Sold To The Dragons (A BBW Paranormal Romance Book 1) (3 page)

Settling back in my seat, I covered my mouth, unable to hold back a yawn. It was now five, and I'd been up since dawn doing washing by hand in a tub. Despite the mill actually providing electricity that day, the twenty-year-old washer that we shared with a neighbor family had been on the fritz, and I'd wanted to leave my little brothers with clean clothes.

Apparently noticing my exhaustion, Tom moved a hand to the tinted glass partition separating us from the driver, seeming like he was going to knock. "Would you like a cup of coffee? Or something quick to eat? We have some refreshments up front, which you might need to tide you over, since the outpost is still some hours away."

Coffee was considered a luxury commodity, and I'd only had it twice in my life. Both times, it had made me a bit jittery and ill-feeling. I usually just had tea, which fortunately was much less expensive.

After another yawn, I managed to respond to Tom. "Oh, no thank you. I'll be fine until we reach the outpost. Which, by the way...where is it?"

"It's about two hours outside a place that used to be called Chicago, if you're familiar. And that place, the formerly called Chicago, is now a city called Ashcrest, named for my family. And that will be our final destination."

Stifling yet another yawn, I nodded. "Oh. Okay."

I wasn't completely familiar with the area that had used to be called Chicago, though I'd seen plenty of old maps.

With his stern expression softening just a slight bit, the way it had when he'd asked me if I was all right, Tom reached into a pocket on one of the front leather seats, produced a thin-yet-velvety-looking gray blanket, and handed it to me. "Why don't you try to get some rest? I can imagine you've had an exhausting day."

He was seeming more and more like a tough-but-not-unkind father. Maybe like the gentle-beneath-it-all father I'd always wanted but had never had. My own father had never handed me a blanket or encouraged me to rest in my entire life. He would have covered his own self with the blanket. Probably after eating the last bit of food without offering me a bite.

Soon I fell fast asleep under the soft gray blanket. I had no way of knowing, but I was about to need all the rest I could get. I was going to need all my strength to deal with the events that were soon to unfold at the outpost.

CHAPTER TWO

I slept the entire way to the outpost, which was a large, two-story brick house, a mansion, really, surrounded by several smaller houses and outbuildings. Though it was now full evening and dark, I could see that at least a dozen uniformed guards dressed all in black stood at various points around the mansion and other buildings. Their black boots glinted in the light from the lamps on tall metal posts overhead.

At least, I assumed they were guards. And when they addressed Tom as Lord Ashcrest, I was pretty sure.

I was beginning to think there was more to my new father figure-slash-possible-future-father-of-my-children than met the eye. That he was incredibly wealthy was obvious, but the level of respect and deference shown him by the guards, who stood to attention, saluting, when he passed, struck me as the type of treatment some type of royal might receive.

The inside of the mansion was like nothing I'd ever seen in my entire life. All polished marble, and gold lighting fixtures, and gilded mirrors, it was dazzling to say the least. After I'd freshened up in a bathroom larger than my bedroom at home, a smiling older woman dressed in some kind of staff uniform led me to the dining room table, above which hung a glittering, electric-lit crystal chandelier so gorgeous I could hardly take my eyes off it.

Tom wasn't joking when he'd said we'd be enjoying a feast. Several members of wait staff brought out dish after dish after dish, and served us delicacies such as filet mignon and roasted duck with orange sauce. I'd never even had steak before, let alone filet mignon. I'd only read about it in books. And now, now that I'd tasted it, I finally understood what all the fuss was about.

Tom and I didn't talk much during the meal. This was partly because sitting at opposite ends of the long, polished oak table, we weren't exactly at an ideal distance for easy conversation. But it was also because I wasn't quite sure what to say to him. He seemed a bit uncertain what to say to me as well.

But near the end of the meal, I noticed some interesting gold candle sconces along the walls. With a satiny finish and ornate details and curlicues along the sides, they looked antique, somehow. The main candle holder pieces were in the shape of dragon heads.

I peered at the sconces, thinking they might be a nice conversation piece. "These candle sconces are beautiful. Are they family heirlooms?"

Tom suddenly stiffened, pausing with a bite of steak halfway to his mouth. After a moment, he set his fork down. "Yes, they're family heirlooms. You could say that.”

He almost seemed to be waiting for me to ask some further question to move the conversation along, and so I did, though not really knowing what to ask.

"So...so, did your family have something to do with the dragons at some point?"

I was thinking maybe they'd fought them or something. But Tom's answer wasn't at all what I expected.

He looked me straight in the eye across the table, his own eyes glinting in light from the chandelier. "We are the dragons."

My first thought was that he had a strange sense of humor and was teasing. But after a long moment went by, and his expression remained completely serious, I could just tell that he wasn't. However, I was more than a bit confused.

Wondering how to phrase my next question, I set my fork and knife down. But after several false starts and stops while trying to make any sense of what Tom had said, I just blurted out exactly what I was thinking. "Well...you're going to have to explain this to me, Tom."

I'd thought he might get irritated about my cluelessness. But instead, he chuckled, surprising me.

"I suppose I do have some explaining to do. But if you don't mind, maybe I'll get to that in the car. It's getting late, and we still have a good hour or two of travel left to go before we reach home."

Home
. His home that was now my home. I was still wrapping my brain around that fact.

We quickly finished our meal, had a few bites of a delicious apple tart, and left the mansion. Almost immediately, we walked into a scene like something between a dream and a nightmare.

Against a backdrop of a midnight blue starry sky, some great dark shape was descending, heading toward the house. The shape was massive. It was winged. And suddenly, not even a split-second after I glimpsed it, it breathed fire.

Another dragon was behind it, seeming to be chasing it. All around me, the mansion guards were actually turning from human men into dragons in the blink of an eye. But I didn't have long to process this. Tom and I were now much closer to the car than the house, and he began pushing me across the remaining distance with a hand on my back.

"In the car. In the car, Kira, now!"

He didn't need to tell me again. After he'd yanked open the door, I hopped right in, and he closed the door behind me -  right before running from the car, turning into a dragon, and lifting into the air. Watching him, I blinked slowly, trying to shake off a feeling of complete surrealism. Because I knew this was all real. This was my new reality.

Heart pounding, I actually locked the car doors. Probably pointless, I immediately realized, since I figured that with their massive hands and claws, it was unlikely a dragon could open a car door, locked or unlocked. I figured one would more than likely just step on the car, smashing it, if one really wanted to hurt or kill me.

Even inside the car I could hear crashing and roaring noises, obvious sounds of a fight somewhere in the distance, in the air. I looked out the window, seeing flashes of fire light the dark sky every so often. After a minute or two, I began shivering, despite the fact that the September night was actually on the balmy side. Wrapping myself in the soft gray blanket, I wondered if I was going into shock. I figured seeing men turn into dragons could probably do it.

I felt near-hopelessly confused. As crazy a thing as it was, I got that Tom and his guards were some sort of man-dragon hybrids. It seemed impossible, and yet I'd seen it with my own eyes. So, I couldn't
not
believe. I couldn't not accept it. Doing so, I knew, would serve no purpose. And I'd never been one to shy away from reality. Even when reality seemed strange. Or even very, very strange, as it did now. But what I couldn't comprehend, what had me near-hopelessly confused, was why, if the dragons were all his family or people, one of them had seemed to be attacking the house, forcing him to put me in the safety of the car.

I didn't have to ponder this for long, though. Mere seconds after the distant roars and fighting noises had died down, two dragons, massive and dark, landed on one side of the driveway and immediately shifted back into human form, fully dressed. The fact that they were instantly fully dressed almost got me more hung up than the fact that they'd shifted into dragons in the first place. I knew that was kind of silly, but I couldn't help it. It just seemed like actual magic. Not that seeing men shift into dragons and then back into human men didn't seem like magic, too.

The two man-dragons were Tom and the driver of our car, and they both came over and got in. Tom immediately began asking if I was okay, and I nodded.

"Yeah, fine. And all of you?"

My question seemed to amuse him.

He sat back in his seat with his eyes twinkling. "We're all just fine. That was just one rogue spy one of my guards caught, and we took him out with no problems."

"Some distant cousin mad that he wasn't invited to Christmas dinner or something?"

While the driver pulled out of the driveway, Tom looked at me with his eyes twinkling once again. "I think I have some explaining to do."

For the remainder of the drive to the city of Ashcrest, he did a
lot
of explaining.

He told me that while his family members were creatures called dragon shifters, not all dragon shifters were his family members. "Does that make sense?"

While we bumped down an unpaved road, I said that it did, and he continued. He told me that dragon shifters had come into existence around the time of The Freeze, and that at first, they'd remained in one large group. However, they could only mate and produce offspring with human women, being that there were no female shifters, and so, they had started kidnapping human women and mating with them by force. They'd also begun killing humans and terrorizing towns just for sport.

This didn't sit well with the shifters who didn't participate in these acts, to say the least, and so, eventually, the group had broken apart into two different factions. Tom's ancestors, the
non
-terrorizers, had razed the ruins of Chicago, built a new city, Ashcrest, in its place, and had become the first dragon lords. They'd come to refer to the shifters they'd broken away from simply as The Destroyers, and they still did to this day, several hundred years later.

Tom glanced out the car window, sighing. "And I'd like to say that The Destroyers aren't still causing us trouble all these years later, but that would be a lie. The shifter we killed back at the outpost was one of their spies."

Turning his face back to me, his expression unreadable in the dark, Tom continued. "You see, once my ancestors formed Ashcrest, we began protecting all the cities and towns in what used to be called the Midwest, which were and still are the only remaining cities in the world post-Freeze. This is why dragon attacks stopped not too long after The Freeze. We Ashcrests made sure of that. And for a while, The Destroyers more or less did their own thing, in their own city, a few hundred miles south of Ashcrest.

“They had a sufficient supply of fertile women from all their raids at this point, and so, they seemed content to let things be. For a few hundred years, even. But recently, over the past several decades, as the fertility of all women everywhere has continued to wane, and for reasons nobody really understands, they've begun causing problems again.

“In addition to trying to kidnap women directly from Ashcrest, they've also begun attempting attacks on all the Midwestern towns again, which has kept me and my men very busy with protection and defense, while at the same time, trying to ensure the long-term future of our people by bringing more fertile women into our community. And in a more civilized way, we think, than dragging women off by the hair, as The Destroyers would do."

I hadn't exactly
liked
standing up on an auction block, but I had to admit it was preferable to being subjected to violence.

I asked a few questions, and Tom explained a few more things and filled me in on more Ashcrest history, both family and city, until eventually, twinkling lights in the distance, far beyond the car but still very visible, caught my attention. The road had also suddenly become very smooth.

Tom looked toward the twinkling lights with his mouth curving in the slightest grin. "And here's the city, still some miles up ahead. As you can see, we have no problems with electricity; we have our own power plant just a bit to the west. This plant provides power to the thousands of homes, manufacturing centers, and businesses in Ashcrest.

We also have a state-of-the-art medical center, with technologies that surpass even those before The Freeze. However...the living accommodations for the royal family, where you'll be living, aren't quite as modern."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, we still have electricity, plumbing, and all other modern, pre-Freeze comforts, but it's the actual physical structure of the royal residence itself that isn't quite as modern. In fact, if you did any studying in school about a time and place called medieval Europe, it might bring that time and place to mind.

“And that's because the royal residence is a castle. My ancestors had a bit of a flair for the grand and the dramatic."

Just then, the outline of a structure very large and well-lit, looming above the city, came into focus, and my heart nearly skipped a beat.

"I think I see it. And it's absolutely gorgeous."

It really was. As we continued to get closer, I could see lights twinkling at least ten stories high.

There was something awfully exotic and romantic about a castle to me, outright sexy, even. I'd never dreamed I'd ever see one in person, of course. I'd never dreamed that any still actually existed anywhere in the world.