Dragon Fever
Masters of the Flame: Book 1
DRAGON FEVER
Elsa Jade
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He must find the heart of his dragon treasure.
She will be the treasure of his dragon heart.
The Nox Incendi dragons are dying. In a mysterious faux castle on the outskirts of Las Vegas, Rave Dorado has been struggling for centuries to find a cure for the creeping cold that is slowly turning his dragonkin to stone. Until his fiery gaze falls on a curvy, plucky female whose purity of spirit lights a flame in his icy soul…
Piper Ramirez knew a girls’ night out with her two best friends at the world’s most exclusive casino would be beyond belief…but she had no idea just how far. Inexplicably drawn to the dark and sexy Rave, she’ll roll the dice and take a chance giving him her body, though he is too much of an enigma to truly trust.
But the Nox Incendi shifters aren’t the only one with secrets in Sin City. Piper will have to open her eyes to a strange new world and Rave will have to open his heart if they want to survive the dragon fever.
Copyright © 2016 by Elsa Jade
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as factual. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be scanned, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
Chapter 1
“Ladies, step into the Keep”—with the touch of a button, the doorman flung open the wide double doors into the casino—“and enter a world of fabulous treasure and mystery.”
On the verge of entering, Piper Ramirez hesitated. The only mystery was what on earth she was doing at this crazy place.
Ahead of her, the gaping hallway was pitch-black except for crystal pendants dangling from above like menacing teeth, then sconces in the stone walls flared to life. Piper bit back a gasp. The flames couldn’t be real. And if they were, no way would she stay in a place with such a fire hazard.
She glanced uncertainly at her friends. Anjali had directed the bellboys to their bags and was standing on the sidewalk with her red head tipped back, staring up at the façade.
Though the Keep was on the very edge of Vegas city limits, it rivaled anything on the Strip for sheer size, so Piper didn’t blame Anj for gawking. Meanwhile, Esme was just getting out of the limo, zipping her Hermes purse. She’d probably tipped the driver despite the fact the man was employed by Esme’s stinkin’-rich fiancé to squire them around on their last long weekend as free women.
Free
. Even though Esme was the one getting married, it felt to Piper as if all three of them were trapped in ways that just a few years ago they swore they’d never allow. Esme was letting her wealthy family guilt her into marrying one of their even wealthier business associates. Anjali was slaving at her nutty uncle’s head shop instead of pursuing her art.
Only Piper was sticking to her post-college game plan: turn her chemical engineering degree into a good, steady job, and never again let anyone tell her what she could or couldn’t be.
But even she felt like she wasn’t quite…there. Like she was still missing something. And her edginess was making her all kinds of confused when she was supposed to be the laid-back one in their friendship trio.
Now this was her last chance to remind her friends of the promises they’d made—not to each other or anyone else, but to themselves.
First order of business—Piper glanced sidelong at Anjali who had finally stepped up beside her in the casino doorway—get an ally.
“The Keep keeps it all,” Anjali murmured. “What kind of casino reminds its marks that the house always wins the ‘fabulous treasure’?”
“An honest one?” Piper mused. “Or one that knows that people always think the rules don’t apply to them.”
Anjali smirked at her in agreement. Anj might’ve been dragged back into her old haunts when her uncle needed someone to watch his shop, but at least she was wearing the braided ring with the inset fire opal she’d designed back in their first year of living together. So she must still remember some of those dreams they’d shared over raw cookie dough and the top-shelf scotch none of them had ever quite liked.
Piper twisted the matching ring—the same as Anj’s except for the copper-flecked sunstone in the middle—on her own finger as she shifted her worried gaze to Esme, skipping down her friend’s pale, too-thin frame to her elegant French manicure. On her left hand, Esme had that god-awful ginormous engagement diamond. On the other hand…nothing. When had she ditched the obsidian-inlaid ring Anj had made for her? Probably Lars “the ash-hole” Ashcraft had insisted that his rock be the only one marking her.
“Ugly thing doesn’t even sparkle,” Piper grumbled.
“Ez’s ring?” Anjali huffed out a breath. “I know, right? It’s gotta be almost three carats, and it sits there like a boiled puffball mushroom.”
“Maybe we can get her to hock it for dollar bills and we’ll go to that male revue we saw on the billboards coming into town.” Piper kept her tone light, but she watched her friend closely. Anjali had always been the first to suggest any party pandemonium; she claimed she was living up to her New Orleans heritage even though she’d left when she was a child.
Anj’s hazel gaze skittered away. “I think we have a spa day tomorrow.”
A spa day? Piper always felt uncomfortable being fawned over by paid strangers. And Anjali’s red Creole dreadlocks weren’t going to get any love in a Nevada spa. “Ez can’t
be
any more polished,” she protested. “This is our last chance—” She bit back the rest of her warning when their friend finally joined them in the casino entry, still staring down at her purse.
“I know I had it,” she muttered.
“What’s up, girl?” Anjali threaded her arm through Esme’s.
“I can’t find my phone.”
“You had it on the plane,” Piper said. “You texted Lars. Like, a dozen times.”
“I must’ve left it.” Esme turned toward the limo, her waist-length silver-blond hair swinging like a veil with the urgency of her motion. “I have to go back.” The pitch of her voice rose. “He hates when he can’t reach me.”
Piper snagged her other arm. “You don’t need it right now. The whole point of a bachelorette weekend is to get you out of each other’s hair for a bit, you know? Put some mystery back in your relationship.”
Although it was another damned mystery to her why Esme had agreed to Lars’s proposal in the first place.
So many mysteries, so little time.
When Esme dragged her stylish leather booties, Piper tugged a little harder. “It’s a private charter plane. No one is going to take your phone. It’ll be waiting for you when we go back.”
Unless she could convince her friend to call off the wedding. And then she sort of suspected Ez would have to get an unlisted number.
A thread of unease made her shiver, or maybe it was just the late-winter breeze snaking down from the dark desert mountains beyond the last lighted street. Piper spent her days testing for the presence of just a few microns of toxic or infectious pollutants in water samples, but she knew Esme’s privileged world was even more micromanaging and potentially lethal. She wasn’t going to let the heartless bastards suck the very soul out of her cheerful, gentle friend.
“Ez,” she wheedled. “If you need a phone, you know you can always borrow ours.” In fact, she’d already decided she was going to make Ez look at the lengthy, numerous, and progressively creepier texts Lars had been sending her—stuff about how much Esme needed to rest before the wedding, how they shouldn’t drink too much, all culminating last week in a demand that Piper report to him if anything went awry during their girls’ night out. At which point she’d decided with finality that
no boys allowed
was going to be the rule for the weekend. “We’ll be together the whole time so we can just share our minutes. Okay?”
After a moment, Esme’s backward lean relented although she let out a shuddering breath. “Without my phone, I won’t know what was scheduled for us.”
Anjali snorted as arm in arm they passed the flickering sconces. “Since when do you keep a schedule, Miss Sleeps-‘Til-Noon? Schedules are Miss Up-At-Dawn’s thing.”
Piper stuck out her tongue. “At least we
know
what time it is, Miss Clocks-Are-a-Construct-of-the-Patriarchy.”
“Well, they are,” Anjali said. She sketched one fingertip skyward, all dozen tin bangles on her wrist falling toward her elbow with a clatter. “The arc of the celestial bodies and the flow of the seasons should be enough to guide our days and nights.”
“Uh huh,” Piper and Esme said together. They exchanged glances with matching smirks and it was Anjali’s turn to stick out her tongue.
Laughing in a way that gave Piper hope she could remind her friends of the dreams they’d forgotten, they passed another doorway of crystal stalagmites and stalactites and stepped into the casino proper.
All three gasped together this time.
Piper had read that the Keep was one of Vegas’s best-kept secrets. Terribly exclusive—and, she figured, no doubt insanely expensive—the casino catered to the kind of high rollers that rolled over other high rollers. But for all the deathly seriousness of the insane stakes at play, the Keep still abided by the Vegas rule of lavish splendor. Half primitive mountain stronghold, half high-tech Fortress of Solitude, the Keep seemed like it didn’t really know what it was trying to be. Although from the steady line of gleaming Rolls Royces and custom muscle cars that had all but pushed their serviceable limo out of the way, obviously the clientele knew what
they
wanted: inside and to give up all their money. Piper had said it was silly for their little bachelorette party to stay there, since none of them gambled, but Esme had said Lars set it up and would be disappointed if they didn’t enjoy themselves.
Piper just
knew
she had to get her friend to break it off. Between Esme’s family and Lars, the sweet, caring roommate who’d opened her awesome apartment to one scholarship student and one dropout had become a ghost of herself, drifting and withdrawn and more pale than ever. Piper wasn’t going to let that go unchallenged, even though she’d always thought herself the least of the three, the younger sister tagalong, mostly invisible beside Esme’s bright beauty and Anjali’s dark glamour. Once upon a time, they’d saved her when she’d been young and homesick and thinking of giving up.