Dragon's Fake Wedding Date (Dragons of Mount Atrox Book 3) Read online

  Dragon’s Fake Wedding Date

  Dragons of Mount Atrox (Book 3)

  A Five Peaks Novel

  Riley Storm

  Dragon’s Fake Wedding Date

  Copyright© 2020 Riley Storm

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, without written permission from the author. The sole exception is for the use of brief quotations in a book review. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real.

  All sexual activities depicted occur between consenting characters 18 years or older who are not blood-related.

  Edited by Trevor Mendham – thecaringeditor.com

  Cover Designs by Kasmit Covers

  Table of Contents

  Dragon’s Fake Wedding Date

  Table of Contents

  Note from the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Other Books by Riley Storm

  About the Author

  Note from the Author

  Hi there!

  Thank you so much for picking up Dragon’s Fake Wedding Date. While this book and series are self-contained and can be read alone, if you want to get the full experience of the Five Peaks world, you would be best off starting with the Dragons of Mount Aterna series and book one, A Mate to Treasure which is linked below.

  Either way, I hope you enjoy!

  -Riley Storm

  Dragons of Mount Aterna

  A Mate to Treasure

  A Mate to Believe In

  A Mate to Protect

  A Mate to Embrace

  Chapter One

  Gayle

  It was a Friday evening at precisely 6:52 when Gayle Weber’s happily planned out life came to an abrupt, screeching halt amid a pile of flames and shattered dreams.

  She didn’t even see it coming.

  Until that point, her evening had been its usual, consistent self. It was Friday. That meant it was date night.

  After getting home from her cubicle day job, a place so very unlike the little dragon gift shop where she worked part-time on the side, Gayle ate a quick snack, showered, and began doing her makeup. Her long-term boyfriend Mike would finish his plumbing work at 5:30 and pick her up at 6:45.

  They had reservations at Climbers, the nicest restaurant in small town Five Peaks. Dinner there, drinks at Peaks Pub, and then some fun back at either her place or his, depending on their weekend plans.

  They’d been doing the same thing for so long, she didn’t even have to text him to confirm that they were still on. She just knew in her heart that he would pick her up. He always did.

  “Tonight’s going to be different though,” she told herself, triple and quadruple checking the way she looked in the mirror, applying some last minute touch-ups to her makeup.

  Gayle wanted it to look perfect tonight. She had a hunch that something extra was going on. Mikey had been a little nervous when she’d called him at lunch. More tense than usual. It wasn’t like him. Which meant something was up.

  Biting her lip to hold back a smile, Gayle forced herself to repeat the same line over and over in her head, to try and get the point home, so that she didn’t overthink things.

  It doesn’t mean he’s going to propose. It doesn’t mean he’s going to propose.

  She’d thought it a hundred times and would think it a hundred more before Mikey knocked on the door. It was important that, if something else happened, she wasn’t upset by it. That wouldn’t be fair to Mikey, though she hoped he was going to propose.

  It had been two years now of dating. Her 30th birthday was on Sunday. Gayle was beyond ready to start the next chapter of her life, and she hoped that Mikey was ready to take that step too.

  Engagement would come first of course, she thought with a happy smile, adjusting one wayward strand of short crimson hair that had gotten caught up in her glittering diamond earrings. They would have a year-long engagement, after which there would be a wedding.

  Her best friend, Karen, would be the maid of honor, of course, Gayle thought with a smile. The two of them went back over a decade, and she couldn’t imagine anyone else by her side. It would be a medium-sized wedding—fifty people, maybe seventy-five. No more than that.

  The dress had already been picked out in her mind, and she couldn’t wait to have her father walk her down the aisle to Mikey, where they would begin their lives together.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Kostwick,” she said to herself in the mirror, adjusting her cleavage as it shifted in the flowing black dress she’d donned for the occasion. “Certainly has a wonderful ring to it.”

  She smiled even wider at the word ring.

  It was after the wedding though, that she was looking to perhaps the most. Gayle wanted to be a mother. She longed to hold her babe in her arms and look down upon the future and watch them grow into their own woman or man. The miracle of life, and she was going to be the one who created it.

  A shiver of excitement ran through her at the thought.

  She glanced at the clock as there was a knock at the door.

  6:46.

  Grinning to herself, she all but darted for the front entrance, forcing herself to slow. She didn’t want anything to fall out of place. When she opened that door, Gayle wanted Mikey to look on her with wide eyes as he took in his—hopefully—future wife.

  Undoing the deadbolt, she opened the door slowly, smiling wide as Mikey stood there looking nervous and uncomfortable. Like a man about to propose. He shouldn’t be nervous though. It wasn’t like there would be any surprise to her answer. He had to know she would say yes.

  The smile faltered and then died amid a look of confusion as the door opened wider to reveal Karen, her best friend.

  “Hey,” Karen said with a happy smile.

  Was this part of Mikey’s plan, perhaps? Was Karen going to ‘tag along’ for some lame reason and then end up being the photographer when he proposed? That would just be the sweetest, cutest thing ever!

  “Hi,” Gayle said back after an eternity, wondering why Mikey still hadn’t said anything.

  The trio stood at the door awkwardly for another long handful of seconds, until Karen nudged Mikey with her hip, and Gayle’s boy
friend jerked his head up.

  “Can we come in?” he said, his face stretching in what might have politely been called a smile. “We need to talk.”

  Boy, he’s so nervous he looks like he’s sweating. This must be it!

  In her own home wasn’t precisely where Gayle had imagined getting proposed to, but maybe Mikey had something special in mind. She didn’t want to ruin it, so she stepped back from the door, gesturing graciously for the pair to enter.

  They walked back into her living room, which was off to the left from the front door. At his urging, Gayle took a seat in the center of her couch, while Mikey and Karen stood opposite her. He wanted her seated, in preparation. So adorable!

  Except, the coffee table is in the way. Is he going to move it? What’s going on here?

  Then, they all just waited. In silence. Gayle wanted to speak up, to say something, but this wasn’t her time, wasn’t her moment. She had to wait for Mikey to make the next move. Didn’t she?

  Then Karen nudged Mikey. Again. With her hip. Again.

  It was a strangely familiar, almost intimate gesture. Gayle hadn’t quite caught it the first time, so caught up in seeing Mikey and thinking of a ring, but this time it happened right at her eye level.

  “Um, so listen, Gayle,” Mikey said, and her attention snapped back to her boyfriend. “This is, well, it wasn’t planned. Nobody expected it, you know.”

  Gayle’s smile faded, slowly being replaced with a frown at the odd, uncomfortable stammering from Mikey. Surely, he’d rehearsed what he was going to say a hundred times, right? Was he just making this up as he went along?

  “What are you talking about, Mikey?” she asked, interrupting him, hoping to give him a chance to recover and find his stride. This wasn’t the proposal she wanted or had dreamed about.

  Maybe it’s not a proposal after all.

  Mikey fell silent, looking everywhere around her house except at Gayle. He was actively avoiding looking at her, and that started to make Gayle feel uneasy.

  “It was a surprise,” Mikey said and then stopped.

  Beside him, Karen sighed, and Gayle switched her focus to her friend, wondering if she would be able to help Mikey get himself together.

  There was movement between the two, and Gayle watched as Karen slid her fingers through Mikey’s, holding them tight in a move too natural to not have been practiced.

  “Listen, Gayle,” Karen said, smiling widely. “I don’t want you to get mad over this, because you’re my best friend and I love you, but you need to know. Mikey and I are in love, and we want to be together.”

  Gayle went still. The wall clock off to her right ticked loudly as each second went by. With a slow strangeness, Gayle turned her head to look at it.

  6:52.

  She watched it for a long time, the long, thin second-hand moving swiftly around in a circle.

  Silence reigned.

  Mikey and I are in love and we want to be together. The words echoed in her head.

  Silence filled the room.

  We want to be together. Her eyes dropped back to their clasped hands, fingers intertwined comfortably with each other.

  Gayle stared in silence.

  Karen opened her mouth to speak.

  Gayle shot to her feet.

  “What the fuck?!”

  Chapter Two

  Rann

  The loudest sound was that of his teeth grinding together.

  With an effort, Rann relaxed his jaw, forcing himself to be patient as the team deployed, surrounding the condemned warehouse down near the rail yard. It was hard though. A lot was riding on this raid.

  His informant had called up Rann earlier that day with word that unusual activity had been spotted at the old two-story building that originated in the early days of the small mountain town of Five Peaks. It was the best tip that he and the other dragons had been given about vampire activity in weeks.

  They needed it. All their patrols and searching had been for naught. Ever since Pietro had managed to kill two of the vampires in a brutal fight, there had been zero sightings, zero information that might lead the dragons to find the creatures from the Otherworld.

  It’s high time we kicked their asses out of here. They don’t belong on Earth. That’s our domain, and the humans are under our protection.

  Rann’s lips pulled back in a silent snarl as the team crept forward in the shadows of late twilight, hopping from cover to cover as they approached.

  He frowned and motioned to Jacen, the team member on his left, urging him to push out wider, around the far side of the junction control box that sat between two sets of rails. The box was large enough that several figures could easily hide in its shadow and go unseen if the dragons passed on the near side.

  Jacen responded without question and pushed out wider, while Rann and Pietro closed from their original angles. Rann breathed a sigh of relief at that. Usually, their team leader, Kladd, put Pietro in charge when the team had to split up, but recently Rann had been assigned that position. Although he felt comfortable, and in fact was actively seeking more of a leadership position both on the team and in clan Atrox as a whole, he was still unsure how his orders would be received in the field.

  The team swarmed across the rail yard as they closed. Rann spied movement on the far side, but it was Trent, another member of the team. That meant Kladd’s team was in position. Another ten seconds went by as they waited for Jacen to clear the junction box and crouch down behind an abandoned flatcar.

  Everyone was ready. Now they just had to wait for Kladd’s signal and—

  A burst of fire as bright as a miniature sun shot up from behind the building as Kladd gave the order for the team to storm the building.

  They went in hard, merciless, and cold, scales of a variety of colors rippling out from under their skin to coat the dragons in an armor harder than steel and stronger than Kevlar. Fire, frost, and lightning gathered in palms as Pietro reared back and blew the nearest door in, stepping back to recover his balance while Rann followed the door inside, eyes scanning the room to ensure that it was clear of enemies.

  Vampires could hide in the slightest of shadows, wrapping themselves in the darkness, but the fire in Rann’s palms shone bright into even the deepest corners, removing any potential hiding spot.

  “Clear,” he growled as the rest of his team filed in after him and they spread out through the old concrete and stone building.

  “Clear,” Jacen echoed as he burst into a side room, lightning running up and down his arms, clearing the area of any shadows.

  They proceeded room by room, working as a smoothly oiled machine, until they came up short around a corner where Kladd and his half of the team were standing in the hallway.

  “Anything?” Kladd asked.

  “Nothing,” Rann spat. “I don’t get it. This place doesn’t even look like anyone but the demo crews have been through.”

  The building was condemned, deemed too unsafe to use, and at some point soon, it would be brought down. It was the perfect spot for vampires to make a nest, but as far as Rann could tell, they had never been here. There was no evidence anyone had lived here.

  “What did your contact tell you?” Kladd asked, his voice holding back the anger visible in his eyes.

  Rann faced his team leader. It wasn’t the first shoddy piece of intelligence that had come their way, and it wouldn’t be the last. In their desperate search to find the vampires before they grew stronger, the dragons had to follow up every bit of information that came their way. If they didn’t, and the vampires were able to increase their strength, eventually they would be able to challenge the dragons.

  And that would be bad for everyone, especially the humans who would inevitably get caught in the crossfire.

  “One of my informants, Jed,” he rumbled. “Bit of a transient, but not off his rocker. I’ll follow up with his boss, see what the hell they were talking about.”

  “Good,” Kladd said tightly. “Because this stinks.” />
  Rann frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, he obviously imagined what he was seeing. Nobody has been living or plotting out of here, that’s for certain. We didn’t miss anything that obvious, and we searched every room.”

  “So did we,” Rann confirmed.

  “And no evidence of activity, vamp or otherwise.”

  “Just the demo crews,” Rann said with a shrug and then paused.

  Kladd came to the realization at the same time.

  “Were we set up?” Rann hissed. “Did they send us here on purpose?”

  Kladd jerked upright. “Everyone out!” he barked.

  The team scattered instantly, everyone coming to the same conclusion as Rann and Kladd. If there was no sign of anyone here but the human demolition crews, that meant one thing, and one thing only.

  A trap.

  Jacen and Pietro went for the nearest door.

  Kladd, Trent, and Iro, the final team member, simply put their heads down and made their own exits through the walls.

  Rann gathered his strength and went up, wings sprouting from his back as he burst through the ceiling, desperately trying to escape as the building went up in flames around him. Fire blossomed everywhere, and the explosion reached up to swallow him whole.

  It had been a trap after all.

  Chapter Three

  Gayle

  “What the fuck?” she repeated, her voice growing in volume and anger as she switched her astonished gaze back and forth from her boyfriend to her best friend.

  The two kept their hands locked together while Mikey shifted uncomfortably, and Karen gave her a sympathetic glance. It was amazing how Karen could both simultaneously destroy her life and look ready to close the distance and help comfort her over the situation. Gayle couldn’t even begin to imagine the thought process necessary that would allow Karen to think Gayle would want her anywhere near her.

  One thing had become abruptly clear to her: They were not friends. Not anymore.

  “Are you two serious right now?” she asked, her voice dropping to a hiss, like a snake coiled, warning approaching predators that they should back away or get bitten. “This isn’t some kind of sick practical joke that you’re playing on me?”