Dragon Temptation

by Amelia Jade

  Kal held up a hand. “Sorry Kyen, not my thing.” He stared at the two rooms, watching the process.

  “How long?”

  “A week. Maybe less. We learned a lot from you, but so far you’re our only test subject. The more we have, the better we can hopefully refine the system. We’ve been at it for a week already.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Kyen nodded. “Yep. It took us the better part of two months with you, but that’s because we moved extremely slowly. Now we know better, but I’m not sure how short we can get it down to.”

  He nodded. Elin took his hand again and dragged him from the room. “There, you’ve seen what you wanted to see, now let’s go and let them get back to work.”

  Kal sighed and followed his mate from the room. “Why did nobody tell me?”

  “Did you ask? No, you just spent the past three days expecting someone to volunteer information they didn’t know you were searching for.”

  He came to a halt, his hand pulling from hers as she continued for several steps.

  “I’m sorry,” Elin said, throwing her head back in frustration, this time at herself. “You didn’t deserve that.” She bounced over to him with a forceful injection of cheer and leaned her head on his chest. “I’m just stressed. There’s a lot more pressure on me now.”

  “I know. And I’m about to make it worse.”

  She eyed him suspiciously, pulling back, but not far enough that she could escape his arm settling around her waist.

  “What are you up to?” she questioned.

  “I want to give you something.” He paused as his voice caught. “Something that, if you accept, will bind us to each other forever.”

  “If this is how proposals went in your time, this is not the best time for that,” she said nervously. “We haven’t even discussed it.”

  There was a smile as she spoke, since though they hadn’t talked marriage, he’d been open with her that being his mate was a forever sort of deal. His kind’s version of marriage. Kallore knew that, and he’d done enough research to realize what was expected of him if he were to propose.

  “I know. This is…from me.” He extended an arm, and opened his palm. “What do you think?”

  Elin gasped. “Kal…it’s gorgeous.” She reached down to pick it up, but he stopped her with his other hand.

  In the palm he grasped a necklace. It wasn’t made from gold or silver, but instead something much rarer. It was dragonbone. His, to be precise. The chain was interlinked lines of bone, twisting round one another like strands of DNA, little channels grooved into each. The pendant was shaped like a scale, with the image of a dragon etched onto it in more little grooves. The perimeter of the scale was also grooved.

  “Can I put it on?”

  “In a moment. Right now it’s just a necklace. Any dragon could forge this from himself. I want to give you something of me. Something to bind you to me as long as you wear it.”

  He concentrated, and flames sprang from his forearm and leapt down into the necklace, filling the grooves in the chain and the scale with a cold fire that wouldn’t burn the skin. “There. Now it’s a part of me.”

  Elin was tearing up. “Kal. I can’t take this.”

  “Yes,” he said firmly. “You can. It’s for you.”

  She looked up at him, tearing her eyes away from the glittering flames. “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “Absolutely positive.” Then he smiled.

  “What other reasons are you giving this to me for?” she asked, her head tilting to the side.

  Kallore laughed. “Several. One, it will ward off any other dragons. If you’re going to be around them, trust me, you’re going to want it. We’re kind of incorrigible like that.”

  “I’d noticed,” she said wryly, her lips twisting upward. “What else?”

  “The dragonbone can only be broken by another dragon. If anyone else ever attacks you, take it off. The flames will recognize evil. Use it like a little whip to defend yourself.”

  Her eyebrows knitted together. “Really?”

  “Yes. But only in times of great need, Elin.”

  He reached up and draped it over her neck as she bowed her head slightly. It settled against her skin and he saw goosebumps ripple outward as the coolness of the flame startled her.

  “Thank you. I’ll cherish it.”

  Reaching down, he swept her off her feet and smothered her with kisses. Elin returned them just as passionately, and before he knew it her shoulders were being pushed into the wall as things grew hot between them.

  “Ahem.”

  Elin yelped as he half set her down, half dropped her—which one it was depended on who you asked. Elin insisted he’d dropped her—and spun.

  “Kyen!” he said awkwardly. “What are you doing here?”

  The pacifist dragon frowned. “This is the entrance to my lab. Which is see-through by the way.”

  Kallore looked at Elin awkwardly as they both realized the two scientists had seen the entire thing. Then to his surprise she began to laugh. He frowned, but that just set her off even more. Eventually he caught the bug and began to laugh off his embarrassment. They held on to each other, the howls not stopping as the tears started.

  “You people are weird,” Kyen said, and stepped back into his lab.

  This time they sank to the floor, holding their stomachs.

  “I love you,” he managed to get out, reaching one hand over to her.

  Elin saw it and managed to grasp it even as they burst into another fit.

  “I love you too, Kallore.”

  She was absolutely perfect.

  ********

  ********

  This concludes Dragon Temptation, Crimson Dragons Book 1.

  I hope you enjoyed the adventure. Please feel free to let me know your thoughts on the book, anywhere from characters, to plot, to even the formatting of the book itself. I appreciate all feedback, whether it be reviews, on Facebook, or via my website!

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  Furnace

  A Fated Mate Romance

  By Amelia Jade

  Furnace

  Copyright @ 2017 by Amelia Jade

  First Electronic Publication: October 2017

  Amelia Jade

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  All sexual activities depicted occur between consenting characters 18 years or older who are not blood related.

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  Furnace

  Storm Surge

  Lex

  Exertion sang through his body, but as he cleared the last hump of rock to reach the top of the not-quite-a-mountain hill, he’d never felt more alive. Getting out among the hills was his fa
vorite pastime, and one he indulged in far too rarely these days. Certainly not to this extent. But it had been impossible to ignore the call of the wild today. Something had pushed him to make the climb. Now as he looked out and over the smaller nearby hills, he suddenly realized why.

  The massive overpressure that had started as a nuisance and grown into a full-fledged assault on his system now made complete sense. The skies over the valley to the east of his were pitch black, and rolling swiftly toward him.

  Lex blinked, eyelids sliding over his yellow orbs in a very human-like manner. The clouds were not just coming in swiftly, they were all but sprinting. He stared at the vast storm system that surged forward, like a lion that was done stalking and now lunged in for the kill. He had seconds, perhaps, before the first raindrops hit him. The wind came up abruptly, announcing the imminent arrival of a storm that would rival anything he’d seen in a very long time.

  It buffeted the hilltop, and even his four-legged form was driven back a step by the gale-force winds. Trees farther down the slope began to groan and were slowly bent up the hill toward him as more winds whipped at them. Dust sprang into the air and he was forced to narrow his eyes to slits.

  Lightning flashed in the skies, sheets of it running every which direction. A second later the boom! of thunder hit him, feeling more like the sonic-powered blast of a plane breaking the sound barrier. It made his fur stand on end and he cringed slightly with the pain in his ears.

  Time to go.

  He wouldn’t gain anything more by sticking around, and the rain was already starting to mat his fur down in clumps, and it showed no signs of slowing either. In fact, he was fairly positive that this was only the beginning. With a frustrated snarl he turned and darted back down the hill toward his own valley, the one that held his home, and the little town he called his.

  Four limbs worked in unison, propelling him forward at great speed. Lex could outrun just about anything in his wolf form. He was among the swiftest creatures on the planet. He’d even tested himself out against a cheetah during a random trip to Africa nearly twelve years earlier, and found that he could not only out-sprint it, but hold the pace for longer.

  Yet the storm made him feel like he was slow-dripping molasses for all the effort he put into it. It slammed into the hilltop, billowed up and over, and came driving down hard at him and the occupants of the valley below. The ground grew slippery underneath and he was forced to watch his step, placing his paws more carefully than if it had been dry. He was used to running in the rain however, and this barely slowed his pace.

  It didn’t matter. He could have been on flat, hard ground, sprinting his fastest, and it wouldn’t have made any difference to the storm. The freakish creation of nature simply washed right over him and kept going. The afternoon sky, once a bright blue and filled with sunlight, was eclipsed by clouds so black even Lex was nearly reduced to seeing only by the flashes of lightning.

  He feared for himself, but more importantly, he feared for the people below. They weren’t ready to deal with a storm of this magnitude. There had been absolutely no warning. It was as if the storm had appeared out of midair.

  A whistling noise alerted Lex to the fact that the wind was picking up in strength. Trees around him began to sigh and flex—the huge Douglas firs used to the storms that would occasionally lash the valley. But those storms always came in from the west, from the coastline nearly sixty miles distant. None of them were ready to deal with such wind shear from the direct opposite. The whistle became a full-borne howl, and in seconds the first branch snapped and plummeted to the forest floor nearby.

  Lex’s flight home had just become infinitely more dangerous. He was now forced to split his attention between the ground in front of him and the skies above. The huge trees towered upward of three hundred feet in the air. They had many branches bigger than most trees. Any one of them could kill him if they came plunging down on his hapless body. Although the wolf form was resilient and able to recover from most injuries, a branch five feet across landing on his head would kill him just as easily as it would a human. There was no understating the imminent danger he was now in.

  As if to punctuate that thought, another branch came flying down out of the darkness overhead. Lex saw it in time and dodged to the left, leg muscles bunching as he hurled himself up and over a fallen tree, one that had come down some time ago. A weird thrumming noise reached his ears. The vibrating sound grew and grew, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

  CRACK!

  He skidded to a halt, looking up with horror as the trunk of one of the magnificent, colossal trees seemed to simply disintegrate before his eyes. It all happened in slow motion. About halfway up the tree a section of trunk easily ten feet around shivered and just sort of exploded into fragments. A loud groan preceded the collapse of over a hundred feet of tree as it toppled over with what appeared to be agonizing slowness, but in reality wasn’t.

  The entire ground shook as the massive trunk hit and rebounded slightly before coming to an abrupt halt. Lex swallowed hard. All around it branches began to fall from other trees, weakened by the passage of the downed titan. He shook his head, trying to get it back in the game as rain lashed at him through the suddenly cleared portion of canopy. The storm was only growing more intense. He couldn’t afford to sit around and try to wait it out. He needed safety, and soon.

  Urging himself onward he rushed forward again. A minute or two later a second tree exploded. This one was off to his right, far enough away and falling in a different direction. He spared a moment’s thought to mourn it and the other centuries-old trees that would be destroyed by the storm, but he never slowed. To slow now would be to die.

  The water finally started to filter down through the thick canopy, drenching him and everything else underneath in a constant waterfall of liquid. There was no escaping it, and the ground underneath became muddy and treacherous, slowing his passage once more. He was forced to move at a more sedate pace, else he lose his footing and go down. Or worse, break one of his legs. Lex had practiced running on three legs before, both willingly and not, but it wasn’t something he enjoyed, nor was he particularly adept at it. Give him four legs any day, please and thank you.

  So with that in mind he ran forward. It felt slow to him, but in reality he was still moving nearly as fast as a wild wolf, one of his distant cousins. His anger spiked at the delay, but in the end, it probably saved his life. The constant boom-boom-boom of lightning overhead was near-deafening, and he never heard the branch when it separated from the trunk high above him. Nor did he hear it bounce off of other branches as it descended.

  But he sure as hell felt it when one of the small outcroppings of the branch dropped over his rear haunch, slamming him to the ground so hard and fast his momentum came to a full stop in less than a foot of distance. He yelped and went down hard, his eyes wide open.

  Less than two feet in front of him the massive branch itself was flat on the ground. It had to easily be six or seven feet around. If he’d been any faster, Lex would have been crushed to dust underneath it. Forcing down the rising tide of fear, he wiggled himself out from under the branch, testing his hind legs to see if they worked. When both responded, he headed out.

  Almost immediately it became clear to him that something was wrong. The legs responded, but the pain lancing into his skull every time he pushed off made it quite obvious he was hurt worse than he’d thought. Lex forced himself onward as the rain drenched him and the ground, racing down the slope, doing his best to ignore the pain.

  If he didn’t get off the hill in time, things were going to go badly. He was approaching the end of the old-growth forest line. Below it, the land had been clear cut nearly five decades before. Some trees had started to regrow, but it was nothing like what he was among now. It was open, and in a storm like this, that meant dangerous.

  The darkness lifted slightly as he emerged into the open, the lack of trees above him allowing the near-constant flashes of lightning to sho
w him the way. Lex was limping now, the pain growing worse as swelling stiffened his left hind leg. But he didn’t dare give up, pushing onward as best he could.

  You’ve got this. You’re almost there.

  He simply had to make it to the bottom of the hill, and then he could race up the road on the next one that led to his place. A flat surface, even if it was only gravel, would make all the difference in the world. Pushing himself, he started to cross the open land.

  He was only a quarter of the way when disaster struck. The water pouring down the hill from above finally made its way out of the forest as well, and that combined with the torrential downpour that had already been working away at the ground finally won out. Lex slipped and fell as the ground beneath him abruptly split and then slid away.

  Landslide.

  Not good. This is definitely not good. In fact, this is probably listed under the definition of Not Good. Think fast, Lex, otherwise you’re dead.

  He looked around for inspiration when it came to him. With a bone-jarring crash that hurt even from a hundred feet away, another massive fir toppled to the ground. It was so tall it stuck out into the cleared land with ease, like a finger pointing out from an enclosed fist. Lex was up on his feet and heading toward it before he’d had time for a second thought.

  The earth beneath him continued to crumble and slide away in a muddy slurry, picking up speed as more and more of it was dislodged. The footing was treacherous, and his ride began to move with the ground. The power of the mudslide was awe-inspiring as it picked up the tree trunk that had to weigh several tons and simply started to move it downhill.

  Lex snarled and put on a burst of speed, ignoring the explosive shot of agony in his hind legs. They were severely injured, he knew that, but if he could just get to the tree, he could rest them, and let the healing begin. First he needed to push them beyond what he should. Otherwise the tree would slide on by, leaving him at the tender mercy of the earth.