Legend Of The Highland Dragon by Isabel Cooper Read Free Book Online Page A

On the other hand, he hadn’t exactly anticipated them the first time.
    She jumped and squeaked when she heard footsteps in the hall. Luckily—God bless wooden floors and hard-soled boots—she had enough warning to collect herself before Polly opened the door again. “This way, miss. If you please.”
    Polly led Mina through some of the same halls she’d run down earlier but turned well before the passage that led to the locked room. Instead, she took Mina up two flights of stairs, casting curious glances at her all the time when she didn’t think Mina was looking.
    No wonder. One didn’t hire secretaries in the middle of the night, particularly not female secretaries, who hardly anyone hired anyhow. Polly must have known by now that she was working for an eccentric; all the same, she must have had a dozen questions. Mina might have heard some of them if MacAlasdair had hired her as a maid, or even a housekeeper. However, secretaries, like governesses, were always a little apart from the servants.
    It was too bad. If Mina had met the other girl under any other circumstance, they could have been friendly. Perhaps they could even have been friends. She would have liked to have a friend in this house.
    The room was a neat, sparse little place with dark wooden furniture and pale flowered wallpaper, clearly not a room for family or guests but also a few steps above Mina’s regular lodgings. She guessed that it had been for one of the more senior servants, perhaps a lady’s maid from a time when the house had had a mistress.
    Polly waited in the doorway, and for a moment, Mina couldn’t figure out why, or why the girl didn’t say anything. Then she remembered more of Alice’s stories: maids didn’t speak until spoken to. That was true even with a secretary, she supposed.
    She cleared her throat. “That’ll be all, Polly,” she said, keeping her voice as clipped and even as she ever had. “Thank you.”
    The maid nodded and departed, leaving Mina alone in the room.
    She took a more careful look around, noticing a small window set high on the wall. The view out of it was gorgeous, though the night was cloudy. Mina could see the outlines of the London roofs, lit against the sky by the still-awake city below, and the dome of Saint Paul’s rising above them.
    Turning reluctantly back to the room itself, she had to admit that it wasn’t at all bad. As far as she could see, there was no evidence of spiders or rats, nor any dust. The air was a little stale, but if she opened the window tomorrow, that would be all right soon enough. For a hundred pounds, she could imagine staying in far worse places.
    There was gas lighting too, she found when she examined the lamp on the wall. MacAlasdair, or more likely his father, wasn’t far behind the times when it came to modern comforts. She wouldn’t have expected it from creatures who lived…however long they lived.
    Mina shivered at the thought. It was an important thought, though, and an important thing to remember. However human MacAlasdair seemed—however handsome she thought he was, at odd moments when he stopped being aggravating—he wasn’t human at all. He didn’t live like one; he didn’t die like one, or at least not at the same rate; and he might well not think like one.
    And the man who opposed him had been human once but was clearly willing to deal with creatures who were anything but.
    Mina wrapped her arms around herself and eyed the corners of the room, the shadows that fell from the bed and the writing desk. They didn’t move. Anything hunting MacAlasdair would hardly start up here.
    All the same, after she undressed, she got into bed with the light still on. She could sleep in almost any conditions, and MacAlasdair could damn well foot the extra bill.
    ***
    Mina woke to clear light, a pair of starlings fighting somewhere near her window, and an immediate sense of unreality. Shadow men. Dragon men, for God’s sake. If she hadn’t been in an attic room