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  Dragons & Fire

  Dragon’s Den Casino #3

  By: Blair Babylon

  Dragons & Fire

  Dragon’s Den Casino #3

  By: Blair Babylon

  Dragons have fated mates, and Cai Wyvern is doing everything he can to make sure he never, ever meets his.

  Cai, Duke Wyvern, absolutely, positively, definitely isn’t falling into a mating fever, and he’s made dang sure of that. He doesn’t trust his instincts, so he waits for women to come to him and dates them a few times at most. If he starts feeling any sort of magic tingle, he leaps away from them faster than a dragon can fly.

  He’s careful, so careful. His father fell into dragon senescence when his mother left, and Cai will do anything to avoid dying like that.

  But when he meets Ember Niamh, a gorgeous, funny, flirty witch who dabbles in the arcane side of witchcraft, he thinks she’s great.

  Really great.

  Really the greatest greatly great, ever.

  A shiver fills his soul when he looks at her. Magic crests over his skin when she touches him.

  And the first time they meet, he ends up on his knees with his head swimming so hard that he can barely remember his own name.

  But he will do absolutely anything to avoid falling into mating fever.

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  Published by Malachite Publishing LLC

  Copyright 2019 by Malachite Publishing LLC

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Special Offers

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Audience with His Majesty

  Two Months

  After the Dragon Scepter Ceremony

  Ember, Hacking

  Roped

  Inappropriate

  The Sexual Harassment Philosophy

  The Serpents’ Stench

  The Penthouse

  The Man with the Dragon Tattoo

  Burn for You

  Revenge Lobster

  Feeding Time

  Rogue Fire

  Free Lunch

  Devouring

  Dust Devils

  Cave

  Serpents and Fire and Air, Oh My.

  Half A Confession

  Refusal

  Revenge Lobster #2

  Fire

  Frenzy

  The Ramifications of Being A Dragonmate

  Walk of Flame

  Gala Opening

  Cai, the Duke of Wyvern

  Arawn, the Duke of Tiamat

  Mathonwy, the Duke of Draco

  Audience with Their Majesties

  Ember Niamh-Wyvern

  Willow Tiamat

  Bethany Aura Draco

  Blair Babylon Books

  More Rock Stars and Billionaires from Blair Babylon

  Frequently Asked Questions

  Dear Reader

  Copyright and Notices

  Prologue

  HIS Grace Cai, the Duke of Wyvern, wrestled the flowing velvet robe weighed down with gold-thread embroidery as he sprinted through the crowd. He hitched it back onto his shoulders and dodged between clusters and groups and couples thronging the California mansion. People packed the hallways. Most of the men wore suits, and so did a fair number of the women. Some people had gone all-out with white ties and tails or long, sophisticated gowns. Bright jewels and gold draped around many people’s necks, wrists, ears, hair, waists, fingers, and noses like a pile of treasure had been dumped over their heads.

  The people in the crowd all appeared to be human—their noses and arms were in the accustomed places—though few actually were natural humans.

  Cai Wyvern wasn’t human, not exactly, though with his amber-streaked hair and brilliant green eyes, he would certainly appear human to anybody who might have happened on this peculiar scene. To a natural human with no knowledge of supernatural society, Cai looked like a strapping specimen of a young man, perhaps twenty-five years old, with broad shoulders and long legs and a carefree, joyous laugh that made everyone he met instantly like him.

  However, he was rather taller than the average human at six-four and change, and his skin was preternaturally warm to the touch.

  And there was the matter of his second soul, the animus of a dragon that lived in his blood and bones, a dragon who could emerge and fly, glittering in the sunlight, and whose tender spirit was the other half of Cai’s own soul.

  Everyone in the crowd seemed rather taller than average, too, and these people seemed slimmer and more muscular than strictly normal, as if their rampant metabolisms burned through calories as they regularly engaged in some sort of strenuous exercise, like flying.

  Afternoon spring sunlight slanted through the tall windows as Cai Wyvern hopped between two gentlemen, trying to reach the throne room. The crowds still standing in the hallways were no reassurance that he wasn’t late. Some people’s status didn’t rate entry into the ballroom proper, so they would be viewing whatever ceremony was about to take place on screens mounted to the walls.

  Cai’s status did rate entry to the throne room, however. His title of the Duke of Wyvern meant that his presence had been “requested and required” when the text had hit his phone only a few hours before, bearing the cryptic message about a ceremony, a reception, and his mandated presence. He’d dropped everything and flown from New York to Los Angeles, arriving just minutes before the stated starting time.

  When he’d entered the California mansion through the enormous, carved front door on the roof, he’d been praying that he wasn’t late.

  His red and gold velvet ceremonial robe fluttered through the air behind him as he tried to scroll on his phone with one thumb, checking to see what had gone wrong at his business since he’d flown in for this sudden, emergency reception. Something always did go wrong. Something always required his immediate attention, phone call, or late-night visit, but that was his job.

  A short man shoved by Cai in the crowd, and Cai’s heavy ducal robe slipped off his shoulder again. With his other hand, Cai clutched the ducal robes that were sliding down as he finagled and wiggled between people. When the heavy red and gold velvet nearly dropped off of his shoulder, the hand holding it flexed, his fingernails growing the slightest hint of talons as he ran.

  But hey, the robe didn’t end up trampled by the crowd. The damned thing probably weighed seventy pounds. The heavy velvet did fall to right above Cai’s shined shoes because he’d had it altered when he’d inherited the dukedom, decades before.

  He glanced around to make sure no one had noticed, but everyone was a bit overwrought with the royal emergency summons. A subtle partial transformation wouldn’t be noted in this crowd. Half of them were probably speaking around fangs or flames, themselves. An emergency summons from the king and queen was enough to make anyone overwrought.

  Still, it was gauche.

  A lady whom Cai recognized, Abertha Deryn, shouldered her way through the tightly packed crowd, edging toward the throne room, and wiped a tendril of orange flame from her lip. Cai paused, letting her through. She shot him a grateful glance as they bulled their ways toward the massive, open doors ahead.

  Cai’s phone pinged and vibrated in his hand with incoming messages overlapping each other.

  Lots of texts from the office. Half of those were from spoiled artists demanding special privileges at the concerts and events that Cai managed. The other half were from their agents and managers, assuring Cai that
they would take care of the spoiled artists’ unreasonable demands and thanking him for the opportunity of playing the arenas that Cai oversaw.

  Several of the messages were from Cai’s childhood friends Mathonwy and Arawn, who were nagging him as usual.

  Where are you?

  The king and queen called an audience.

  It must be important. You need to be here.

  You can’t just skip these events, Cai.

  Get your scaly ass to New Wales right now.

  Yes, with all the people shoving him as everyone tried to get in the throne room, his ass was getting a little scaly, and his talons were emerging again, too.

  Cai was the youngest of the three of the friends by a few months, but those guys acted older, much older, like big-ol’-drags-older, regardless of the fact that Cai had held and managed his dukedom for decades longer than those two late bloomers had.

  His phone buzzed again. Cai! By the DLords, where are you?!?!?!

  Cai sighed and texted Arawn, Just landed. Crowd up here. Save booze.

  After the transcontinental flight, he needed a drink.

  Luckily, parties at the Royal Palace were always flush with alcohol, despite the inadvisability of having so much flammable liquid around people who could set it on fire with a puff of flames from between their lips if they were talking about taxes or politics. Half the whiskey sours were accidentally turning into Flaming Snakebites when someone made an unanticipated joke, and then the drinker had to bat it out or suck it down. The air was getting warm in the Spanish Colonial mansion from all the little jets of flames despite the sea breeze blowing off the Pacific Ocean through the open windows and the air conditioner laboring on the roof. The heat was like a thousand candles burned in the room, if the candles could swoop and dart above the crowd and into the air.

  Cai dropped his phone in his pocket, accosted a waiter who was fighting his way through the crowd, and commandeered two glasses of champagne that he slid down his throat like a frat boy before returning the empty glasses to the waiter’s tray.

  The sparkling wine quenched the flames lingering in his throat, for now.

  Better.

  So fortified, Cai dodged between people, making his way through the crowd to the throne room.

  Cai nodded to the guards who allowed him to pass through the looming doors and inserted himself into the teeming masses crowded into the throne room. People were packed even more tightly inside, all of them trying to get close enough to the throne dais to see when the monarchs actually emerged.

  No sooner had Cai drawn a breath and begun to look over the crowd for Mathonwy and Arawn when his arm was grabbed by Lord Dyl, the Earl of Ladon, who shouted into his ear, “Please, my lord Cai, allow me to introduce my brilliant and beautiful daughter Nerys—”

  Nerys, who was indeed brilliant and beautiful, was standing directly behind her father and doing her best to sink through the floor to escape her father’s meddling. She smiled wanly and waved as she grabbed her father and tried to drag him away.

  Cai grinned at her and winked as she dragged her father, stumbling, through the crowd. Nerys and Cai had once had a torrid weekend affair while in undergrad together, but as they’d agreed and as was Cai’s usual practice, they’d parted as friends on Monday to make sure that neither of them had an adverse reaction and fallen into the fever.

  Mating fever.

  Despite the overheated air and heavy velvet robes, a chill ran down Cai Wyvern’s spine.

  Cai’s entire life revolved around avoiding attachments. He didn’t want to die like his father had: slowly, painfully, gruesomely, far too early, and from a broken heart.

  No one even whispered the word severed around Cai.

  No one whispered it at all, really.

  It happened so very seldom that most people didn’t think about it.

  Unless you’d seen someone severed.

  Then, the memory of it lingers.

  Watching someone you love die from it is torture.

  Thinking it might be your own future is chilling.

  Nope, Cai was a single man and liked it that way. He had no intention of searching the world for his One Fated Mate and falling into a terminal case of love.

  And if he did accidentally run across her, he’d run far away to make sure the mating fever never, ever took hold of him.

  The crowd surged, pushing him, and he planted his feet on the ground to avoid getting run over.

  Who the hell had let this many people inside? Wasn’t this a fire hazard or something? He texted Arawn, Dragon Lords, WTF is this? R U here?

  Cai straightened and peered over the heads of the crowd, looking for two other overly tall dukes who had probably arrived on time and weren’t crashing the party late.

  Yep, over by the throne dais where two ornate chairs stood under velvet-draped teesters, Mathonwy and Arawn were prairie-dogging over the crowd, looking for him.

  Cai raised his arm and waved hard. Arawn saw him and waved back, and Cai began swimming overhand through the crowd, grabbing shoulders and pushing them behind himself to reach his buddies so they could endure this insanity together.

  In his haste, Cai stepped between Eurig, a minor lord but a major pain in the ass, and his mate, Silveretti.

  Crud.

  He did not want to be shot in the back with a laser-plume of dragonfire, so he turned back, plastering a smile on his face.

  Eurig’s face had darkened, and he scowled.

  Silveretti patted his burly arm absently while smiling at Cai.

  Dammit, did Silveretti want to get Cai killed in a dragon fight in the middle of the Royal Palace’s throne room?

  Well, she was fae, and the fae folk did love a good fight to the death over their beauty.

  Silveretti was stunningly beautiful, as all fae were, with her flowing, white-gold hair and slanted, sparkling gray-green eyes, but her mate’s eyes glittered with dragon testosterone. The magical fire that filled a dragon shifter’s eyes when they fell into the mating fever roared in Eurig’s black irises, and he clenched his fists as he stepped toward Cai.

  A mated dragon shifter in full protective mode can decimate a city in his rage.

  “Hello, my lord Eurig!” Cai said, “and my lady Silveretti,” as if an afterthought. He turned back to Eurig. “I’m so glad I caught you here! I have heard that you like concerts.”

  Cai prayed that Eurig liked concerts.

  Eurig, Earl of Fafner, blinked, and his snarl lessened in confusion. “What?”

  “A little dragon told me that you like concerts. As I run concert production for Dragons Den, Inc. and our various venues, I’ve been meaning to give you a couple of tickets to one of our shows! You work in the finance department, yes?”

  Eurig nodded, his confusion overcoming the urge to pummel brought on by someone interfering with his mate.

  “Annual concert tickets are one of the benefits of working for DDI, of course.” They were not. “What kind of concerts do you like? Modern pop? Country?”

  “I—We like the modern stuff,” Eurig said, settling back.

  “Excellent. Do you like Niiki Harrison? I was just talking to her last night—”

  “You’ve met Niiki Harrison?” Silveretti asked Cai, laying her hand on his arm this time. Her fey magic seeped through his thick velvet robe.

  He shook her off. “Why, yes. Yes, indeed.” Cai swiped on his phone and showed Silveretti a picture of the pop singer sitting in his lap. Another up-and-coming starlet was kissing his cheek, while yet another had stuck her tongue in his ear. It was a silly pose for the cameras, of course. Later, when he’d gotten seriously drunk, Cai had taken all three of them to bed, and they’d taken advantage of him and his dragon stamina for hours.

  Silveretti’s gray-green eyes alighted on Cai, and her fey magic tickled the edges of his dragon animus.

  Inside Cai’s mind and soul, Wyvern growled, lifting his lip to show his fangs. He didn’t like fey magic.

  Silveretti sighed, “I would lov
e to meet her.”

  “I might be able to get you backstage passes.” Anything rather than start a dragonfight with a hothead like Eurig.

  Silveretti’s gray-green eyes lit up, and she turned to her mate, laughing. “Can we go to the concert? I’d love to go!”

  The fae were such flirts, even after mating.

  With this, Eurig was mollified, and he laughed, too. “Yes, I would appreciate tickets.”

  Cai sent a couple of comps over to Eurig’s phone and took off through the crowd before that conversation could turn sour again.

  He was careful to watch where he was going more closely and not to step between an overprotective, mildly homicidal dragon and their mate.

  And to be clear, female mated dragons were much, much more dangerous than males. Cai sidestepped those couples quickly.

  As he slipped between people, trying to find Mathonwy and Arawn, both of whom were laughing at him, the bastards, trumpets played a brassy flourish to announce the entrance of the Dragon Queen and Dragon King to the throne room. Their Majesties walked into the throne room at a stately pace, slowly ascending the dais toward the thrones.

  Cai finally reached where Arawn and Math were standing, tugging his dark red and gold ducal robe back into place from where it had dragged over people. “Hey, guys.”

  Mathonwy told him, “I cannot believe how close you cut arrivals. It’s why you’re late half the time.”

  Those two jerks hadn’t had to fly in from the East Coast against the jet stream, and man, were his shoulders tired.

  Cai slugged Math’s arm. “The party doesn’t start until I’m here.”

  Arawn scowled. “What did you show Silveretti and Eurig?”

  “Oh, I was at a natural’s party in the Hills last night, and these ladies showed up.” He showed them the phone because he knew it would piss off those two prudes.