Releasing the Dragon Read online

  Releasing the Dragon

  A Kindred Tales Novel

  Evangeline Anderson

  www.evangelineanderson.com

  Releasing the Dragon, 1st Edition,

  A Kindred Tales Novel

  Copyright © 2018 by Evangeline Anderson

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Art Design © 2018 by Reese Dante

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writers’ imagination or have been used factiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to a retailer of your choice or evangelineanderson.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only.

  Any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  Contents

  Releasing the Dragon

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  The End?

  Sharing a Mate

  An Excerpt

  Sign up for my Newsletter!

  Do you love Audiobooks?

  Also by Evangeline Anderson

  About the Author

  Releasing the Dragon

  A Kindred Tales Novel

  A girl with a painful past

  A warrior with a Dark Half—the Drake locked inside him.

  When they come together and the Drake freed,

  Will it draw them closer together…

  Or kill them both?

  You’ll have to read Releasing the Dragon to find out…

  Back in high school, Annie Michaels was an outcast. Too short and plump with frizzy red hair, glasses, and braces, she was the poster child for unpopular. But now, ten years later, things have changed. Annie is still plus-sized but she’s ditched the glasses and braces and pays to have her hair straightened. She just wants to go to her high school reunion in peace and try to hook up with her old crush—the elusive Christian Wentworth.

  Too bad a tall, dark Kindred warrior has other ideas for her.

  Drugair of the Drake Kindred is annoyed when he starts Dream-Sharing with the luscious little redhead. He doesn’t have time to call a bride and besides, as a member of the Kindred Elite Espionage Corps, his job is too difficult and dangerous to complicate matters with a helpless Earth female. It also doesn’t help that he has a Darker Side—the Drake who lives inside him wants to claim Annie as theirs but Dru does everything he can to suppress it’s fiery desires. He tries to ignore the dreams and finds he can’t…he has to go to Annie.

  But just because she’s been dreaming of Dru doesn’t mean Annie’s willing to drop everything and be his bride. It’s only after he rescues her from the reunion gone wrong that she begins to feel for him—enough that she stows away on his ship and gets caught up in his latest mission, tracking a terrorist to the Shadow Palace in the Maw Cluster millions of light years away.

  While in the Shadow Palace, Annie has to pose as Dru’s x’aan-chow or “sex pet.” This new twist in their relationship brings them closer together but when Annie is threatened, Dru’s Darker Half takes over. When the Drake comes out, will it bring them closer together? Or will they both die as a result?

  You’ll have to read Releasing the Dragon to find out…

  One

  It was Halloween and Annie Michaels was ready for the reunion of her life.

  Why the fifteen-year high school reunion should be held on Halloween was beyond her. It probably had something to do with the influence of Michelle Prouty—who all the boys used to call “Michelle Pretty”—because of her long blonde hair and perfect boobs. Back at Hillsborough High, Michelle had ruled the roost and was always the chair of the party planning committee as well as the head cheerleader and class president. If she decided she wanted to have the fifteen-year reunion at Halloween instead of during the summer like most reunions, she would do it and no one would dare to tell her no.

  Annie didn’t care when the reunion was held though—she had been preparing for the event for a solid year, ever since she’d first gotten the notice from her old high school’s alumni board that the reunion was in the works. Well, almost a solid year, anyway.

  At first she’d been reluctant to go and had almost sent the email directly to her spam folder. Then she’d thought to do a quick FaceBook search for Christian Wentworth and had seen his status was currently “single.”

  Christian was the golden boy of her graduating class—literally. He had hair that looked like melted honey in the sunlight and gorgeous deep blue eyes like the sky. He’d been the captain of the football team and the captain of the chess team—the perfect Renaissance man.

  He was also one of the only guys in her class that had never called Annie “fat” or “four-eyed-freckled-fat-face” or “pig” or “oinker” as in “Little Oinker Annie” which was the nickname Michelle Prouty had hung on Annie freshman year—the name which had stuck all the way through graduation and made her life miserable.

  It had taken Annie years to get over what she went through in high school and when she’d graduated, she had promised herself she was never going back. She’d thrown away her cap and gown—stuffing them into a nearby garbage can before she even left the auditorium where the graduation ceremony was being held. She’d wanted nothing to do with Hillsborough High ever again. In fact, she had only bought a yearbook so she could have a picture of Christian and he was the only one, coincidentally, who had signed it.

  Now she took out the battered Hillsborough High Sentinels book and flipped it open. It fell open naturally to the one page she had looked at over and over, back when she was still a love-struck girl—the page dedicated to Christian with the title: “School Hero in Sports and Smarts.” It had color photos of him in his gray and blue football uniform and also looking intently at a chess board as though he was just about to declare “check!”

  Under a beaming picture of the golden boy himself, Christian had written, “Hey, pretty Annie—you’re a real cool girl. Thanks for all the help in English lit—I’ll never forget you! Love, Chris.”

  It was the “love” part that the teenaged Annie had swooned over, alone in her room on Friday nights when all the other girls had dates. She would lay there on her second-hand pink ruffled bedspread and imagine what her life would be like if she wasn’t stuck with braces and glasses and didn’t have such frizzy red hair. If only her freckles erased themselves and she was the size of Michelle Prouty instead of “the size of a hippo�€