Dragons Do It Nerdier, page 1
DRAGONS DO IT NERDIER
A DRAGON SHIFTERS DO IT ROMANCE
GEMMA CATES
CONTENTS
About Dragons Do It Nerdier
Of Dragons and Dragonkind: A Cursed Lineage
1. Kaylee
2. Dex
3. Kaylee
4. Dex
5. Kaylee
6. Dex
7. Kaylee
8. Kaylee
9. Dex
10. Dex
11. Kaylee
12. Kaylee
13. Dex
14. Kaylee
15. Kaylee
16. Kaylee
17. Dex
18. Kaylee
19. Dex
20. Kaylee
21. Dex
22. Kaylee
23. Dex
24. Kaylee
25. Dex
26. Kaylee
Epilogue, War Demons as Mothers: Kaylee
Epilogue, Coffee Shop Chaos: Kaylee
Epilogue: Susie
Fanged and Fabulous Excerpt
Also by Gemma Cates
About the Author
ABOUT DRAGONS DO IT NERDIER
A blocked writer looking for inspiration
Kaylee
I write about bad men who do dirty things to needy women. Or I used to.
I'm on a deadline and the words aren't coming. My creative well is nothing more than a mud puddle. Perhaps a reflection of my equally uninspiring life.
But then I encounter a smoking man with a serious book habit at my local library. Suddenly, he's my hero.
I'm writing about a gorgeous, bespectacled guy with lickable abs and bitable biceps.
The words are flowing, but it's not the book I meant to write. Not enough handcuffs, too many teeth and claws...and I'm not entirely sure why.
A nerdy dragon looking for love
Dex
I found her. My one true mate. And...
She thinks I'm a lunatic.
"Dragons aren't real."
I just have to convince a woman with an imagination so vast she creates fictional worlds for a living that everything she's ever dreamt is real, magic included.
No problem.
Without revealing my true form.
More complicated.
While keeping her safe from my enemies.
Dammit.
Note from the author: This book contains a practical writer who’s certain that dreams and magic are for children, and that happily-ever-after only exists in fiction. It also contains a badass nerd dragon who's ready for love...until he meets the woman of his dreams and realizes life with him is full of unavoidable dangers.
OF DRAGONS AND DRAGONKIND: A CURSED LINEAGE
All dragon shifters were men.
It hadn’t always been so.
At some point in a long distant past, dragonkind had been like most other magical creatures, with both males and females born in roughly equal numbers.
But for many centuries now, only male children born of a dragon mating were true dragon shifters, possessing the duality of dragon and man inside them. A female child of a dragon mating took the aspect of her mother.
Lore claimed a male dragon betrayed his mate, a dragoness who was also a powerful witch. Her heart shattered by the deceitful actions of her unfaithful mate, she’d used her own death to power a spell. She magicked dragonkind, her intent to spare its females the desolation of an unnaturally broken mate bond.
What had been a blessing in her eyes, saving all other dragonesses from the despair she’d suffered, became a curse to all dragonkind as fewer and fewer females were born until eventually none remained.
Dragons were forced to look elsewhere to find their mates.
For a brief time, dragons embraced this solution. But it didn’t take long for dragon males to discover that there were very few creatures with whom they could create a mating bond.
As more time passed, civilizations grew and mankind spread across the planet.
Already declining in number, dragonkind faced a new challenge: concealment from the eyes of mankind.
With their numbers diminishing, the only dragons left were those descended from lineages capable of cloaking themselves from the nonmagical.
And they could only thrive if they could find mates.
So they searched…
1
KAYLEE
The guy was here again.
The gorgeous one with all the muscles and the glasses.
He was hard to miss, since most guys at my local library branch were either teenagers or octogenarians…but I also might have been looking for him.
I might have started coming to the library every morning to write instead of my usual once or twice a week. Well, to write, and in hopes of getting a glimpse of him and all his pretty muscles.
Not that I was a weirdo stalker or anything. I didn’t follow him out of the library to see what kind of car he drove. Or try to figure out what books he was reading. That would be creepy.
No, I just…looked.
I swallowed a wistful sigh. He was yummy. Inspirationally, mouthwateringly, motivationally yummy.
A lightbulb flickered.
My latest book had stalled. I felt like I was trudging through a sticky mire of useless words. The blinking cursor taunted me with its wink-wink-wink, as if with each flash it was poking me. “You suck. You suck. You suck.”
A word of warning to my future self: shaking the computer didn’t work. And drinking a gallon of coffee might be an even worse choice. In fact, all that caffeine made me twitch in time to the vicious jibes of my cursor.
I had a schedule, and no words were coming. My outline was lame. My hero unfun. What was worse, even I didn’t want to do my character. If I didn’t want to get cuffed, spanked, and fucked by the guy, why bother writing about him at all? Because if I didn’t want him, no one reading the damn book would either.
Unlike my library hottie.
Who wouldn’t want to read about him?
And that was when not just a lightbulb but stadium lighting went off in my head.
My nerdy hottie was a man born to be a romance hero.
I could make that happen.
The hero in my book morphed. He turned into the gorgeous bespectacled guy with ridiculously fabulous muscles, and the words started to flow.
2
DEX
My hot stalker was at the library again.
I noticed her last week and was intrigued. She was an adorable bunch of contradictions. Hot as fuck but wrapped in an oversized beige cardigan I’d swear I saw my eighty-two-year-old neighbor wearing the other day.
Interested—she’d eye-fucked me every time she didn’t think I was looking her way—but wouldn’t make eye contact.
And absolutely oblivious to the fact that I was onto her.
She eyed me like she wanted to yank me into the travel section and suck my dick until I blew my load. How was I not supposed to notice that?
But I played along. I let her maintain the delusion that she wasn’t obviously checking me out.
Mostly because the alternative wasn’t great. She seemed shy enough with the no-eye-contact business to pack up, disappear, and not come back if she realized she’d been found out.
So I watched her watch me, and I watched her type frantically on her laptop. I wasn’t sure why she was in the library every morning, because she certainly wasn’t here for the books.
Unlike me. I glanced at the pile I’d made atop my favorite reading table. I had research to do. Sort of. I wasn’t going to find answers to a magical problem in a human library, but I was hoping for some hints that would point me in the direction I should be looking.
My buddy Bain thought I’d lost my mind. He was ready to knock a few heads together locally and get some answers, but I wasn’t so sure that was the most productive route. For one, neither of us knew where to start. It wasn’t like I’d pissed off a witch who’d then hexed me.
To the best of my knowledge, I’d only been around three witches recently. Aiden, the ice witch who was buddies with Bain and wouldn’t even consider messing with one of us.
Then there was the Van Helsing who could throw fire. No way I’d pissed off Morgan Van Helsing, and if I had, she’d have told me to my face then tried to set me on fire. End of story. She was straightforward like that.
As for the third one, I didn’t think she even knew she was a witch. That was some weird. Bain’s woman’s ex’s fling was a witch. The few times I’d run into her at Derek’s, my initial suspicion had been reaffirmed: witch. Oblivious, probably an accident waiting to happen, but definitely a witch.
Aiden was Bain’s friend, and neither of those ladies had a beef with me, and there weren’t any other fucking witches. Especially not the kind of beef that bound my dragon, preventing me from shifting.
Cue the angry internal dragon roar. Not really. But sort of. The inner calm I worked at was definitely being tested. I was a dragon shifter who couldn’t shift. Not ideal, but not panic-worthy—or so I was telling the big guy who made up my beastly half. And it was even true, so long as I didn’t get into any fights, need my fire, or need to heal.
If it lasted more than a few weeks, then I’d be ready to fuck up some people in pursuit of answers. I was still a big guy who knew how to fight. As it was, it was an inconvenience. It wasn’t like I flew around in cloaked dragon form on a nightly basis.
Eventually it would be a problem, because I had to shift regularly. Stretch my wings,
Hence my morning library outings. I was here to find answers, not scope out my sexy stalker.
Okay, fine. I was here for both reasons. I could multitask. I was clever that way.
I glanced over the top of the book on modern myths and witchcraft that I was reading.
My stalker’s hair looked long, but I was only guessing. It was all wrapped up in a messy swirl of chocolate strands with bits of honey sticking out. She was a hot, adorable mess.
She shifted in her seat, which was her tell. She was about to glance my way. I pushed my newly acquired glasses high on the bridge of my nose, ducked my head, and pretended to be absorbed by the text. Surreptitiously, I watched her over the tops of my readers. With my chin tucked in, I could just see her.
Thankfully, my distance vision was intact. It was only my close vision that had been affected by the hex.
I was of the opinion that my situation, both my shifting issue and the other effects I’d been experiencing, were temporary. There was no way I’d angered a witch powerful enough to bind my dragon for any significant duration. Not without realizing it.
Temporary was good. I could be patient. Except…
The other symptoms involved were troubling. Those I hadn’t shared with Bain or Archer. Those guys might be my best friends, but they’d either lose their shit or give me shit, depending on their mood, and I didn’t want to deal with either.
Dragons had exceptional sight, even in human form, but lately… The light was never strong enough to read the small print on anything. Also, since when was anything “small print”?
It started that day I’d had to turn on every light in my kitchen just so I could barely make out the recipe for the cake I’d been preparing. Don’t judge. There wasn’t much out there that was more relaxing than getting my bake on, especially after a hard workout.
But then it went from small print in the kitchen to increasing the font size on my computer to roughly double. It was ridiculous to deny reality, so I’d caved and gotten some reading glasses.
A dragon with reading glasses.
Again, depending on their mood, the guys would die of hilarity or think the world was coming to an end.
Not that my hot stalker seemed to mind them. She was once again eyeing me like I was a treat she’d like to lick and suck and—
Fuck. I didn’t need a hard-on in the library. There were kids here. I’d get labeled as a perv, banned, and then I wouldn’t get to see stalker girl any more.
I returned to my modern myths and legends book. But I couldn’t read the words.
My sight hadn’t suddenly gotten worse. No, I stopped reading because I was too busy freaking out. Just because I was old as dirt, had lived through more wars than I could count and fought in a good number of them, didn’t mean I couldn’t get my twelve-year-old-little-boy-freak-out rolling like an actual twelve-year-old.
I knew this about myself. It was why I meditated, worked out regularly, and did some other coping bullshit. Because my brain could occasionally be my enemy.
For the most part, I’d been trying not to think too much about my situation. Focus on a solution. Do some research. Figure out what had happened. Fix it.
An action plan that allowed me to maintain my calm.
In general, my advice to my inner twelve-year-old was to not freak. Because if I did, the next thing I knew, I’d be leaning into Bain and Archer’s recommendations of violence, and I wasn’t that guy. Not anymore.
I was trying to be all Zen and shit these days.
But… My glasses weren’t the only issue. Pretty sure I was losing my close vision because my eyes were aging. My eyes shouldn’t be aging so quickly, because I didn’t age that quickly. At least I didn’t when I wasn’t hexed by some unknown witch with some unknown complaint.
I’d also found a few gray hairs and some creasing around my eyes that hadn’t been there before. I might have bought eye cream.
If I was vain, which I wasn’t.
Okay, whatever. I bought eye cream.
That would have the guys in stitches, right up until they realized what it meant. I was aging rapidly by dragon standards, which also meant that my ability to heal myself had been damaged or bound along with my dragon.
This no-healing, aging shit was no joke. I’d even considered skipping one of my runs with Chelsea this week, because I’d still been sore from a workout the previous day. But then her sweet brown eyes had persuaded me otherwise. Also, she’d eat half my house if she didn’t get enough exercise. Malinois weren’t exactly couch potatoes.
But the point was that I’d been sore. I’d taken extra care with cooling out and stretching, and I’d still been noticeably achy. That wasn’t normal. Not at all.
And tied up in all that was the reason for my freak-out: Chelsea. The one real concern with this hex was that it would have a negative effect on my dog. My dogs lived long lives. Magically long. It wasn’t anything that I overtly did. I was no spell-casting witch. I could throw magical fire, kick some creature ass, and generally hold my own in a fight whether in dragon or human form. Even though it wasn’t within my magical abilities to affect the longevity of another being, my pets lived long lives.
Some of my magic rubbing off because of the close contact? Maybe.
This curious effect wasn’t limited to dogs. I had a horse once that had lived to be sixty-three and only died because some asshole hit him with an arrow. (That guy didn’t live much longer than my horse.) But this trick I had of imbuing my pets with longevity wasn’t something I wanted to risk losing.
And that thought was trying to push my panic button: what if my temporarily diminished capacity meant I wasn’t the only one aging?
So far Chelsea hadn’t shown any signs of advanced canine age. I was the only one of the two of us to have gray hair overnight. But if I saw any indication that she was, I’d really lose my shit.
And if Chels had her life cut short because of some witch with a grudge, there would be blood.
Stalker girl stopped typing. I shouldn’t have noticed. I was busy considering disembowelment of a faceless witch, but she was typing like a journalist on a tight deadline or a highly caffeinated college student who’d waited till the last second to finish her essay—and then just stopped.
The cessation of all that movement was hard to miss.
Probably just as well. I wasn’t that disemboweling guy any more. Mostly. Unless someone fucked with my dog.
3
KAYLEE
I was sneaking more than the occasional surreptitious glance at my nerdy hottie. Otherwise I’d never have noticed, but he was sitting at his favorite reading table having a mini-meltdown.
I knew the signs.
I’d been a shy introvert as a kid, raised by a single father who thought that socializing was a healthy, normal way to behave. My dad was all about “normal” behavior. I’d been put in more situations that had stressed me almost beyond my capacity to cope than I liked to remember.
So yeah, I recognized the signs.
He looked like he was about ready to burst from his skin. Fidgety, jaw clenched, a frantic light in his eyes.
It was my concern for his well-being that led to my downfall. I looked and I let that look linger. And then it happened.
He saw me.
Shit.
He caught me staring. Not that it was probably anything new for him. With a body like that? A smile like that? (Yes, he was smiling at me now, and I couldn’t look away.) Definitely this guy was used to being stared at.
