Teresa Medeiros - [FairyTale 02] (7 page)

“My mother was a lady. The daughter of a Lowland baron. She died when I was nine.” Gwendolyn lifted her chin against a pain that time had done little to dull.

“Your lack of nobility is no lack at all to me, since I can assure you that I’m no gentleman.”

She was unsure whether to take this as reassurance or warning. Gwendolyn dared a glance beneath the sheet before giving him a smile as sweetly mocking as she imagined his to be. “So I gathered. If you were, I’d still be wearing my clothes.”

“And still be in imminent danger of expiring from consumption.” His voice hardened. “Which leads me to a question of my own. Just how did you end up sopping wet and bound to a stake in the middle of
my
bloody courtyard? “

Gwendolyn stiffened. “Do forgive me for having the ill manners to disturb your precious solitude, M’lord Dragon. I can just picture you sitting with your cloven hooves propped up on the hearth, enjoying a nice warm cup of kitten’s blood, when you heard the shouting of the mob. ‘Damnation!’ you must have growled. ‘I do believe someone has left another human sacrifice on my doorstep.’ “

He was silent for so long that Gwendolyn began to tremble. But his reply, when it finally came, was as dry as the rattle of dragon bones. “Actually, I was enjoying a nice glass of port when I heard the commotion. I had to swear off kitten’s blood because it gave me dyspepsia.” Gwendolyn was caught unawares by the dazzling flare of a match. Its flame died before she could blink, leaving her with the aroma of cheroot smoke and a glowing tip in the darkness. “So the villagers dragged you up the cliff in the pouring rain, bound you to that stake, and left you to die at my hands.” He snorted. “And they have the nerve to call
me
a monster.”

Gwendolyn focused on where his eyes should be, trying to hold his invisible gaze. “I don’t see how you can condemn them when they were responding to your own greedy demands.”

A cloud of smoke streamed from the darkness, revealing a flash of temper. “I asked for a haunch of venison and a jug of whisky, not a bloody woman.”

“That’s not all you asked for, was it?” she said softly.

His sudden stillness warned her to tread with care. “Why do you defend them when they care so little for you that they would cast you away as if you were of no more consequence than a sack of rubbish?”

“Because they’re foolish, uneducated, and misguided, but you’re nothing but a mean-spirited bully, preying on ignorant superstitions and terrorizing innocent people!”

The glowing tip of the cheroot vanished, as if he had stubbed it out in a fit of anger. “They might be ignorant.

But they’re far from innocent. They’ve more blood on their hands than I do.”

Up until that moment, Gwendolyn would have sworn her captor was English, but a faint burr had crept into his speech along with his passion, like moonlight stealing over the heather.

“Who are you? “ she whispered again.

“Perhaps I should be the one asking that question,” he suggested, his voice even more clipped than before. “By what name should I call you? “

Frustration emboldened her. “You refuse to tell me who you are, yet I have no lack of names to call you.”

“Such as coward? Bully? Charlatan?” he offered.

“Blackguard. Knave. Scoundrel,” she added.

“Come now,” he coaxed. “I’d have expected more imagination from that nimble little tongue of yours.”

She bit her bottom lip, tempted to let fly with a string of oaths that would have made Izzy blush. “My name is Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn Wilder.”

She gasped as a gust of wind whipped through the chamber, extinguishing the candles. At first, she thought he’d gone, forsaking her to the darkness, but then he was there, surrounding her on all sides without ever once touching her. She breathed him in—the aroma of sandalwood and spice, as inescapably masculine as it was intoxicating. In that moment, she knew exactly where she was.

His
lair.
His
chamber.
His
bed.

“Why you?” His whisper resounded with a strange urgency. “Why did they choose you?”

To Gwendolyn’s ears, his words had the ring of deliberate cruelty.
Why didn’t they choose someone prettier? Someone thinner? Someone more like Glynnis or Nessa or even Kitty?

She closed her eyes, thankful he couldn’t see her burning cheeks. “They chose me because virgins are even more uncommon than dragons in Ballybliss.”

His hand brushed her damp hair, its treacherous tenderness reminding her without words that it could be more dangerous to be at a man’s mercy than a monster’s. “A thousand pounds. Is that the price they’re putting on innocence these days?”

He didn’t wait for an answer she did not have. There was another gust of wind, then more darkness. But this time Gwendolyn knew that he was gone. She hugged her knees to her chest and gazed up at the mural she could no longer see, feeling more alone than she had ever felt in her life.

The Dragon had never much cared for the taste of virgins.

Their flesh might be delectably tender, but wooing them required both charm and patience, two qualities he hadn’t possessed in abundance for quite some time now.

As he wound his way into the depths of the castle, stepping over shattered stones and ancient bloodstains without a second thought, he cursed his ill fortune. He had never intended for his elaborate hoax to lure a
woman into his lair. Especially not a woman as maddening as the one who now kept him from his bed.

When he had laid her back on those rumpled bedclothes, unwrapped his cloak, and started to peel the sodden linen from her icy flesh, he had thought only to warm her. But as each snowy inch of her skin was revealed, the detachment that usually served him so well had abandoned him. His own flesh had been gripped by a primal fever that curled low in his belly and made him burn to touch her. It had been torture enough when his eyes had lingered on the pale, generous globes of her breasts, but when he caught himself trying to steal a glimpse of the soft, blond thatch of down he knew he would find between her thighs, he had jerked the sheet up over her.

While he’d kept his candlelight vigil, waiting for her to regain consciousness, he’d had ample time to wonder if he’d truly become so much of a beast that he would be tempted to ravish an insensible woman.

He lengthened his strides and raked a wayward lock of damp hair out of his eyes. Not that there was actually anything “insensible” about his captive. As she’d warned him in the courtyard, she was the most sensible of creatures—a student of science and rational thought who devoured pamphlets from the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge by Experiment. She didn’t believe in dragons and she didn’t believe in him. He couldn’t very well take exception to that insult, since he didn’t believe in himself, either.

If he had expected those big, blue eyes of hers to
well with tears while she pled for her freedom and her life, he would have been sorely disappointed. She had even dared to chide him for his greed. She might have shamed him if he still had a conscience.

He was shaking his head at her boldness when he rounded the corner to discover that he had little hope of drying out his own damp clothing because his lavishly appointed wing chair, his cozy fire, and his bottle of port had been appropriated in his absence.

The underground room had once served as an antechamber to the castle dungeon and a haven for its guards. Rusted axes, claymores, and broadswords adorned the dank stone walls, giving the room all the welcoming charm of a medieval torture chamber. But the room’s grim ambience didn’t seem to be troubling the man who reclined in the Dragon’s chair, his stocking feet stretched toward the fire crackling on the stone hearth. He’d traded his damp frock coat for a scarlet and black tartan. A jaunty plaid bonnet adorned with a cockade of white feathers perched on his brow, the perfect complement to the bagpipes propped against his knee.

The Dragon paced to the hearth, earning a somnolent glare from the fluffy gray cat toasting himself on the hearthstones. He’d taken in Toby in the hopes that the massive feline would help reduce the rat population of the castle. But Toby and the rats seemed to have reached some sort of gentleman’s agreement. The rats would flourish and Toby would sleep twenty-three hours a day.

The Dragon hadn’t realized how exhausted he was until he had nowhere to sit. He swung around, ignoring the unspoken question in his friend’s eyes. “If you keep marching around the parapets bleating on those pipes, Tupper, we’re going to be found out for sure.”

“On the contrary,” Tupper replied, hefting his glass of port in a smug toast. “I’m quite a tolerable piper. I don’t bleat at all. And the villagers think I’m a ghost.”

The Dragon shook his head. “I can’t imagine why you’re so enamored of this accursed country and all of its ridiculous trappings.”

“What’s not to love?” Tupper exclaimed, the bogus burr he’d taken to affecting since their arrival in the Highlands growing thicker with each word. “The misty mornin’s? The sparklin’ burns that ripple through the glens? The quaint charm of its folk?”

“The fog? The chill? The damp?” the Dragon countered, backing closer to the fire.

Tupper slanted him a sly look that was decidedly at odds with his cherubic countenance. “Aye, but with a bonny lass to warm your bed, even the cold and the damp might be bearable.”

“If you’re referring to the ‘bonny lass’ I just left in my bed, I can assure you that the cold and the damp would make better companions on a lonely night than her frosty contempt.”

His interest piqued, Tupper leaned forward in his chair and mercifully dropped the burr. “So what gruesome crime did this girl commit to deserve being fed to the likes of you?”

The Dragon sank down heavily on the edge of the hearth, ignoring Toby’s growl of protest. “No crime at all. She’s innocent.”

Tupper snorted. “Perhaps in her eyes, but not in the eyes of the villagers. So what is she? A murderer? A thief?” A hopeful twinkle lit his brown eyes. “A harlot? “

“I should be so fortunate. At least I’d know what to do with a harlot. It’s much worse than that. They intended her to be a sacrifice.” The Dragon could feel his jaw stiffening as he struggled to form a word he’d had little cause to use in his dealings with the fair sex. “A
virgin
sacrifice.”

Tupper gaped at him for a moment before throwing back his head and roaring with laughter. “A virgin? They’ve given
you
a virgin? Oh, that’s priceless!”

“Not quite. The villagers seem to think she’s worth a thousand pounds.”

Tupper abruptly sobered. “ I tried to tell you it was too soon to play that particular card. You should have given them time to fret over your demand. Time to start eyeing each other and wondering who among them might have that ill-gotten treasure buried in his cellar.” His reproachful sigh ruffled the drooping plume of feathers on his hat. “But who am I, Theodore Tuppingham, the plodding son of a minor viscount, to gainsay a man who has stared down the mouths of the fire-spewing cannons at Louisbourg? A man who has been knighted by the Crown for valor and amassed a fortune using nothing more than his quick wits and his utter lack of care for his own life? I’m descended from a
long line of sniveling cowards. All I have to do to inherit my title is outlive a papa given to gout and heart palpitations.”

As Tupper waved the glass, splashing wine on the flagstones, the Dragon whisked it out of his hand. “You shouldn’t drink port, you know. It makes you blather.”

“And it makes you brood,” Tupper retorted, retrieving the glass and draining it dry.

The Dragon buried his fingers in Toby’s plush mane. A more amiable cat would have purred, but Toby’s whiskers simply twitched in a regal sneer. “I’m at an utter loss, Tup. Whatever shall we do with her?”

Tupper settled back in the chair. “Has she seen your face? “

“Of course not. I may be a bloody fool, but I’m not an idiot.”

“Then perhaps it’s not too late for me to disguise myself as one of those rugged Highlanders and carry her back to the village.”

“And what? Leave her in the square with a note pinned to her gown saying, ‘Thank you very much for the delectable virgin, but I’d prefer a nice tasty strumpet’?” He snorted. “You might fool
them
with such a ruse, but it’s far too late to fool her. She already believes I’m nothing but a greedy charlatan out to fleece the villagers of all their worldly goods.”

“Couldn’t you threaten her with your fiery wrath if she dares to expose you? “ Tupper snapped his fingers. “What about my dragon-shifting-into-a-man-at-will rumor? I was particularly proud of that one.”

“And it might have worked had they offered me some witless girl afraid of her own shadow.” He shook his head, his exasperation tinged with reluctant admiration. “This one won’t be so easy to fool. If we let her go, she’ll bring the whole village down on our heads. And I’m not ready for that. Yet.” As he rose to pace the chamber, Toby threw himself into a full-body stretch, taking up every inch of hearth the Dragon had vacated. “It seems I have no choice but to add abduction to my burgeoning list of sins.”

“So you intend to keep her?”

“For now. But she must never see my face.”

Tupper lifted the glass to his lips before remembering it was empty. “And if she does?”

The Dragon surveyed his friend, his lips twisting in a bitter smile. “Then she’ll discover that there are darker things in this world than dragons. You must remember, Tup—the villagers just
think
you’re a ghost. I
am
one.”