Teresa Medeiros - [FairyTale 02] (13 page)

After Tupper had finished repairing the window grate in Gwendolyn’s chamber, he emerged from the castle’s shadows to find the Dragon pacing the courtyard where they had first found her. Despite the morning sunlight streaming over the crumbling walls, his friend’s countenance was as black as midnight. Smoke streamed from his finely hewn nostrils as he took a long drag on the cheroot tucked in the corner of his mouth.

Tupper gave the tip of his mustache a nervous tug. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your little tryst. I pray you’ll forgive my lack of discretion.”

The Dragon snatched the cheroot out of his mouth.
“Your
lack of discretion? It’s not
your
lack of discretion that troubles me—it’s mine. What must she think of me? Every time I find myself alone with her, I fall upon her like the beast she thinks I am. Have I been so long without a woman in my bed that I have to prey upon the first innocent who has the misfortune to cross my path? “ He flung the cheroot away and resumed his pacing. “Is it any wonder I’m not fit company for civilized folk?”

Tupper fell into step beside him. “That’s not precisely
true, you know. My great-aunt Taffy is quite fond of you. She says you put her in mind of this magnificent, high-strung stallion her father owned when she was a girl.” Tupper shook his head, sighing sadly. “Of course, they eventually had to shoot the poor fellow in the head after he took three fingers off one of the grooms.”

The Dragon paused in his pacing to give him a withering look. “Thank you for sharing that. I feel so much better now.”

He covered the remainder of the courtyard in three long strides, forcing Tupper to scamper to keep up with him. “You really shouldn’t berate yourself so,” Tupper tried to console him. “It wasn’t as if you had tossed her nightdress over her head and were having your way with her on the table. You simply stole an innocent kiss. What harm can there be in that?”

The Dragon couldn’t very well explain to his friend that the kiss had been anything but innocent and that he feared the harm had been done to him, not her. That shy flick of Gwendolyn’s tongue against his own had stirred his blood more deeply than any bold embrace of a London bawd ever had. He had thought to give her a taste of dragon’s breath, but it had been he who’d ended up burning for her.

He came to a halt in front of the statue that still reigned over the ruins of the courtyard. Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, seemed woefully out of place in this courtyard where no love had dwelled for nearly fifteen years. If her head hadn’t been blown off by one of Cumberland’s cannonballs, he mused, he might very
well have heard a mocking ripple of her laughter on the wind.

“I must be away from this place,” he said softly, running a hand along the bared curve of the goddess’s shoulder. “Before I lose my own head.”

“We did give the villagers a fortnight to come up with the gold,” Tupper reminded him.

“I know we did,” the Dragon said, turning his back on Aphrodite’s ravaged beauty. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t hasten them along, does it? Light some smoke pots in their fields. Flash some torches in the castle windows. Play the bloody bagpipes until their ears bleed. I want them at each other’s throats until they’re begging to bring me the bastard who’s been hoarding that gold all these years.”

Tupper snapped off a smart salute. “You can trust me to put the fear of God into them.”

The Dragon swung around, his face set in such ruthless lines that even Tupper took a hasty step backward. “It’s not God they have to fear. It’s me.”

T
UPPER
CREPT
THROUGH the Highland night, his stealthy footsteps guided by the dappled light of the rising moon. As he picked his way over a shelf of loose rocks, taking care not to dislodge a single one, his pulse quickened with exhilaration.

He’d never cared much for danger, but he thrived on drama, something that had been in short supply in his life until he’d met the Dragon in that gaming hell two years ago. It had been as much boredom with his aimless existence as fear of scandal that had prompted him to put the mouth of that dueling pistol against his temple. Although neither of them had brought up that night since then, he suspected that the Dragon knew he would have never had the courage to pull the trigger.

Had it not been for his friend’s intervention, he’d either be rotting away in debtors’ prison or drinking himself to death in his elegantly appointed London town house with nothing to look forward to but the occasional romantic entanglement with a bad actress and
the legacy of gout and dyspepsia bequeathed to him by his father. The viscount’s one attempt to purchase him a commission in the Royal Navy had ended in disaster when Tupper had gotten seasick on his very first voyage and cast up his accounts all over the braided coat of an admiral who just happened to be one of his father’s oldest friends. Although his seasickness had eventually ebbed, his father’s contempt never had.

Tupper almost wished his father could see him now—dressed all in black, creeping through a forest thicket without so much as stirring a leaf or snapping a branch. For the first time in his life, he was a man with a mission. As the foliage began to thin, forcing him to dart from tree to tree, he marveled that his footsteps were no longer plodding and clumsy, but fleet and full of purpose.

As he leapt a narrow ravine, his black cloak rippled behind him, making him feel as if he could take flight. He hoped the Dragon didn’t mind that he’d borrowed the cloak. He felt it added a badly needed note of élan to his disguise.

Leaving the copse of trees behind, he started across a meadow littered with stones, counting on the rocky ledge at its outskirts to hide him from the village tucked into the glen below. He scanned the thick grasses, seeking a good place to light the smoke pot tucked beneath his arm. Its brilliant flare and billowing smoke would rouse the villagers from their beds, making them believe the Dragon had made another strike against them.

Therein lay the beauty of their scheme. The denizens of Ballybliss were so superstitious and so plagued by guilt that he had only to plant the seeds of fear in their fertile imaginations to convince them that some terrible supernatural force was at work in their lives. Then, if the milk curdled or the baby howled with colic or the cat coughed up a furball, it was surely the Dragon’s doing.

Tupper positioned the smoke pot on a fat hummock of grass and drew a tinderbox from his pocket, chuckling beneath his breath. If the villagers were so foolish as to mistake sulfur for brimstone and smoke for dragon’s breath, then they deserved their sleepless nights. He struck a flint against the tinder, then bent to touch its flame to the smoke pot’s fuse.

“Is that you, Niall? When I woke up, you were gone. Why did you leave me all alone in the forest?”

As the lilting cadences of the sweetly female voice caressed his ears, Tupper straightened, the flame sputtering to its death. He slowly turned to face the woman who had caught him at his mischief.

“You’re not Niall!” she exclaimed accusingly, taking a step backward.

“No, I’m not. If I were, I would have certainly never left you all alone.”

She faced him in the moonlight, a fey wood sprite with skin as fair as cream and a tumble of dark curls. Her skirt was stained with grass, her hair tousled, her bodice misbuttoned, but her dishabille only made her
more appealing. She looked like a wayward child playing at being a woman.

A woman whose rosebud of a mouth was still swollen from another man’s kiss, he reminded himself.

She put her hands on her hips, and eyed him boldly. “I’ve never seen you in Ballybliss before, sir. And I know all of the men who live there.”

Tupper had to clear his throat before replying. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

She looked down with embarrassment at her garments. “I hope you don’t think I always go around looking like this. I just… took a bit of a tumble.”

Tupper dragged his gaze away from the soft swell of her breasts, his tongue growing more tied by the minute. “I’ve been known to take a bit of a tumble myself on occasion. Once I drank too much port and tumbled right off my horse into the lap of a lady who was riding through the park in her phaeton.”

“And did this lady think you were
falling
in love with her? “

It took Tupper almost a full minute of basking in the warmth of her sparkling brown eyes to realize that this beauty, this Highland rose, was flirting with him.
Him.
Theodore Tuppingham, the plodding son of a minor viscount.

“If she did,” he replied, “then she showed it by screaming for a constable and beating me about the head with her parasol.”

A merry half-smile curved the girl’s lips as she took
in his black silk shirt with its full sleeves and fall of lace at the throat and cuffs, his clinging knee breeches, the shiny jack boots that pinched his toes abominably but gave him a dashing air that was well worth any suffering he had to endure, and the elegant folds of his cloak.

As her gaze traveled back to his face, her smile began to fade. “Why, I know who you are.” Her eyes widened to luminescent pools as she began to back away from him. “You’re the Dragon!”

Tupper was about to deny it, but the glow of awe in the girl’s eyes stopped him. In his entire life, he had never had a woman look at him like that.

Before he even knew what he was going to do, he had sucked in his stomach, puffed out his chest, and said, “Aye, lass. I
am
the Dragon.”

He wouldn’t have been surprised had she fled the meadow screaming in terror or recoiled with disgust to discover that the Dragon was a balding, slightly paunchy Englishman. But what she did instead was hurl herself into his arms.

“You!” she shrieked, pummeling his chest with her small fists. “You’re the wretched beast who ate my sister!”

As one of those fists connected with his newly concave stomach, his chest deflated with a mighty
whoosh.
Desperate to silence her before she roused the entire village, he dragged her against his chest and clapped a hand over her mouth.

“I didn’t eat your sister,” he hissed in her ear. “She’s alive and well, and I can prove it. She even told me about you. You must be the youngest—Catriona. But
she calls you something else. Um—Katie? Cat? “ As he frantically searched his memory, she dug her sharp little teeth into his palm hard enough to draw blood, and he jerked his hand away.

“Kitty,” she spat, squirming more like an outraged tiger than her cuddly feline namesake.

“Kitty! Of course! How could I have forgotten? You’re Kitty and your sisters are Glenda and”—he snapped his fingers—”Nellie! You live in the manor in the village with your father, who’s several cards short of a full hand of whist!”

Kitty ceased to struggle, but continued to glare up at him. “It’s Glynnis and Nessa. And Papa has never cared for whist, only faro. He cheats atrociously, but Gwennie says we must allow him to win because it makes him laugh.” She clung to his ruffled shirtfront, her eyes clouding as she began to absorb the full import of his words. “Gwennie… ? Could it be? Is she really alive?”

“She’s alive and well,” Tupper said gently, covering Kitty’s hands with his own. “She’s staying at the castle as my guest and she has beautiful clothes, ample food, and all the books she cares to read.”

Kitty sagged against him, the silky sweep of her lashes fluttering as if she might weep. Tupper feared he might burst into sobs himself if he was forced to watch a tear tumble from those beautiful eyes of hers.

But she stilled the quivering of her delicate chin and slanted him an oddly sultry look from beneath the fringe of her lashes. “Who would have thought that
Gwennie would end up being your mistress instead of your meal.”

“I can assure you that she hasn’t been either,” Tupper hastily protested, stepping away from her. “I haven’t compromised your sister. Her virtue is as intact as it was the night she was left at the castle.” Remembering the fiery kiss he’d witnessed between Gwendolyn and the Dragon only that morning, Tupper wasn’t sure how much longer he would be able to make that claim.

Kitty sighed and shook her head. “That’s a pity. If ever a lass was in need of a thorough compromising, it’s our Gwennie.”

Shocked by her frankness, Tupper turned away to hide his blush, cursing his fair complexion.

“So you’re the Dragon.” She looked him up and down with brazen regard, making him regret that he hadn’t had time to suck in his stomach again. “Is it true that you can change from man to dragon at will? “

“Only on Tuesdays and the second Sunday of each month.”

As she drew nearer, he began to back away from her, unnerved by the predatory glint in her eye. “And have you developed a taste for human flesh, as Maisie’s mother says?”

Tupper jerked his guilty gaze from her mouth to her eyes, having been wondering at that precise moment what her lips might taste like beneath his. “I honestly don’t think I’d fancy it. Underdone roast beef gives me indigestion.” His back came up against a tree, making further retreat impossible.

She leaned toward him, her little pink tongue darting out to moisten her lips. “My friend Maisie swears you’re possessed with a fierce hunger to mate with one of the village lasses.”