Ranulf (Snow Dragons Hunting #3)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

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.

His human mate.

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 being his fated 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 and human for them too, but were now mated to them? his dragon taunted.

Ranulf believed his situation to be completely different from his brothers’.

He was 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.

Belle and Zoey had come into their lives while the brothers were searching for the person who was responsible for the death of a local young man who’d been killed after he had stolen an eight-hundred-year-old journal written by a girl who had once lived in this very village.

Ranulf remembered that meeting very well. The beautiful girl had been tied up and left as a sacrifice to the “dragon gods” by the villagers as an enticement for the dragons to ensure their harvest and hunting was good that year.

Superstitious nonsense!

Ranulf and his brothers were dragon shifters who could choose to be dragons or warriors. They were not cannibals. Which was why they had untied the girl and flown her to the safety of a convent far from the village.

It had been a shock to Ranulf and his brothers to discover, all these centuries later, that the nun had learned to read and write. Having done so, she had then written in one of her journals about the dragon warriors who had saved her life.

A journal that Belle, now Lachlan’s mate, had bought in a house sale without having any idea of its importance.

The same eight-hundred-year-old journal that was now in the hands of the modern-day dragon hunter who was searching for them in the area where the nun had said she had met them: in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands.

In this very part of the Scottish Highlands, to be exact.

Hunter, the family tech expert, had tracked the dragon hunter to his home in Cornwall from the exchange of emails on the now-deceased young man’s laptop.

The content of those emails also revealed that the two men were to meet once the journal was in the thief’s possession, where he’d expected to hand it over and be paid.

Instead of receiving payment for the journal, the younger man had been horrifically murdered by the dragon hunter. The killer had then returned to his home in Cornwall, with the journal in his possession.

He had just as quickly disappeared after Hunter had tracked him to that remote home, and they had not been able to find any trace of him since.

Hunter believed, after learning that Edgar Wallis had flown out of Cornwall in his helicopter, that the man had gone to ground for the moment and would not reappear until he was ready to do so.

It had been almost a week since his disappearance, and despite using their dragon-enhanced senses, they hadn’t been able to find a single trace of his scent.

Lachlan and Hunter had both tried to fight their need to mate, despite how painful that denial was for them and the women with whom they were in love. Finally, Lachlan could stand it no longer, and he had given in to that driving need to be with Belle. Followed by Hunter and Zoey a week later.

Which was why, a week after that, Ranulf was still doing everything he could to avoid being anywhere near the woman with the enticing scent of strawberries.

To allow himself to feel the inner frenzy of the lust and possessiveness for his mate was the very last thing that he needed to happen right now.

But just hearing this young woman’s voice clearly for the first time and not distorted through the thick glass, as it had been when he had watched her through the windows of the inn where she helped her parents by working in the bar in the evenings, Ranulf was unable to continue to deny that she truly was his human mate.

A mate who the wild clamoring of his dragon inside him said he wouldn’t be able to resist for too much longer.

During all the centuries they had been alive, the three Drake brothers had always assumed, when they thought of it at all, that their mate must be a female dragon shifter.

And as there weren’t any of those left in the world, the brothers had resigned themselves to a life of solitude with only each other for company.

Belle and Zoey, both human, had shown them how wrong they had been to think that way.

Ranulf couldn’t have been more pleased for his two brothers. But the possibility of there being a third human mate, one meant just for him, had seemed extremely remote.

Except for the obsession he had felt, these past few weeks, to observe the young woman with the vibrant pink hair, the freckles across her nose, and the voluptuous curves that had aroused and continued to arouse him the moment he so much as set eyes on her.

Ranulf still remembered his feeling of inner panic, a distress he had managed to hide from his brothers when, earlier in the New Year, Hunter had returned to Drake House and told them that a search was being organized for a girl who had gone missing from the village.

Ranulf had instantly jumped to the conclusion that the girl was the pink-haired beauty who smelled of strawberries and whom he couldn’t stop thinking about.

He had only learned later that it was Belle, Lachlan’s fated mate, who had gone missing.

But for the short time Ranulf had thought the missing girl was the one with pink hair, he had felt a tight heaviness in his chest that had threatened to choke him.

Hearing his name now on his mate’s lips, knowing she was standing only feet behind him, Ranulf knew he had no choice but to turn and face the beautiful young woman who had the power to literally bring him to his knees.