Releasing the Dragon Read online

  Releasing the Dragon

  A Kindred Tales Novel

  Evangeline Anderson

  www.evangelineanderson.com

  Releasing the Dragon, 1st Edition,

  A Kindred Tales Novel

  Copyright © 2018 by Evangeline Anderson

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Art Design © 2018 by Reese Dante

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writers’ imagination or have been used factiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  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.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to a retailer of your choice or evangelineanderson.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only.

  Any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  Contents

  Releasing the Dragon

  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

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  The End?

  Sharing a Mate

  An Excerpt

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  Also by Evangeline Anderson

  About the Author

  Releasing the Dragon

  A Kindred Tales Novel

  A girl with a painful past

  A warrior with a Dark Half—the Drake locked inside him.

  When they come together and the Drake freed,

  Will it draw them closer together…

  Or kill them both?

  You’ll have to read Releasing the Dragon to find out…

  Back in high school, Annie Michaels was an outcast. Too short and plump with frizzy red hair, glasses, and braces, she was the poster child for unpopular. But now, ten years later, things have changed. Annie is still plus-sized but she’s ditched the glasses and braces and pays to have her hair straightened. She just wants to go to her high school reunion in peace and try to hook up with her old crush—the elusive Christian Wentworth.

  Too bad a tall, dark Kindred warrior has other ideas for her.

  Drugair of the Drake Kindred is annoyed when he starts Dream-Sharing with the luscious little redhead. He doesn’t have time to call a bride and besides, as a member of the Kindred Elite Espionage Corps, his job is too difficult and dangerous to complicate matters with a helpless Earth female. It also doesn’t help that he has a Darker Side—the Drake who lives inside him wants to claim Annie as theirs but Dru does everything he can to suppress it’s fiery desires. He tries to ignore the dreams and finds he can’t…he has to go to Annie.

  But just because she’s been dreaming of Dru doesn’t mean Annie’s willing to drop everything and be his bride. It’s only after he rescues her from the reunion gone wrong that she begins to feel for him—enough that she stows away on his ship and gets caught up in his latest mission, tracking a terrorist to the Shadow Palace in the Maw Cluster millions of light years away.

  While in the Shadow Palace, Annie has to pose as Dru’s x’aan-chow or “sex pet.” This new twist in their relationship brings them closer together but when Annie is threatened, Dru’s Darker Half takes over. When the Drake comes out, will it bring them closer together? Or will they both die as a result?

  You’ll have to read Releasing the Dragon to find out…

  One

  It was Halloween and Annie Michaels was ready for the reunion of her life.

  Why the fifteen-year high school reunion should be held on Halloween was beyond her. It probably had something to do with the influence of Michelle Prouty—who all the boys used to call “Michelle Pretty”—because of her long blonde hair and perfect boobs. Back at Hillsborough High, Michelle had ruled the roost and was always the chair of the party planning committee as well as the head cheerleader and class president. If she decided she wanted to have the fifteen-year reunion at Halloween instead of during the summer like most reunions, she would do it and no one would dare to tell her no.

  Annie didn’t care when the reunion was held though—she had been preparing for the event for a solid year, ever since she’d first gotten the notice from her old high school’s alumni board that the reunion was in the works. Well, almost a solid year, anyway.

  At first she’d been reluctant to go and had almost sent the email directly to her spam folder. Then she’d thought to do a quick FaceBook search for Christian Wentworth and had seen his status was currently “single.”

  Christian was the golden boy of her graduating class—literally. He had hair that looked like melted honey in the sunlight and gorgeous deep blue eyes like the sky. He’d been the captain of the football team and the captain of the chess team—the perfect Renaissance man.

  He was also one of the only guys in her class that had never called Annie “fat” or “four-eyed-freckled-fat-face” or “pig” or “oinker” as in “Little Oinker Annie” which was the nickname Michelle Prouty had hung on Annie freshman year—the name which had stuck all the way through graduation and made her life miserable.

  It had taken Annie years to get over what she went through in high school and when she’d graduated, she had promised herself she was never going back. She’d thrown away her cap and gown—stuffing them into a nearby garbage can before she even left the auditorium where the graduation ceremony was being held. She’d wanted nothing to do with Hillsborough High ever again. In fact, she had only bought a yearbook so she could have a picture of Christian and he was the only one, coincidentally, who had signed it.

  Now she took out the battered Hillsborough High Sentinels book and flipped it open. It fell open naturally to the one page she had looked at over and over, back when she was still a love-struck girl—the page dedicated to Christian with the title: “School Hero in Sports and Smarts.” It had color photos of him in his gray and blue football uniform and also looking intently at a chess board as though he was just about to declare “check!”

  Under a beaming picture of the golden boy himself, Christian had written, “Hey, pretty Annie—you’re a real cool girl. Thanks for all the help in English lit—I’ll never forget you! Love, Chris.”

  It was the “love” part that the teenaged Annie had swooned over, alone in her room on Friday nights when all the other girls had dates. She would lay there on her second-hand pink ruffled bedspread and imagine what her life would be like if she wasn’t stuck with braces and glasses and didn’t have such frizzy red hair. If only her freckles erased themselves and she was the size of Michelle Prouty instead of “the size of a hippo�
�—as Daren Thomas had said to her during one awful gym class she would never be able to forget.

  Annie used to imagine herself sweeping up to Christian on a dark dance floor, her hair long and smooth, her teeth straight and white and gleaming, her freckles magically erased and her figure svelte and athletic. She would wait until he turned around and noticed her to smile at him. But of course he wouldn’t recognize her—not “Little Oinker Annie”—because she wasn’t that person anymore. She would be a bewitching red-haired siren—a temptress he couldn’t resist. He would ask her to dance and only after they had been dancing for hours and he had fallen completely in love with her would Annie reveal her true identity.

  This was the point where the fantasy got really vivid. She could just see his gorgeous, sky-blue eyes widening and he would say, “Annie? You mean Annie Michaels who helped me with all my English Lit papers?”

  Annie would blush prettily and nod and smile and Christian would say,

  “But you look so different now! You’re so thin. And where are your glasses?” He would peer closer and murmur, “Brown—your eyes are the most gorgeous shade of brown. I always wondered what color they were.”

  Then the band would start playing a slow-dance and he would take her in his arms again and they would spend the rest of their lives together—happily-ever-after—just like in the cheesy romance books which were Annie’s secret indulgence.

  Of course the grown up Annie didn’t dwell on such childish fantasies. It had been fifteen years since high school and she’d barely thought of Hillsborough High or its denizens since she graduated. Most of those memories were painful and she preferred to bury them so deep they never troubled her. That is, until she’d gotten the email from the alumni committee—then everything came rushing back and her old fantasy of finding Christian on the dance floor had resurrected itself like an unquiet ghost.

  The memories the email brought back had started her thinking. After all, she wasn’t the frizzy-haired, freckled “Little Oinker Annie” anymore. True, she was still plus-sized but she’d actually grown an inch and a half after high school and had started watching what she ate so everything had kind of evened out. No longer was she shaped like a beach ball—now she was more like a full-to-overflowing hourglass. She was never going to look like Michelle Prouty—her body just seemed to want to be full-figured—but she wasn’t a roly-poly ball of freckles with glasses and braces anymore either.

  The braces had been gone before she went to college and Annie had ditched the glasses in favor of first contact lenses and then, when she started having success in her chosen field as a video game designer, she’d had Lasik surgery to correct her vision. She’s straightened her hair too—and paid a great deal to keep it straight and smooth.

  In short, Annie had completely transformed herself and now when she looked in the mirror she saw someone pretty—maybe even pretty enough to tempt the elusive Christian Wentworth out on the dance floor and possibly even into her bed.

  The old longing rose within her at the thought, as well as a new fiery desire that had been growing inside her for the past three months.

  For as long as you’ve been having the dreams, whispered a little voice in her head. Annie tried to push it away but somehow it wouldn’t go.

  You know—the dreams of that strange man with the black eyes and huge wings?

  Annie frowned at herself. All right, yes—she had been having some pretty strange dreams lately. Dreams that woke her up panting and shivering in the middle of the night, her heart racing and her pussy hot and wet and needy.

  And all the dreams were the same—the man with black eyes staring at her, an unreadable look on his sharp features. He would glare down at Annie from his great height and then the pupils of his eyes would open—not round but slitted, like a cat’s. The pupils would spread wide and a burning red light would pour out, as though someone had just opened twin portals to an unseen inferno.

  The dreams always ended the same way—the strange man would point at Annie and say in a deep, inhuman voice, “Mine.”

  Then he would unfurl great, black wings, spreading them so wide they blocked out the sky. As Annie stood there, helpless, he would lean forward and enfold her in those wings, blotting out all light and plunging them into darkness.

  Then she woke up.

  Annie supposed the recurring dream should have scared her to death. After all, it was like she was being stalked by a demon. But instead of leaving her breathless with fear, they left her breathless for another reason—lust.

  Every time she woke from one of these maddening dreams of the man with black eyes, her pussy was throbbing. At such times she tried falling back on her old fantasy of Christian on the dance floor but the moment her fingers drifted under the covers to part her swollen pussy lips and try to find some relief from the sexual tension, it was the man with black eyes who appeared in her imagination. Annie imagined him doing all kinds of things to her—things she’d never done before in her limited experience but had only dreamed about.

  She told herself uneasily it was just her imagination running away with her. She’d always had vivid dreams—she usually put them to good use by dumping whatever she dreamed of into her latest video game design. In fact, she was working on a game right now loosely based on the Night Watch books by Sergei Lukyanenko. The man with burning black eyes and huge black wings would fit right into that dark fantasy nicely.

  But somehow Annie couldn’t bear to put him in. He was hers and she didn’t want to share him with anyone—even if he was just a dream.

  “Time to forget about dreams and get real—the reunion is tonight,” Annie told herself, looking in the mirror.

  She was wearing the dress she’d bought specially for the reunion—a sexy black number that hugged her curves and plunged low to show the creamy swell of her breasts. She felt a little nervous going out in an outfit this revealing—especially since she spent most of her days in jeans and t-shirts—game designing didn’t have much of a dress code. But she’d told herself when she bought it that this was her one chance to make the old fantasy come true—it was go big or go home.

  To go with the dress, she’d gotten a pair of fluffy white wings and a matching halo that was attached to a headband on a wire, so that it hovered over her head. If anyone asked, she was going to say she was a fallen angel. She could have been a regular angel, she supposed, if she’d gotten herself a white dress to go with the wings and halo. But though she was thinner than in her high school days, she still wasn’t up to wearing a white dress to the reunion. Black was so much more slimming.

  “I look good,” Annie told herself firmly, practicing the positive self-affirmation the councilor she’d seen in college for her low self-esteem had taught her. Getting over the awful events of high school had been hard—and going back was going to be even harder. But if she didn’t take a chance, she’d never know if her fantasy about Christian might become a reality.

  “He’s single and I’m sexy,” she told herself firmly, tossing her long red hair over one creamy shoulder. Her freckles were carefully covered, as always, by a special and very expensive make-up she bought that was originally used by movie makeup artists to cover tattoos. Her blush and bronzer were perfectly blended to bring out her cheekbones and her lipstick was flawless. She’d even watched a tutorial on how to do an expert smoky-eye and the results hadn’t come out half-bad, in Annie’s opinion.

  In short, she was as ready as she was going to get to go after Christian and make her fantasy a reality.

  “I’m a success,” Annie told her reflection, continuing with the mantra of self-affirmation. “I have a fun and interesting job that pays well and I’m happy with what I do. I like the way I look. I—”

  Her words were interrupted by a sharp knock on the front door of her apartment.

  Oh good! That must be the perfume I ordered!

  Annie hurried to the door, feeling a surge of excitement. She’d been afraid the online service she ordered from wasn’t goin
g to get the package to her before the reunion. Lately they had been a lot less than reliable and their promise to deliver anything you ordered in two days or less was more like four days to a week. She’d been prepared to wear her old perfume but now it looked like she wouldn’t have to.

  Excitedly, she threw open the door exclaiming, “Oh, I’m so glad you came! You’re just in ti…”

  But the words died in her mouth as she saw who was standing at her front door—it wasn’t a deliveryman.

  Standing on her cute little welcome mat with paw-prints and the inscription “Wipe your Paws” was a huge, imposing man who had to be almost seven feet tall. He had black hair, black eyes, and a look on his face Annie recognized—a look of anger and possession.

  It was the man of her dreams and he looked mad.

  Two

  Drugair didn’t have time to call a bride right now.

  It was bad timing that he’d started Dream-Sharing with the little Earth female when he had. But then, it was always going to be bad timing. Dru was a member of the Kindred Elite Espionage Corps—he functioned as a diplomat, a spy, and when need be, an assassin. He had a difficult, dangerous, demanding job which would only be complicated by the addition of a helpless Earth female.

  Which was why he was so irritated when he found himself inevitably drawn to the girl in his dreams.