapped the blanket over his shoulders and pulled it closed around his body.
“Can you stand or do you need help?”
“I can stand on my own, thank you.” And he demonstrated his ability by rising from the rock in a single, fluid motion that left me staring with my mouth hanging open.
“Wow,” I said.
Emiliano looked at me, eyes questioning.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man move like that before. It’s like you don’t have the same joints I do.”
“That is a possibility.” He looked around, taking in the dry, baked ground. “Where am I?”
I wondered briefly what his answer could possibly mean. Why would it be a possibility that he had different joints than I did? And how could he not know where he was?
“Arizona, just outside Phoenix,” I answered.
“Phoenix? What clan lives here?”
I opened my mouth and closed it a couple times before clearing my throat. “I don’t know of any clans, but there are about a million and a h
alf people who live in and around Phoenix.”
Emiliano nodded.
“You mentioned healers. I would like to see them now, please.”
“Sure, sure. I’m standing around chatting when you’re in pain. I’m so sorry. Let’s go.”
I held out my hand to him, and he hesitated before taking it. I’d expected his skin to be burning hot after finding him chained to a rock in the desert, but it felt cool like I’d dipped my hand into a cool pond. I stared at his hand in mine, unable to move or speak. When I could finally raise my eyes to meet his, I found him staring back at me, a look of undecipherable wonder on his face.
“What?” I asked, anxiety cranking up to ten.
“Thank you for coming to my rescue without question.”
“You’re welcome. My pleasure. We should go. That sunburn will blister if we stay out here much longer.”
He looked at himself and saw how red his skin had turned.
“Do you have any water?”
I kicked myself mentally. Of course, he was thirsty. Hell, I was thirsty, and all I’d done was walk the fifty yards from my car. Who knew how long he’d been out here.
I dropped his hand and scrambled in my bag.
“Sure, sure. I should have offered sooner. I’m so sorry.”
I held up a bottle of water, watching Emiliano as he examined it after taking if from me. He twisted off the cap and rather than lifting the bottle to his lips, he poured it over the link-shaped wound in his chest.
He hissed and clenched his jaw, but did not cry out. I could tell he was in pain, but he refused to let it out with a scream. Perhaps he felt it would diminish him in some way to scream with pain.
“We should go,” I said.
“Is there more water near here?”
“You mean like a lake or river?”
“Which one flows?” he asked, looking interested.
“Flows? You mean moves? That’s a river. Closest one is about an hour by car. We should get you to a hospital first.”
“These healers, will they have flowing water?”
“Sure. All you need from the faucet.”
Emiliano nodded, “Then take me to these healers, please.”
“Come with me,” I said, holding out my hand to him again and he took it. If anything, his hand was even cooler now than it had been the first time I touched him.
“How do you do that?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Cool your skin like that? I wish I could to do that. Especially out here.”
Emiliano looked at his hand. “I didn’t know I felt different than you might.”
“Not different, just cooler,” I said, shrugging my shoulder.
We made our way through the brush to where I’d left my car in the parking area. I opened the passenger door and held it open to Emiliano. He lowered himself into the passenger seat. As he settled himself, the blanket gaped open, and I saw that the wound from the chain he’d poured water on had healed almost completely.
“Neat,” I said.
“What’s that?” he asked, confusion in his eyes.
“The water healed you.”
“Of course it did. Had I your ‘river,’ I would be able to submerge myself and fully heal.”
I nodded but remained silent as I circled the car and got into the driver’s seat. Sure, I had a boatload of questions for this man. How had he ended up naked in the desert, chained to a rock? Why did he speak as though he were from somewhere else, somewhere very far away? Why did he think he was a prince? So many questions, and yet they all stuck in my throat.
The man curled over himself in my passenger seat did not invite conversation or questions. I could almost see the wall he raised around himself. I wondered what he was protecting himself from and whether whatever had put him on that rock in the desert would come for him again.
“Shall we go?” he asked, turning pain-bright eyes to me.
“Right. Of course! I’m sorry. I’m wool-gathering, and you’re in pain.”
I started the car, backed out of the space and turned toward the city. I prayed the traffic wouldn’t be bad and that whatever it was that would help Emiliano would be available to him at the hospital. I had questions for him, and I wasn’t going to let him leave my life until he answered them.
Chapter 3
The woman who called herself Ella piloted the vehicle to the home of the healers. It was a soaring building that teemed with people, coming and going like creatures in a colony. There seemed to be little logic to how things worked.
She walked with me into the midst of chaos. Screams and tears predominated as I walked past those with wounds and other problems. Ella led me to a harried looking woman behind a claustrophobically small desk.
The woman behind the desk looked me up and down before frowning at me.
“We’re really busy today. If you’re not dying, you might want to go to the urgent care down the street.”
“Seriously? You’re sending us away without even seeing him?”
Ella’s face suffused with bright color and her body vibrated with anger. She was concerned for me, I could tell, but also angry with the unnamed woman behind the desk.
“Well, what’s wrong with him?”
“I’m standing here. You may ask me questions.”
The woman’s eyes moved from Ella’s angry face to take in my visage and the ratty blanket with which I was clothed.
“Fine. What’s wrong with you?”
“I was bound to a rock in your desert. I have suffered severe burns on my flesh from the light here and from the copper to which I am allergic.”
I shrugged the blanket off my shoulder and showed the woman the link burns. She laughed and shook her head.
“You have sunburn? Do you see how many people are in the waiting room? Do you see how much blood is on the floor? You’ll be here a week before a sunburn is a high enough priority for a doctor to see you.”
“And this other healing location, they will heal me sooner?”
“Yes. They’ll have more time for something like this than we ever will.”
I turned to Ella.
“We should go to the other healing location. This one will not help me.”
Ella nodded. She took my hand and led me back to her vehicle. She held the door for me, and I got back into the tiny vehicle while she circled the vehicle and got behind the wheel.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “She treated you poorly.”
“Then it is better that we go elsewhere. If the gatekeeper is so lacking in compassion, what must the healers be like?”
Ella stared at me for a moment. I wondered whether my use of her language sounded awkward to her.
“You’re absolutely right. Let’s get you to the urgent care. They’ll take good care of you.”
She started the vehicle and turned us into the direction the woman in the box had pointed us towards.
I examined my wounds and saw that they were beginning to heal already.
“I think it would be best if you simply dropped me off somewhere far from your civilization. I am already healing, and I am not comfortable with your people.”
“But you’re hurt. And you’re naked. You at least need some clothing. You can’t walk around naked. You’ll get arrested and go to jail.”
“Do you have any clothing I might wear?”
Ella considered my request and then nodded.
“I have some clothes an old boyfriend left behind. You’re welcome to use those.”
“Thank you. You’ve been very generous. I don’t know what I can do to repay your generosity.”
“You don’t need to do anything. I’m happy to help.”
Ella turned the car in the opposite direction, I assumed to take me to her home where the promised clothing awaited. I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. I was exhausted and really needed to find a safe haven where I could rest and heal.
I must have dozed off because un unbelievably short amount of time later, Ella was tentatively touching my shoulder and calling my name.
“Yes, yes, I’m awake,” I quickly said, not wanting her to notice that I’d dozed off.
“We’re here. This is my house.”
I opened my eyes and took in the small, low-roofed dwelling in front of the vehicle. The house felt as though it were a representation of Ella herself. It was compact, useful, and unobtrusive, much like the woman herself.
“Thank you.”
“Would you like to come in, clean up, get dressed?”
I very much wished to do exactly those things, but I knew I was taking advantage of Ella. She was dazzled by my magnetism, and that was unfair. I assumed she would likely have left me in the desert had she not been overwhelmed by the magnetism that was part and parcel of my race. It certainly would have been safer for her if she had left me there. My presence meant she was in danger and I didn’t want her to be harmed.
I paused in the process of getting out of the vehicle to examine that thought. Why should I care about this stranger? Yes, she was beautiful and kind, but those traits were hardly reason enough to deny myself comfort in a time of need. There was something compelling about her, something that drew me to her.
I must have been staring for too long because when I re-focused my gaze on Ella, she was looking at me as though I’d done something very strange.
“Well, you should come in and put on some clothes, at least.”
“That would be acceptable. Thank you.”
I followed Ella into her dwelling, my head swiveling left and right to take in every detail I could. I hoped her home might give me more insight into this woman to whom I was feeling an inexplicable draw.
“The bathroom is the first door on the left,” Ella said, pointing to the chamber she wished me to use. “Why don’t you wash up a little and I’ll bring you the clothing.”
“Thank you for all of your assistance,” I said before closing the door between us.
I stood before the reflective surface adhered to the wall and dropped the blanket Ella had given me. The pits from the copper chain were shallower now than they had been and the redness of my flesh was fading. I’d be healed by morning; sooner if I found a natural body of water in which to submerge myself.
