Ranger: Intergalactic Dating Agency (Dragon Brides Book 2), page 1
Ranger
Dragon Brides
Kate Rudolph
Contents
Dragon Brides
About Ranger
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
What’s to read next: Saber
Intergalactic Dating Agency
Also by Kate Rudolph
About Kate Rudolph
Dragon Brides
Fated mates, fierce women, and dragon princes are ready to find their mates in the new Dragon Brides series from Kate Rudolph.
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Crux
Ranger
Saber
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About Ranger
He's supposed to be a prince, not a prisoner...
Things are as bad as they can get for Ranger when he's thrown in a cell and told he's about to be sold for a profit. But his captors don't know he's a dragon, and he's ready to rain fire on them all in payback.
Until he meets Sidney.
She's stronger than she looks...
When Sidney discovers Ranger on the ship, it throws her world into upheaval. She's no slaver. She'll do what it takes to free him, even if it means crossing her captain and crew. When Ranger turns the tables on her, she's almost too angry to be attracted to him.
Almost.
Freeing Ranger has repercussions. And soon it's not just Sidney that's in danger, but everyone she loves as well. She'll need to trust the dragon prince if she's going to save them all.
But how can she do that without losing her heart?
Fated mates, fierce women, and dragon princes are ready to find their mates in the new Dragon Brides series from Kate Rudolph.
1
Rough hands dug into Ranger's arms, the force barely blunted by the thick fabric of his clothing. He struggled, but it was of little use. The two humans holding him had strong grips, and there were two other humans ready—eager, even—to do him harm if he broke free.
He'd been struggling ever since they caught him.
Stupid. So, stupid.
But how could he ignore a distress call in this corner of space? He wasn't that far from his home planet of Vemion, and he had a duty to help anyone he could save.
Stupid.
"This one's in good shape. He'll catch a fair price." The human trailing them to cut off that escape route made the comment. Ranger didn't bother to try and turn and get a look at him. These humans didn't all look the same, but they all wore the same grim expression that came from a hard life lived on the edge.
"Boar's not going to be happy," the human on his right arm said as he jerked Ranger forward. Apparently Ranger wasn't moving fast enough. "We need to stop home before we hit any of the markets."
They must have been confident about their setup if they spoke so openly. Ranger didn't like that. He had the martial skills required of a dragon prince, but those worked better when he had an army to back him up.
He could tell them he was a prince.
The thought came and went just as quickly. Yes, his father would ransom him without a second's hesitation. Or, if these humans played it right, he'd give them a reward for Ranger's safe return.
But even in a few sentences, Ranger had heard too much. These humans were just as likely to spook and kill him as return him home.
And he'd never hear the end of it if his father knew this had happened.
He was supposed to be on a mission, not trussed up by second rate human slavers and in dire straits.
Well, they might have been first rate. They had captured him without much trouble. Of course, he'd been knocked out by a cheap shot. But that didn't matter.
Ranger's flame simmered within him, but he held it back. He was almost certain these humans thought he was just another human. Humans and dragons looked alike… until a dragon shifted or summoned their flame or warrior form.
Then things couldn't be more different.
But he decided to keep his human form for now. He needed to figure out more of this situation. And he didn't want to give these people a clue to his actual strength. Not to mention the fact that he was exhausted. He hadn't had much of a chance to fight back, but whatever they'd done to him had sapped him of strength. He needed a minute to recuperate.
And if they were dragging him to a cell, he'd have plenty of time.
The matchmaker hadn't warned him about this.
He struggled more as they turned a corner, unable to just give in to what the humans wanted him to do.
Ranger thought back and wanted to curse the dragon woman. He knew his brother had gone to her not long before he disappeared from the palace. His father was uncharacteristically quiet about Crux's whereabouts.
So Ranger had taken it upon himself to find his older brother.
The matchmaker was the best clue, especially since she didn't answer to the king. Not directly, at least. Everyone answered to the king eventually.
She'd given him instructions to head into space and follow his instincts.
Now he wondered if this was a setup. Was the matchmaker working with these humans and taking a cut of the profits? Slavery was strictly prohibited in Vemion, and slavers were dealt with harshly. But that didn't mean people didn't try.
Ranger was a fool.
He jerked his arm and caught the human at a weak moment. He broke free and lashed out, elbowing the man in the face and making him cry out with pain as bright red blood burst from his nostrils.
Ranger heard a satisfying crack and smiled, even as the other humans piled onto him and paid him back three times over for his act of defiance.
His lip was split and his eyebrow cut. He was sure to have a black eye. But his nose wasn't broken. He spit blood onto the walkway.
The humans gripped him tighter and picked up the pace.
He didn't have time to fight back again.
Ranger tried to get his bearings, but there wasn't much to see. They were on a ship of some kind, cargo if he had to guess. Cargo ships could be like mazes, and if this one was normally used to transport slaves, he wouldn't be shocked if it was full of secret hideaways and hidden hallways.
He should have been paying attention to their path rather than wallowing in his own failure.
But what was done was done. And he'd made one of the humans bleed. He could at least be proud about that.
It was only a few minutes and two turns later that the humans brought him to a stop in front of a door. The human leading their group placed his palm against a scanner and the door slid open.
He stepped aside and let Ranger's two guards shove him into the dark room. Ranger stumbled, and before he could turn around, the door was already sliding shut.
Ranger burst into action and slammed his fist against the door. Unsurprisingly, it did nothing. His anger wanted him to pound against the door until his hands turned bloody and he made a dent.
But a smarter part prevailed.
He let his hands fall to his sides and breathed deep to steady his heartrate. Panic wouldn't gain him anything except a headache. He was a dragon warrior prince. He was above panic.
His racing heart didn't seem to realize that.
He couldn't hear anything outside of the cell. The humans could be standing right outside waiting to see if he had any tricks they hadn't yet seen. Or they could be on their way back to wherever they normally dwelled on the ship.
If Ranger was a betting man, he'd guess the latter.
He looked around. The cell was dark, but there was just enough light to see by coming from recessed lights in the wall. He'd never loved the dark, so he was thankful for that small blessing.
He looked for a camera or any other surveillance equipment but didn't see anything. That didn't mean it wasn't there, but for now he was willing to take his chances.
He took a deep breath and called on his warrior form, feeling a knot of tension uncoil as his skin thickened with scales and claws grew out of his hands. Now that he had a moment to think, he realized just how panicked and disoriented he'd been while the humans dragged him here.
His warrior form could have made quick work of four humans.
And yet he'd hesitated.
Stupid, useless prince.
But he was here now and could only move forward. He tested the door with his claws, but they barely scratched the metal. He was stronger in this form, too, but he couldn't put a dent in the door.
Fire was his only hope.
It was dangerous on a ship. He didn't know the o
xygen content of the air around him. If it was too much, he could end up making a fireball that destroyed the ship and left them dead in space.
Better dead than enslaved.
Ranger summoned his fire, but rather than breathing it, he let it flow into his hands until they glowed red hot, then he set them on the door.
He heard a strange hissing, and for a moment thought the door was buckling under the heat.
Then he yawned.
His eyes felt heavy.
He could barely lift his arms.
He caught sight of some sort of gas coming from a tube on the floor right before the strength went out of him and he fell to the floor, unconscious.
2
Sidney banged her wrench against a pipe and cursed as water shot out. "Wrong one, wrong one." She glared at the makeshift water treatment machine. It was older than her and made up of more rust than actual parts. The water in the settlement had a distinctly metallic taste, and the chemical tests that Sidney ran every week were coming back more and more toxic as time passed.
They needed a new machine. Or she needed to figure out magic so she could fix this one with nothing but spit and hope.
If the toxicity levels weren't bad enough, the machine was working at half capacity and dropping. They wouldn't have any treated water if it kept up.
"Making headway?" Cyclone peeked her head into the shed where Sidney was working.
Sidney jerked in surprise and almost slammed her head against one of those rusty pipes, pulling back just in time. She wasn't concerned so much about a concussion as what she could do to the pipe. Rust had a habit of breaking easy.
"Depends on how much toxic metal you want in your water. Or how much water you want." She had to scoot on her ass to get untangled from all the pipes, and only when she stood up did she notice just how stiff her muscles had gotten. Lovely. She followed Cyclone out of the shed and rolled her neck, trying to work out the kinks. "We need to replace the filtration system at the least. It would be best to replace the whole machine."
Cyclone gave an uncaring shrug. "Water tastes good enough to me."
"You can't detect dangerous toxins by taste. Mostly." Sidney tightened her grip on her trusty wrench and resisted the urge to chuck it at the water treatment machine.
Cyclone just rolled her eyes. She was one of the settlement elders, a woman that Sidney had looked up to for all her life. She had long gray hair she kept in tight braids and wrinkled pale skin that was starting to look as gray as her hair. Sidney wasn't sure how old Cyclone was. She'd been an adult all of Sidney's life, but it was scary to consider that the woman was getting old.
"Don't know why we need some fancy machine," Cyclone muttered again.
It was an old argument, one Sidney didn't feel like having right now. She'd started working on the mechanical equipment with her old mentor a dozen or more years before. Now she was twenty-six or so and the only person who cared about maintaining the equipment that kept their settlement running.
They'd carved out a bit of land for themselves on a barely habitable planet. It was the only home Sidney had ever known, even if she hadn't been born there.
She knew she had to be grateful.
But it could be frustrating to scream about how the settlement was on the verge of disaster and no one seemed to care. After all, everything had been fine for years.
They didn't mention that in those years a mine had been dug upstream from their town and all the runoff and refuse polluted their water. Sidney was the one who had to care about that.
And she wasn't going to argue now. Cyclone couldn't help her.
"Boar's landing," Cyclone said as they walked from the water treatment station down to Shadow's to grab a bite to eat for the midday meal. Half the town was lined up out the door of the restaurant, waiting for whatever Shadow had put together. She had a way with cooking that everyone else in town envied.
"I thought the crew was gone for the month." Sidney tried not to let excitement overtake her. Boar had listened to her last time she talked about repairs. The money wasn't there, not yet, but he understood the concern. He'd told her he'd bring it up to the council.
Maybe he'd listen about the water treatment machine.
She and Cyclone shuffled through the lunch line. Shadow moved fast, and it only took about ten minutes to get their food. They took it to one of the nearby trees and sat in the shade.
"Don't know why he's back soon," Cyclone said as she munched on her stew, scooping up the thick liquid with bread.
Sidney ate fast. She'd been pulled away from too many meals by breaking equipment, and she wasn't letting a bite of Shadow's stew go to waste. And eating gave her a few minutes to think.
"Do you think something's wrong?" she asked between bites.
Cyclone shrugged. She'd served on the settlement council for years before her retirement, but after she'd stepped back, it was like she stopped caring about the goings-on of the settlement. She talked with who she wanted to talk to, she went where she wanted to go, and she didn't let herself worry about what she didn't control.
Sidney wasn't sure if that was admirable or not.
She'd just finished the last bite of her stew when Prodigy, one of Boar's trusted lieutenants, ran up to her. He had a bandage on his nose and nasty looking black eyes.
"Are you okay?" she asked before he could greet her. "What happened?"
Cyclone just looked at him with one eyebrow raised.
"Some cargo wasn't properly stored." Prodigy winced as he spoke, and his tone was more nasal than usual. "Boar wants to see you. Now."
Sidney didn't make him wait. She bid farewell to Cyclone and followed Prodigy to the edge of town where the landing pad for their ship was located. The ship was too big to land on the planet, so they used a ferry to travel to and from space.
She couldn't remember the ship. She'd only been on it once, back when she was an infant, rescued from a wreck and taken in by the settlement. Sidney didn't think of it much, she was far too busy. But heading towards the ferry brought back memories.
The ferry was three times as tall as a person and as big as the gathering hall in the center of town. If this was small, Sidney could hardly fathom how big the ship up in space was.
Boar was waiting for them at the launch pad. He was a giant of a man, easily a foot taller than her, with huge muscles and a bushy beard. He was in his forties, or maybe his fifties by now, and until he'd taken over the space missions a decade before, he'd been one of the adults charged with her care.
Sidney didn't have adoptive parents, that wasn't how the settlement worked. Children were raised collectively. She only knew the other way because she'd been able to read old Earth books that were kept in the settlement library. Their ways sounded strange.
"Go get your nose tended to," Boar told Prodigy as they approached. The other man turned around and headed back towards the settlement without another word. Strange. Sidney would have thought they could treat something as simple as a broken nose on board. But Boar didn't give her time to question. He slung a friendly arm over her shoulder and gave her a hug. "It's good to see you, girl. It's been far too long."
Sidney hugged him back. "You're the one who keeps flying away."
Boar laughed. "You know it's necessary."
That's what everyone said. It was easier to fly through space to the other side of this planet to buy supplies than to trek over land. And the other planets in the system were densely populated. The settlement wasn't self-sufficient. They had to hire out the ship for any number of reasons to keep the settlement going.
Speaking of. "We're having trouble with the water treatment machine." Boar wasn't in charge of the settlement or anything, but he did have the ear of the council. He was likely to take a seat the next time one came open. If anyone could help her, he could.
