The Highland Dragon's Lady

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Copyright © 2014 by Isabel Cooper

Cover and internal design © 2014 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

Cover art by Shane Rebenschied

Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

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Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

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An Excerpt from
Night of the Highland Dragon

About the Author

Back Cover

To my late grandmother, Helen Virginia (Myers) Kunkle, a truly great lady.

July 1895

Someone was climbing up to Colin MacAlasdair’s room.

The plum tree below the balcony where he stood was moving, first lower branches shaking, then higher ones. The night was windless, and neither a bird nor a squirrel would cause quite that much disturbance. Not even the stable cats of Whitehill Abbey, overfed as they were, could manage it.

So, then: a human being, and probably a live one, despite the abbey’s reputation for ghosts. Ghosts generally didn’t bother climbing trees, in Colin’s limited experience.

He didn’t think Whitehill housed any mortals who wanted him dead. When the eldest son of the house asked a chap to pay a visit, the locals weren’t generally disposed toward assassination, at least outside of novels. Edmund Talbot-Jones and his parents seemed harmless enough, and the other houseguests would be more likely to drive a man to suicide than kill him outright, although Colin thought Mrs. Osbourne wouldn’t be above a discreet bit of arsenic in the teacup if she thought the situation required it.

Of course, he could be wrong.

The leaves were rustling just above the edge of the balcony now. Colin stepped back into the shadows and waited. One way or another, he suspected he’d be enjoying himself immensely over the next few minutes.

The intruder shimmied off a branch, grabbed the edge of the balcony, and swung herself up to sit on the railing.
Herself
was the definitive pronoun: the girl in question was wearing a man’s shirt and a pair of trousers, but both were rather small even for the average stable boy, and she…wasn’t. Athletic and limber, yes; boyish, definitely not.

This evening was definitely looking more interesting.

Nonchalantly, with the air of having regularly occupied exactly such a seat, Colin’s visitor slid forward on the railing, twined her legs around the marble bars below her, and made herself comfortable. In the darkness, from Colin’s distance, a mortal man would have seen only her figure and the braid of dark hair trailing behind her.

Not being mortal, Colin saw that her face was long and delicate-looking, with big brown eyes and a turned-up nose with a spray of freckles across it.

That was as far as observation took him before the girl started to speak.

“You really are a prize idiot, you know that?”

Other people, most notably Colin’s siblings, had made similar observations, but they hadn’t prepared him to receive such comments with perfect equanimity, particularly coming from the small mouth of a girl he’d never met in his life.

Words didn’t precisely fail him. He could think of quite a few. But the process of choice stumped him just then and created a receptive silence, which the girl clearly read as a request for more on the same theme.

“
If
you don’t like a girl, you poor dumb fish,” she went on, “the thing to do is to avoid her, and possibly to talk about other women whenever you can. You do
not
have long, vague conversations with her in gardens at twilight, and you certainly don’t jump into lakes after her hat. And you needn’t tell me that you do like her, because this is me talking to you, and I know perfectly well that you don’t. It doesn’t seem likely that anyone could.”

Hat? Lake? Gardens? Colin would have admitted, under very little pressure, to having walked in any number of gardens with any number of women. He couldn’t precisely swear that, over the course of three hundred years, he’d never rescued a hat from a watery grave. None of the above, however, had happened over the course of his time at Whitehill.

He cleared his throat.

“Which brings me to point two,” said the girl, sensing that the moment was right to press forward like the proverbial wolf on the fold, “which is that, if you think you’re going to marry her, I’ll throw you into the lake myself. There are
plenty
of perfectly nice girls in England who’d be glad to marry anybody. Even if you’ve given in to Pater at last, you’ve got no need to choose some”—she waved one white-clad arm in a vigorous manner, causing Colin to shift his weight forward in case she fell from the railing—“some mad scientist’s cross between a toffee pudding and a Salvation Army captain.”

“Ah—”

The girl slid down from the railing. Her tone softened. Having gotten the initial message across, she clearly felt that she could now show some mercy. “Don’t fret,” she said. “I’ll get you out of it this time, and I’ll have a word with Pater about the sort he keeps pushing on you. But
do
be careful, won’t you? Leave the Heselton filly to that dancing-master-looking Scottish chap you brought down.
He
knows how to handle a girl, if you believe Bettina. And Lily. And—”

“My dear lady,” said Colin, stepping forward and bowing before she could continue the list. Housemaids were clearly creatures of little discretion and a great deal of trouble. “I’m afraid you’ve been laboring under a case of mistaken identity.”

At this point, the situation could have gone a number of ways. The girl might have screamed. She might have fainted, although your modern girl, in Colin’s experience, was rather beyond fainting, particularly the specimen of modern girl who climbed up to balconies in the dead of night. She might have thrown a small but tasteful potted geranium at Colin’s head, or she might have slapped him.

Instead, she laughed.

Respecting the hour, she laughed quietly, but she didn’t otherwise bother to restrain herself. She leaned against the railing, tilted her head back, and broke into a cascade of giggles that made her shoulders shake and let Colin see that her breasts were clearly unbound beneath her shirt. The night air, even in July, had a certain chill, but heat welled up between his legs nonetheless. He adjusted his dressing gown to provide a little more discretion.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said eventually. “You’re—”

“The dancing-master-looking Scottish chap. Colin MacAlasdair, at your service.”

“Reggie Talbot-Jones. Er, Regina. Miss Talbot-Jones.” She made a face. “Doesn’t seem like I can stand on propriety, though, considering the circumstances. And I’ve known plenty of dancing masters in my life, all of them very handsome and, um, respectable.”

“Good Lord, I hope not.”

Reggie giggled again. “You really ought to have let me know sooner,” she said.

“Oh, aye, probably. But you didn’t really give me much chance to think, you know. Poor Edmund.”

“Poor Edmund, my foot. You don’t know half the trouble he’d have gotten into if I wasn’t his sister. And why are you in his room, anyhow?”

“Ultimately, because Mr. Heselton broke his ankle,” Colin said and remembered that Reggie was a daughter of Whitehill. “Have any of the steps on the front stairway ever broken before?”

“Not since we’ve been here,” said Reggie, “but that’ll only be two years at Candlemas.” She lifted her eyebrows. “If you’re asking whether I think the ghost could be responsible, the answer is yes. But you knew it would be. You’re here because of the ghost, aren’t you?”

“I’m here because your brother invited me. And because I was curious,” Colin admitted.

Mr. Talbot-Jones had not invited public scrutiny of his house’s less material inhabitants. His guest list, though comprised of a number of people versed in the occult, included nobody as well-known as Blavatsky had been or Besant still was, and he was clearly trying his hardest to seem as if he’d simply decided to host the indefinite houseguests that any wealthy man might welcome in summer. They’d all played croquet the day before, and there’d been sundry talk of shooting and boating among those assembled.

Edmund had put the invitation in almost those terms. “It’ll be a lark,” he’d said. “Even if they don’t manifest more than a bit of gauze. And I could use a bit of friendly company.”

“You do seem like a
curious
sort of man,” said Reggie, giving him a once-over. “Since Edmund invited you and not Pater, does that mean you’ve no idea what to do with a ghost?”

“Depends on the ghost, I should think.”

“Ha,” said Reggie, her suspicions clearly confirmed. “Well, if you’re just up to gawk, at least you won’t be drifting around being mystic at everyone. We had a girl in over the winter who kept lecturing me on the spiritual properties of my food. I think I lost two stone before I fled back to London.”

“I’d imagine you’d find that helpful, considering your hobbies.” Colin gestured toward the tree.

“One, climbing trees isn’t a hobby; two, I wasn’t that heavy to start with—so chivalrous of you to mention that, by the way—and three, that plum is very sturdy.”

“Not as sturdy as the floor, I’d think. Do you always take the arboreal route?”

“It’s easier than sneaking through the house,” said Reggie, shrugging. “Even when I was a child and we didn’t have ghosts, we had vases. And ornamental tables. And hat stands. Do you know how much damage the average hat stand can do to a growing girl?”

Colin laughed. “I can’t say I’ve ever made a study. But why sneak at all?”

“When I was young, because of”—she waved a hand—“nannies and governesses and housemistresses and things. They disapprove of nighttime excursions. I can’t imagine why. I’ve always found them awfully broadening to the mind.”

“That’s probably why,” said Colin.

“And now I don’t want to wake the place. The maids talk, and then Mater frets—and if I want to air certain frank views about certain houseguests, it’s dashed hard to find a time to do so during the day. Especially with those houseguests languishing around the place all the time, pouting soulfully.”

The air of scorn about Reggie was too thick, in fact, to cut with the proverbial knife. A kukri might have done the job, or a machete.

Out of a mingled sense of helpfulness and devilment, Colin pointed out, “Such sisterly honesty isn’t likely to do very much in the way of changing Edmund’s mind, you know. Not if he’s in love with the girl.”

He knew that much from experience. Over the last few hundred years, he, Stephen, and Judith had all waxed fairly frank with each other on the subject of romantic connections, and all three had failed to make much impression—though Colin did give himself credit for pushing along his brother’s romance with the woman who was now his wife.

“He’s not,” said Reggie.

“Are you certain? Miss Heselton isn’t to everyone’s tastes when it comes to personality, but there are men who like that sort of thing, and she’s certainly up to the mark physically, if you’ll forgive my bluntness.”

“I will,” said Reggie, perhaps feeling once again that a woman who vaulted onto balconies in the dead of night couldn’t stick strictly to the approved rules of conversation. “But Edmund doesn’t care about that, and he doesn’t want to marry her.”

She spoke quickly and clearly impulsively, but there was no idealism in her voice, no suggestion that she was a high-minded young woman who expected her brother to care only for the heart and soul or other such sentimental rubbish. No, Reggie spoke as one who knew facts that she wasn’t telling.

“He must confide in you a great deal,” said Colin, meaningfully.

“He does,” said Reggie, with a sudden look of realization and alarm, “and I shouldn’t be discussing him with a stranger. A pleasure to meet you, I’m sure, but—”

She turned toward the balcony.

“No, wait a bit!” Colin said. Reggie was the best bit of entertainment he’d had all day, and he hated to lose her to a sudden attack of scruples. When she didn’t turn at his voice, he darted forward and caught her by the wrist.

She did turn then, her eyes wide with fear, but it didn’t matter. At the touch of skin on skin, Colin felt a presence in his mind, a brush of warm contact that came, in the strange way that mental contact sometimes worked, with the smell of oranges.

He thought of flying on a summer’s day, wings open to the updrafts, in southern climates where he hadn’t been for decades.

Then he heard Reggie’s shocked voice: “You’re a
dragon
?”