“So the message says. Er—” He coughed. “You can trust Colin.”
“If there’s trouble?”
“As a general rule. He’s a good enough man, whatever he pretends. I didn’t want you to worry.”
“I didn’t,” said Mina, blinking, “but thank you for telling me. How dangerous do you think this will be?”
“Not very, I should think,” said Stephen, and hoped he was right. “It’s only a meeting. I’d just…I’d wanted to be sure you knew the situation.”
Mina smiled, puzzled but touched, and not kissing her then was one of the harder things Stephen had done lately. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll…well, I’ll be here.”
He left her standing in a pool of lamplight, looking very small in the middle of the hallway. The image stayed with him through the slow carriage ride—it seemed that every hack in London was out that night—and onto “Mr. Green’s” doorstep. A feeling of deep unease went with him too. He felt like a man watching clouds grow dark in the west and waiting to hear the first rumble of thunder.
Colin would look after everyone, Stephen reminded himself. Colin was no slouch in a fight and not half bad with magic, either, dilettante though he was. He certainly wouldn’t make trouble for the staff. Baldwin and his wife knew him of old, and as for the others, Colin had always been rather engaging.
Half the dairymaids at Loch Arach had been in love with him by the time he was eighteen, in fact, and more than a few of the farmers’ daughters.
That was Loch Arach, of course. London girls were more sophisticated and far more cynical. Neither Polly nor Emily seemed the type to moon about after a gentleman, no matter how charming, and Mina—well, no. Mina had a mind like a scalpel and the will of a particularly stubborn mule. Colin would stand no chance with her.
Certainly not.
The possibility wasn’t even worth thinking about.
Twenty-seven
Dragons, Mina was rapidly learning, could be as boring as anyone else.
She was a quarter of the way into the journal she was reading, was reasonably sure that the author was a dragon—he made frequent mentions of “transformation” and of flying—and had spent half her time almost pinching herself to stay awake. The man had done half of his estate records in his journal, for one thing, and had also apparently had very decided opinions about his nearest neighbor.
In between sheep and hounds, Mina had found a few interesting bits: a paragraph about what seemed very coldly cordial relations with the “Great Ones of the East” (or, the way he spelled it, “ye Great Ones of the Eaft”) and a mention of sending his priest to “settle” a haunted house.
Like half-buried gems, those few sentences kept her digging.
Eleanor arrived today from France,
the latest entry began,
and brought with her the children, who are growing well. She wishes to add to their number, and I have no objection, but I would wait a while before the rite, so as to ensure that our youngest may be born in the spring. Meanwhile, as I’ve observed before, it does no harm to practice the mortal portion of the marital act.
Mina stared.
The writing, though old, was very proper. The author hadn’t yet in her reading been vulgar or even profane, which had come as a bit of a surprise to Mina in the first place. Just when she’d gotten used to a nobleman apparently fitting the image of the kindly and proper lord in children’s books, he was writing about the “marital act,” which apparently had extra aspects if you were a dragon and wanted to achieve the traditional result.
She knew that a number of human rituals concerned themselves with that part of life. She’d read a few books she wasn’t supposed to read, and she’d typed a few pages of notes that Professor Carter had harrumphingly warned her about beforehand. From a scholarly perspective, mentions of “the rite” were quite interesting and not at all surprising.
What the journal writer meant, unless Mina was very wrong, was that if a dragon-man and a human simply had a bit of fun—as they might have said back home when they were being polite—then the lady wouldn’t end up in a fix for it. At least, that seemed to be the case.
For example, if she and Stephen—
Of course, that was when the door opened.
Mina was up from her seat before she knew what she was doing, putting her back to the wall and wishing she had a better weapon than a fountain pen.
“Easy, lass,” said Colin MacAlasdair, laughing and leaning against the doorway. “I promise I’ve not come to muck up your filing, nor yet to steal a book.”
“They’re your books,” said Mina. She dropped the letter opener back on her desk. “I’m sorry. I’m a bundle of nerves today, it seems.”
“Spending as long as you have here, I’m surprised you’venottried to kill anyone yet. Though I’d prefer it not be me you target when your mind does snap. You’d break the hearts of so many women.”
