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CHAPTER TWO

Hunter, having moved to stand outside the window of the study where Wallis and his visitor were talking, now wanted nothing more than to gather Zoey up in his arms, breathe in her alluring scent before shifting into his dragon, and fly them both back to his beloved Scottish Highlands.

Once there, he would introduce her to his brothers and Belle, before taking Zoey through to the caverns in the mountain at the back of their Highland home.

It was where the three brothers kept their treasure hoards, and although she didn’t know it, Zoey had just become the absolute center of Hunter’s universe and the pinnacle of his treasure.

He might wish to do that, but he hadn’t lived to be twelve hundred years old by acting without due regard for the consequences of his actions, to his brothers as well as himself. And shifting into a dragon before abducting a then terrified young woman would not go unnoticed.

He would ensure Zoey didn’t remain terrified for long, of course. But even so, Hunter believed it might take a little time to encourage her into seeing him as the true life mate he now knew her to be for him.

Besides, Zoey’s connection to Edgar Wallis was cause for concern. Very much so. Because Hunter was certain that Wallis was responsible for not only stealing a revealing journal from Ben McGregor, but also for the young man’s death.

The three brothers had survived living all these centuries because they always acted with caution. To do anything else now, even though Hunter knew Zoey was his true mate, would put them all in danger.

From his position standing to one side of the bay window of Wallis’s study, Hunter’s sensitive hearing allowed him to overhear the conversation taking place inside the room.

Which was how he had now learned that Rainbow Girl, as he had already dubbed the young woman in his mind before the butler revealed her name as being Zoey, was Edgar Wallis’s niece.

Which didn’t make any sense because he knew Wallis was an only child.

So who or what was Zoey, really?

Mine , his dragon purred.

Oh, Hunter had absolutely no doubt, and nor did his dragon, that Zoey was his true mate. Their nostrils were still filled with her mating scent of Lily of the Valley.

Hunter’s body also thrummed with a primal need to take and mate her, just as his dragon was eager to shift and show her his full magnificence.

Plus, there was the euphoria bubbling up inside Hunter and growing stronger with every passing second. He had found his one true mate, and he wanted to shout it from the rooftops and into the atmosphere!

It was incredible.

Unbelievable.

Miraculous.

Hunter had absolutely no doubt that was who and what Zoey was to him. Or that, when the time was right, he was going to take her into his arms and never let her go. Stopping from doing so now was taking every bit of his self-control. Even if he knew it was very necessary.

He would first need to explain to Zoey that he and his brothers were dragon shifters. He could only hope that Zoey would be as open-minded about that as Belle had proven to be. Much to Lachlan’s relief and future happiness.

It had helped in Belle’s case that she was a student of mythology and so very much predisposed to wanting to believe in magical creatures, most especially dragons.

Thank God. Because, after being alive for over twelve centuries, the brothers had slowly begun to despair that any of them would ever meet their one true mate.

They had heard of, but didn’t know, a family of brothers in Wales, who, it was said, had found all their mates in human women. But never, even in Hunter’s wildest dreams, had he thought he would meet his own true mate. Or that, like Belle, she would be human.

The fact that Lachlan had met his mate in Belle had started to give him and Ranulf hope they too might find a mate. Although Ranulf was being far more reticent on the subject.

But now, Hunter had seen and breathed in the scent of his Rainbow Girl. His Zoey. His one true mate.

It was… Euphoria couldn’t even begin to describe the ecstasy building inside Hunter.

But there was still that troubling connection Zoey appeared to have to Edgar Wallis. The man Hunter believed was responsible for killing one of Zoey’s housemates.

The same man, once Hunter had retrieved the damning journal Wallis had acquired from Ben McGregor before murdering him, Hunter had every intention of killing.

Eight hundred years ago, Hunter and his brothers had rescued a young woman who had been tied up and left as a sacrifice to the dragons the local people believed could determine whether they had a good harvest and hunting that year.

As Hunter, Lachlan, and Ranulf were those dragons, and they didn’t require any sacrifice, nor could they guarantee a good harvest or hunting, they had untied the girl and delivered her to an English convent, far from the villagers who had so callously offered her up as a sacrifice and would probably kill her themselves if she attempted to return to them.

Superstition of witchcraft had been rife in those days.

What none of the brothers had known until recently was that Sister Agnes, as the girl Ailsa had later become, had been taught to read and write at the convent.

As a consequence, she had written several journals about her life.

In one of them, she had written about being rescued by three huge dragons that could shift at will into large and powerful warriors.

Before this most recent Christmas, Belle Brown had accidentally acquired several of the nun’s journals at the bottom of a box of old books she had bought at a house auction.

Hunter now knew, from the emails he had managed to retrieve from Ben McGregor’s retrieved and damaged laptop, that the young man had been paid to steal one particular journal from Belle. It was the same one in which Sister Agnes had described meeting those three dragon shifters.

Which Ben had duly done.

But instead of being paid for the task, as promised, Ben had been murdered and the journal taken from him.

Those emails discussing Ben stealing the journal and the time and place for a meeting and exchange of the journal for money had all originated from the IP address of Edgar Wallis.

The man Zoey had just called uncle.

Edgar Wallis wasn’t Zoey’s real uncle, of course.

He had been her father’s best friend. But her parents had been killed when the small plane they were traveling in had crashed into the Irish Sea.

Their bodies had been found two days later, but the light aircraft still remained at the bottom of the deep gray sea.

Edgar, a man she hadn’t remembered ever meeting before meeting him at her parents’ funeral, had been named as Zoey’s guardian in her father’s will. Very soon after that, Zoey’s home in London had been sold, and she and Edgar Wallis had moved into Tregarthen House in Cornwall.

As a lawyer and a stickler for what he believed was correct, Edgar hadn’t been able to accept a girl of eight calling him by the familiarity of his first name. Instead, he had grudgingly accepted the title of uncle.

Not that Zoey had spent all that much time at Tregarthen House, having been shipped off to boarding school almost immediately after she and all her belongings had been moved into the house.

She’d usually been left to her own devices in the holidays too, and, if she did go outside, had preferred to spend most of her time on the beach with the local children.

To say Edgar was something of a cold fish would be putting it mildly. He rarely smiled, let alone laughed, and the only passion he ever displayed was for the history books he studied with an intensity that bordered on obsession.

Quite what he was looking for, Zoey had no idea, and he wasn’t the sort of man who had ever invited her curiosity, let alone her questions, about anything.

Which meant the past twelve years had been something of a trial for both of them. Zoey had always been a gregarious and outgoing child who liked to draw and paint rather than read anything as boring as history books.

Edgar didn’t understand art at all, and Zoey was pretty sure that the only reason he had allowed her to go to university to study for an art degree was so that she wasn’t constantly under his feet after she left boarding school two years ago.

They had become even more estranged during those two years.

Which made it doubly strange that Zoey had felt drawn to return to Cornwall today.

Oh, she had an affection for Edgar. After all, he had accepted guardianship of her after her parents died. He had even cared for her in his cold and distant manner.

Even so, Zoey had missed her parents’ love and affectionate attention all these years. Edgar didn’t seem capable of giving either of those softer emotions.

If Zoey was being completely honest, she found it surprising that he and her father had been friends at all. She remembered her father as being very much like her: always smiling and never taking anything too seriously. The exact opposite of Edgar.

Her father had been a hit-or-miss investor in business, meaning that sometimes they were rich and sometimes they weren’t.

Her mother had been the more practical one in the marriage, always ensuring there was enough money put by for those times when an investment didn’t pay off.

But Zoey remembered her mother as also being smiling and indulgent with both her husband and her daughter, which had added considerably to the family’s happiness.

Because they were so different, Zoey had once asked Edgar about his friendship with her father.

He had explained that they’d met at university, where they had shared a dorm room for a year.

They had kept in touch, from a distance after university in the years that followed, and more recently, Edgar had become her father’s lawyer.

“I thought you were in the Highlands celebrating Hogmanay with your friends?”