Matched with the Dragon: A Shifter Dating Agency Romance Read online

  It was not so easy. Not soon after joining the elite service, Briana went out on a date with an international businessman. Lila had told her that he was Russian, and therefore should not be so familiar nor obsessed with her former occupation or celebrity status.

  “What makes you think this man may be the right fit?” Briana had asked.

  “He’s middle aged, and therefore more mature. He has been married but does not have kids and usually that is the M.O. of a man ready to settle down and commit. Also, have you seen Russian men? Beautiful!” Briana remembered Lila exclaiming.

  “I’m hesitant.”

  “Don’t worry. You hired me for a reason, right?” Lila asked. “Well, what’s the point if you don’t trust me to do the job you hired me for?”

  Briana had to finally accept that this was true, and if she were serious about living the rest of her life on her own terms and with a true love, she would have to submit to Lila. But, the date ended in disaster. Somehow, even that felt like an understatement! On the surface, the man had seemed like an excellent choice. He was clean and well dressed, with an incredibly handsome face and masculine frame. His accent was interesting, and he had chosen the most elegant restaurant for dinner. It wasn’t until the date actually began that she realized this man was not what she expected.

  He had been aggressive and chauvinistic. More than once, he had stated that he was displeased with her former career and stated that a woman’s place should not have been on the cover of magazines but rather the bedroom. He had also been creepy beyond belief. Briana had thought matchmaking would filter out people that only cared about her appearance, but the second this man had lain his eyes on her, she felt like a possession to be polished and put on a shelf. Between his ravings about the acceptable place in society for women and his greedy ramblings about her appearance, she’d had enough.

  When she had tried to stand up and leave, the man snatched her hand and yanked her into his lap. In shock, she had struggled to stand up, and it was not until she nearly caused a scene that he let her go. In anger, he had followed her out of the restaurant.

  “How dare you reject me!” he had cried out angrily, his face growing red.

  “How dare I—,” she had begun before being cut off by his rantings.

  “You, you young lady, are meant for nothing more than a strong mans bed and kitchen. You will make a nice addition to my compound and you will bend to me!”

  It was in that statement that Briana realized this man was entirely insane. How he had made it past Lila’s various screenings was truly shocking. He was entitled enough to feel that Briana was a possession more than a human. She had never felt more dejected in her entire life than in that moment. She had sought to finally escape her material value, and only fell deeper into the hole. But she hadn’t been prepared for what came next.

  “You will come back to Russia with me. I have more influence and power than any meek woman! Do you know who I am, girl?” he had said, gripping her arm and hissing into her ear. “I will let you turn your back on me now, but I own the Russian underground, and one of these days, you will find yourself being shipped back to Russian without even knowing how it came to be. You may as well accept that I own you from here on out.”

  With that, just as swiftly as the ghastly Russian man had come rolling into her life, he was gone, but not without making the most terrifying threat Briana had ever had lodged against her. She immediately dialed Lila fully outraged.

  Lila immediately tried to contact the man, but somehow all of the contact information she had collected led to disconnected phone lines and obscure Russian villages. Confused about how this man had managed to make his way into her organization, and anxious to understand who he really was, Lila had asked Darian to personally do some dark-web digging on the man.

  What he had found was disturbing to say the least. The man was the kingpin of essentially the Russian mafia. His name was Ivan Petrov, and he hadn’t even used his real name to gain entry into Lila’s services. He had paid double the membership fee and had eagerly provided all the personal information necessary. Knowing the truth of his identity now made it clear how he had so easily worked the system. It also made it clear that his threats against Briana were not empty.

  “Lila! Really Lila? Really?” Briana hissed at Lila in her office the week following the disaster date. “How could you do this…how could you let this happen? What are we going to do? Is this even something the local authorities can manage? Not to mention he didn’t actually physically harm me!”

  “I know this is stressful, Briana, but I think our best course of action is to remain as calm as possible—”

  “Calm! You want me to remain calm! You fed me to a psychopath gangster!” Briana spat out between heaving breaths, terror washing over her.

  “Listen. Are you listening?” Lila asked as Briana covered her face with her hands.

  “Yes,” Briana moaned out.

  “You are right about the local authorities. I submitted my cyber security guy’s findings to the FBI, but it will probably only be logged as a sighting of Petrov in the states to them.”

  Briana blanched at the information before Lila continued, “But! There is a but! I promise no more international clients, and this won’t happen again!”

  “Are you crazy? You think I’m still letting you play matchmaker for me after this?” Briana said with eyes wide.

  “Briana, this was a horrible mistake, but I am going to personally pay for a premium security detail on you, and I can guarantee your safety. This all will most likely blow over! In the meantime, I don’t think that you should let life beat you down and give up so easy in the love department. Let me try to help you, free of charge,” Lila said calmly, like a psychiatrist talking to her patent.

  “I’m not sure about this, Lila. I feel like I can’t catch a break. I had a career that many women would kill for, and it hardly made me happy. In fact, at this moment it seems it has made my life miserable! Now, all I would like is some normalcy in my life, some love and balance, and I get threatened by a Russian mobster!” Briana said, disheartened, again with her face in her hands.

  As she lamented her poor luck, Briana nearly fell out of her chair. She couldn’t believe her ears, but it sounded like Lila was laughing!

  “How dare you!” Briana yelled across Lila’s desk.

  “Briana, honey, you can’t try to tell me that this isn’t comical. You can’t even make this stuff up!”

  Briana sat for a second, paralyzed by Lila’s ability to find humor in the situation. She had abandoned a career in order to find happiness, and the fact that it was thwarted so soon, and after she had thought she had taken all the right steps to achieve what she wanted, she wasn’t sure she still had effort in her heart. Maybe the remote island plan is what she should have gone with. But the more Briana found herself thinking about it, the more she realized that all the resilience she had shown throughout her life could not be broken down now, especially when she needed to keep the strength of her character firm more than ever.

  No, she would not give up. And she would give Lila another chance. She enjoyed the woman’s company, realizing that Lila was potentially the most genuine friendship that she had been able to find. If it could even be considered a friendship.

  “You know, Lila, despite what happened, despite the potential of Petrov continuing to haunt my life, I still want to find love. I can’t view the threats made by Petrov as something that halts my life or pushes it off course. I think I am open to you providing me with another match.”

  “And this time I think I’ll avoid gangsters,” Lila said with a wink.

  “Forget gangsters, tell me about this ‘premium security detail’ you are giving me!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  She was beautiful. Darian could admit to that at least. Her beauty had been just as striking as Lila had made it seem. She was tall and slim, of course like a model. But there was something more to her. She ca
rried curves in all the right places, while still keeping the lean elegance of someone that made their beauty a profession. Her hair was pitch black, dark like a raven, and falling in large rounded curls around her shoulders. Her most striking feature, even visible from across the room, were her seemingly unhuman eyes. They had a pitch-black pupil, with a fiery gold ring rimming it. Her iris was the clearest, lightest blue he had ever seen, but the rim of it was a dark blue, as though holding all the colors of her eyes in a trusting embrace.

  She had the most elegant hands he had ever seen, and her rounded hips cascaded down into lithe thighs and calves. Petite shoulders framed full and rounded breast that set off her ideally thin waist. Her long-lashed gaze was accented by high set cheekbones and a full-lipped dimpled smile as bright as it was alarming in its perfection. Unlike most women, Darian had caught himself more admiring that observing and it was creeping into the pit of his stomach with a slow burn like nothing he had ever felt before.

  He had been following the woman around for several entire days. He had parked his car outside her apartment building starting early in the morning and watched her as she carried out her day to day activities. She did normal things, like went to get coffee at a coffee shop, went to the gym, and went shopping. It is what she was doing right now that confused him most. She was just sitting.

  She had come to a park, and quietly strolled through the pathways until she made herself comfortable on a bench. It appeared as though she was admiring the Japanese maples trees, and Darian couldn’t help but think their brilliant orange leaves were no match for the stoic beauty that sat and watched them.

  He actually was beginning to feel somewhat childish. It was a drizzly day out, and because of this there were no people anywhere around where she had decided to sit. In order to stay out of her sights, he had been forced to duck into the bushes. He couldn’t decide if it was embarrassing or comical that a man capable of transforming into an immensely powerful dragon had been reduced to bush-huddling. Despite the embarrassment of the act, Darian felt like he was looking at a painting, maybe a soft Monet or emotional Renoir.

  There she sat, down the paved path and just off to the side on a wrought iron bench. Her black hair sat stark against the greens and oranges of the park, and her tall posture only allowed the beautiful shape of her body the ebb and flow like it belonged in nature next to all the beautiful flowers and trees.

  Her delicate chin sat angled towards her chest, and she sat with her hands in her lap, palm up in a meditative pose. It was like she wasn’t in any danger at all, the way she ventured off alone and sat so exposed. He could feel the instincts of the beast inside him recoiling against her overt lack of concern for her own safety. Darian stood and watched her, still behind the dense greenery.

  With her eyes gently closed, her black lashes coyly rested across her cheek bones, and her full lips sat in a beautifully calm pout. Watching the soft rise and fall of her chest was like a mother’s lullaby, swaying him into repose. It was that feeling, a feeling of relaxation while he watched Briana, that shocked Darian back to awareness. Calm was hardly the definition of Darian’s day-to-day sentimentalities, yet somehow this stranger had managed to render him defenseless, even if it was just for a split second.

  It was true—this beautiful creature had somehow managed to disarm him. As he again checked his feelings regarding the area around him, he didn’t sense any pending danger, and allowed himself to again settle back into admiring Briana. This time, a different feeling welled in his chest. He felt warmth traveling through his veins, and blood pumping out to his extremities. For seemingly no real reason, Darian felt out of breath.

  He was imagining what it would have been like to walk up to Briana in that moment, to take her beautiful face in his hands and stand over her to admire her features up close. He imaged how it would feel to have her graceful mouth press fully and longingly against his own, or down his neck, across his shoulders…

  Her hands too, her feminine long fingers caressing his back as he held her and felt her chest rise and drop against his own beating heart. The fire inside him began to burn intensely as he felt a pulsing begin to build between his legs. It was a longing Darian was sure he had never felt, and he was worried that the overwhelming nature of the feelings would cause him to lose control of the silver dragon that rest in his heart. As he tried to focus on the burning under his skin and bring it under control, he suddenly heard a strange crackling noise.

  It was only then that Darian realized he had begun to smolder, causing the branches brushing up against his skin to ignite and crack with flames. Looking down at himself, his skin was covered in flashy silver scales, beginning to spread and travel over his hands and down his arms. He clenched his fists and closed his now burning eyes, using all his strength to remove the thoughts he had just been having about Briana from his brain.

  Considering the burning bush around him, he knew his cover would be easily blown, and when he felt he had gotten his dragon self under control, he quickly turned and patted out the branches that had begun to smoke. Finally, looking back up to once again watch Briana, he felt his heart skip a beat when he realized she was no longer on the bench. Instead, she was casually strolling the other direction down the pathway, ready to move on with her day. As he moved away from his hiding spot and prepared to follow her once again, he looked at his suit jacket only to see he had managed to char large holes into several places.

  “So much for an easy security detail,” Darian thought to himself.

  He realized that he would not be able to do anything about the burned patches of clothing and would have to minimize the obviousness of the burns by ditching the jacket all together. Surprisingly, that was a tough act for Darian. As a serious businessman, and one with a serious demeanor to boot, the unprofessionalism of removing his jacket even irked Darian while simply moving from bush to bush. He couldn’t help but laugh at himself a little, realizing that Briana had never actually even spoken a word to him, yet she was managing to get him out of his clothing.

  As he carefully strolled behind Briana in the park, he picked up a magazine someone had left on the bench and used it to cover his face as he trailed her. Even her walk was beautiful. His acute senses and heightened attention to detail made it easy for him to admire the symmetrical sway of her body as she floated down the park path. Even the simplest of movement made Briana seem otherworldly. He couldn’t imagine ever seeing another woman that ever made the act of being a simple human seem so perfect. Another first for Darian—he wished that he was normal suddenly.

  Watching Briana go about her day so easily, casually chatting with people as they passed, or stopping by a park to walk, made Darian feel as though the Dragon that welled up and receded back in his heart had caused him to avoid a normal lifestyle. For a second, he thought about the amount of time he spent outside of the walls which housed his tech empire. Hardly any at all. It was in that moment that Darian decided that through watching Briana, he would be able to experience the different nuances of a typical human existence, going about her days with her. It was that idea of togetherness, that idea that he would have someone to experience life with, even from afar, that caused a feeling in Darian’s chest he could hardly control.

  It was an immense pressure, but not a kind that offered discomfort. Rather, it was the kind that caused a person to take pause and look around for the figure that must have been wrapping them in a large embrace. Yes, it was like a hug. Darian had never felt pleasure in another’s embrace, but somehow the simple presence of Briana had given him that joy.

  Suddenly, Darian began to feel that emotion in his chest spreading, but this time like a wildfire. It was a familiar feeling that he had, one he had only experienced as a young man unable to control his temperaments. It was like someone had injected his skin with boiling water, the heat coating his veins and spreading through his lungs and heart. Trying to contain the power rising out of his body, he hunched forward, heaving for air. When he sa
w the black smoke spilling from his nose and mouth, he was forced to accept that he was not going to be able to stop what was coming. Looking at his hands, the silver patches of scales that usually formed in moments of uncontrolled emotion like this had covered his body and touching his face he felt the hard ridges of scales lining his eyes and nose.

  Glancing up, he could see Briana’s blurry figure continuing through the park in the distance. Darian ran deeper into the wooded portion of the park. He was lucky it was two o’clock on a Wednesday and there would be no one to witness his transformation or potentially run into him in his dragon form. Giving in to the beast that wracked his human form, Darian dropped to his knees as his body flexed and pulsed while silver scales expanded out around his transitioning limbs. His pants tore away from his body as his large horned tail fell to the ground behind him and his blue button shirt began to shred away from his body with the pressure of his growing figure expanding into the space around him.

  His silver curls had grown out around his head, flowing onto his neck and shoulders as it too transformed into broad silver scales. If a human had witnessed his transformation, the beauty of the act itself would have been just as shocking as the creature which he became. His beautiful human form was left to expand outward, his elegant arms rising from his sides and easing out into big, scaled wings that must have been 20 feet in length. His broad chest burst away from his body, ballooning out into a rippling silver chest that flowed into a long, thick neck.

  What was so unique about Darian was the color of his scales. When his dragon form appeared while frustrated, but still mostly human, his scales appeared as though they were completely silver. In his behemoth dragon form, though, the silver scales shined with a copper highlight when touched by the light. It was a brilliant sight, his grey eyes now a fiery orange, like lava, with large wings that rested on the dead leaves below his large clawed feet. His tail spread behind him as he stretched his head forward and shook away the discomfort of the transformation.