Teresa Medeiros - [FairyTale 02] (6 page)

Gwendolyn could not have said when she closed her eyes and began to scream. She only knew that the terrible roar died at the exact same moment as her scream.

She slumped away from her bonds, going limp with terror. The rigid stake pressing against her spine was the only thing keeping her on her feet.

It took her several long minutes to realize that the rain had died to a gentle patter, more melancholy than threatening. It took her even longer to screw up the courage to open her eyes.

When she did, she discovered that her only companion was the headless statue of the woman in the corner, looking as forlorn and abandoned as she felt. She swallowed around a knot of panic. At least she still had her head.

For now.

That little girl’s voice came from somewhere in the past—from a time when she had believed that flickering will-o’-the-wisps haunted the marshes and bogs, that squat bogies could transform themselves into handsome men just long enough to lure innocent maidens to their ruin, and that a boy with eyes the color of emeralds might mistake her for an angel.

She searched the shadows, realizing with a start that she was not alone after all. Someone… or something… was watching her.

Although it cost her the very last crumbs of her strength, Gwendolyn forced herself erect, refusing to meet any monster, real or imagined, while cowering in terror.

“I don’t believe in you, you know,” she called out. Embarrassed by the hoarse croak that emerged from her throat, she tried again. “This is 1761, not 1461, and
I’m not some ignorant peasant you can intimidate with your superstitious nonsense!”

When only the whisper of the rain greeted her defiant words, she wondered if perhaps her sanity had snapped somewhere during that torturous journey to the castle.

She shook a sodden string of hair out of her eyes. “I’ll have you know I’m a student of science and rational thought. Whenever Reverend Throckmorton journeys to London, he brings me back pamphlets from the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge by Experiment!”

A gust of wind swirled through the courtyard, snatching away her words and raising the gooseflesh on her arms.
There.
In the corner to her left, something had moved, had it not? Even as she watched, some formless shape was beginning to separate itself from the shadows. Her entire body began to quake with a bone-deep chill that had nothing to do with the rain or the cold.

“You don’t exist,” she whispered, praying that if she said it often enough, it would be true. “You don’t exist. You’re not real. I don’t believe in you.”

Every instinct urged her to close her eyes and make the thing that was slowly emerging from the darkness go away. But the same damnable curiosity that had once prompted her to dip one of Izzy’s hair rags in a flask of oil and light it—while Izzy was wearing it— wouldn’t even allow her to blink.

In the end, it wasn’t the stark ebony wings that rippled
around the magnificent breadth of his shoulders or the silvery smoke streaming from his nostrils that proved to be Gwendolyn’s undoing. It was his face—a face more terrible and beautiful than any she might have imagined.

That face was the last thing she saw before her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped into a dead faint.

A
S
THE
MAN
WHO
CALLED himself the Dragon gazed with stunned disbelief upon the offering the villagers had left for him, the lit cheroot tumbled from his lips and hissed to its death in a puddle of rainwater.

“I know you’ve earned a reputation for making women swoon,” his companion remarked, stepping out of the shadows and cocking one sandy eyebrow, “but never before at the mere sight of you.”

The Dragon began to circle the stake, his long, black cloak billowing around his ankles with each step. “What in the holy hell possessed them to bring me a woman? All I wanted was a haunch of venison and a jug of whisky to warm my bones on this miserable night.”

“I’d be willing to wager she’d warm your bones.” His friend appreciatively eyed the woman’s full breasts and ample hips. “She’s what my outspoken great-aunt Taffy, who was once the mistress of George I, would call a ‘good breeder.’ “

She appeared to be wearing some diaphanous length
of fabric that was more shift than gown. Rain had plastered the garment to her skin, leaving little to a man’s imagination. The shadow of one dusky nipple peeped shyly out from between the sodden strands of honey gold hair that spilled over her breast.

Realizing with a start that he was ogling her just as avidly as his companion was, the Dragon took off his cloak and wrapped it around her, swearing beneath his breath.

She had slumped forward when she swooned. He gently tipped up her chin with one finger to reveal a jaw that was strong but compelling. A hint of a dimple graced her cheek. Her lips were full, her skin as soft and white as fleece.

“Bloody savages,” he muttered, tugging at her bonds. “Leaving her trussed up like some sort of sacrificial lamb. I ought to fetch my pistol and shoot the lot of them.”

“Then they might think you were displeased with their gift.”

He shot his friend a dark look. It was beginning to rain in earnest again, forcing him to blink the raindrops from his thick lashes. The wet ropes resisted his efforts to untie them. When he saw the raw grooves they’d carved into the tender flesh of her upper arms, he swore again, more savagely this time. As he chafed her wrists, trying to massage the blood back into them, she moaned.

The last of the ropes fell away. As her knees crumpled, he scooped her up in his arms and started for the castle.

His companion abruptly sobered. “Do you really think that’s wise? If she sees your face… ?”

He left the question unfinished, but the Dragon knew only too well the dangerous consequences of such folly.

He swung around, the golden waterfall of the woman’s hair streaming over his arm. “What would you suggest I do with her? Leave her out here to drown in this storm like some abandoned kitten?”

A rending crack of thunder deafened him to his friend’s response and sent a violent tremor through the woman’s body. The sky seemed to split open at its swollen seams, unleashing another torrential downpour. The Dragon cradled the shivering woman against his chest and raced for the castle, left with no choice but to carry her into his lair.

Without going to the bother of opening her eyes, Gwendolyn stretched, all but purring with contentment. She never dreamed it would be so very cozy in a dragon’s belly. On the contrary—in the flicker of eternity before that
thing
had come lumbering out of the darkness, she’d had ample time to imagine her flesh being seared from her bones by flame or stripped away by boiling acid.

She rolled to her side, pillowing her cheek against a fat, fluffy bolster. Compared with the prickly, heather-stuffed tick she shared with Kitty, it felt as if she were sleeping on a nest of feathers. The heady incense of
sandalwood and spice enveloped her. Perhaps she wasn’t in a dragon’s belly after all, she mused, but in heaven.

She stiffened, coming fully awake. Even the meek Reverend Throckmorton had always preached more on the perils of hell than the pleasures of heaven. Up until that very moment, she wasn’t sure she had believed in either. But neither had she believed in dragons.

She drew in a steadying breath before sitting up and opening her eyes. As her gaze surveyed her surroundings, that breath escaped from her lungs in a sigh of pure astonishment. This was surely a heaven more luxuriant and decadent than anything the pious minister had dared to imagine!

She floated in a shimmering pool of midnight blue satin. The rumpled bedclothes shrouded a whitewashed four-poster whose carved columns jutted upward in a fanciful swirl. Lit candles ringed the bed—not smelly tallow, but fragrant wax, melting in a cascade down the graceful arms of the standing candelabrum that cradled them. The tapers cast a flickering halo of light heavenward, drawing Gwendolyn’s eyes to the mural painted on the rounded dome of the ceiling.

Nude women, both goddesses and mortals, frolicked in faded pastel meadows, the exuberant abundance of their rosy flesh making Gwendolyn feel as svelte as Kitty. There was Persephone, forsaking spring to surrender her heart to the lord of darkness; Ariadne guiding her lover from the monster’s labyrinth; Psyche waking up in a bed of flowers while Cupid watched her
from the shadows, his beautiful face forever hidden from her curious eyes.

Gwendolyn craned her neck, so beguiled by their shameless sensuality that she barely felt the sheet slide from her shoulder. She might not have noticed it at all had she not heard a sharply indrawn breath that was not her own. She glanced down, her skin prickling with shock as she realized that beneath the bedclothes, she was as naked as Psyche. Snatching the sheet up to her chin, she slowly lifted her head.

The luminous candlelight gave the bed the unholy glow of a sacrificial altar, but left the corners of the chamber veiled in darkness. Yet she knew she was not alone.

She wished she had paid more attention to Reverend Throckmorton’s sermons. Perhaps she wasn’t in heaven after all. Perhaps this decadent bower was a place of endless torment disguised as dark pleasures of the flesh.

Gwendolyn shook her tousled hair out of her eyes. “Only the worst sort of coward would spy on a woman from the shadows. I dare you to show yourself.”

She heard a muffled footfall, and instantly regretted her challenge.

If this was hell, she was about to meet its overlord.

THERE
’
S
NO
NEED
TO
BLANCH and cower beneath the blankets. I’m not a dragon or a monster. Simply a man.”

Gwendolyn squinted into the corner and clutched the sheet to her breasts, the caress of that smoky baritone somehow more a threat to her virtue than her own nudity. She didn’t know whether to be frightened or relieved when its owner stopped just short of emerging from his veil of shadows. The moody flicker of the candles kept her eyes from adjusting. She could make out little more than a dark figure leaning against the wall with indifferent grace.

“If I’m cowering beneath the blankets, sir,” she said, “it’s because some shameless libertine has stolen my clothes.”

“Ah, but if I were so shameless a libertine, there would have been no need for me to steal them. You would have surrendered them willingly.”

The clipped English bore no trace of a burr to soften
its mockery. Against her will, Gwendolyn was beset by an image of strong, masculine hands peeling the wet fabric from her naked flesh. She clenched her teeth to hide a shiver that had little to do with her fear. “You dare to accuse me of cowardice, yet you’re the one hiding in the shadows, too craven to show your face.”

“Perhaps it’s not fear for myself that prompts my caution, but fear for you.”

“Is your face so horrible to look upon? Will it drive me insane or turn me to stone?”

“It already made you swoon, did it not?”

Gwendolyn touched her fingertips to her temples and frowned, unable to summon up more than a hazy recollection of that moment in the courtyard—the smell of rain, the flap of wings, a silvery swirl of smoke… and his face. A face made all the more terrible by its utter impossibility. She struggled to capture the memory, but it melted away, more elusive than the stranger taunting her from the shadows.

“Who are you? “ she demanded.

“The villagers of Ballybliss call me the Dragon,” he replied.

“Then I shall call you charlatan. For only a charlatan would perpetrate such a cruel hoax.”

“You wound me, my lady,” he said, although the hint of laughter in his voice told her she had succeeded only in amusing him.

She sat up straighter, tossing a damp curl over her shoulder. “I’ll have you know I’m no lady.”

Her ears were so tuned to his movements that she
would have almost sworn she could hear him cock an eyebrow.

“At least not in the strictest sense,” she amended. “My father possesses no title.”

“Forgive my presumption. You don’t speak in the crude tongue so common to these Highland savages, so I naturally assumed…”