The Lightning Dragon's Mate (Hideaway Cove Book 3) Read online

  The Lightning Dragon's Mate

  Hideaway Cove Book 3

  Zoe Chant

  Copyright © 2022 by Zoe Chant

  Cover design © 2022 Marie Hodgkinson

  All rights reserved.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  EPILOGUE

  More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant

  Special Sneak Preview

  1

  Apollo

  Gemstones glittered in piles on the workbench’s pitted surface. Dragon shifter Apollo sifted through them, admiring the play of light on the faceted jewels. They were every shade of the rainbow: brilliant citrine, rich garnet, lush amethyst, ranging from midnight hues to the barest blush of color.

  Come on, he willed his inner dragon silently. Out loud, he murmured: “And here I thought dragons were obsessed with sparkly things. Is there something you’re not telling us, Harrison?”

  The brown-haired, broad-shouldered man standing next to him huffed. “Don’t get any ideas.” Harrison Galway’s inner griffin glared out through his eyes, sharpening their mild hazel to something ferocious and possessive.

  Apollo raised his hands in mock surrender. “Don’t worry. My motives are entirely pure.”

  It was the truth.

  And that was the problem.

  He was a dragon shifter, for God’s sake. If the other dragons he’d met were anything to go by, he ought to be in a constant state of half-crazed gold-lust, scheming to get his hands on as much treasure as he could carry, and then more. He should have seen Harrison’s piles of glittery loot, snatched them up, and flown away cackling over the burned bridge of their friendship.

  It wasn’t as though he didn’t look the part. In his dragon form, he was magnificent: serpentine body, powerful wings, and gleaming scales like sun-touched gold. His human form wasn’t too shabby, either. He kept his long blond hair tied back, which drew attention to his aquiline bone structure and the unearthly gold of his eyes. The only other dragon shifter in his family—his grandfather—wore a three-piece suit for all occasions, but that wasn’t really the vibe of Apollo’s chosen seaside home, so he did his best with well-broken-in casual shirts and jeans that hugged his swimmer’s torso and narrow hips.

  Draconic vanity—tick. But…

  You’re sure we don’t want to steal his treasure? Even a little bit? Even just one piece?

  His dragon let out a bored sigh and shuffled its wings. Apollo tried not to let his own shoulders slump.

  Right. I get it. ‘Treasure? What treasure?’ It’s only a pile of jewels, after all. His chest tightened. Why would we be interested in anything like that?

  “They’re not for me.” Harrison paced around the workshop, ruffling his hair with one hand and shooting unsure looks at the gemstones he’d scattered across the bench. “They’re for the baby.”

  “Uh-huh.” Apollo exchanged a look with Arlo, who was doing his usual lurk-scruffily-in-the-corner routine.

  Harrison must have sensed doubt in their raised eyebrows. He shoved his hands in his pockets and said gruffly, “We don’t know if the baby will be a shifter or not, but Lainie’s dad was a magpie shifter. She wants to recognize that heritage. And I—”

  “You’re nesting.” Arlo’s sapphire-blue eyes sparkled.

  “I’m not nesting.”

  “What do you call it, then? You’ve spent the last three months driving your mate up the wall re-renovating your newly built house, and now you’re going to glue sparkly rocks up in the nursery?” Arlo crossed his arms and leaned against the wall, grinning. “Your griffin side’s coming out. You’re nesting.”

  “This from the man whose wolf rustled him up a ready-made pack.”

  Arlo’s grin became wider. “Yeah. Great, isn’t it?”

  Apollo’s eyes slid to the gemstones again.

  Harrison and his mate Lainie were expecting their first child. Arlo had Jacqueline and their pack of adopted seal shifter kids.

  And what did he have? Not even a hoard. Worse than that, he didn’t even want a hoard.

  He must have lost control of his cheerful expression for a moment, because as Harrison returned to the bench to grumble over his gemstones, Arlo pulled away from his corner and clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Don’t worry, Sparky. It’ll be your turn soon enough. There’s someone out there who wants to swim around in a pile of gold coins with you like Scrooge McDuck, and when it happens, we’ll be here to heckle from the sidelines.”

  “What would I do without friends like you?” Apollo feigned the sarcasm his friend expected from him, but the words felt like sawdust in his mouth.

  Arlo had hit on the exact thing that kept him awake at night, wondering what was wrong with him. The fear that his turn wasn’t coming. That it never would. That he had no mate waiting for him. No perfect other half, a lover and companion precious beyond all others. No one to cherish, to protect and love and build a life with.

  How else could he explain his dragon’s lack of interest in collecting a hoard?

  Dragons didn’t collect hoards out of greed or a desire for shiny things. The whole point of having treasure was so that when they finally met their soulmate they could heap it at their feet, shower them with jewels and wonders and show they were worthy mates. The gold-lust was an evolutionary drive.

  But Apollo didn’t have any gold-lust. He had no instinctual need to gather treasure. His own hoard was still as pathetically small as it had been when he left home aged eighteen, as all dragons did, to seek his fortune.

  He had put on a good act back then. Chased rumors of hidden treasures across the globe, raced other dragons to find long-lost caches of gold and jewels, because that was what you did.

  But when push came to shove—when he had to choose between facing off against another young dragon in battle for some lost treasure and lying on a tropical beach—he always chose the beach.

  That was how he had ended up here in Hideaway Cove, working with Harrison and Arlo. He had been chasing a story about a long-lost smugglers’ treasure of gold coins and jewelry. And for once, he was the only dragon in search of it. He had told himself that was a good thing: no chance for his lack of gold-lust to take over and let him give it up to someone else. Once he found it, it would be his.

  He had tracked rumors and stories and mentions in old newspaper clippings and local histories up and down the state. Finally, he had landed in Hideaway Cove. A small fishing village that from the outside looked no different from the other quaint little towns this far up the east coast. But once he arrived…

  Hideaway Cove was a shifter town. A sanctuary for shifters, safe from the human world. In all his travels, Apollo had only rarely come across communities where shifters could live openly while keeping their true natures secret from the hum
an world. He had swum and sunbathed in dragon form on hundreds of remote, isolated beaches around the world—but there was something special about doing so on a non-remote beach where you could buy an ice cream sundae afterwards.

  Hideaway Cove wasn’t exactly tropical, but it had a beach, and a great restaurant and incredible ice cream parlor, and friendly locals, and what with one thing and another, Apollo had never ended up finding the rumored smugglers’ treasure and had never left, either.

  And despite living in a shifter sanctuary town, he still kept secrets from his friends here. His lack of draconic instincts. His fears about not having a mate.

  It would be one thing if he didn’t want a mate. Some shifters didn’t. They were content on their own. But not him. It had started as a twinge of jealousy when Harrison found Lainie, and the twinge had grown to an ache after Arlo found Jacqueline and their ready-made pack. He saw how happy his friends were, how their mates filled a hole in their lives they hadn’t even noticed before they found them. He wanted that for himself.

  But if he didn’t want gold, treasure, a hoard worthy of offering the woman who was destined to be his… maybe she didn’t exist.

  He made sure none of his thoughts showed on his face. He was never one to turn down a pity party normally—he was famous for milking it when he over-extended his magical powers and exhausted himself—but this was private. He didn’t want his friends’ pity. He would rather they never found out at all.

  Arlo shot him a watchful look. Damn his wolfish senses. Arlo was quiet, and often came off as sullen or grumpy, but he had a nasty habit of noticing things.

  Now would be a good time for that seal pack to come and distract their alpha. Apollo closed his eyes briefly and concentrated on his dragon’s magic.

  Here was something he was good at. Something no other dragon he’d met had ever talked about, and which he’d never dared to ask his grandfather about. His draconic powers. Apollo had the ability to weave magic through the town he lived in, creating a shining web that strengthened and defended the town. His power shone from every light bulb and hummed in every wire. It made houses cozier and kept food from catching on the stove. It danced invisibly around the perimeter of the town, letting him know whenever someone was about to arrive—very useful for a town of people who didn’t want to advertise the fact that most of them could magically turn into animals.

  Apollo jerked. His dragon’s eyes snapped open inside him, its sudden alertness an electric sizzle beneath his skin.

  Someone was driving across the boundary right now.

  He opened his mouth, ready to let Harrison and Arlo know they had a visitor.

  And then shut it again as his dragon shrieked at him.

  Every scale on its body was standing on end. It was trembling with excitement, pricking its claws against his ribs like an excited puppy.

  Go! it hissed. Quickly!

  Its urgency coiled around him, electric-sharp and so overpowering it took him a moment to figure out what it was talking about.

  He sent a thin thread of his magic to examine what had just passed through the boundary. A car—modern, generic. And inside it…

  Treasure.

  Sparks crackled over his skin. He couldn’t sense what sort of treasure was in the car—just that it was treasure. The most precious, valuable treasure he had ever found.

  And he wanted it.

  At last. Relief flooded through him, followed by a dizzy, buoyant energy. He wasn’t broken, after all. His dragon was as gold-lust-y as the most terrifying dragon he had ever avoided meeting on his travels around the world.

  He had finally found a treasure that he wanted to hunt down. He would have a hoard. And that meant there was someone for him out there. A mate. Someone who he could make as happy as Harrison made Lainie, or Arlo made Jacqueline.

  He opened his eyes.

  Arlo was staring at him oddly. “Hey, Sparky, are you okay? You look like you caught a two-by-four to the head.”

  “Fine. Good. Excellent!” He gathered his magic around him, ready to shift, and tugged his shirt off. “Must dash!”

  “What are you—”

  He didn’t wait to hear the rest of Arlo’s question. Ignoring his friends’ confusion, he hurried outside. He tripped as he kicked his shoes off and almost face-planted on the driveway. Halfway to the road and halfway through pulling his pants off, he realized he had better warn them that—

  His dragon growled at him and he almost fell over again.

  I’m not going to warn them about the treasure, he reassured it. His heart leaped. Not only was his dragon focused on capturing this treasure, it was already jealous of telling anyone else about it, too? This kept getting better and better. All those draconic instincts he had heard so much about but never actually experienced—here they were. His. At last.

  He heaved a deep breath and raised his eyes to the hills that surrounded the bay. Darkness made heavy by thick fog clung to the water and the hillside, broken only by the soft glow of the town lights. His town.

  The fog clung damply to his skin for a breath of time before he shifted.

  His dragon form was magnificent. It was pure gold, with long elegant wings and a gleaming crest that turned into a row of spikes down its spine. Its tail whipped the air and he leapt into the air, ready for the hunt.

  2

  Felicity

  Felicity Park was on her way to ruin people’s lives.

  Back in the office, with her boss eyeing her from the other side of his sarcophagus-like desk, it had seemed simple. Palatable. Doable. But the further away from her workplace she got, and the closer to the lives she was meant to be ruining, the more she wondered if she’d made the wrong choice.

  Which might have seemed like a stupid thing to wonder, but if the last five years had taught Felicity anything, it was that the only wrong choice was disobeying her boss’s orders.

  But… people’s lives.

  But it was her job.

  But literally people’s lives, Fee.

  She bit her lower lip. The voice in her head sounded a lot like her friend Maya.

  But Maya didn’t work for Saint-John Montfort.

  Montfort was the most terrifying person Felicity had ever met. His company, Montfort Industries, was the business equivalent of a bulldozer. It ground other companies to dust and sifted through the remains for anything left that was worth having. Saint-John Montfort himself was more like a shark. If you got in his way, then by the time he was done with you, there wouldn’t be anything left to sift through.

  Five years, she’d worked for him. She’d thought it was incredibly good luck at the time: a temp job as one of Montfort’s rotating stable of personal assistants, assigned to his social calendar. Nobody lasted more than a week in the job. She lasted two. Then a month. Then, suddenly, half a decade, and it was too late to get out.

  Five years ago, everyone except Felicity knew that if you lasted a week under Montfort, you got your pick of secretarial jobs anywhere else in the city, because people assumed that if you could cope with him that long, you could cope with anything. But that was then. These days, if Montfort got rid of you, good luck sifting through what was left of his competitors to find another job.

  And it wasn’t only her job that he controlled. Her chest tightened, a steel trap pressing harder and harder around her ribs. He owned her apartment building. She was pretty sure he’d bought out her student loan.

  She shouldn’t even be thinking this, because he had the creepiest habit of—

  Her phone rang. She jumped, which was annoying, because she’d known this was going to happen, and tried to shrug off cold, prickling dread as she accepted the call on the car’s Bluetooth.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  “Lily,” he barked. Felicity didn’t even blink. She remembered Lily, a sweet white woman who’d smuggled Felicity a coffee on her first day and run sobbing out of the building two days later. She wasn’t sure Montfort had even noticed. He certainly hadn’t updated h
is internal Rolodex. “How long are you going to keep me waiting this time?”

  It was important not to pause, or take a deep breath, or try to find your center. Montfort saw through that sort of shit in a hot second. The trick was to leap on board whatever horrible conversation he’d decided he wanted to have, run to keep up, and pick up the pieces later in your own time.

  Oh, and ignore how every instinct in your body was screaming at you to run away, as though he was an ogre from a fairytale and not just a horrible boss.

  I’m fine. I’m totally coping.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Montfort. I haven’t made as good time as I expected. I’m still on the road, approximately ten minutes away from the town.”

  At least, she hoped she was. The fog was so thick she couldn’t see ten feet in front of her, which was why she was running late. Not that she could tell Mr. Montfort that. She just had to hope that ten minutes wasn’t too optimistic an estimate.

  If only her GPS were working. It had led her this far, from the snarl of city traffic to open highways to the all-but-invisible road she was on now, which was meant to be following the coast but felt as though it was turning back on itself in circuitous knots. Her car’s location kept jumping back and forth on the screen as though it wasn’t sure what was going on either.

  It was too much to hope for that the phone signal would be as unreliable as the GPS, but to her surprise, Mr. Montfort took her excuse in stride.

  “Fine. Don’t call me as soon as you get in. Go prop up the bar, or whatever passes for a bar in a place like that. Get someone to buy you a drink and tell you their life story. We find their weak points, we know where to put the pressure.”

  To make people uncomfortable enough to sell up. Because they weren’t. Montfort’s usual tactics of buying up mortgages and forcing the owners out hadn’t worked. His much less preferred tactic of offering cash for what he wanted hadn’t worked, either. Which was why she was here. Because she had spent the last five years smoothing every feather he’d ruffled in a hundred-mile radius, so why not send her a few thousand miles to work her magic on some grumpy locals, too?