Ashborne: Defiance (Emberquell Order #1)

His greatest battle isn’t war… it’s wanting her.

Just weeks from an arranged marriage to a man old enough to be her father, Lady Grace Barnslow encounters Voski, a dark, enigmatic dragon rider from a neighboring kingdom—who despises her on sight.

While Grace was born to a world of silk and silver, every privileged choice determined before her birth, Voski is everything the realm admires in a Furyknight: An accomplished man of few words, with intellect and wiles as sharp as his blade, and the casual courage to ride dragons.

He is cold to the point of cruelty, yet Grace is unable to resist his savage allure.

Voski refuses to trust a noblewoman who smiles sweetly in the ballroom, yet navigates the shadows with all the skill of a spy.

When he finds her following him, he intends to return home, leaving her in the velvet cage of the enemy’s castle. But his plan is waylaid when a wild dragon Chooses her—and bonds his dragon.

Together the pair are sucked into the bonfire of a she-dragon’s heat.

Voski goes to war with himself, and the draw of a dragon bond.

Yet, in the wake of his triumph at resisting both, he finds himself standing not on the bloodied field of victory, but in the ashy remains of what might have been.

If he cannot overcome the scars and open his heart, Grace will be lost forever.

Not only to a rejected bond, but to the type of man Voski despises: A noble of power who sees not a woman, but merely a womb… and the prestige riding her blood.