The Highland Dragon's Lady (2 page)

Reggie knew she shouldn’t have said it, not aloud.

Since the age of thirteen, when her strange power had started expressing itself, she’d begun to learn the art of a closed mouth and a good poker face, as hard as both were for her. At eighteen, after an evening that still hurt to remember, she’d doubled her efforts. Now she considered herself very good when she wanted to be.

Most people didn’t grab her. Most people wore gloves, and so, most of the time, did Reggie. Society made her situation a little easier that way. And most people didn’t remember flying on great leathery wings or the glint of sunlight off midnight-blue scales.

Under the circumstances, Reggie really couldn’t kick herself too hard for anything she blurted out.

She did wish she hadn’t said it when Colin’s hand was around her wrist, though. He was a dragon. He was also tall as a man, and despite his slim body, he’d caught her with considerable strength; and from what Reggie could make out in the moonlight, he was staring at her like he’d been poleaxed.

People could get damned angry when one found out their secrets. Colin’s secret was more shattering than most.

Taking advantage of his distraction, Reggie yanked her wrist away and stepped backward, trying not to stumble. Dignity: that was the ticket. Her backside hit the balcony railing and she yelped.

Dignity. Right ho.

“And what on earth,” Colin asked, tilting his head to the side and staring at her, “are
you
?”

He hadn’t pulled the sinisterly curved knife that books said was generally inevitable in these situations. He hadn’t tried to throttle her—which was an acceptable alternative from the perspective of your average faceless fiend or ax-wielding maniac—and he didn’t sound angry. Speculative might end up being just as bad, in the end, but Reggie could at least play for time.

“Just a girl,” she said, “as far as I’ve ever been able to tell.”

“A girl who can read minds,” said Colin, “from a family whose house is haunted.”

“We only moved in two years ago. They’re not
our
ghosts,” said Reggie, for all the good that correcting him was likely to do her, “and I can’t exactly read minds. And I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”

Colin chuckled. “Of course you won’t. Who’d believe you? You can put
your
mind at ease,” he added, with a graceful wave of one hand. “I’ve no ill intentions toward you. I’m only curious.”

“You mentioned that,” said Reggie.

Now that she could breathe normally again, and the balcony felt more solid underneath her feet, she had to fight the urge to be surly. Her temper had been the subject of several tedious governess lectures when she was growing up. In this instance, she couldn’t help feeling some justification for it.

While she was trying to adjust her view of the world, Colin was standing there, his hands in his smoking jacket, looking down at her without any apparent care. It was quite possible that the next word out of his mouth was going to be “fascinating,” and it was quite possible that Reggie would push him off the balcony if it was.

To add insult to injury, he was also handsome: tall and slim, with high cheekbones and a pointed chin, large silver-gray eyes, and thick dark hair that blew picturesquely in the faint breeze. Reggie didn’t doubt that he knew it.

She threw back her shoulders, raised her head, and asked, “Do I get to be curious too? It’s not as if you’re an ordinary sort of fellow.”

“Oh,” said Colin, his voice dropping and taking on a caressing tone, “I’d be glad to gratify
any
curiosity you’re having, I’m sure.”

Years had passed since Reggie had left the schoolroom, and she’d run with a bohemian crowd in the meantime. She’d heard her share of suggestive comments. Most of the time, she didn’t even blush. When warmth spread across her face as Colin spoke, it was due to the uncomfortable knowledge that other parts of her body were responding as well.

She crossed her arms over her chest and cursed the thin fabric of her shirt.

“I should’ve expected that,” she said, trying to sound world-weary. She really
should
have too, except—well, he was a friend of Edmund’s, and many of them weren’t very interested in women.

Reggie, of course, wasn’t supposed to know about such things, but there were many things she wasn’t supposed to know about, and yet there was very little of the world with which she wasn’t familiar by now.

So she’d thought, anyhow. She was revising that opinion at full speed.

“I didn’t even know your sort
enjoyed
young women,” she said, by way of firing a further shot across his bow, “at least not in any way but dinner.”

“Myth and fable, I assure you,” said Colin. He shrugged. “Oh, there’s a villain in every family, if you look hard enough. A great-great-great-uncle might have breakfasted on the occasional peasant, and I believe an ancestor on my grandfather’s side swallowed up most of a Russian regiment, but that was the spoils of war. I wouldn’t dream of eating anything with a mind. Besides, it’s hard enough to get a cook who won’t spoil
beef
.”

“That’s a weight off my mind,” said Reggie, laughing despite herself.

“Glad to oblige. And speaking of minds—what exactly do you do, if you don’t read them?”

“I get impressions. Thoughts. Memories, sometimes. I don’t do it on purpose, and I can’t control it very well. It’s more like being shouted at than reading.”

“Sounds unpleasant,” Colin said, with a refreshingly matter-of-fact sympathy. “Do either of your parents have the same power? I’m sure I’d have noticed by now if Edmund had.”

“Are you?” Reggie asked, but she didn’t wait for an answer. Gentlemen did take off their gloves to shake hands; she didn’t want to think there was anything more involved, not when Colin had been flirting with her a minute ago. “But no, he doesn’t. Neither does anyone living in the family, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell. Mater’s grandfather was supposed to have been ‘odd,’ but she wouldn’t ever give me details, and Uncle Lewis went a sort of puce color when I asked him.”

“That’s a bad habit. Doubtless highly destructive to all sorts of circulatory systems and limbic whatnot. You shouldn’t encourage him in it.”

“I try not to encourage that side of the family in anything much. They’re the sort that need sitting at regular intervals. But it was when I first started to read people,” she said, “and I was—well, curious. What about you? Great-great-grandfathers and so on aside.”

“While I’d quite like to believe myself unique in many ways,” Colin said, smiling, “my powers aren’t one of them. Not that England is festooned with dragons, you understand, but there are a few of us, even as late as my generation. Perhaps there are more than that, only the blood runs too thin for them to change shapes. Talents like mine—and yours—do generally pass on down the family line.”

“You would say that, wouldn’t you?”

Colin blinked at her, satisfyingly surprised by the change in direction. “How do you mean?”

“I do pay some attention when Pater talks. You’re a lord’s son, aren’t you?” Memories from finishing school were always at her fingertips somehow, even when more practical things slipped her mind. “The Honorable Colin MacAlasdair?”

“As a matter of formality, yes,” he said, and his eyes glinted silver in the moonlight. He took a step toward Reggie. “In actuality, I’m honorable only when I can’t find any way ’round it.”

Once again, Reggie was glad the railing was there to support her. This time, the weakness in her knees was more pleasant, but no less dangerous.

“I can believe that easily enough,” she said and didn’t even try very hard to sound disapproving. “Even without my power.”

“In all justice,” Colin said, “you have to admit I’ve not done anything particularly scandalous tonight. I was simply admiring the view, and I’ll presume so far as to think your father wouldn’t have given me this room if he’d minded the use of the balcony.”

“But he didn’t,” said Reggie, finding a point of challenge and grabbing for it. “It’s Edmund’s room. You’re just here because the vicar broke his ankle—and I’m not quite sure how that means you get Edmund’s room, come to think of it.”

“He was going to switch with Mrs. Osbourne, but she likes an eastern view,” Colin said, and his brow crinkled slightly as he thought. “So she traded with Miss Browne, but Miss Browne is allergic to the lilacs on this side of the house, and I believe she—”

“Oh, no more.” Reggie stopped him with an upraised hand. “Or at least have the grace to work it out with a blackboard and a bit of chalk. I’m sure the right angle of a parallelogram comes into it somewhere.”

An owl flew by as they laughed together, its call echoing across the garden below. It was the first moving thing Reggie had seen, other than her and Colin, since she’d landed on the balcony. They might have been the only two people in the world. They were, she thought, the only two people in
a
world, at least as far as Whitehill’s residents were concerned.

“How long have you been reading people?” Colin asked.

“Since I was thirteen. Edmund had just come back from school. That’s why he knows. He’s the only other one who really does.”

“But you go about in society and everything? It must be rather hard on you.”

“Not as bad as all that. It only works by touching bare skin.” Reggie took a step forward, looked up into his eyes, and smiled. “And that doesn’t happen very often.”

Fluid, laughing, Colin held up his hands. “A point to the lady,” he said. “I shouldn’t have grabbed at you. But surely your maid—”

“Doesn’t touch me as much as you might imagine,” said Reggie. “I don’t get anything through hairpins or corset strings. Besides, I can generally control myself if I know in advance that someone’s going to touch me.”

In moonlit silence, her words sounded like the most blatant of innuendo. From Colin’s slow smile, Reggie knew that he hadn’t missed the implications, either. She looked between the smile and his heavy-lidded eyes and felt her heart start beating faster.

Reggie couldn’t think of anything to say that would cut the tension between them. She couldn’t think of much to say in general. Any minute
Colin
was going to say something, and it would be urbane and witty and put her even more off her footing than she was now—or he’d be one of those horrid skillful men who could put her at ease, and they’d both know that he was doing so.

So Reggie stepped forward and kissed him.

Scandalous as many found her life, Reggie knew that certain things were appropriate and others were not. Rules governed the universe, as strong as the laws of gravity or Mater’s fussing about seating arrangements. One of those rules was that, when throwing oneself into the arms of a strange man whose balcony one has invaded in the middle of the night, one does not kiss him with maidenly or timorous forbearance.

She’d never sat down and thought about that particular rule, but it seemed obvious now.

It seemed imperative, in fact, that she grasp Colin by the shoulders so that she could feel the muscles beneath the dark velvet of his dressing gown and the way that they flexed as he wrapped his arms around her. A sense of the appropriate also dictated that she open her mouth beneath his, caressing his lips with her tongue until they parted, and that she not simply melt bonelessly into his embrace but mold her body against his.

One had to enter into things with the proper spirit.

Also, dear God, the man could kiss. After the first few seconds, Reggie stopped thinking about technique and tactics and appropriateness; there was too much sensation to enjoy. Colin’s tongue stroking against hers, for instance, teasing and suggestive, or the way his hands grazed over her back. She’d never thought of her spine as a particularly sensual place, for heaven’s sake, but he trailed his fingers up from her waist to the back of her neck, and Reggie felt the touch throughout her whole body.

She did manage not to moan. The man was far too smug already.

At least she was also having an effect on him. That was very definite: she felt his rod rubbing against her thigh and felt as well as heard his sudden intake of breath when she writhed in response. Either he was very large, she thought hazily, or dressing gowns and breeches provided considerably more information on that score than more proper clothing. She wasn’t complaining.

She wasn’t complaining about the clothing at all. The shirt, small and thin as it was, let her feel Colin’s hands on her back much more and also let her press her aching breasts against his chest. Furthermore, when Colin slid one hand down to cup her backside, she thought she felt every nerve where he touched spring to life. It was almost as good as being naked.

Before very long, she would be: naked, in her parents’ house, with a man she’d met not twenty minutes before, while two floors of guests slumbered around them.

The risks crashed down on her head with the weight of a small mountain.

Reggie pulled away and stepped back. “Well,” she said, breathless. “You see? I didn’t learn anything about you at all.”

Before Colin could reply, she leaped to the balcony, grabbed hold of a tree branch, and scrambled back to safety.

“Rotten old pile, isn’t it?” Sprawled on a violently green plush sofa, Edmund Talbot-Jones flung out a hand, gesturing to the study and the window beyond it, where darker green drapes framed a gray, rainy landscape. “This isn’t the worst of it. Mater’s done one of the drawing rooms in an exotic theme. There’s a stuffed lion’s head that’ll give even you nightmares.”

“It can’t be
that
ferocious, surely,” said Colin, eyeing his friend with amusement and propping his feet up on an oversized black-and-gilt desk. Edmund wasn’t the sort to find a dead lion particularly frightening. His mortal comrades still talked about the Rowing Blue he’d earned at Oxford, and Colin had seen himself that the man knew his way around a gun.

“No,” said Edmund. “It’s that badly stuffed. When Uncle Gordon gave it to us, Reggie said it looked like he’d glued a bad wig on a stray dog. Not in front of him.”

“Of course,” said Colin, though he suspected it was a near thing, even having known Reggie as briefly as he had. Remembering their first and last encounter, he crossed his legs and reached for his glass of brandy. Best not to let his thoughts go too far down certain paths while he was talking with the girl’s brother.

At least they didn’t look very much alike. They had the same dark hair, but Edmund’s eyes were pale blue-gray, and his features were much broader and spread across a square face. His body was square, too, and muscular.

Colin himself was stronger than he looked, even in human form. It had been a long time since a mortal, particularly a mortal with no magical skill, had worried him.

Nonetheless, he didn’t think he wanted to tell Edmund about his encounter with Reggie.

“How did you get it?” he asked, by way of a change of subject.

“Uncle Gordon. The man’s actually gone on a safari. He just has no taste in gifts or taxidermists—oh, you mean Whitehill?” Edmund lit a cigarette and leaned his head back on the couch, blowing smoke toward the ceiling. “Came up for sale three years ago. The last of the family has a flat in London and couldn’t be bothered with the expenses. He didn’t even know he was in line to inherit until he got the letter. Not a man who wanted to be a landowner. But Pater was, so here we are.”

“Here we are,” Colin echoed. “Who did he inherit from?”

“Oh, you mean Old Morgan?” Edmund laughed. “That’s what they called him in the village, I hear. Did you ever hear anything so gothic?”

“Not in a while,” said Colin, which was true. It had been at least a hundred years.

“He was a bit of a local legend, as I recall. Shut himself up in here with his books, never went down to the village, kept barely any servants. Died aged ninety-something, with no teeth and a beard down to his knees. One hesitates to inquire about his fingernails.”

“Could he be the ghost?”

“Do I look like Madam Blavatsky to you?” Holding his cigarette lazily in one hand, Edmund took a sip of his brandy. “I doubt it, though. From what Pater tells me, the place was odd even before Old Morgan fell off the twig. Nothing dramatic, but plenty of the old tricks: strange noises, cold spots, faces at the window. Old Morgan had a terrible time keeping the few servants he did have, they say. Of course, I haven’t really made a study of it—by the time we bought the place, Reggie and I were full-grown. I don’t know that either of us has stayed here for more than a month at a time.”

“Really? I would’ve thought it would be just your sort of place—pastoral beauty, woods and streams, plenty of hunting. And you said that your sister was an athletic sort of girl.”

“Did I?” Edmund blinked, then shrugged. “Well, I might have, and she is.”

“Then—” Colin gestured questioningly, the motion sending waves of brandy against the sides of his glass. “Is it the ghosts?”

“Not hardly, though I’ll own some of the things I’ve heard about—the shrieking and that—could wear on the nerves. No, Reggie and I know that ghosts have nothing to do with the real curse of Whitehill.”

“What’s that?”

Edmund grinned wryly. “Its new owners.”

“Ah,” Colin said, laughing. “That bad, are they?”

What acquaintance he’d had with the senior Talbot-Joneses hadn’t been arduous. Then again, he wasn’t related to them. He remembered a childhood friend, the son of his father’s falconer, asking what was so bad about Judith. After a list of successively less convincing statements, twelve-year-old Colin had finally settled on “…and she’s my
sister
.”

That had said it all, at the time.

Exhaling another cloud of smoke, Edmund shrugged again. “The Aged Parents are good sorts at heart,” he said carefully. “For me, it’s only that they have their hearts set on marrying me off soon. Particularly Pater. Now that he owns land, he’s as concerned about the succession as if our line went back as far as yours did.”

“It does, in its way,” said Colin.

“Yes, but it goes back to a lot of fishermen in Leeds.”

“So do most people’s, if you look far enough,” said Colin.

“To fishermen in Leeds? They must have been a randy lot—”

“You know well enough what I mean,” said Colin. Of course,
his
bloodlines had stranger things in them than a hint of blue, but the principle applied. He could very well be descended, on one side, from a Chinese milkmaid or an Indian farmer’s daughter.

“Yes, but I also know you’re a radical,” Edmund said.

“Of course. How else would we have met?”

“At some thoroughly respectable club, perhaps. I think Pater’s signed me up for two or three.” Edmund sighed. “He does mean well. And it’s not unreasonable to want an heir, I know.”

“You’re not the only child.”

“But I’m the son, and that counts for more here than in your homeland, barbarian.” Edmund pretended to wince as Colin pretended to glare. “And Reggie’s not…that is, they think she’s less likely to produce a son than I am.”

“Oh? Stops clocks with her face, does she?” Colin asked, glancing casually down at his glass.

Edmund shook his head. “Rather pretty, at least as far as I’m any judge of women. But she doesn’t much care for their sort of society, hasn’t since she was young, and said so around the wrong company. Those people have very long memories.”

“Ah,” said Colin.

“Besides,” Edmund said, smiling again, “they don’t generally dare throw men at her, and most men wouldn’t dare be thrown.”

“Perhaps that’s your problem,” Colin offered. Wind gusted past the windows, and suddenly the room was chilly; there was probably a draft somewhere. In old houses like Whitehill, there nearly always was. He tugged his coat a little more firmly around his shoulders. “You need to be more intimidating.”

“And how would I manage that, pray?”

“It shouldn’t take much. You’re a brawny lad, so you start with an advantage already. Scowl more, look out the window and brood on occasion, and be as terse as you can. My brother, Stephen, could give you a lesson or three.”

“Isn’t your brother married?”

“Yes,” said Colin, “but his wife’s a rare sort of creature. I suspect it’d take the better part of an army to frighten
her
off once she’s got her teeth into something.” Thinking of Mina MacAlasdair, he smiled and raised his glass again.

This time, with no need to conceal his thoughts, he didn’t look down. The rim of the glass had nearly touched Colin’s lips when he heard Edmund’s wordless exclamation of horror.

Instincts centuries old froze his body into tense alertness, ready to move at any second but completely still just then. Colin’s perception widened and sharpened at the same time. He saw Edmund’s face, wide-eyed and openmouthed, staring at the glass Colin held.

He saw the wasps on the rim.

Four clustered there: bloated things that moved without purpose or intent, buzzing mindlessly. The sound was not faint; Colin would have heard it before, if the wasps had been in the room. He would have seen the insects if they’d been in the room.

The chill from before returned, and this time Colin knew it had nothing to do with wind or drafts. He felt the hair lift on his arms and the back of his neck. Inwardly, he felt his other shape stir, then subside as his human mind rejected that option. Slowly, with utmost care, he put the glass down.

The desk buzzed underneath his feet.

“Colin?” Edmund had turned toward the desk, his eyes taking up most of his face. He began to rise.

“Be still,” said Colin, lifting a hand.

He stood up. The buzzing was louder now, growing by the second. The brandy glass was trembling by the time his feet hit the ground.

He breathed a word in Latin, transferring his vision to a different level of reality, and saw the pulsing yellow-black blotch where the desk had been. He had time to do that much.

Then the desk split apart.

Mahogany split apart in a series of jagged-edged cracks, too quiet and easy a succession of sounds to have come from such a sturdy wood. Wasps poured out in a seething cloud. Colin glimpsed a few of them, enough to see that they were as overgrown as the ones on his glass, but he couldn’t make out any more details. There was only the cloud, buzzing and furious.

“Oh bloody goddamn
hell
,” said Edmund, sounding half-strangled. Colin didn’t turn around, but he could hear the other man’s feet hit the floor. “Come on, old man, we’ve got to—”

He was running toward Colin as he spoke. Colin didn’t know why; it seemed a damned stupid thing to do, and he was about to tell Edmund as much.

That was when the cloud of wasps dove.

Colin raised his hand again, a swift, sharp motion like the slash of a blade. He focused his will and his vital energy outward through his palm; force flowed down his arm with a faint glassy pain he’d mostly learned to ignore. The air around his hand crackled with blue sparks.

He lifted his gaze to the oncoming wasps. The power went with it, not traveling through the air as lightning did, but leaving his hand and coalescing in a spinning, hissing sphere around the cloud of insects. Colin focused his eyes, breathed out—and the sphere flashed once, painfully bright.

A bitter, burnt smell filled the room, and so did the sound of a heavy rain: the bodies of the wasps dropping to the floor. Colin stepped forward, reaching for one of them, and saw it vanish just ahead of his fingers. He touched the rug where the insect had lain and saw a faint silver sheen on his fingers.

“Ectoplasm,” he said, as much to himself as to Edmund. “That’s what the spiritualists are calling it, no? Mrs. Osbourne might know a bit more.”

“What are you talking about?”

Colin turned, holding his hand out. “This. Our wee friends aren’t much for staying around, clearly, but they do leave some residue.”

“Wonderful,” said Edmund flatly. “What were those? And what—what
was
that you did to them?”

“A little trick I picked up about five years ago—there’s a chap in Ireland who’s doing some interesting research into what he calls ‘vital magnetic force.’” Colin waved a hand. “But I expect the details aren’t very interesting to you at the moment.”

“I really can’t say I give a damn.”

Mortals. Colin stifled a sigh.

“Magic, then,” he said with a shrug. “You know I’ve an interest in it.”

“Oh, theosophy and the Golden Dawn and that, yes,” said Edmund, dismissing the various schools of mysticism with a vague gesture that would’ve sent many of their followers into an hour-long fit of pique, “but none of those sorts ever mentioned calling
lightning
.”

“Most of them probably can’t,” said Colin. He hadn’t tried to sound humble in several decades; he didn’t bother now. “It’s a new sort of technique, and it takes a fair amount of practice. And it works better if you’ve a great deal of experience with other magic.”

“Hark to the great scholar,” said Edmund.

He found his seat on the couch again. Watching him, Colin observed that the man, though certainly startled, didn’t seem as shocked as he would have expected from a mortal without any magic in his bloodlines.

Then again, there was
something
in the Talbot-Jones family, even if the power had come down only to one of its daughters, and growing up with a sister like Reggie was bound to broaden the mind.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone,” said Colin. “The chap I mentioned wants his research kept quiet for a while yet.”

“No fear!” said Edmund, shaking his head. “The last thing I want to do is draw attention to myself. Especially here.” He glanced back to the ruins of the desk. “Though I think it might be a bit late for that.”

“I hope it wasn’t a sentimental piece,” said Colin. “Your house doesn’t appear to like me very much.”

“I don’t think it likes anyone,” said Edmund.