✨ GUEST POST ✨
Hello everyone! Thank you, lovely Addison, for allowing me back on the blog 🥰
I’m Holly Day, and I write MM romance stories, most often paranormal, to celebrate different holidays. Now that the big holidays are over, I thought we could concentrate on more important things. Things like Appreciate a Dragon Day.
How come no one’s made that a bank holiday? What could possibly be more important than appreciating a dragon? 😆 I decided it was time I did, so I wrote The Dragon’s Prisoner.
I have a series of standalone stories that all take place in a small town named Edge. It’s named Edge since it’s where human civilization ends, and the dragon realm takes over.
In the town, there is a street named Dragon Row. The houses on Dragon Row are all tall, and they all have towers with stair-less doors. Dragons are heavy, and they find it easier to take flight from height rather than from the ground.
Dragons like treasures, everybody knows that, so almost all the shops on Dragon Row deal with either jewelry or gemstones or both. Saxon the Sinful has a jewelry store named The Dragon’s Treasure.
He hates it.
He doesn’t hate jewelry. Of course not! But he hates having to work, he hates most humans, and he hates Edge. He’s been exiled though and can never go back to the dragon realm. Since he doesn’t want to die, he’ll just have to suck it up.
Then one day, there is an idiot trying to steal from him. No one steals from Dragon Row and survives to tell the tale, and they certainly don’t steal from him.
Kasper is the kind of thief who needs a boss. He’s not any good at planning hits, he never knows what to steal or how to sell the thing he’s stolen. But in Kasper’s line of work, you have to be able to trust the people around you, and Kasper can’t.
He wants out, but his boss won’t let him go until he does one last job. He’s to go to a place named Edge and steal something from a place called The Dragon’s Treasure.
Kasper has heard of dragons, everyone has, but he never believed they were real. What are the odds of fire-spitting reptiles being real anyway?
Hindsight is a bitch. He should’ve done his research. If he had, he might not have ended up tied to a chair in a dragon’s basement. Do dragons eat humans? It would’ve been good to know.
The two previous stories in the Dragon Row series are The Book Dragon’s Lair and Mated to the Fire Dragon, but you don’t have to have read any of them to read this. Some of the characters from the previous books pay a visit, but you don’t have to know them to read The Dragon’s Prisoner.
The Dragon’s Prisoner
by Holly Day
GENRE: Gay Paranormal Romance
LENGTH: 36,967 words
RATING: 4 flames
🛒 Purchase Links
Blurb
Stealing from a dragon is bad, getting caught is worse.
Kasper Cobalt is a thief who wants to quit, but his boss forces him to do one last job. He has, of course, heard of dragons, but he isn’t sure he believes in them until he’s standing in front of a guy who breathes smoke and has weird eyes.
Saxon the Sinful is bored out of his mind. Running a jewelry store on Dragon Row should be pleasing. He is, after all, surrounded by gold and gemstones. But he’s also surrounded by humans, and one of them has the audacity to try to steal from him.
After having caught Kasper, Saxon locks him up in his basement. He should kill him, and he might, but first he’ll feed him. He looks hungry. Kasper can’t hang around and play dragon’s prisoner even though Saxon takes great care of him. His boss will kill him if he doesn’t finish the job. Kasper is reluctant to betray Saxon, but a thief and a dragon can never have a happily ever after, can they?
NOTE: The Dragon’s Prisoner takes place on the same street as The Book Dragon’s Lair and Mated to the Fire Dragon but can be read as a standalone story.
Excerpt
Saxon unlocked the door to The Dragon’s Treasure and moved to sit behind the counter. Another day of snarling at humans and collecting stupid paper notes. He needed more paper notes, but they didn’t bring him joy. They weren’t gemstones.
In the beginning, he’d sold pretty jewels, but he’d soon realized the people of Edge couldn’t afford it. Some of the tourists coming were a little better off, but the majority weren’t. They wanted to interact with dragons, but they didn’t have money to spend.
Humans appeared unable to build treasures. If it was because they were bad at trading or bad at hoarding, he didn’t know, but they did something wrong. They bartered their ugly, but valuable, paper notes for useless trinkets that wouldn’t increase in worth over time.
He still had some priced necklaces and bracelets on display—he couldn’t call himself a jeweler if he didn’t—but more than half of the store was filled with trashy knick-knacks. Silver stuff, decorative beads with no real worth. Saxon didn’t like it. It felt as if it lowered his value, but people were willing to trade paper notes for them, and he’d quickly learned there were no real jewelry dragons on this side of the veil. Everyone traded in paper notes.
Soon the bell above the door chimed and a lost-looking male stepped inside. He gave Saxon a wide-eyed look and almost stumbled back out again.
He didn’t bother to puff smoke or change his eyes.
The man caught himself and straightened his back. “Good morning.”
Saxon nodded.
“I’m… eh… My wife.” He took a deep breath, and Saxon tried not to roll his eyes. Everyone wanted to see a dragon until they did.
“Yes?”
“We’ve been married for ten years on Saturday, and I figured I should buy something for her.”
Saxon got to his feet. Mated for ten years, was it enough for a human to want to buy diamonds? Every mate should be showered in diamonds, but he didn’t believe humans had realized it yet. Despite living as short lives as they did, they didn’t value their mates as they should. “I have a beautiful necklace over here.” He walked over to a glass showcase and reached for the key in his pocket.
The man walked closer, only to shake his head once he spotted the jewelry on display. “I was thinking something cheaper.”
Cheaper? For his mate? Saxon wasn’t planning on taking a mate, but if he ever did, he hoped he never said the word cheaper when shopping for gifts. “How cheap?”
The man winced, and the bell by the door chimed again as a group of giggling young women spilled in through the door. Saxon shifted his eyes as he looked at them—it was what they expected. A couple of them gasped.
“She likes… eh… pearls.”
Pearls were good. Saxon like pearls. He pivoted and headed toward the counter. He had all the pearls locked in drawers behind it, and a few on display in the glass cupboards behind the cash register. He’d almost made it there when he realized the man wasn’t following. He looked over his shoulder only to see the man gesture at the jewelry stands with beaded creations.
“Beads?” Beads were not pearls.
“Ah, yeah. She likes blue.”
Saxon didn’t have to fake the growl building in his chest. Stupid humans. “So pick something blue.”
The man looked stunned for a moment but nodded and turned toward the stands with different necklaces and bracelets. People could pick through them as they wanted. They weren’t worth the effort of trying to protect from shoplifters. Though no one dared steal from a dragon so he could most likely have left his pearls and diamonds in the open too, but he didn’t feel comfortable doing it. Though there had been one fool who’d tried some years ago. Idiot was lucky to be alive, if he was alive. They’d scared him out of Edge, and he didn’t care where he was now, but Saxon did his best to remember not all humans had brains that functioned the way they should.
He didn’t want to sell his diamonds, but paper notes were what counted on this side of the veil. He gathered them until he had enough to buy something real, then he picked something from the display and sent it to his mother.
Turning to the women, he allowed smoke to waft around him. “What do you want?”
One of them took a quick step back, but another one took a step closer. “We’re just looking.” She spun a lock of hair around her finger and popped her hip while looking directly into his eyes. He allowed his teeth to change. “This isn’t an exhibition. Buy something or get out.”
She huffed and headed toward the door with rapid steps. The group quickly followed behind her, and Saxon shrugged. If they weren’t planning on buying anything, he didn’t need them taking up space in the store.
“I eh… think I’ll have these.” The man neared the counter holding one necklace with a matching bracelet with blue beads. Had they been made in sapphire or blue topaz, they would’ve been lovely, but they were made with glass beads.
Saxon nodded and rang them up. The man handed his money over before Saxon could tell him the cost.
“Can I have them wrapped?”
“No.”
The man stared.
“It’s a jewelry store, not a gift-wrapping store.” When Saxon first had opened, over ten years ago, he’d tried wrapping gifts, but he didn’t have the patience for it. Tape got stuck everywhere, and the paper tore, and the scissors always went missing. Nope, he was not a gift-wrapping dragon.
The man didn’t speak again, which was for the best.
About the Author
According to Holly Day, no day should go by uncelebrated and all of them deserve a story. If she’ll have the time to write them remains to be seen. She lives in rural Sweden with a husband, four children, more pets than most, and wouldn’t last a day without coffee.
Holly gets up at the crack of dawn most days of the week to write gay romance stories. She believes in equality in fiction and in real life. Diversity matters. Representation matters. Visibility matters. We can change the world one story at the time.
Author Links
