Flame Daddies Read online

  Flame Daddies

  Katie Douglas

  Copyright 2018 Katie Douglas. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be transmitted or disseminated without the express written permission of the author.

  Edited by Sandy Ebel at Personal Touch Editing

  Cover Design by Katie Douglas

  Smashwords Edition

  Dedication:

  For all the people who will never see this book, who will never read it, who will never know how they changed my life. I wish you were all here.

  Copyright

  Flame Daddies:

  A dragon reverse harem in space

  Katie Douglas

  Copyright 2018 Katie Douglas

  All rights reserved

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  Chapter 1:

  Alora opened her eyes and tried to look around, but it was difficult because something was making her body feel floppy. All she saw were the slightly blackened, metal ceiling panels above her. The floor was uncomfortable, and she suspected it was that metal flooring with the holes in it that was useless in a fire or a laser gun attack. Not that she’d ever been in any sort of combat before today. But she had a lot of downtime as the empire’s First Daughter, and she’d seen a lot of action holo-movies. She hoped those movies would stand her in good stead today.

  “She’s awake.” Someone came into view. He looked like he was in dire need of the attention of several dermatologists. His nose was covered with boils, and his cheeks were indented with pockmarks. His odor proved the galaxy needed daily bathing routines with soap and water, no matter what the hippy-dippy elves of Telia II said.

  She pressed her lips together in contempt. These bastards who had taken her were going to all die, very slowly, then she’d get back to Nidia and restore order to the Interplanetary Alliance. She still had difficulty believing gangsters had made it onto the most important planet in the galaxy without being blasted out of the sky. Her action movie knowledge told her this had to be an inside job. The rest of her had no idea who would do such a thing. Nobody on Nidia stood to gain from the suicide bombing that had shattered Prime government. Nor had they accomplished anything by shipping her off-planet.

  “Awake already?” another voice called. “Strip her then, and prep her for sale.”

  “Youse think anyone will want that? It’s a poor specimen. No curves at all. Not thin, either. Just... square.” The man looked down at her with disgust. She wanted to bite his nose off to spite his face. If only she could move, she knew she would kill him.

  Alora had reluctantly completed a history of art major but had much preferred taking gymnastics classes in college. She barely scraped enough academic credits to pass history of art, but since she was the daughter of the Emperor-Paramount of the Interplanetary Alliance, it was understood she wasn’t required to learn anything to finish college. Everyone thought she’d spent her time out partying, taking drugs, and generally being badly adjusted to her life as a future galactic leader. Her father knew the truth though, he had to. He had spies everywhere. And he’d allowed her to train. By the time she was twenty-two, her body had been well-defined and hard, and it helped that she was six-feet tall.

  Now, four years later, her body was still not princess-shaped, but other than that, she was a little out of practice. She cursed her lack of routine in recent months, especially. One of these bastards must have snuck up behind her and injected her with a muscle relaxant or whatever it was. So, instead of being able to run away or try to take them on, she was waiting like a floppy slab of meat. Helpless.

  Then the man tore at her clothing until she was completely bare. In, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. She concentrated on her breathing. It was the only thing she could control right now.

  Rough hands pinched her nipples, and she tried to move her arms to slap them away, but she couldn’t even flex her fingers. Then a hand went lower. She tried not to panic, but it was hard. She’d spent hundreds of hours learning how to climb, balance, flex her body into various shapes, and yet she realized she had no idea how to fight these men. If she wasn’t so floppy, she could evade them, but... where would she go? Alora had no idea how to fly a ship. She hated that she was a hand-wringing damsel in distress right now.

  “Hey! No sampling the merchandise!” the other voice snapped. She held her breath as the hand was withdrawn.

  “Boss? Don’t we need to check she’s responsive?” the man with the creepy crater face asked.

  “She’s humanoid. She’s got holes in the right places. She’s getting sold as a slave. Nobody cares if she orgasms. Leave her alone. She might catch something.”

  “Like what, boss? Ain’t no VD no more, and youse know it.”

  “I don’t trust your species. You probably have some mutant form of hepatitis that escaped the smart viruses when they wiped out the rest of the diseases.”

  The newcomer didn’t talk like a gangster, and Alora thought that was probably significant. She filed it away for future use.

  “When’s our ETA, boss?” Crater Face asked.

  “Few seconds. We’re using one of the Quantum Possibility Drives from the cyborgs.”

  Alora knew for a fact the cyborgs on Spheron were definitely not giving away the means to appear anywhere in the galaxy within moments of setting a course. So this ship had to be stolen. Who would risk stealing from the cyborgs, though? It didn’t make any sense.

  A loud rumble shook the entire ship.

  “Youse got company, boss!” Crater Face said. Alora was almost certain there were only the two men on this ship. She wanted to tear their heads off and force-feed them up their own asses. It would do for a start. She wished she’d taken hand-to-hand combat classes at college instead of showing up late for three classes of fencing 101 then never returning.

  The ship rumbled again. She was thrown across the room and hit a hard metal panel on one wall before sliding painfully back on the uncomfortable floor.

  A flash of brilliant white light blinded her for a moment, and when she opened her eyes, the most incredible four men she had ever seen stood in an opening blasted in the side of the ship. The twisted metal must have sealed itself with a force field because she wasn’t being sucked out into space, and her head wasn’t swimming from low pressure, both things she was sure were supposed to happen about now. It would be just like the cyborgs to have such fail-safes.

  “Youse made a big mistake!” Crater face announced, and Alora heard the safety being taken off a gun.

  One of the men glowed silver, and his tanned, tattooed skin gave the impression of scales as he seemed to breathe blue-white flames. Alora stared in amazement. She must be losing the plot. Everyone knew dragon-people were a myth made up by the alien races of Telia II to scare kids into brushing their teeth.

  Another man stepped toward her. His bare, tanned chest shone iridescent greeny-turquoise as it caught the light, then it was normal skin color again. He had tattoos on his arms.

  “Can you move?” he asked, speaking in the sort of soft voice people used when they didn’t want to spook unicorns. She couldn’t speak or shake her head, so she just looked up at him with wide eyes and waited to find out if he was a friend or foe. There was the possibility, once these men discovered she was Princess Alora, they would seize her to ransom back to Nidia. They wouldn’t know Prime government was currently a smoking ruin. She still wasn’t sure how she had survived the explosion, given that she had passed out or something and only awoke surrounded by burned-out carnage in every direction.

  Her father would probably be dead, and she should be much sadder about that, except she hardly
knew him. She had been raised by nannies before being sent to boarding school. When she had returned to the palace after college, she ate dinner with him each day. They had never argued or had any reason to dislike one another, but she didn’t really know him, and she was never really sure what to say around him. Oh, but now she would never get the chance to know him. So many things she had always been curious about, so many things she wished to tell him—all gone. Perhaps his loss was going to be more difficult than she’d thought.

  “Whatever you’re thinking about, it’s making your heart rate go too high, so think about something else. Does your planet have puppies? They’re these sweet, four-legged creatures that were taken from Earth before it was destroyed. What about unicorns? They’re good to think about too. Imagine you’re stroking a unicorn.” The man’s voice was soothing and slightly hypnotic, and while her brain threw up all the reasons not to trust him, Alora found herself lulled into a calmer state.

  “You’re talking like she can hear you, Sharpe!” another voice called. It didn’t sound contemptuous so much as in need of banter.

  “She’s awake, Brynn,” Sharpe—the occasionally slightly green man—replied softly. He turned back to her, and she lost herself in his emerald eyes. “I’m going to heal you. Don’t be afraid.”

  He breathed fire on her—bright green fire that roared and crackled, consuming her entire body. The last thing she felt was fear before darkness claimed her.

  Chapter 2:

  When Alora opened her eyes, she was in a dim place that looked like a big cave with solid rock forming a ceiling overhead. The ground was soft, and her fingers suggested she was lying on sand. Best of all, her body wasn’t hurting anymore, but she still couldn’t move much. Luckily, her lips seemed to no longer be numb.

  “You!” she exclaimed in surprise. The green-eyed man sat beside her, his short black hair rustling slightly as he turned his head, and she got a close-up of his entire face. It was rugged with some messy scarring on one cheek, but it looked like it had healed a long time ago. Her gaze took in the tattoos on his arms and the fact his chest was unclothed.

  “I’m Sharpe. We brought you to our lair—our home—because you needed time to heal.”

  “Who or what are you all, where are we, and why did you rescue me?”

  “We’re on Telia II. We rescued you because we thought that ship was stealing dragon eggs. They were not which is a shame because we damaged our ship when we landed back here, and we worked very hard to get our ship off the ground in the first place. For some reason, our sensors picked up the faint trace of dragon DNA. My brothers and I are dragons—men who breathe fire. We can unleash the creatures within us to fly, and we are virtually indestructible. If you put that to the test, I’m pretty sure Argon will take his belt to your ass, though,” he winked at her, but she wasn’t sure if he was joking or simply trying to take the edge off the truth.

  “Who’s Argon?” She had briefly glimpsed four huge men, one each—shimmering gold, silver, purple and green, and all about the same size as Sharpe who she knew had been the green one even if his skin was perfectly ordinary now. Even sitting on an upturned crate, his body suggested he must be about eight feet tall. Muscular, too, even for that height. She wondered what sort of diet he was on and how often he exercised to keep his figure in shape. Her own used to take a lot of maintenance before she lost the impetus to keep practicing her gymnastics.

  “Argon is one of my brothers. His eyes are silver.”

  “And his skin?”

  “His skin? Oh, you mean his scales. Yeah, they’re silver too. He’s a silver dragon.”

  “And you’re a green one?”

  “Emerald. Correct,” Sharpe nodded. “There’s also Brynn, who is a golden dragon, and Canavan, who is an amethyst dragon.”

  Alora tried to arrange the information in her mind. “I’m Alora. If you’re brothers, how are you all different types of dragons?”

  Sharpe gave her an odd look, then comprehension seemed to dawn, and he chuckled. “Oh, you don’t really know about dragons, do you?”

  “Well, no. We don’t have them on Nidia or the other Prime planets.”

  “You’re from Nidia? Explains it. Dragons are banned from the Prime planets. The movers and shakers don’t like the idea of being close to incendiary beings,” he explained ruefully.

  Alora stared in disbelief and tried to figure out the polite way to talk to a subspecies who was, to all intents and purposes, invisible. “So... aren’t you represented at Prime HQ? The government?”

  “No. We’re a minority on Telia II. That’s about all we get. And the elves hunt us.”

  The idea, on the outer planets, sentient creatures tracked other sentient creatures for the sole purpose of killing them, was quite barbaric. Alora supposed it was only to be expected from creatures who didn’t live on Prime planets, though.

  “When will I be able to move again?”

  “Whenever the nerve agent wears off. I’ve healed your wounds, but I cannot seem to reverse the toxin. I apologize. And to answer your earlier question about dragons, we are brothers because our mother mated with four different dragon men. She laid a clutch of four eggs. We hatched within an hour of one another; Argon was first, but Brynn was a close second. Dragon women always mate with as many men as possible and lay one egg for each man. It’s the only way we can survive while we’re being wiped out by elves.”

  “That’s... fascinating. But I thought the elves of Telia II were kind and loved the planet and so on? Is that not true?”

  “It’s completely true. They are friends to the planet and all the non-sentient animals. They simply have an irrational hatred of dragons. I think it’s because they’re stupid enough to build cities out of wood when they know they share this planet with creatures who breathe fire.”

  “You dragons... burned down their cities? And now they’re mad?”

  Sharpe sighed. “It was one accident when a silver dragon sneezed about a thousand years ago. But elves and dragons have long lives and longer memories so they won’t let it go.”

  Alora understood that only too well. Her father had told her some interplanetary conflicts went on for thousands of years simply because of some ancient blood feud or other. One of the requirements for entry into the elite listing of Prime planets, with their favorable import and taxation laws, was to not be at war with any other planets unless the entire galaxy was backing one specific side of the conflict. The hundred or so outer planets had all sorts of other problems that made them unsuitable to be influencers.

  “So, you all live in a cave? Together?” She decided changing the subject away from local politics was probably the wisest choice.

  “Strength in numbers. The bond between brothers is strong. We were sired by four brothers, and so were they, and so on, for generations. Females are rare, you see.”

  Alora was beginning to understand. Fleetingly, she wondered what it would be like to be a female dragon, mated to four huge dragon warriors... probably annoying, she decided. There wasn’t enough air freshener in the world for one woman to keep up with all the cleaning generated by four men. It wasn’t like they seemed to have servants here. She knew the outer planets rarely had a working class. Everyone was the king of his own hill away from the Prime worlds.

  “Wait,” she mumbled as her brain caught up with the implications of what he’d just said. “That means you four will mate with one dragon female too, right?”

  “Eventually. Females are so rare though. They usually spend enough time with males to mate, then... they move on.”

  “I wonder why a woman would possibly not want to clean up after four studs,” Alora remarked sarcastically.

  “I think it’s genetic,” Sharpe replied, and Alora was uncertain whether he had taken her seriously through misunderstanding or because he gave as good as he got in the sarcasm stakes.

  ***

  Sharpe was trying hard not to breathe through his nose. The humanoid female had an intoxicating scent t
hat made him want to part her legs and press parts of his anatomy deep within hers. It didn’t help matters she was naked, and her delicate frame was like a perfect miniature version of dragon females—well-defined muscles, but an incredible, sensual femininity about her that was much more alluring than the hulking female dragons who were built like brick shithouses so they could birth as many viable eggs as possible in the shortest space of time before moving on for their safety.

  He had never met his mother; she had flown the nest shortly before he hatched, and three of their four dads had been killed soon after, leaving Sharpe’s emerald dragon father to raise him and his brothers for the first couple of decades or so before they had been ready to stand on their own two feet. Dragon men had strong daddy instincts.

  Sharpe wanted to protect Alora. Beneath her muscular-but-tiny exterior, there was something soft and vulnerable buried deep within her heart. He saw it when she smiled. He had heard of elves who took one another as slaves or who submitted. Less frequently, he had come across men who took care of women as though they were little girls, nurturing them and giving them love, attention, and discipline.

  Until now, he had never understood the allure. But at six feet tall, she was so little, and he was so big that he might break her if he wasn’t careful—but part of him wanted to so he could put her back together again. He suppressed a sigh. What would his brothers say if they knew he was attracted to a humanoid woman?

  ***

  “Here, let me heal you again,” Sharpe said, and if Alora didn’t know better, she’d swear he just colored red. But he was an emerald dragon, so how was that possible? He stood close to her, and she sensed the heat from his body. He was near enough that she saw his chest rise and fall as he breathed.

  The air crackled between them as he leaned over her, and she caught a scent of his masculine musk. It was... incredible.