ROMANCE: SHAPESHIFTER ROMANCE: Dragon Baller's Bride (Dragon Shifter Alpha Male Romance) (Paranormal Romantic Suspense) (60 page)

R
on loved helping
David in his business, and when the winter was coming to a close David told him he wanted him to stay so he didn’t have to hire another estimator. He wanted to continue slowly training Ron in the business so he could eventually go out on his own, but for now they would go to jobs together so Ron could learn everything he needed to know. Julie continued working part time from home, and she loved taking care of her two men outside of that.

At some point over the past few months Ron had moved into their bedroom with them and often Julie was in the middle while they slept. David was most definitely in control of the household, but both Julie and Ron enjoyed that. It was hard for Ron to occasionally let go of some controls, and he still struggled with obeying from time to time but David was quick to punish him for his disobedience. They all knew Ron enjoyed the punishments as much as everyone else, which was the purpose after all. He had become more outgoing and outspoken, and he had really integrated into life in Minnesota. They had introduced Ron to skiing and hiking, and on two occasions Ron had gone with them when they had transformed. He had been fascinated by it and looked forward to it each time.

David sometimes went with Ron when he went hunting, mostly because Ron hadn’t known the area as well and had wanted to go further from town to catch something bigger. Ron had started using the gym in the basement, much to David’s amusement as the equipment had never been used before, and was bulking up quite a bit which made him stronger. Not that he needed the strength when hunting because he was fully acting on instinct then, but it helped him in everyday life especially when David saw fit to wrestle him. Whenever David thought Ron needed cheering up he would start tickling him, which always turned into wrestling fairly quickly and would leave both of them exhausted at the end while Julie mumbled about some men never growing up.

None of them really had very many true friends, which meant that nobody knew how close they were. Out in public none of them acted as if they were in a relationship with anyone, and they were all fine with that. They didn’t mind that they had to hide, but they also knew there were other groups out there just like them. Julie had found a group online who communicated about their experiences in the lifestyle they enjoyed, and they knew that at some point they would probably meet some of them in person but for now they enjoyed the privacy the anonymity provided.

A month prior Ron’s father had reached out to him. His mother was very ill and wanted him to come home. Ron had not wanted to, and when David had tried to talk to him about it he had thrown a raging fit. Instead of yelling back David had pulled him into a hug and simply held him as he cried about the injustice of his father calling now when he hadn’t for years. He wanted to see his mother without seeing the rest of his family, but he knew if he went he’d have to go alone because they would never accept David or Julie. They barely accepted him, since he was only half-vampire, and even then it was only because of his father. He had finally gotten over the rejection he had felt from them and didn’t want to go back to that, but he also knew if he didn’t go he would regret it the rest of his life. In the end David had gone with him, and while they had glared at the two of them, Ron had been happy to see his mother one more time. When his father had started in on him for the way he had left, David had stood up for him, which had surprised Ron’s parents (with his mother smiling) and made Ron love David even more. That night David had let him get stupid drunk, and the following morning he had moved on. The last thing connecting him to that family had been his mother, and he had said his goodbyes. He started focusing on his life in Alaine more and both David and Julie noticed that he somehow seemed happier and lighter, like a weight had been lifted.

They all knew that Ron still felt insecure fairly often and often felt like he was intruding on their relationship, even though they kept reassuring him that he wasn’t. It didn’t matter how often they told him that he was adding to the relationship, not taking away from it, Ron still had doubts at times. David and Julie wanted to do something for him to reassure him further, and after going hunting by himself five months after he had moved in with them, Ron found them sitting on the couch, the living room lit by candles and rose petals everywhere. He hung his coat up by the door before walking further into the room and seeing that in the middle of the living room where the coffee table had been there was now a circle of larger candles and rose petals. David was holding a box of sorts, and they were both looking at him with expectation on their faces as if trying to determine what his mood and reaction would be.

“What is going on?” he asked as he looked around in confusion. He had no idea they had even been planning anything, and while he had been surprised when David hadn’t given him a time limit on his hunting like he usually did to ensure he was safe, he had thought David had simply been too busy with work. Now he knew that they had been waiting for him to leave so they could plan this and he had been completely oblivious to all of it.

“We want to do something to confirm our relationship and promise ourselves to one another. We obviously can’t do this legally, but we want each of us to have that confirmation of our love each time we look at the rings,” David replied.

“What rings?”

Julie opened a box which held three identical rings. They were white gold with light blue diamonds imbedded in them. They weren’t large, but they were both manly and feminine at the same time and Ron couldn’t deny he loved them. They were beautiful and while he normally wouldn’t have chosen a diamond ring, especially not a blue diamond, he couldn’t help but think it was perfect for all of them. There were three diamonds in each ring, which fit their relationship perfectly and Ron was stunned for a minute.

“Ron?” David asked.

“They are beautiful. You want to do a commitment ceremony of sorts?”

“Yes, we do. We always knew something was missing, but with you in our lives we have felt complete. What was missing was you and we never knew it. Be honest, what are you thinking now?”

“Confused, overwhelmed. Happy and terrified.”

David and Julie both smiled at him, and when he looked at them he knew that they were serious. He wasn’t interfering with their relationship, he was adding to it and it was as if he suddenly saw it. “I accept,” Ron said with a smile, his mind made up.

“We have the wording right here, but maybe you want to look at it and see if you want to change anything? We would be saying it in unison while sliding the ring on the finger of the person to our right.”

Ron grabbed the piece of paper and read it, deciding there wasn’t anything he really wanted to add. “This is fine the way it is.”

As they stood in the middle of a circle of candles Ron knew they had put a lot of time into this. This wasn’t a spur of the moment thing and it made him feel loved that they had wanted to surprise him with it. As he took Julie’s hand with her to his right, he held his left hand for David to take. Looking at each other they each took a ring and slid it over the other person’s finger before starting to talk in unison.

“We have come here today to confirm our bond. To confirm our love for each other. To confirm that in this relationship of three, we are all equal. To give each other a token of that love and that bond. This ring represents a love without doubts, without jealousy and without fear. May it remind us when we forget, and might it remind us of it when we are alone. I love you.”

They now had a ring on their fingers and as Ron looked at Julie’s hand he felt a hand slide to his butt while Julie kissed him. “I want you to take me tonight,” Julie whispered. Ron’s eyes flew open as he looked at her before looking at David, who nodded. Until that day Ron had never done more with Julie than touching, and they had waited for David to be alright with it. As he looked at the ring on his finger he knew the moment was there and he took Julie and David’s hand and led them up the stairs.

Once there he started undressing Julie, who was undressing him in return. He heard a zipper behind him and knew David was getting undressed as well while he started kissing Julie while slowly walking her back towards the bed. He could feel that she was already wet and the thought of sex with Julie alone had him hard. As he kneeled in between her legs, stroking her clit and letting his fingers slide in, he felt a hand on his behind. When he looked back he saw David right behind him, stroking himself.

He couldn’t focus on both at the same time, and he had never gone further than just hands with David, and as he lowered himself into Julie he couldn’t help the moan that escaped his lips. Julie moaned as well, and Ron was glad she at least enjoyed it when he wasn’t nearly as big as David. Sliding gently in and out, Julie was meeting his movements easily.

David had stopped touching him but Ron heard him right next to them and he saw Julie reaching her hand out. The thought of Julie jerking off David while he was inside her got him moving harder and faster, with Julie moving harder and faster to keep up. All three of them were panting when Julie screamed out her release, both Ron and David following soon after. This time it was Ron who was in the middle in the bed, Julie snuggled up in front of him and David behind him. David was stroking his thigh and he enjoyed the comforting feeling as he glanced down at his ring. “This is beautiful. Thank you.”

“It was time,” David mumbled. “We are perfect for each other. Just don’t expect me to ever let you take me up the ass.”

“Hadn’t even thought of that.”

“You can go up my ass,” Julie mumbled. “David is a bit big for that.”

Ron looked over his shoulder at David whose eyes had grown wide at the possibilities that provided, and Ron knew they would be just fine. The three of them had learned to not only live together but to love one another and he still had no idea how he had ever gotten so lucky. With David’s hand on his thigh, he thought it was time for him to misbehave again. It had been several weeks and he quite enjoyed the rough, fast and hard sexual experiences afterwards. He loved gentle and slow, but every once in a while he wanted it rough. Last time those big hands had held him down as Julie had sucked him to completion, stopping and starting frequently to draw it out, and as David had tied his feet to the bed he had been unable to move. Completely at their mercy he had been forced to focus on what was being done to him and he had loved it. Each time David came up with something new, Ron was excited to go along for the ride and it was time for David to be challenged for something new once again. With that in his mind, Ron finally dozed off to sleep, thinking of everything that would be coming his way in the years to come.

Thinking back on that night five years later, he knew that walking up to that doorstep to rent a room had been the right choice. He had never paid a dime in rent, and in return he had two people he loved dearly. They did everything together and as he looked at Julie while she was asleep on the couch, her head in David’s lap, he couldn’t help but think he had hit the jackpot. He shared a smile with David before turning back to the movie they had been watching, his hand on the slightly rounded belly Julie was sporting. The baby was Ron’s, which they had found out after a DNA test, and they were about to find out if the baby would be a vampire-dragon. It hadn’t been planned, but the baby was going to be welcomed with open arms and would grow up loved beyond belief. And whether the baby was a vampire, a dragon, or a vampire-dragon, it wouldn’t matter. Their family was growing and if it was up to Ron, this would not be the only child they had. That thought alone made him smile again and as David’s hand covered his on Julie’s belly he knew that this was happiness. This was what life was supposed to be like

M
ira Clark has lived
a lonely life. Then her grandmother dies, leaving her feeling even more alone in the world. A lifetime of boarding schools, university, and being on a different coast, have left Mira with a strong sense of self-reliance, but with an emptiness that she thinks can never be filled. Being a BBW doesn’t help matters as most of Mira’s relationships have ended when her partners grew bored with her.

Then Salvador Perez walks into her life, stunningly handsome, and jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and even stalwart Mira can’t resist turning into a giggling teenager around him. But he has a strange tale to tell her, and even she can’t help but think the man calling himself a were-jaguar is insane. Then he tells her that she’s one too, and that she has a long family history she didn’t know about in Mexico. If she’s brave; if she’s willing to take a chance, she might find far more than she’d bargained for in her ancestral home. But then again, she might find the heartache of a lifetime.

A moment of passion with Salvador is far more than Mira can resist, and the trip of a lifetime is more than she can pass up. Mira follows Salvador not knowing if her future holds happiness or more loneliness, but sometimes you have to take that leap to find out, or risk facing a lifetime alone regardless.

“
H
istory shows
that mankind is very unkind to those they deem different. Every human settlement on earth has brought about destruction to native populations or to nearby populations. Subtle differences in religion or gender found in peer-groups have even led to death, expulsion, or other forms of abuse for those deemed too different, or out of the norm, of so-called civilized society. Because we are so very different, so very strange to those that do not have our abilities, we have to hide who we are and what we are. We are natural animals, the same as any other animal on this planet, but because we can change our shapes, our appearances, we would be hunted, killed or used for warfare as a weapon in some way. For our very survival we cannot go public; we must hide in the shadows, and we must not allow the world to know we exist. Our nature must be hidden if we are to survive.”

Mira closed the dusty old book, wondering if it was a work of fiction or that of a deranged mind. She could tell by the age of the cover and the paper that the book was at least one hundred years old, but the last few entries had been done in ball-point pen; which is not that old. The older entries were certainly done with a quill and ink; that much was obvious by the scratches and blobs of ink found on some pages, but the newer ones were definitely modern ink pens. Mira thought the books strange, there were three of them that she’d found so far, hidden in her grandmother Angelica’s mattress, but she wasn’t able to translate the older writing yet. It appeared to be in Spanish, and though she could read Spanish, every time she looked at the pages her eyes went blurry, and she was unable to make out the words. The portions written in English were as clear as day, but the Spanish portions just made her eyes water.

Putting the book down on her grandmother’s nightstand, she looked round the room. She’d never been allowed in this room as a child and it was only now, after her grandmother’s death, that she was able to walk into the other woman’s sanctuary. The room looked like it had been decorated around 1930 and left as it was. The furniture consisted of period pieces that were simply made, but serviceable in a pink color that apparently appealed to ladies back in the day. Mira called it ‘bismuth pink’; it reminded her of stomach ailments, but her grandmother must have loved the color because the whole room was painted the same shade.

Mira thought about the lines she’d read again; she was certain she had found a hoax, an early example of fictional monster writing, anything but the true account of a nineteenth-century shape-shifting were-person. Were-people! Mira thought if this type of person truly existed now, science would have discovered it, examined it, and published numerous articles on the discovery. Such a discovery would have been reported world-wide, surely!

Mira picked up the book she’d been reading and looked through the pages again. She decided to read through the last few pages, as those were the only ones she could truly read without her eyes going all fuzzy, and found that her name was mentioned on the last page. She read the line and thought perhaps the books were some kind of deranged family history, as the words only mentioned her parents and her name along with her date of birth. She knew her mother’s mother had been Hispanic, but not that the woman knew how to read or speak Spanish. She’d always assumed her grandmother, born and raised in California, did not know the language because Mira had never heard her speaking it. The only reason Mira knew any Spanish was because of friends and her classes in school. She wouldn’t know any of the language otherwise.

Thinking the whole thing odd, Mira put the book down again as she heard cars arriving in the driveway. That must be her father’s cousin Monica and her daughter Alice. They were the only family Mira had left and she didn’t remember either of them, but they had offered to drive her around when she got back into town, once they found out she was here. They’d come over to her grandmother’s house not long after she took a taxi from the airport, and offered their help then. The ladies were both older than Mira, and she hadn’t really had anything to do with them since she was a child.

Mira’s grandmother had sent her off to boarding school as soon as she was old enough to travel to the east coast of America on her own. The years apart had caused a distance to grow between Mira and her grandmother, and she hadn’t even known her grandmother was ill when the older woman had passed away. Too many family secrets, too much time apart, it’s no wonder I stayed in New York for so long, Mira thought to herself. There simply wasn’t anything here for me.

Leaving the room, she walked down to the foyer and let the two women in who came to take her to the funeral. Each woman embraced Mira, embraces she returned awkwardly and asked them if they needed to freshen up or needed a drink before they left to go to the funeral. Both women declined, and they all walked out to the car.

The drive was filled with chitchat, with Mira explaining that she’d been given a month off from her job as a historian for a museum in New York so that she could get her grandmother’s estate in order. She explained that she was planning on going back as soon as she could, and that she was going to sell the house as quickly as possible also. She had no wish to stay in California, as she felt no real connection to it and was eager to get back home. Mira learned that both ladies were married and spent their lives devoted to the men in their family. This much was obvious to Mira as the women bragged about the exploits of their men but said very little about the female offspring they had produced, other than to say they had married well. Whatever that meant, Mira thought, as she looked out the window. This type of woman was an oddity to Mira and held little interest for her. She was not a homemaker and never would be.

At the graveside later, Mira noticed more people were there than she expected. She had a catering service setting up refreshments back at the house, but she hadn’t expected this many people to show up. A range of beautiful people, young and old were present and each came to her to express their condolences. Mira was pleased that her grandmother warranted such a large turnout but hoped the catering service could keep up.

Shaking away the strange thought at a time like this, Mira walked over to her cousins and asked if they were ready to go once the service was over. She wanted to get back to make sure everything was set up. Before she could get to them though, Mira saw a man that made her stop in her tracks. Well over six feet tall, the man was not only handsome; he was gorgeous with tan skin that just begged to be touched and kissed. His dark hair was pulled back into one of those man-buns that should look silly, but on him, it made Mira want to tear his clothes off. She also noticed he had dark-green eyes, an unusual emerald shade that made her wonder if he had contacts in. Mira felt an urge to walk over to the man and introduce herself, maybe ask how he knew her grandmother but talked herself out of it.

Looking into the blacked out window of a nearby car Mira saw that she herself was tall, but not as tall as this man, with blonde hair and brown eyes, but she wasn’t very attractive. At 26, some might still call her an old maid, or boring, uninteresting and other such words. The only part of her that ever seemed to draw attention was her large breasts but when people noticed the rest of her was rather plump; their interest seemed to wane. She wasn’t the beautiful model type this man had to be used to. She tried to shake this strange, overpowering attraction she felt towards the man and walked away, reminding herself she was at her grandmother’s funeral, not a pickup bar.

Mira found her cousin and the woman’s daughter but still couldn’t quite take her eyes off the man. Turning to Monica, she asked if her cousin knew who the man was. Both Monica and Alice shook their heads and said no. Monica asked if she was alright, and ready to get back to the house. Mira said that she was but even after getting into the car, she couldn’t quite take her eyes away from the man. Her eyes followed him until he was out of sight, far behind her and miles away, and even then her eyes seemed to scan for him in the people she passed by. Rubbing her head, Mira wondered if she was getting sick or just desperate for male attention. What a weird time to become infatuated, she thought, as the car pulled up to the house. Well, it’s time to forget him now and plaster a smile back on your face; people will be here soon enough.