The Havards

The Havards are dragons. Men to look at, apart from molten-gold eyes with a slit pupil and a fine line of bronze-gold scale at temple, throat and the backs of the hands; they hold their valleys and their houses quietly, pay everything on time and in full, and have stayed out of the public record for centuries. There are not a great many of them and they do not gather. A Havard runs physically hot, keeps what he has decided is his, and is not ashamed of either.

One law stands above the keeping: a thing must be given. A Havard will not take, will not shut a gate, will not buy his way to what he wants, and never raises money as an argument. The hoard is enormous, meticulously recorded and entirely his — and the only thing in it he cannot simply acquire is a person's consent. That law is the engine of every book on this line.

The Havards is a series of standalone dragon romances about that family, loosely connected, each book a different one of them and a different house — a grey-stone pile at the head of a Northumberland valley with one warm room in it, a Teesdale side-valley, a London strongroom behind a Hatton Garden lock. Every book turns on an object: a stone, a piece, a thing given, refused, returned or finally worn. He puts things on her, and he cannot be argued out of it, and she is not for sale and says so. The book is the distance between those two facts closing on her terms.

Expect opulence rather than make-do: warmth, weight, gold, silk, lamp light on metal, and heat that is explicit, frequent and unhurried, with the temperature of him in every scene. No fated mates, no bond, no compulsion; he wants her specifically, for reasons he can state. The heroine is tall, glamorous and unapologetic about enjoying being given things. The last image of every book is her wearing something she chose to keep.

Dragon shifter romance · being kept · treasure-giving · possessive hero · old money · no fated mates · open-door explicit heat · guaranteed HEA

Each book is a complete interconnected standalone with a different Havard, a different house, and a guaranteed HEA. Read in any order — though most readers begin with The First Thing He Kept.