Aeran & Rhys (Dragon Hearts 7): Dragon Hearts, #7

By Carole Mortimer

AERAN & RHYS is the 7th and last took book in USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestselling Author, Carole Mortimer's, paranormal dragon shifter series, DRAGON HEARTS.

Author's Note: Beware of very sexy alpha dragon shifters on the hunt for their fated mates!

What happens when two dragon shifters, even two dragon shifter brothers, discover they have the same fated mate?

Everyone knows dragons don't share.

Especially two such different dragon shifters as Aeran & Rhys Pendragon. Aeran is tech savvy, a man of the 21st century, and Rhys is still the warrior he has been for the past sixteen centuries, living by the code of kill or be killed.

Even more troublesome, their fated mate is the daughter of the man Aeran and Rhys helped condemn to death after he tried to kill the fated mate of their eldest brother, Grigor.

Cristina doesn't know who she can trust when she finds herself alone and unprotected in London after her father's disappearance. She daren't accept the help of Aeran and Rhys Pendragon when they suddenly appear in her life. She doesn't know either man, and her father never mentioned knowing them either, so who are they and what do they want from her?

Unfortunately she doesn't have any choice but to accept Aeran and Rhys's protection after an attempt is made on her life.

Finding herself suddenly alone with these two handsome and totally different men, Cristina quickly realizes she's attracted to both of them.
Aeran and Rhys make it obvious they return that attraction.

Cristina has no idea how she is supposed to choose between these two intensely determined men.

She's even more confused when they assure her she doesn't have to, and ready to run when they explain the reason why she doesn't.

Carole Mortimer has written over 240 books, in paranormal romance, contemporary romantic suspense, and Regency romance. She became an indie author in 2014. In May 2017 she received a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times. She is the Recipient of the 2015 Romance Writers of America's Lifetime Achievement Award. An Entertainment Weekly Top 10 Romance Author—ever. 2014 Romantic Times Pioneer of Romance. She was also recognized by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012, for her "outstanding service to literature".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carole Mortimer
• Release date: Aug 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781910597699

Carole Mortimer

Carole Mortimer was born in England, the youngest of three children. She began writing in 1978, and has now written over one hundred and seventy books for Harlequin Mills and Boon®. Carole has six sons, Matthew, Joshua, Timothy, Michael, David and Peter. She says, ‘I’m happily married to Peter senior; we’re best friends as well as lovers, which is probably the best recipe for a successful relationship. We live in a lovely part of England.’

Book preview

Dragon Hearts 7

AERAN & RHYS

By

Carole Mortimer

USA Today Bestselling Author

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2018 Carole Mortimer

Cover Design Copyright © Glass Slipper Designs

Editor: Linda Ingmanson

Formatter: Matthew Mortimer

ISBN: 978-1-910597-69-9

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All Rights Reserved.

DEDICATIONS

My Wonderful Family

Chapter 1

There’s someone in the apartment!

Cristina felt an icy chill down her spine as she lay beneath the rumpled duvet on the bed, barely breathing and too afraid to move as she heard the soft click of the apartment door closing behind whoever had entered at two thirty in the morning.

A door that had a numbered security lock that only two people knew. One of those people was Cristina.

Her father was the other one, of course, as this was his apartment; her own was on the other side of London.

Except her father seemed to have disappeared, his men along with him. Cristina knew that because there had been no sign of her father when she arrived two days ago. The apartment had been ransacked, and she hadn’t seen anyone since then. The warehouse near the docks from which her father ran his empire had also been broken into and was completely deserted.

How long ago those things had happened, she had no idea. Her phone calls to her father had been a little patchy over the last few weeks. Having recently finished her university degree, Cristina had decided to spend the summer backpacking in Europe with a group of friends.

She hadn’t telephoned to let her father know exactly when she was coming home either, had wanted to surprise him. But she had been the one who was surprised after taking a cab from the airport and letting herself into the apartment, expecting to shout Surprise! and instead finding it empty and wrecked.

She’d instantly tried calling her father on his cell phone, but he hadn’t answered. She’d panicked a little after taking another cab to the warehouse and finding traces of blood in several of the empty and ransacked rooms. But still no sign of her father, nor of any of his men.

Calling the police was a big no-no in her father’s world, and not knowing where else to go or whom she could trust, Cristina had decided not to go to her own apartment but stay at her father’s home instead, on the basis it had already been broken into once and so it was unlikely it would be a second time.

To help with the impression the apartment was unoccupied, Cristina left everything as she’d found it. Furniture turned over or broken. Paintings tilted or off the walls completely. Ornaments and photographs smashed on the floor. Her father’s bedroom and study were the worst affected, every drawer and cupboard opened and the contents thrown carelessly over the floor. All of which made it impossible to tell if anything was missing.

Except her father, of course.

Perhaps it wasn’t an intruder at all but her father finally returning from wherever he had disappeared to?

Or whoever broke in the first time has come back for a second look!

Doesn’t look as if anyone’s here, a deep voice rumbled.

What gave it away, Aeran, the smashed and overturned furniture or the fact all the lights were off? an even deeper voice came back mockingly.

You know, Rhys, I’m getting fucking sick and tired of your sarcasm, the first man snapped.

And I should care, why? the second man growled.

Sooo not her father, or the same people who had broken into the apartment the first time, but two men called Aeran and Rhys.

Grigor is going to want us to search the apartment anyway. The first man didn’t bother to reply to the previous comment.

No shit, Sherlock, the man called Rhys mocked.

A heavy sighed followed. Whoever came up with the idea of the two of us working together needs to have their head examined by a qualified psychiatrist.

Everyone else is busy, and it was your intel on Petran’s cell phone that alerted us to the fact she was here at Fescaru’s apartment.

Oh God…

Fine. You take the bedroom, and I’ll look in the kitchen and study.

They’re going to search the apartment!

Cristina desperately tried not to panic as she slid silently out of the bed and onto the floor before crawling on all fours toward her father’s walk-in closet. There was a safe room hidden at the back of it, and if she could just get there without being heard, she could lock herself in. The small room had been designed and built in such a way so as not to be detectable from the outside. It was also soundproof and bulletproof.

Because her father was Cezar Fescaru, head of the Romanian Mafia in London.

Or, at least, he had been when Cristina left London four weeks ago. She had no idea what or where he was now. The hope she’d been harboring, that her father was still alive but just unable to contact her, was becoming more and more remote.

She didn’t have the time, or desire, to think about the alternative right now. She just needed to reach the safe room and lock herself in until these two men had searched and then left the apartment. She could decide what she was going to do next after they’d gone.

Cristina breathed a soft sigh of relief once she’d used the combination lock to open the door to the safe room, crawling inside and pressing the button to close and lock the air-tight door behind her just as she heard someone—Rhys?—enter the bedroom.

The safe room wasn’t large, only the width of the walk-in closet, with just enough depth for a narrow cot-bed, a chair, and a desk with a laptop so she could stream the camera images from each of the rooms in the apartment. She refused to even look at the loaded gun she knew was in one of the drawers, although her father had insisted she learn how to shoot it. There was also a mini fridge she knew would be stocked with energy bars and bottled water.

Yes, because everyone has a safe room hidden in their closet, with a loaded gun in the desk and a fridge stocked with enough food and water for a siege!

Cristina drew in a shaky breath as she turned on the laptop and waited for the cameras in the apartment to come on line. The dangerous world her father lived in meant they had always known it might come to this, which was why her father had the cameras installed and this room built. As she didn’t normally live here, Cristina had just never thought she would be the one to use either of them. After all, her father was one of the most powerful men in London’s underworld.

But not the most powerful, she reminded herself. That honor belonged to Gregori Markovic, head of the Russian bratva.

Had her father done something to upset the Russian?

Stepped over a line and paid the consequences?

Once Cristina moved to London, her father hadn’t tried to hide his illegal activities from her. It would have been impossible with all the dangerous-looking men he had working for him. She also knew from her father that he and Markovic coexisted in an uneasy truce in London’s underworld. A truce that would continue as long as neither of them encroached on the other’s business empire.

She sincerely hoped her father hadn’t done something stupid, like challenging Markovic—

Ah, the cameras had come on line, and she now had eyes on what was happening in the rest of the apartment, even if it was only in black and white.

She didn’t need color to know she was looking into the kitchen at one of the largest men she had ever seen, which was saying something, considering the muscled bodyguards her father surrounded himself with.

The man in the kitchen—Aeran?—had to be at least six and a half feet tall, and possibly aged in his mid-thirties, with slightly curling dark hair and neatly trimmed designer stubble. He was also one of the handsomest men she had ever seen: intense pale eyes, an aristocratic nose between high cheekbones, full and sensuous lips above a strong jaw. Not only tall but ripped. A dark T-shirt clung to impossibly wide shoulders and defined chest and abs, with dark jeans resting low on muscular hips, his thighs as wide as tree trunks.

His head lifted suddenly, and those pale eyes looked straight at the camera. As if he was aware she was watching him.

Which was impossible, wasn’t it?

She had to be imagining the intensity of that narrowed gaze. Understandably so after two days of being shut up here, completely alone with only her own panicked thoughts for company, as she questioned what might have happened to her father.

Besides, the man Rhys was the closer danger.

A second camera showed him having to duck his head slightly as he entered the bedroom. Meaning, if anything, he was even taller than the other man.

The two were also of similar age and even looked a little alike and had the same muscular built. Except Rhys had very short dark hair, which gave him a more severe appearance. If anything, his eyes, also pale, were even more intense than the other man’s.

He came to an abrupt halt once he’d fully entered the bedroom, lifting his head and—

Good God, what he actually sniffing the air in the bedroom? As if he could smell her? Or, at least, the gel and shampoo she had used earlier when she took a shower in the adjoining bathroom before going to bed?

Cristina took another involuntary step back, her calves hitting the chair so that she fell into it as those intense and narrowed pale eyes became fixed on the camera in the corner of her father’s bedroom.

What was it with these two men that they seemed to know they were being watched?

That she was the one watching them?

Fescaru’s woman is here, Aeran stated with certainty as he stepped into the bedroom where Rhys was. Only to be almost instantly brought to his knees by the aroma of hot female and spice. A unique and heady scent that he recognized as belonging to his mate. I felt her looking at me on the camera.

So did I.

I can also smell her.

So can I, his brother growled.

So could Rhys?

What the hell did it mean that Rhys was as aware of Cristina Petran as he was?

All eight of the Pendragon brothers were dragon shifters, and they had been alive for over sixteen hundred years. Originally, they had helped their brother Arthur, but after he died, they had fought in war after