Heartflame

A stubborn witch. A rare red dragon. A bond he doesn’t dare name… And a betrayal that brings a whole world down.

Quill:
I don’t chase legends. I chase mileage.
Run the course, go to class, keep my head down. Graduate, go home, and drag my parents’ failing potion shop into this century. That’s the plan. I’ve never needed a better one.
Then Aeron Pyre walks through the gates.
A red dragon — the first at Widdershins in two hundred years, grandson of the dragon who runs the Elder Council, and so far up his own tail he can’t see daylight. The entire academy loses its mind over him. But I want nothing to do with him.
Apparently that makes me the most interesting person on campus, because now he’s on my running route. Across the table in the library. In the doorway of every room I walk into, smirking like he already knows how this ends.

He says he’s going to make me beg for it. What he won’t say is why he’s started looking at me like I’m something he’s terrified of losing.

Aeron:
Dragons choose once. One mate, one time, out of a life that runs for centuries.
I’m eighty-five, practically a teenage, and planning to spend the next eighty exactly like the first. No titles, no politics, no promises, no committment. Then I ended up in the dark with a mouthy ginger witch who hates everything about me, and a word surfaced in me like it had been waiting there since I hatched.
Mate.
He can’t know. Not while he still thinks this is my ego talking, because the truth is so much worse than arrogance. If I’m right, he belongs to me for the rest of his life.
And a witch’s life is a blink to a dragon.
The academy treats me like a trophy. My grandfather treats me like a message. Quill Aster is the only person here who has never wanted a single thing from me, and that is exactly how I know he’s my mate.
And if that wasn’t enough, now something is testing the wards at Widdershins. Every breach comes harder than the last, every answer from the Elder Council gets thinner, and the people sworn to protect the students seem far more interested in keeping them quiet.
When the wards finally fail, what comes through isn’t the enemy anyone prepared for. And the truth behind it is standing far closer to Aeron than either of them can survive believing.

Heartflame is a dark, high-heat MM paranormal academy romance — enemies to lovers, fated mates, obsessive pursuit, first time, size difference, touch-him-and-die protectiveness, and a hero everyone underestimates right up until he saves them all. Guaranteed HEA.