The Highland Dragon's Lady (20 page)

Kissing Colin, Reggie could almost have forgotten everything else: the ghosts, Edmund and Miss Heselton, her parents’ expectations, and even her sudden engagement to a man who wasn’t entirely human. He’d said he was good at living in the moment. In his embrace, with his mouth hot on hers and his hands cupping her backside, Reggie wasn’t bad at it herself.

It helped that she could feel his desire—pressed rigid against her stomach and also as a constant, rising pulse in the back of her mind, echoing her own longing. When she nipped gently at his lower lip, he shuddered. When she kissed the hollow of his neck, he sucked in a breath, and Reggie shared the spark of lust that leaped within him each time.

She thought he’d been telling the truth about his reasons for proposing. She couldn’t have made herself accept otherwise—the idea of marriage to Colin had sent a stupidly girlish tingle of excitement through her, but it had been, and still was, terrifying. She wouldn’t try and touch his mind more deeply, to find out if he truly thought she’d be more than a pretty girl who’d needed a favor at a convenient time. Her ethics forbade it. Her pride forbade asking more than she already had.

Touching Colin, kissing him, she could be certain of his reaction. She didn’t come to the table entirely empty-handed.

As he stroked her breasts, she thought of the previous evening: of what he’d done and what he’d said, of what she’d offered at the time. Reggie caught her breath and stepped back, taking hold of Colin’s hand as he reached for her.

Caught off guard, he tilted his head to the side and regarded her, puzzled. Reggie smiled at him. “Don’t move,” she said and carefully put his hand back at his side.

Oh, he liked that. Reggie wasn’t touching him anymore, but she saw the way his whole body went rigid when she spoke and his pupils widened, almost eclipsing the silver-blue of his eyes. “Your servant, madam,” he said thickly, not entirely joking.

She began kissing him again, slowly and lightly, but without the gentleness he’d shown her. Every twitch of his body, every swallowed oath made her smile against his neck. She didn’t know how good his control was, but the idea of testing it made her own heart race. So did being pressed up against him. She’d thought leaving her shirt on would keep her own desires in check. Instead, it was one more source of friction, tormenting her breasts in the best way possible. When she undid the knot of Colin’s dressing gown, her hands shook—but she got it open without his help, and if he noticed any unsteadiness about those same hands as she ran them up his chest, he didn’t say anything.

Beneath the heavy brocade, his body was slim and firm, his skin pale and silk-smooth except for a small patch of dark hair between his tawny nipples. Reggie knew that the usual metaphor for handsome men was marble statues, but touching him, she thought of some great metal machine: smooth and hard, warm and thrumming with energy just under the surface. She stroked his nipples and grinned again as his hands clenched at his sides, then traced a line down his flat stomach to the waistband of his trousers.

He held very still. Reggie wasn’t even completely sure he was breathing.

At first she touched him very softly through his trousers, the barest brush of her fingertips up and down his shaft. Then she slid her palm over his length and squeezed lightly. He made a sound. If it was a word, it was all vowels.

“I take it that’s good,” she said, because she didn’t want to ask. Not here, not like this. She wanted to know, but she wouldn’t ask.

“Very good. Too good. You shouldn’t—”

“I don’t take instruction well,” she said, rubbing her hand slowly back and forth. “Ask anyone.”

“Don’t think I will,” he said hoarsely.

Reggie chuckled. “Unless you were going to say I shouldn’t stop. Except I have to,” she added and started to unfasten his trousers.

Buttons were slightly easier the second time, or maybe just with concentration. She then discovered that no man on earth, mortal or not, looked anything remotely close to dignified with his trousers around his ankles, even if looking at the rest of him did make her sex ache with longing. “I should have seduced you at the ball,” she said. “Kilts are probably much more convenient.”

“Oh, aye,” said Colin, and his smile was full of light. “But you’ll get another chance or ten, I promise.”

“Good,” said Reggie, sincerely. She eyed Colin, trying to put aside lust long enough to work out logistics. “Lie down on the bed,” she said finally.

Complying, he reached for her, and Reggie shook her head. “You still don’t get to move,” she said, grinning at him. “That was just a temporary exception.”

“Oh?”

Reggie took a long look at him: his lean body framed by the dark sheets, his organ jutting up, long and proud, against his flat stomach, the look of sheer lust in his silver eyes, and the inviting smile on his lips. “I don’t want to kneel tonight,” she said and climbed onto the bed beside him.

Evidently, it took Colin a second or two to realize what she’d meant. When Reggie bent her head and ran her tongue down the length of his rod, his groan sounded a trifle surprised. Mentally, Reggie took back her earlier statement. She liked surprising him, she was discovering—at least in certain ways.

The male body presented its own set of surprises and was generally more complicated than the vague stories she’d heard. Supplementing her own sketchy knowledge with her power and the sounds Colin made helped considerably. The first time Reggie closed her lips around his rod, she felt a burst of sensation that made her press her legs together and whimper.

Later, she told herself, and concentrated. It was a pleasant puzzle to solve, this way of pleasing a man. There were angles to try, and experiments involving her tongue and her hand, and a whole assortment of new sensations. Reggie took her time as long as she could, until she found a rhythm that made Colin throw his head back and groan, until she felt from his mind the inescapable desire for
faster
and
more
.

“Reggie,” he managed, and she knew it was half a protest, felt him trying to make himself pull away. Then he couldn’t. Caught up in the shadow of his climax, she tasted him in her mouth and heard him cry out, and she smiled to herself once again.

“Can I move now?” he asked afterward, opening one eye.

Reggie laughed. “I think you already did. A few times.”

“Involuntary. Doesn’t count. Can I touch you, or would you like me to beg? I never did get down on one knee,” he added, looking down at her thoughtfully.

“Both, sometime,” said Reggie, and she stretched herself out beside him. “And yes.”

She didn’t ask. He didn’t wait for her to. With a speed she wouldn’t have expected from a man so recently sated—“and then they generally fall asleep and snore dreadfully” had figured in the stories she’d heard—Colin was kissing her, hard and eager, calling all of her own desire to the forefront of her mind. She’d held those impulses in check for what seemed like hours. Now they left her aware of only sensation. As Colin ran his hands down her back and over her derriere, she was already circling her hips against him, desperate for his touch.

Even as preoccupied as Reggie was, she felt quite smug when Colin fumbled with the fastenings on her trousers. “Not as easy from that angle, is it?” she asked in between kisses.

“No’ as easy under these circumstances, I should say.”

“Hah,” said Reggie, except that Colin took her nipple into his mouth then, lashing it with his tongue through the worn linen of her shirt, and it was very difficult to sound skeptical when one was moaning.

Whether sensing Reggie’s mood or acting on his own urgency, Colin didn’t tease her that night. He jerked her trousers off roughly—Reggie heard a seam rip and didn’t care—and then slid one hand between her legs: deft, considerate, but not lingering. He didn’t make her ask, not even silently. He gave without prompting, and the motions of his fingers, inside and over her sex, sent Reggie soaring quickly to the peak where she’d brought him only minutes ago.

Reggie had enough composure to sigh at the end instead of screaming, but only just. “I really don’t know,” she said, floating and giddy in the aftermath, “how people manage this sort of thing most of the time.”

“Not sharing a house with their parents, I should think,” said Colin, draping an arm around her. “And counting on everyone else to ignore them, or pretend to. At least there’s more privacy now than when I was a boy—wooden walls don’t block as much sound as you’d hope, and it wasna’ as common to have your own room.”

“No wonder you know so much,” Reggie said, laughing.

“An early education, but not a comprehensive one. I’m not certain any living man has
that
.”

“‘Nothing new under the sun’?”

“I’ve never believed that.” Colin leaned over and kissed her lightly. “I’ve not met anyone like you before, for instance.”

“You’re supposed to flatter a girl before you take her to bed, not after,” said Reggie, but she was aware that she was smiling idiotically. She wasn’t sure it was a bad development, but it was one she’d have to think about, and her present position didn’t really encourage thought. She sat up and reached for her trousers. “And I’d better get back to my own room. We’re not free from scandal yet, you know.”

“I do wish we could bring dogs,” said Mr. Talbot-Jones, looking around the game trail with a great deal of attention and no certainty at all. “I see the danger after what happened with the horses, of course—but I’d like a better way to track than my own intuition. I don’t trust it at all on business like this.”

“I see what you mean,” said Colin. “I’ve been thinking something similar myself.”

To wit: they were supposed to know whether they were on the right track by the air getting colder or by feelings of unease. The human mind—even a mind that was only part human—was very good at manufacturing sensations for itself, and tracking a murderous ghost would have anyone feeling uneasy right from the start.

He wished that his magical skills could tell him more. The life of the forest was still enough to drown out any trails. They’d started at the point where he, Reggie, and Edmund had lost the horses, on the basis that they must have been getting close to something, but Colin hadn’t yet seen any trace of magic.

As he and Mr. Talbot-Jones walked, Colin kept glancing at the sky overhead, looking for signs of impending storms, but none showed. The air was warm and clear, and with any luck, Janet Morgan still couldn’t manage such a dramatic attack again—at least not when she’d spent more of her strength controlling the horses.

“Thank God we’re not in America,” Mr. Talbot-Jones said, as if following Colin’s thoughts, “or anywhere else where the local wildlife’s larger than a few squirrels.”

“There are always hawks,” said Colin, giving the sky another look for good measure. He could probably scare a hawk away magically—he could certainly kill it, one way or another, if the situation so demanded—but that required him to be prepared.

“Hawks are intimidating, I’ll grant you,” said Mr. Talbot-Jones, looking farther down the road, “but mountain lions and grizzly bears outdo them handily.”

“Yes,” said Colin, grimacing at the thought. A full-grown grizzly bear could have given him a hard time, even in dragon form. One possessed strongly enough to be heedless of its own life and limb could very possibly kill him. He’d heard, in generations before his father’s, of dragons who could have made two minutes’ work of such a creature, but the world was fallen and his blood was thin and all that. “Count our blessings, eh?”

“I try, even in situations like these. Perhaps particularly in situations like these.” Mr. Talbot-Jones sighed into his beard. “Not that I’ve encountered very many of those in my life. Do you know, I honestly thought myself fairly knowledgeable about the Other Side before all of this unpleasantness.” He shook his head. “Hubris, I suppose.”

“Human nature, I’d say,” said Colin. Thinking, he peered off to the side of the road, trying to make out anything unusual—dead trees or clumps of standing stones. Summoning demons wasn’t the sort of thing one did just anywhere, but whatever spot Janet Morgan had picked, he couldn’t make it out. “There’s a certain comfort in believing that we know everything about this world or the next one. Or our fellow man, for that matter.”

He glanced back to see how Mr. Talbot-Jones took that line of philosophy. They’d been wandering the forest for the better part of an hour, and in all that time, Colin had been acutely aware that he was going to be asking the man for his daughter’s hand before very many more days had passed.

That interview was
likely
to go well. As Colin himself had said, he had money independent from the MacAlasdair fortunes. Although he was two steps removed from the inheritance now, he was nobility, and of a decent vintage. And there were no current scandals about him in England, Scotland, or even Ireland, where he’d been living for the better part of two decades before Stephen’s recent troubles had brought him to London.

Poking around Loch Arach might reveal a few odd rumors, but he didn’t think any of the tenants there could complain about him. Mr. Talbot-Jones might not be a magician himself, but he believed—all the more strongly now—so the truth, eventually, might actually go over better than with most mortals.

Then again, it might not. Whatever his openness to new theories, Mr. Talbot-Jones could easily be far less open to his daughter marrying a man who could turn into a whacking great lizard. He might investigate Colin’s past thoroughly, even if Colin didn’t tell him, and a few of the names and dates that turned up might raise his suspicion. Colin thought he’d done a decent job of covering his tracks, but he hadn’t cared, until now, nearly as much as Stephen had said he should.

He hated it when his brother was right.

If her father did object, what then? Reggie might be open to elopement—she was an unconventional girl and might figure that her family would come around later. On the other hand, she’d already weathered one scandal. And she’d only said yes provisionally: hardly Juliet, there. Colin would have liked her better for her sensibility, most of the time, but at the moment it was doing nothing for his case of nerves.

Because he had a case of nerves. Over a mortal. Over, specifically, whether a mortal actually found the prospect of being married to him pleasant, or whether she’d been lured into it by Colin’s skills in bed or driven there by desperation and her family, or indeed both. If she changed her mind, or if another obstacle came up, Colin thought he actually might rather fight a bear.

Judith would make fun of him for years if she ever found out. Stephen would just smile knowingly. He could see them both, and the desire to bang their heads together was almost as great as if they’d actually been present.

Perhaps he should just concentrate on the ghost. That was less complicated.

“I don’t know what we would have done without Regina here,” said Mr. Talbot-Jones, helpfully. “She’s a tremendously adaptable girl.” When Colin looked over, the other man was paying careful attention to the side of the road. From the tone of his voice, he was just passing remarks—and when Colin didn’t respond at first, he continued. “So many of your generation are, of course. You’d almost have to be, with the world changing as much as it has in your lifetime.”

Colin had developed considerable self-control, so he was mostly beyond having to bite his cheek against the urge to laugh. Needing to do it now pointed as much to his unease as to the irony of Mr. Talbot-Jones’s statement. “That could be,” he said, careful to sound serious, “but maybe every generation thinks so about the one coming after.”

Mr. Talbot-Jones shook his head. “When I was a boy,” he said, “one couldn’t get this far into the countryside by train or send a message across the country in minutes. I don’t recall ever needing to keep up with as many developments as one does now. Fortunately,” he added with a small smile, “I’m old enough to be excused for the most part.”

“The trains do make a difference,” said Colin, frowning down the length of the trail. The air had turned cooler—but the day was also rapidly moving toward evening. “My brother’s estate is still a good fifty miles or so from the nearest station, and even the trains there don’t run every day. It’s quite a different place from the village here.”

“Do you spend much time there?”

Colin shook his head, started to speak, and then held up a hand. Behind the sound of the birds and squirrels, he could hear a faint trickling noise. “Water?” he asked, gesturing in the general direction of the sound.

Mr. Talbot-Jones shrugged, smiling. “Your hearing is a trifle sharper than mine, I daresay. I can’t hear it—but it’s likely. There’s a creek on the property, and it’s supposed to start at a spring somewhere in these woods. I’d always thought that I’d come out and find it one day, when we’d cleared the trails.”

“I expect you’ll have a chance, once we’re finished,” said Colin.

“I hope so. It would be a lovely place under normal circumstances.” Now he did look at Colin. “And we’re always glad of visitors, particularly family—I would very much like to have the forest to show them.”

“Ah,” said Colin, and he coughed. Reggie had said that her mother harbored expectations, and if Mr. Talbot-Jones hadn’t come to his own conclusions, his wife might well have given him marching orders. No bad thing, given Colin’s own inclinations—save for Reggie’s request. “Yes,” he said feebly. “Quite so.”

Mr. Talbot-Jones’s eyes narrowed, looking much like his daughter’s when she was in a wary mood. “I think I should tell you—” he began, when, to Colin’s great relief, a familiar voice called out a greeting, and they both turned to see Edmund on the trail just ahead.

“Good God,” said Mr. Talbot-Jones. “How did you get here, Edmund? I thought you were taking care of business in the village.”

“I was,” said Edmund, while Colin mentally kicked himself for being unobservant. He hadn’t even heard the man approaching. “I took another path. They said you’d come out this way. The gamekeeper knows a shortcut.”

“Helpful of him,” said Colin, concluding that his earlier opinion of Hobb had been neither fair nor charitable. Anyone who sent Edmund out to save him from both the devil and the deep blue sea had certainly earned the right—retroactively, granted—to be suspicious of strange noises in his domain. “Feeling sensitive, I hope. We’re at a loss.”

“I can probably manage something,” said Edmund. He didn’t sound as hearty as usual, and though he stood in shadow, his face looked pale. “Colin,” he said, “could I have a word?”

“Here?” Colin turned from Edmund to his father and then back, lifting his eyebrows. “Seems inconvenient.”

“Are you all right, son?” Mr. Talbot-Jones peered at Edmund, sounding both touchingly worried and annoyingly suspicious. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing. Nothing important. But it’s urgent.”

That combination suggested several possibilities to Colin, none of them pleasant—and none of them anything Edmund would necessarily want to discuss in front of his father. Mr. Talbot-Jones came to the same realization, for after a moment of thought, he sighed. “It’s probably time I was heading back, at that,” he said and shook his head preemptively as Colin started to speak. “I should fare well enough on my own. I’m going out, after all, not in—and that doesn’t seem to cause as many problems.”

“If you’re certain,” Colin began. Edmund made no such protest. Was he that angry with his father, or simply that engrossed in whatever had sprung up?

Mr. Talbot-Jones nodded briskly. “Completely. Both of you be careful—ghosts aside, the ground is damnably tricky out here, and God knows what sort of obstacles there are, particularly after that storm. I’ll see you.”

“Back at the house,” said Edmund.

“Yes, back at the house,” Mr. Talbot-Jones repeated and walked off.

“Good Lord, have things been that bad?” Colin asked once Mr. Talbot-Jones was out of hearing distance. “I can’t say I don’t sympathize, but I thought he’d given up about the Heselton girl, at least.”

“What?” Edmund shook his head. “No. It’s not that. Let’s keep going. I’ll—I’ll figure out how to put it along the way.”

“Is this about Reggie?” Colin asked.

Again, Edmund looked dumbfounded for a second, as if he’d forgotten he even had a sister. “No. Not about Reggie,” he said and started walking.

Colin followed. He of all people could probably stand to exercise a little patience.