Читать книгу Loch Dragon's Lady - Christine McKay - Страница 4

Of what use was a forgotten lump of land in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland? An island in the Caribbean—now there was a treasured gift. Great-Aunt Clara might as well have willed her her collection of size six shoes.

Ellen Kildonan wore a size ten.

The sea’s cold spray wet her cheeks, her rented boat bouncing in the choppy water like a preschooler on a trampoline. She burrowed deeper into her coat, hands clenching the straps of her duffel bag. The captain, a reedy man with wind-blotched cheeks and a nest of tomato-red hair in serious need of a shears’ touch, glanced back at her and grinned. “She’s a nasty vixen today. Storm’s brewing.”

She swallowed hard, forcing down the remains of her lunch, and nodded.

Ellen could count the number of words she’d exchanged with her aunt over the years. Why, as the eccentric old woman was divvying up her personal possessions, did she look at the island and think of her great-niece?

“Can’t guess crazy people’s motives,” her friend Liddy said when Ellen had told her about the odd gift.

Ellen leaned over the boat’s edge to vomit. Whatever her reasons, Aunt Clara must be cackling in her crypt about now.

Robert Dunyveg lugged the bag of rubbish onto the shore. Damn tourists and their water bottles, plastic bags and whatnot. He’d spent the better part of his day scouring his shoreline and collecting trash from the last plague of day-trippers.

His skin cast off loch water like a slicker shedding rain. He lifted his head, nostrils flaring. Speaking of which…the scent of rain filled his lungs. He didn’t mind the cold, though he doubted a good dousing would lessen his temper.

Another scent tainted the air. His upper lip curled. Man. He sniffed again. No, a woman. The disdain didn’t lessen. What buggering fool stumbled onto his isle? And for what reason? He’d bloody Magnus’s nose if he caught the youth dropping off more vermin in exchange for coin.

Picking up his plaid from where he’d cached it in the rocks this morning, he slung it over his shoulder and cinched the belt around his waist. Much to his dismay, the scent thickened as he approached his castle. If he found her poking around his belongings, may the good Lord stay his hand. He was in no mood to be generous.

What he found, though, was a hunched figure crouched around a ring of stones as she desperately tried to start a fire. A haphazard pile of supplies lay on the beach, though if the storm manifested as it seemed wont to, the water’s greedy fingers would soon filch it all. He paused, hands balled on his hips. Either she was a stupid thing and stranded, or a weather witch and unconcerned about the squall. He bet on the former. The rain smelled too pure to be conjured.

He strode toward her. “Hey there, what are you about?”

Her covered head shot up. He caught the glint of steel as she snatched up her knife, tucking it in her sleeve. Not as dim-witted as he first surmised, then. Good. He had even less patience for the crafty. Let her bear the brunt of his temper.

She straightened, and the first thing that struck him was her height. He stood a solid six feet and she nearly matched him. Licking his lips, he scented her fear and surprisingly, her anger. That had his eyes narrowing and his gait slowing. A knife, however small, could do serious harm to his human shape.

“I could ask you the same. This is Dun Isle, isn’t it?” she said. In spite of her fear, her voice rang clear.

American. That earned her yet another scowl.

He ignored her question. “How’d you get here?”

She shook back her hood. “I imagine the same as anyone else, by boat.”

Despite her accent, her looks were anything but what he’d expect from an American. Though, if tourists were an indication, they were a mongrel lot. White, chocolate, pink, and ranging from blond and as pale as the winter’s sun to as black as the bottom of his castle’s well, there wasn’t a shared feature among the lot of them. Unless rudeness and ignorance could be counted. He nearly smiled at his own wit. A hazard of keeping one’s own company.

This one dabbled in the chocolate palette, with straight dark hair that hung to her breasts, and eyes the color of polished mahogany. Her nose was wide and a bit flat, its ordinariness compensated for by her lush coral lips, both set in a perfect oval. Comely, for a human woman. If one favored that sort of thing. He didn’t. He wouldn’t let himself savor such again. Why waste emotion on something that had a shorter life cycle than his trees?

“I don’t see your boat.”

She bit her lip. A smidgen of her distress leaked out. “I was dropped off.”

“Dropped off? Alone? Dear Lord, girl, are you daft?” Dropped off in the middle of a squall? And here she was trying to light a fire instead of erecting what passed for her shelter. His first assessment was correct—comely but dim-witted. A shame.

“I’m not alone. My friend, Eric, is just over that rise.”

He raised an eyebrow. He’d not scented a man, but he detected her lie now. “I don’t believe you.”

She skirted his denial. “You didn’t answer my question. Who are you and what are you doing on my island?”

“Your isle? What makes you think it’s your isle?”

“It was willed to me by my aunt Clara. I have the deed of ownership.”

“With you?” he challenged.

“Of course not. I’m not daft.” She mimicked his tone and words.

Many had tried to lay claim to his isle. He’d scared all but the most desperate away, though none dwelled here now. Those that did linger lived and died in his shadow, men without families, willing to keep his secret in exchange for peace and solitude. No women had willingly lived here for any length of time. But the feminine name Clara struggled to emerge from the depths of his memory. It sounded familiar.

There was a man, Tom, who’d set up life on the far part of the isle in a whitewashed cottage overlooking the sea. He’d had a daughter with him. Was her name Clara? He strained to remember. Humans slipped through his life so fast, it was difficult to cling to their names and faces. Tom had died in a fishing accident—had Robert been near, he’d have prevented it—and the child had been taken away. The sea claimed the cottage in a winter squall.

“Raven-haired, with a lilting voice,” he murmured. He remembered listening to her sing as she skipped about the isle.

“Yes. Clara was from India.” Her eyes narrowed. “How would you know that? You couldn’t have possibly known her as a child.”

His lips twitched. “What makes you think that?”

“She lived to ninety-eight. You don’t look a day over thirty.”

He humphed.

“Whatever.” She nonchalantly took a step back, putting a little distance between them.

He noticed the movement and her intent. “When will your boat be back?”

She chewed on her lower lip, clearly toying with telling the truth or another lie. “Soon.”

“Lying worsens my temper.”

“I don’t care. Get in your boat and get off my island.”

“I don’t have a boat. I live here.”

She blinked. “You must get supplies from somewhere.” She eyed his plaid. “Maybe not clothes, but food.”

“I swim.”

He watched the fear surface in her eyes again and cursed himself for enjoying its flavor. “You’re crazy.”

“If that’s the case, lass, then you’d best be getting off my isle.”

She glanced at the darkening skies. As if she’d conjured it by will alone, a fat droplet fell, splattering on the sleeve of her coat. “It’s going to rain. Why don’t you go wherever it is you’re going and leave me alone?”

“Not before I see you off. Who’d you buy passage from?”

“What?”

At her blank stare, he sighed. “The boat,” he repeated. “Who is its captain?”

“Oh.” Her brows furrowed. “Murphy, Gregor. Maybe Andrew. There were a zillion kids running around. I don’t know which one drove. MacDonald is the last name.”

He rolled his eyes.

Another fat droplet struck her coat. “You’re going to get wet,” she pointed out. “Don’t let me stop you.”

Humans were so daft. If they didn’t breed like rats, he was certain they’d have died off long ago. He could leave her here, but he didn’t trust her to not get into trouble. A missing American woman would attract unwanted attention. Taking her with him was an option he’d rather not consider, but it appeared to be the only safe one. So what if she left the isle gibbering about castles and shape-shifting men? A raving American woman was preferred to a dead one, at least in the human world. He wasn’t so sure.

The sky’s outburst decided it for him. Striding forward, he reached for her elbow. “You’ll come with me.”

“Get away from me.” She tried to twist out of his reach, but he was quicker. Seizing her elbow, he dragged her in his wake. “Let me go!”

He cared even less for screaming women. He briefly considered knocking her in the head and tossing her over his shoulder like a sack of barley.

He forgot her knife. His mistake.

She plunged the sharp little blade into his side.

Fury and pain muddled rational thought. He reared back, and she wrenched herself free, stumbling to the ground.

His hands fumbled for the blade. Jerking it out, his form shifted and blurred. Damnations. Pain overrode common sense. The wound, large on a human body, shrank as his body grew. His arms split in two lengthwise, his bones realigning themselves to form long streamlined wings and short webbed forepaws. Skin gave way to iridescent scales, violet and midnight and black. His head elongated, jaws and teeth replacing human lips, pupils widening until they consumed the whites of his eyes, leaving behind whirling multifaceted orbs. A jagged line of spikes protected his spine, from the back of his head to the end of his tail, which now lashed in agitation. He sat on his haunches, tipped his head back and roared.

The woman squeaked once and fainted.

The urges to toss her to the now-frothing sea, or to protect the limp body being pelted with rain warred within him. Mercy won out. Picking her up in his short forepaws, he carried her over the hill and to his castle.

She’d seen a man turn into a dragon. Reason struggled against what she’d witnessed. Dragons were the stuff of legend. They had no place in the real world, unless she happened to be on some Hollywood set. And she knew that wasn’t the case. She’d taken a red-eye flight to Scotland. She’d paid good money to be ferried to a godforsaken chunk of dirt willed to her by a great-aunt she’d met only a handful of times. She was bound and determined to find something of worth on the lousy rock.

Looked as though she had. A dragon.

She opened her eyes.

She was lying on a bed, covered in a thick blanket. Wool, her fingers told her. A fire blazed in an open hearth at the foot of the bed. She turned her head. A man stood at the window, dressed in a kilt, the spare cloth thrown over his shoulder like a cape.

Not just any man, she noted as he turned his head. The dragon man. Solidly built, he stood with his legs slightly spread, like a man surveying all he owned. A shock of thick black hair did nothing to soften his granite profile. She might as well have been trying to bludgeon a gorilla with a toothpick for all the damage her pocketknife had done.

She must have made some sort of noise for he turned to her. Black brows, as unruly as his hair, knit together. “Don’t think fainting will soften me toward you.”

She sat up, realized she was nude and clutched the wool to her chest. He chuckled. The chuckle vanished when she fixed him with a glare. “Where are my clothes?”

He nodded toward the fire. “You were wet.”

“You undressed me?”

He regarded her with amusement. “There’s no one else here, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“You changed into a dragon,” she blurted out. Ah, that wasn’t exactly the way she wanted to address the subject, but she couldn’t take the words back.

“Dragon, eh? You conked your head quite good. And ‘twas obviously hallucinating. There’s a knot on the back of it,” he added when she eyed him suspiciously.

She touched the spot gingerly. That’s all it was, a delusion? No. She shook her head. “I fell after you changed.” After she stabbed him.

“What kind of nonsense did they fill your head with on the mainland? Listening to too many Nessie stories, that’s what. I was trying to get you to safety and you balked.”

“You kidnapped me.”

He snorted. “Why would I do that?”

She glanced wildly around the room, looking for a weapon.

“You left your knife on the beach. The water’ll have claimed it by now.”

And all her gear, too. She quietly cursed. “You’re trespassing. You’re going to kill me and hide my body and keep the island to yourself.”

That earned her another snort. “Kill you? That wouldn’t attract anyone, would it? Fact is, as soon as the storm breaks, I’ll be carting you back to the mainland.”

“But you don’t have a boat.”

He smiled, a wide white grin. It did nothing to soften his features. “I lied.”

Inspiration struck. “Show me your wound.”

He arched a brow, puzzled. “Come again?”

“Show me where I stuck you.”

He obediently turned, flashing her a long strip of his muscled thigh as the plaid swirled around his legs. “Here.” He pointed to a red welt. “Barely a scratch. You needn’t apologize.”

She ground her teeth. “Listen, you brute. You’re on my island. If anyone’s going to make apologies, it’ll be you.” Damn, she swore she’d buried the knife to its hilt. A three- inch-deep hole should look worse than that.

Unless he was really a dragon and could heal himself. She’d rather stick to reasonable answers. She’d tried to wound him. She’d fallen instead. Whatever else she saw or thought she saw had to be a figment of her imagination.

“Robert Dunyveg’s my name, lass.”

It was hard to rant and rave when one was nude. She eyed the distance between the bed and the bundle of her clothes on the chair beside the fire. If he’d planned to hold her captive and rape her, she figured she would have woken up tied to the bed. Maybe he assumed with the knot on her head she’d be too wounded to escape. Maybe he liked a little violence with his sex. She clenched her teeth, reminding herself that, despite his rugged looks, he had some loose wires in the brain department.

“And you are?” he prompted when she remained silent.

“Ellen Kildonan,” she retorted, sullen. “Could you hand me my clothes?”

He ignored her request. “That’s a fine Scottish surname, though you don’t look the part.”

“Times change.” She’d inherited the name. Lord knows how many generations it’d been since her ancestors laid claim to Scottish soil. Genealogy didn’t interest her. Well, it hadn’t until she’d inherited an island…and apparently a crazy person with it. “My clothes, please.”

“No damage done to your feet.” He winked. “I carried you.”

And no doubt copped a feel while he did so. “You just want to see me naked.”

“I already have,” he pointed out.

Her face flushed.

“They’re probably still wet. You weren’t out that long.”

Long enough to be carried to the crazy man’s home and undressed. “Fine. Do you have something else I can wear until they dry?”

“My plaid.” He started to undo his belt buckle.

Her mouth watered. She held up her hand. “No. No, the blanket’s fine for now.”

He grinned.

Sitting back against the headboard, she sighed. What was she supposed to do? She was trapped on her island in the midst of a storm with a sexy trespassing madman. She turned her head. A glint of iridescent purple caught her eye.

She blinked and surveyed the room again. There!