Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

January 4th,

Drake House, The Scottish Highlands

"There's a girl missing from the village."

Lachlan looked up from where he had been about to move one of the exquisitely carved chess pieces on an equally uniquely carved chessboard.

Instead of making the move, he watched his brother Hunter as he threw himself into a chair beside the blazing fire after making that dispassionate announcement.

Hunter raised his eyebrows at the partly played game on the chessboard, having commented more than once about how sad Lachlan was for playing chess against himself.

Lachlan ignored the derisive glance. "How do you know that?" he prompted his youngest brother.

"I overheard two men talking about it in the local tavern."

"I thought we had agreed you have to stop going there."

The brothers were dragon shifters and had been born of the same clutch twelve hundred and ten years ago. Lachlan first, then Ranulf, and finally Hunter.

They had stopped physically aging at the age of thirty-three, eleven centuries ago.

They were capable of masking their presence, if necessary, but Hunter liked to go to the public house in the nearest village five miles away and enjoy a pint of beer and a chat with the locals.

Having lived for so long meant the brothers had to disappear for a couple of generations every century. The break was necessary to add authenticity when they returned and claimed to be ancestors of the previous members of the Drake family who had lived in Drake House.

The time for that break this century was fast approaching.

The brothers knew it, and each responded in their own way.

Hunter became morose at being completely cut off from humanity.

Ranulf welcomed it.

Lachlan usually dealt with the approaching solitude pragmatically. It was something that needed to be done, so he did it.

But for the past few days, he'd been feeling restless. As if there was something he urgently needed to do, but he had no idea what it was.

Very soon, the house would be closed, the windows shuttered against intruders, and the brothers would withdraw to the safety of the network of connecting caverns in the mountain behind Drake House.

Their hoards were there anyway, so it was no hardship to spend a few decades guarding that treasure in their dragon form. That lack of exercise meant they weren't hungry as often either. Even when they were, they only left the caverns on the nights there wasn't a full moon, which would have made it possible for them to hunt for food during the hours of darkness without detection.

The existence of the internet in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was making all that more and more difficult to achieve. Too many people took photographs with their mobile phones nowadays, which they immediately uploaded to social media platforms.

It had its benefits too, of course. Hunter was the technical expert in the family, and he had been able to add to their considerable wealth with the many investments he had made online, both in business and property. Online banking also enabled him to access their many bank accounts without having to appear in person. Again, for the purpose of it not being noted that the brothers weren't aging.

Once the brothers were hidden in their caves, Hunter had set things up so those investments would simply rumble on for another fifty years or so, increasing in value and adding to the billions of pounds they already had. That was without the value of the hoard of jewels and gold they had stashed away in their caves over the past twelve hundred years.

Hopefully, this strange restlessness inside Lachlan would also have dissipated by the time it was safe for them to reappear.

"You said soon, not immediately," Hunter defended. "Besides, I didn't go into the tavern, but masked my presence as I stood outside looking in," he explained wistfully. "That's when my acute hearing allowed me to overhear two of the local men talking about the missing girl." He shook his head. "It made me nostalgic for the days when the villagers used to leave out a virgin sacrifice for us at the bottom of our mountain."

Hunter threw one of his jean-clad legs over the arm of his chair before taking a large, unconcerned bite of the apple in his hand. His teeth were very white and even and nothing like the two rows of razor-sharp incisors the brothers could bare as dragons.

A thousand years ago, the local people had believed that leaving the sacrifice of a virgin every spring as an offering to the dragons guarding the mountains would prevent those fierce creatures from eating them if game should become scarce in the area.

What was one virgin against the welfare of the rest of the villagers?

They had also, illogically, believed that the virgin sacrifice would secure their own successful hunting for another season.

Lachlan had never understood the correlation between those two events.

Despite Hunter's supposed nostalgia for those bygone days, the brothers had never eaten the virgin as dragons nor seduced her as the men they could shift into. Instead, they usually helped the girl find somewhere else she could live and flourish, knowing she couldn't return to the village for fear of being slaughtered by the superstitious villagers, who would probably have thought she had returned from the dead.

The offering of a virgin sacrifice had, thankfully, died out as the centuries passed, along with the superstitious belief that dragons existed at all.

"Which girl is missing?" their brother Ranulf prompted, his voice gruff from lack of use.

Of the three Drake brothers, Ranulf was the one who had become more and more reclusive and less talkative as the decades and centuries passed and their humanity became less and less with each passing year. Lachlan feared that one day, his brother's ability to shift into a man would disappear altogether.

After all, they were first and foremost dragons, not men.

Hunter shook his head. "I didn't mean one of the girls who lives in the village is missing," he assured once he'd finished chewing and swallowed his mouthful of apple. "This girl was a visitor."

"Ah." Ranulf gave a satisfied nod before returning to concentrate on whittling the piece of wood he held.

Ranulf was a master carver and had been for centuries. Initially, he had carved furniture for the wealthier households to buy, but as time passed, his realistic carvings of animals had become in great demand and nowadays sold for seven figure numbers. He still carved bespoke furniture, and he had carved the beautiful chessboard Lachlan was playing on.

"Was?" Lachlan was now the one to echo sharply.

Hunter shrugged. "She's been missing since yesterday, and you know how low the temperature fell in the Highlands last night."

Lachlan's nostrils flared at his brother's easy dismissal of a young girl's life. Another part of having been alive for so long, unfortunately, was that the paltry years of a human lifetime had taken on less meaning. "If she isn't a girl from the village, then who is she?"

"Her name is Belle, and she's a friend of the youngest McGregor boy."

"Belle?"

"It means beautiful." Hunter nodded. "I wonder if she lives up to her name?" he speculated.

A speculation Lachlan didn't like in the slightest. "Ben McGregor has a girlfriend?" It seemed only yesterday that the youngest McGregor bairn had been born.

Time really had lost all meaning if Ben was now old enough to have a girlfriend and possibly starting to think of having children of his own.

Hunter finished chewing another bite of his apple before speaking. "I don't think she's his girlfriend, as such. He invited a group of friends who share a house with him near the English university he's attending, males as well as females, to spend an authentic Scottish Hogmanay with him and his family. This girl apparently went for a walk on her own yesterday morning, when everyone else in the household was still recovering from the excesses of the previous two days and nights. No one realized she was missing until Mrs. McGregor called them all together for dinner yesterday evening."

Lachlan scowled at hearing this girl had now been missing for thirty-six hours. "Did they send out a search party?"

"No." Hunter grimaced. "It had already been dark for several hours by the time they realized she was gone. Plus, they decided the fresh covering of snow that had fallen during the day would have covered any tracks she might have left. Ben and his father went out to look for her first thing this morning."

"As it's now late afternoon, I'm guessing they didn't find her?"

"No." Hunter shrugged. "Which is why I used the past tense a few minutes ago when referring to her."

Lachlan snorted his frustration, agitation churning inside him. "You don't seem at all concerned that a young girl might have lost her life last night while the three of us were safe and warm inside this house."

His brother shrugged. "She isn't the first and she won't be the last to perish in the severe winter weather conditions in the Scottish Highlands."

"Which doesn't make it right for this girl to be left to die too," Lachlan snapped.

Hunter released a heavy sigh. "If you're that concerned, then go and look for her yourself."

Lachlan knew that his youngest brother wasn't as callous as he sounded. It was just that they had seen so much death during their long lifetimes that, in some ways, they had become inured to the inevitable human plight.

The past couple of centuries had been hard on all of them.

They were now the only three remaining dragons of their clan. Their uncles and aunts had died without offspring. Their own parents had died six centuries ago. But not before they had both reached the age of three thousand years old.

Their parents had met and were mated by the time they were both a thousand years old. The brothers were now two hundred years older than that and more than ready to find their true mates.

Except there were no female dragons left in the world.

Hunter, the brother who roamed the farthest, had recently visited Wales and learned that a family of male dragons living there had taken human mates within the last five years. That they now all had young too.

But those male dragons had been born to eight Welsh goddesses from the sperm of a specific single human male. This made them very different to the Drake dragons, who had been born to dragon parents.

Because of that difference, the brothers had no idea, if they attempted to mate with a human female who wasn't their true mate, whether or not the mating would succeed or be the death of the female.

The Drake brothers had all agreed it would be unwise to even attempt to do so. None of them had ever been celibate by any means. They often had sex in their human form with willing human females. But none of those women had tempted any of them to bite them as they mounted and mated her.

Their parents had told them they would instinctively know when they met their true mate. That the connection would be instant with the female, dragon or human, who was perfect for each of them.

The three brothers had clung to that hope for several more centuries after their parents' deaths, but as time passed, they'd had to face the fact that they were never going to find the female meant just for them.

The brothers' lives had become bleaker and bleaker without the love and intimate connection a true mate would have brought to their long lives.

As a consequence of that fading and now lack of hope, it was becoming more and more difficult to continue living this singular existence. For them to be able to shift into men at all when the lure of being dragon pulled on them so strongly.

Lachlan knew they would probably have considered ending their existence long ago if they hadn't each had the company of their two brothers to sustain them.

But just because life had become black, white, and varying shades of gray for the three of them, that was no reason to fail in their inborn duty to protect humans. Even the ones who didn't come from their village.

Lachlan rose abruptly to his feet. "As you suggested, I'm going out to look for the girl."

"Want company?" Hunter offered, always eager to live up to his name.

"No." For reasons he didn't understand, Lachlan felt that he needed to do this search alone. "But keep the fire burning and warm the venison stew for when I bring her back with me."

"If," Ranulf put in softly, raising his head when neither of his brothers responded. "You should be prepared to find that the girl will have frozen to death by now."

Lachlan threw back his head, and without premeditation or forethought, he partially shifted into his beast, his features no longer human as his dragon roared his fury.