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  CURVES FOR THE DRAGON

  ANNABELLE WINTERS

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  BY ANNABELLE WINTERS

  THE CURVES FOR SHEIKHS SERIES (USA)

  Curves for the Sheikh

  Flames for the Sheikh

  Hostage for the Sheikh

  Single for the Sheikh

  Stockings for the Sheikh

  Untouched for the Sheikh

  Surrogate for the Sheikh

  Stars for the Sheikh

  Shelter for the Sheikh

  Shared for the Sheikh

  Assassin for the Sheikh

  Privilege for the Sheikh

  Ransomed for the Sheikh

  Uncorked for the Sheikh

  Haunted for the Sheikh

  Grateful for the Sheikh

  Mistletoe for the Sheikh

  Fake for the Sheikh

  THE CURVES FOR SHIFTERS SERIES (USA)

  Curves for the Dragon

  Born for the Bear

  Witch for the Wolf

  THE CURVES FOR SHEIKHS SERIES (UK)

  Curves for the Sheikh (UK)

  Flames for the Sheikh (UK)

  Hostage for the Sheikh (UK)

  Single for the Sheikh (UK)

  Stockings for the Sheikh (UK)

  Untouched for the Sheikh (UK)

  Surrogate for the Sheikh (UK)

  Stars for the Sheikh (UK)

  Shelter for the Sheikh (UK)

  Shared for the Sheikh (UK)

  Assassin for the Sheikh (UK)

  Privilege for the Sheikh (UK)

  Ransomed for the Sheikh (UK)

  Uncorked for the Sheikh (UK)

  Haunted for the Sheikh (UK)

  Grateful for the Sheikh (UK)

  Mistletoe for the Sheikh (UK)

  Fake for the Sheikh (UK)

  THE CURVES FOR SHIFTERS SERIES (UK)

  Curves for the Dragon

  Born for the Bear

  Witch for the Wolf

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  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  Copyright © 2019 by Annabelle Winters

  All Rights Reserved by Author

  www.annabellewinters.com

  If you'd like to copy, reproduce, sell, or distribute any part of this text, please obtain the explicit, written permission of the author first. Note that you should feel free to tell your spouse, lovers, friends, and coworkers how happy this book made you.

  Cover Design by S. Lee

  CURVES FOR THE DRAGON

  ANNABELLE WINTERS

  1

  ATHRAAK PROVINCE

  BORDER OF SYRIA AND IRAQ

  Adam Drake closed one eye—the green one—and looked through the scope on his custom-built sniper rifle that had an extended range. He knew he wasn’t going to take the shot, though. You don’t kill a man without giving him a chance to fight back, a chance to surrender, a chance to bow down to your superiority, to beg for his goddamn life. You don’t kill a man from a mile away. You do it up close, so he knows what’s about to happen, understands that his own actions have led to this moment, led him to face Adam Drake, the Dragon of the Desert.

  Say my name, whispered his dragon as Adam raised his head from the scope and looked out over the desert landscape. Call me forth and we will fly there and take him. Burn him alive. Eat him whole, bones and everything. Hmmm, crunchy!

  “We are not eating anyone today,” Adam muttered, shaking his head and blinking. He squinted into the distance, past the golden sand-dunes of the Athraaki desert, this lawless land somewhere between Syria and Iraq, a place where he’d lived in self-imposed exile for what seemed like too long now. “It doesn’t help us when we eat our targets. We can’t collect a bounty when there’s no proof we finished the job.”

  We can save a couple of his teeth for identification, said his dragon, and Adam almost smiled at the thought of himself Changed into dragon form, becoming one with his daemon, all that fire and fury unleashed, burning everything in his path, eating flesh and crunching bone and then delicately placing two rear molars in a Ziploc bag to hand over to John Benson in the CIA so he could collect the bounty.

  “I’m pretty sure our target doesn’t have any dental records that can be used to match his teeth that you so generously offered not to eat. And who eats teeth, anyway?”

  A monster, replied his dragon. That is what we are, yes? A monster with green-and-gold wings, talons as thick as pillars, sharp as spears, breathing fire and bringing vengeance to the wicked.

  “Can we not be so goddamn dramatic, please?” Adam muttered, twisting the scope on his rifle and leaning in to get another look at the target amidst the small group of armed militants.

  Why do you bother with that scope? Just say my name and you will have the power of my vision at your command. I can hunt a worm from a mile up in the sky.

  “A worm? Isn’t that like your cousin or something?”

  Mock me all you want. You know I am you, and so you only mock yourself. Now say my name and give me control. We need to fly. We need to burn. We need to—

  Adam gritted his teeth, cutting off his dragon’s inner voice. It had been years since he’d gained control of the dragon inside, the dark side of his being, brought it under his command after almost losing himself to its unbridled power. Now the Change only happened at his command, when he called his dragon by name. But over the past few months he could feel a restlessness within him, a yearning that he knew only meant one thing, the most primal of needs, the need for a—

  “What the hell?” Adam muttered as he glanced through the scope again, his body tensing up when he saw a caravan of ten SUVs and trucks rumble towards his target, a leader of an insurgent party. The man had a bounty on his head: $500,000 from the U.S. and another $250,000 from the United Kingdom. Not a bad score for a pretty easy target. But these new arrivals changed things. To handle this level of activity, he might need to . . . Change.

  He felt his dragon stir as he had the thought, and Adam blinked as his vision blurred for a moment and then suddenly flipped to dragon-sight, that crisp, clear, ultrafocused vision that let him see miles beyond what even the most powerful military scope afforded. He felt his green eye move left, sensed his gold eye turn right, giving him that expanded field of view that was so damned useful in a fight.

  “There isn’t gonna be a fight today,” Adam muttered as he surveyed the scene. “We aren’t killing a hundred people just to collect a bounty on one guy. We’ll keep eyes on him and take him down when there’s a little less heat.”

  More heat, whispered his dragon. More heat, Adam. Say my name. Say my goddamn name.

  Adam felt a catch in his throat as he felt his dragon try to take control. It surprised him, and for a moment he thought he might Change without giving the command, without calling forth his dragon by name.

  He felt a sharp pain behind his left eye, and when he focused again he saw that some of the trucks had stopped, their canopies flipped open as the militants gathered around to examine its contents.

  “Oh, shit,” Adam muttered. “Hell, no.”

  But there was no mistaking what he was witnessing down there in the lawless desert: The trucks were filled with people. Women. Girls. Adam had heard rumblings about this: Insurgents kidnapping women from unprotected villages. Women that would become war-brides to insurgent leaders, sex-slaves to the foot-soldiers, property to be used, abused, and then discarded. He sighed and sho
ok his head. There was no walking away now. Not after he’d seen this.

  Slowly he stood up, unstrapping his equipment belt and tossing it into his Jeep along with the rifle. He wouldn’t need the rifle. He wouldn’t need any of this. He would just need to become who he was: That avenging angel. The Desert Dragon.

  A moment later he’d pulled off his khaki shirt, dropped his trousers, and then he was buck naked under the desert sun. He looked down at his lean, hard, deeply tanned body and took a long breath as he visualized his line of approach, his method of attack.

  Then he exhaled slowly and spoke the word.

  He said the name.

  He unleashed the beast.

  2

  MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN

  UNITED STATES

  “Wait, what’s the name again?”

  “Adam Drake. Don’t you remember him from high school?”

  “Ohhh, yeah! The Bronze Beast, right? Didn’t he go . . . I dunno . . . crazy?!”

  Asheline Brown chuckled as she shook her head at her best friend Polly. The woman didn’t have any filters—which was fine, because when it came to her work, Ash was all filters. She had to be, because being a serious journalist meant you needed to protect your sources with everything you had. That was the way you got to the big stories. And Adam Drake was a big story. Ash could feel it. She could almost smell it, it was so damned close!

  “What’s that smell?” Ash said, sniffing the air like an animal and frowning at Polly. Then her eyes went wide and she turned and made a mad dash for the kitchen. “You didn’t turn off the oven, you moron!” she screamed just as the first thick plume of black smoke came swirling around the corner to greet her.

  “Was I supposed to? You just told me to take the stuff out because it was done. Oh, shit, I’m so, so sorry! I’m calling 911! Hold on!”

  “Don’t call 911. I got this,” Ash said calmly, squinting through the smoke as she pulled open the cabinet above the stove and grabbed her spray bottle with a special concoction of baking soda. She pulled open the oven, blasted her home-made potion into it, and then slammed the oven-door closed and ran to open the windows.

  In minutes the smoke had made its way out of the kitchen, and Ash sighed and placed her hands on her wide hips, pinching her own love-handles as she glared at Polly and then glanced over at the home-made bear-claws sitting patiently on the counter.

  “Good job,” she said to Polly, smiling at the perfectly shaped pastries. “Just some frosting, and then lunchtime!”

  Polly was still breathing heavily as she stared at Ash, then the bear-claws, and finally back up at Ash. “Good job? Lunchtime?! Ash, I almost burned down your house!” She frowned and looked up at the ceiling. “I can’t believe the smoke alarm didn’t go off.”

  Ash winked and pulled open one of the drawers. In it was a smoke-alarm, disabled, dismantled, and possibly broken. “I don’t need a smoke alarm. The sound drives me insane. Besides, I have a really good sense of smell, especially when something’s on fire.”

  Polly shook her head as she finally calmed down enough to look at the tray of pastries that was going to be their Sunday lunch. They did this every Sunday, the two of them. Bear-claws with extra frosting, and then Netflix until their eyes bugged out.

  “Speaking of insane,” she said as Ash pulled out a massive tube of red frosting. Always red. “Why were we talking about Adam Drake anyway?”

  “So you remember him,” Ash said, blinking at the memory of that intense, smoldering hot . . . beast. The bronze beast. They’d called him that because he was always tanned, even in the dead of the Wisconsin winter, when there’d been no sun for weeks! Once, some of the guys had teased him about going to a tanning salon like a pretty-boy. That was the only time anyone messed with Adam Drake. Ash didn’t even want to think about that day when Adam Drake had taken on five or six guys in the schoolyard, breaking noses and knocking out teeth like a goddamn lunatic. No one saw Adam after that. Everyone assumed he’d been expelled or sent to some kind of juvenile rehab center.

  “Yes, I remember him,” said Polly, dipping her pinky into the red frosting and tasting it. “Voted Most Likely to become a Psycho Killer. Is that what this is about? He finally went full-on nuts and killed someone? Is that the story?”

  “Something like that,” Ash said, taking a breath as she put the final squeeze on their sugary lunch and stepped back to admire her work. Bear-claws. Always bear-claws with blood-red frosting. “But no, one of my sources mentioned his name the other day. So I looked him up, and it turned out he joined the military after high-school. Actually he never finished high-school, but whatever.”

  Polly rolled her eyes. “Well, that backs up my suspicion that the military is full of psychos who just want an excuse to kill someone.”

  Ash whipped her head around, the anger rising so fast she had to clench her fists and jaw at the same time just to stay in control. “Don’t you dare bad-mouth the military in my presence! These men and women risk their lives so we can live fat and happy, all right? Got it?”

  Polly took two steps back, her eyes going wide before she blinked three times. “Whoa! Shit, I’m sorry, babe! I forgot about your parents for a moment. And your brother, ohmygod! I . . . I . . .”

  “Let’s just eat, OK?” Ash said, frowning as she looked down at her clenched fists. Yeah, the military was a hot-button for Ash after her parents, who worked for the Department of Defense, were killed when she was seven. Then her Army Ranger brother had gone MIA, his body never recovered, his death neither confirmed nor denied. It had driven her to become a journalist, to spend her career developing sources deep in the military and government—sources with whom she played a delicate game of give-and-take, sometimes writing stories that would serve their interests, other times respecting their wishes to hold back information that she felt the American people needed to know. She’d made compromises, but mostly her conscience was clear. She’d always felt like she was working towards something big, something that would change everything, something that would change her!

  Change me into what, she wondered as she picked up two bear-claws and held them up to the light. The red frosting looked like blood, and Ash stared at her own hands as her vision blurred. She caught flashes of images, images that had been coming through in dreams over the past few months, images of herself as an animal, with claws and teeth, out-of-control, driven by raw instinct, a primal need, the need to run free, the need to roar wild, the need to . . . mate?

  Ash closed her eyes tight and shook her head. Freakin’ hormones, she told herself as she felt those telltale cramps coming on. Her periods over the past few months had been excruciating, with headaches so splitting she could barely handle them—and Ash could handle a lot!

  “You all right, hon?” Polly said, putting down her bear-claw and touching Ash on the arm.

  “What?” Ash said, her eyes flickering open, her mind returning to reality. “Oh, yeah. I’m fine. Maybe just the smoke. Let’s head out to the porch.”

  “The porch? Um, it’s December in Wisconsin, Ash. It’s like two degrees outside.”

  “There’s blankets near the door,” Ash said simply. Suddenly she wanted the cold. She needed it. “Don’t wipe your sticky fingers on them.”

  “I’ll wipe my sticky fingers on you for subjecting me to this,” Polly grumbled as she put one bear-claw on a plate and strutted her skinny butt towards the door. “I don’t have the insulation you do, remember.”

  Ash opened her mouth wide as she stared at her waiflike friend. But then she just smiled and shook her head. Polly could get away with a remark like that. And anyway, Ash didn’t care. She’d been a larger woman her entire life, and even back when she was just growing into her body, she was mostly comfortable with her curves no matter what anyone else said.

  They sank into the oversized, all-weather chairs on the back-porch of the house. The house was within Mi
lwaukee city limits, so there wasn’t much of a backyard, and Ash sighed as she stared at the fence dividing her property from the next. She’d grown up in this house, and it had always seemed big enough, even when it was a family of four. But now she felt almost claustrophobic, caged, chained, restrained . . . like she needed more space, space to roam, to run, to be . . . herself. Her real self.

  “Really?” came Polly’s voice through Ash’s roaming imagination.

  “Really what?”

  “Did Adam Drake really join the Army?

  “Looks like he joined the Air Force, actually,” said Ash, her focus returning as she ate her first bear-claw in three bites and let the sugar take over her system in the most decadent way. “He did always have really good eyesight, if I remember correctly. There was this one time he saw a penny on the sidewalk . . . the sidewalk across the street! He ran through traffic to grab it like it was treasure!”

  Polly laughed. “Yeah, I remember that! He’d do that all the time! Picking up coins and things from the schoolyard! Weird.”

  Ash shrugged. “I guess he just liked money. Or maybe he was a hoarder in the making. Well, anyway, so the best I could tell, he joined the Air Force, was selected to fly F-16 fighter jets.”

  “Wow, that’s big deal, isn’t it?”

  “Yup,” said Ash almost proudly. “But then there were no more records of him. Couldn’t find anything on him beyond four years in the Air Force. Not even from my regular sources in the military.”

  “Which means . . . what? He went crazy and they fired him? Or put him in military prison?”

  “Well, no. If he was court-martialed or dishonorably discharged or quit or whatever, there’d be a record. In my experience, disappearing from the records means just one thing. Special Forces.”

  Polly’s eyes widened and she stopped chewing, pulling her blanket closer around her thin shoulders. “Wow! Like the Navy Seals?”