CHAPTERONE
Mid-January
Scottish Highlands
“Mr.Drake!”
Ranulf froze.
Not because the falling snow was landing on and wetting his hair and clothes.Because he and his brothers were snow dragon shifters, and their body temperature always remained slightly higher than a human, no weather affected them, be it hot or cold.
The gently falling snowflakes had already built up to a foot high on the sidewalks, and the road was completely impassable for vehicles.There were also drifts three or four feet high next to buildings and hedgerows.
Sound was muffled by all that snow, that silence feeling otherworldly.As if only this small village existed in the whole of the universe.
It was the sort of weather Ranulf and his two brothers usually reveled in.Hence their choice, centuries ago, to make Scotland their main home.They had other homes around the world to accommodate their necessity to disappear every second or third human generation.But they always inevitably returned to their home in the Scottish Highlands.Their treasure hoard was also there, so there was another incentive to return as soon as possible.
“Mr.Drake!”That female voice sounded closer.“Ranulf, please!I desperately need to speak with you!”
Ranulf’s heart was pounding so fast and so loudly, he could barely think.It didn’t help that he was also trying not to breathe, knowing that when he did, he would be able to smell and taste the rich and heady scent of strawberries.
A scent that belonged uniquely to the young woman he knew was behind him.
The scent of the young woman Ranulf thought might be his mate.
Hishumanmate.
He’d been alerted to that possibility the first time he had breathed in that unseasonable and delicious scent of strawberries wafting in what had been the late December air, before then tracking the origin of that aroma to the village inn.Strawberries had long been Ranulf’s favorite fruit.
When asked, Hunter, the Drake brother who interacted more with humans than Ranulf and Lachlan, had told him that there were no guests staying at the inn right now.However, the daughter of Silvia and Tim Malcolm, the new innkeeper and his wife, was currently home from university for the Christmas and New Year holiday.
The first time Ranulf looked at her from afar, he had scorned even the possibility of the young human woman with the dyed pink hair, sparkling blue eyes, freckles across the bridge of her nose, full and smiling lips, and deliciously voluptuous curves, as beinghisfated mate.
Only to have that self-denial contradicted the moment his gaze was drawn to those curvaceous hips and he was instantly beset with the image of pounding his cock into the dark, wet heat of the channel between her thighs.
He had just as quickly reminded himself of how unsuitable she was to be his mate.It wasn’t only the rebellious color of her hair, but she looked to be only about twenty years old.Far too youthful and vibrant for a dragon shifter who could be grumpy and antisocial at the best of times and was over a millennium old.
In the same way Lachlan and Hunter had thought Belle and Zoey were too young andhumanfor them too, but were now mated to them?his dragon taunted.
Ranulf believed his situation to be completely different from his brothers’.Hewas different.Mainly because he didn’t like humans and avoided them whenever possible.They were chaotic and noisy, and their fragile bodies and lifespan of threescore years and ten was laughable to a creature who had been alive for over a thousand years.
Our mate’s lifespan will become the same as ours once we’re mated.In the same way that Belle’s is now linked to Lachlan’s and Zoey’s to Hunter,his dragon again rumbled its own opinion on the subject, impatient with Ranulf for not having already claimed their mate.
Unfortunately, despite the fierceness of the hunger growing deeper inside him daily to claim his own mate, with Lachlan and Hunter currently lost to the mating thrall, Ranulf was now the only one left to deal with the dragon hunter they knew could expose them all.
Although Hunter believed the reason the man was currently pursuing them so relentlessly had nothing to do with exposing their existence so much as stealing their dragon treasure.
Since their parents’ death six hundred years ago, it had only been Ranulf and his two dragon-shifter brothers against whatever foe—usually dragon hunters, although that had become rarer the more people were educated, followed by the internet encroaching more and more upon their previously private lives—threatened the peaceful and undetected life they led in their remote castle in the Scottish Highlands.
A castle that had necessarily become more and more shielded by the three brothers as the centuries passed, so that, to the human eye, it now more resembled a large manse rather than the castle it really was.
The easy access for twenty-first-century tourism, along with the immediacy of social media, made it difficult to hide an actual castle that wasn’t listed on any map.
Both Belle and Zoey had seen the castle for exactly what it was.
Because they are the dragon shifter mates of our brothers, and our shields do not work on them.
Those dragon shifters and their mates were now hidden away in the network of caves and caverns in the mountain behind Drake House, the place where all the brothers kept their dragon treasure hidden.
