You can read Thrax free below.
Blurb:
A dragon shifter, paranormal romance book. Part 1 in the Planet Of Dragons series. Meet Sir Thrax. He’s not just a hot dragon knight, he’s basically godlike! Seriously, the guy is flawless and at the top of his game.
He is so great that women are lining up to be his mate and bear his babies, only to be chosen by lottery. And the lucky winner? Agena Morrow. But Agena is about to find out she’s signed up for more than she expected…
Turns out Thrax is all about the logistics of baby-making, but actually having one? Not so much. So what will happen when Agena discovers the true intentions behind Thrax’s charming facade? Find out in this were dragon romance story by Bonnie Burrows.
Chapter 1
If only they would not make such a spectacle of the thing.
That was Agena Morrow’s only exception to what had brought her to the planet Lacerta. Why must the Courting Lottery be such a spectacle?
Truth be told, Agena was well accustomed to loud, raucous, and clamorous public displays. She was a professional athlete, an interstellar champion of the game of Sphereball. She was accustomed to roaring, cheering, hooting, howling, screeching, and sometimes even rioting crowds of humans and many other species friendly to Earth-kind. She was accustomed to millions of eyes being upon her on whatever planet she happened to be competing and across the transmitted media of thousands of planets. It was a routine part of her life.
But that was the nature of competition and of the fans and culture that surrounded athletes and sporting events. And in the context of her sport and her champion status, she welcomed it.
But for the purpose that had brought her to the planet Lacerta, it felt like an intrusion, an invasion, an imposition, a nuisance—even an annoyance. She wished that in this of all endeavors, it could be kept personal because it was the most personal thing in the world.
This was not about competition. It was not about winning, not about claiming a prize, and not about the acclaim of the masses of the galaxy. This was about her future, and it was a much more intimate thing. Or, to her mind, it should be.
It happened that the Governing Aerie of Lacerta felt otherwise, and it was all done according to their laws and their customs or not at all. Agena could live with it, or she could go seeking what she wanted somewhere else. And she had no desire to look elsewhere. If she were to find what she was seeking, she would find it here, on this planet, with these people. So, she would do it their way.
Agena stood on the stone balcony of the Courting Chateau, leaned on the railing, and looked out across the cityscape of Silverwing, the capital of the planet. Fittingly for a planet whose inhabitants could all fly, Silverwing was a city designed to grow upward. It was a place of gleaming towers and turrets, with arches and bridges built between them, interspersed with high domes.
Entrances and exits were not all at ground level. Many were high on building facades and on rooftops. If one did not happen to be one of the locals, one got around from place to place via air sled, and Agena could see a number of these vehicles zipping about over the streets and between the buildings, occupied by terrestrial humans like herself and by off-worlders of various species. The natives did not require air sleds unless they were in an off-world company. The natives had their own means of transportation.
She saw hundreds of them swooping and soaring amid the architecture spread out before her. The natives of Lacerta, those she could see from her present vantage, had wings—mighty, leathern wings that stretched out like living sails, beating at the air and buoying themselves up in it. They had massive tails with scales and stripes, beating and undulating behind them as they went.
Their limbs were muscular, sinewy things, adorned with scales as well, and their hands were fearsomely taloned claws. Their necks were long and serpentine, scaled and striped to match the tails, and adorned with rows of spines. And their heads were the heads of great, fantastic reptiles, etched with scalation and crowned with regal horns. The men and women who built the proud, elegant civilization of the planet Lacerta had arrived as human colonists—and had become a race who were both human and dragon.
Peering down to the street below, Agena could make out some Lacertans in their human form who might morph to humanoid dragons and claim the air at any moment or any whim. Lacertans customarily wore garments that looked not so much woven from fabric as forged or spun from shining metal. The backs of their clothing were always open, exposing the skin and permitting the wings to unfurl from the upper back and the tail to extend from the lower back when they transformed.
The planetary climate control lent itself to this custom; everywhere on Lacerta, the average temperature ranged from twenty-four to twenty-nine degrees Centigrade, which was one of the things that made Lacerta a popular destination for travelers. Another thing, of course, was the Lacertans themselves.
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Something about their long-ago mutation into dragon metamorphs had made the Lacertans a race of beautiful-looking beings, whether in their human form or their semi-reptile shape. It was almost enough to recall ancient superstitions from Earth and make one suspect they had been deliberately designed that way. Humans had long ago used genetic engineering and molecular and cellular surgery to select certain qualities out of their gene pool and perfect their bodies.
Somehow, being both human and dragon had naturally refined for the Lacertans the process that people on Earth had accomplished artificially. Lacertans were never homely, never bald, and never obese. They were perfect: lean, toned, muscular and sinewy, and hypnotically beautiful of face and features, every last one of them, and they needed no modification of their genes or other procedures to make them so. Physically, they were the envy of human civilization—which was part of what had brought Agena to this planet.
Agena looked carefully among the figures walking about below her and those flying so effortlessly beyond her; she looked for a particular kind of figure. At one moment, three of them came soaring by her, clad in silver garments decorated with dragon-claw symbols. These she recognized as the color and symbols reserved for a specific group among the Lacertans. Only the Dragon Corps wore silver from shoulders to feet and were adorned with those symbols. These, then, were the planetary peacekeepers, trained to patrol Lacerta and maintain internal law and order on the planet.
Except for the Ruling Aerie, only one body of Lacertans held a higher authority than the Corps. Agena could see none of them at the moment, but she knew that their global headquarters lay at the place they called the Spires, nearer the center of Silverwing than where her Chateau stood. It made her skin tingle to think of them, the dragon men and women who ranked higher than the Corps and were the enforcers of justice not only on this planet but everywhere in the galaxy that Lacertans lived and traveled. She knew that somewhere nearby, the capital was under the vigilant watch of the Knights of Lacerta.
The Knights of Lacerta: even the mention of their name commanded respect across known space. Like the Corps, they dressed in metallic foil and armor uniforms, but their symbols were dragon heads, and the hilt of each knight’s formidable weapon was wrought in that shape. The Knights wore an array of colors in combinations and patterns reserved especially for them. The lowest-ranking Knights wore single-color suits.