Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

Belle trembled with fear and shivered from the extreme cold as she heard a roar echo around the mountains outside the cave she'd been huddled in for hours in an effort to keep warm.

It had been an animalistic and primal roar the likes of which she had never heard before.

Perhaps it had been made by a dragon, she inwardly mocked herself.

If getting lost on a mountain in heavily falling snow and then ending up taking refuge in this small cave overnight when that snow turned into a blizzard had taught her anything, it was that her determination to prove that dragons had existed or still did exist was going to get her killed from hypothermia.

Without her having proved a damned thing!

She had brought a bottle of water with her, which was something, but she didn't even have a cereal bar she could eat.

Unsurprisingly, when she'd checked, there had been no reception on her cell phone, and the light function had run out of power hours ago. Leaving her sitting in complete darkness through the night. It was light again now, but with the blizzard still raging outside, the cave was enshrouded in a gray half-light.

Everything that had happened to her these past few weeks was because she'd found those archaic journals in a box of books she'd bought at a house auction several months ago.

She was a student of mythology and often went to those auctions on a weekend if she wasn't working a shift at the coffee shop. Something the other students she shared a house with found highly amusing, both the working in the coffee shop and the buying of old books.

Belle ignored their remarks on the subject.

She loved books, especially those on mythology, and after the elderly owner of a country house died, there were often some bargains to be had in those random boxes of books in the sales that followed. The box Belle had bid on that particular weekend had included a beautifully engraved copy of The Odyssey.

Once Belle arrived back at the house, she'd had a chance to look through the rest of the box's contents. That was when she'd found a series of worn leather-bound journals tucked beneath the much-heavier tomes.

The date and name inside the front covers claimed they had all been written eight hundred years ago by the same nun, a Sister Agnes.

Most of the journals' contents were mundane to say the least. But in the journal with the first date, the one that dealt with the nun's life before she entered the convent and shortly after, Sister Agnes had written that dragons really did exist.

At least she'd claimed they had existed eight hundred years ago.

The nun wrote that three of them had been living in the Highlands of Scotland at that time. And the reason the woman knew this was because she claimed the magnificent creatures had spared her life when her family and the other people who lived in the village near the dragons' mountain had left her tied to a tree and naked as a sacrifice so that the magnificent beasts would take her and protect the villagers from other predators, men as well as animals.

Even more miraculously, the woman claimed they had all landed as dragons beside her, before they shifted into large and lethal-looking human warriors with swords strapped to their broad backs, which they had used to cut the strips of leather tethering her to the tree.

Instead of the killing or ravishing she'd feared would follow, those men had covered her nakedness with a cloak before flying her, once again as dragons, to a convent many miles away from her home in Scotland.

She'd written she had been taught to read and write there, which in turn had allowed her to write these journals of her life. Most especially, of the time she had met those Highland warriors who could shift into dragons.

Belle wasn't sure about that last claim. It seemed a bit too farfetched. But the dragon part she really wanted to believe and prove, if she could.

Aged twenty, she was in her third year of studying mythology at university, with the intention of teaching it once she had attained her initial degree and then going on to take a master's degree. Possibly even a PhD.

Finding the journals, most especially the one that had also hinted at the general area where the dragons had been living eight hundred years ago, had offered the perfect opportunity for Belle to prepare and present a unique end-of-year paper. One she would hopefully be able to use later as the focus for her advanced degree.

The language in the journal was as archaic as the time Sister Agnes made those notations about. The writing was also very small, as if the nun had been trying to conserve paper. Which she perhaps had. Paper would have been scarce in the thirteenth century.

It had taken some time for Belle to translate enough of the tiny writing and to then go online and discover that the place Sister Agnes claimed the dragons had taken her to was now called the St. Francis convent, and it was situated in Worcestershire.

She'd contacted the Mother Superior immediately and been permitted to visit for an afternoon.

Once there, Belle had also been allowed to search through the convent's records, after promising to take very good care of them.

From those often badly written records, Belle had been able to establish that there had been a Sister Agnes living in the convent at the time the journal claimed she had. Those internal records went further and revealed that Agnes had been Mother Superior of the convent from the age of forty until her death at the age of eighty-two.

There was nothing in those other records, written by a number of different nuns over the years, to ever indicate or imply that Sister Agnes had been in the least deranged.

Which must surely mean that the female sacrifice, who had later become a nun and in charge of a convent, must have at least thought she had been in the presence of real dragons.

Belle had hardly been able to restrain her excitement at the possibility of dragons having once existed. That those magnificent creatures weren't a part of mythology at all, but had once been very real.

The nun's claim that the dragons she had met had the ability to change into human men was something Belle was willing to overlook as the woman's hysteria after thinking she was about to die.

Belle's only interest was in finding evidence, any evidence, that would confirm dragons had once existed.

With that in mind, she had decided the next step would be to arrange for a visit to Scotland during her Easter break. The weather would, hopefully, be milder and the snow all melted by then.

Ben McGregor's invitation for her and the other four students who shared their house to join him and his family in the Highlands for a traditional Scottish New Year had been fortuitous. Even more so when Belle discovered the McGregor family lived in one of the villages very near to where the nun had claimed to have been rescued by the dragons who could shift into men.

Belle had spent Christmas alone, as she usually did, having no family of her own to spend it with. After which, she'd excitedly boarded the train that would take her up into the Highlands for the New Year.

She'd brought that one journal with her, of course. She'd been carrying it around in her backpack since she'd managed to translate it and realized its importance.

To her, at least.

No doubt, if someone else had bought that box of books, they would have simply decided the journals were of no value and then thrown them out.

Her stay at the McGregors' home hadn't gone quite as smoothly as she had hoped it would.

After escaping the NewYear revelries the evening before, she had returned from using the bathroom down the hallway to find Ben stretched out on her bed waiting for her. He left her in no doubt he was expecting to share her bed for the night.

Something, once Belle had recovered from the shock, she had very quickly disabused him of.

She didn't know him any better than the other two boys and two girls her fixed budget allowed her to share accommodation with. Ben had definitely never shown the slightest interest in her when they were in London. Not that he wasn't good-looking, because he was, but the two of them had absolutely nothing in common.

Belle had been orphaned at the age of three and spent the rest of her childhood either in care or fostered by a couple that was more interested in the money they received to keep her than they were in actually spending time with her. When she'd reached the age of fourteen, they had decided they didn't want the hassle of a teenager in the house and sent her back to the orphanage.

She'd attained good grades on her exams. Her application to a London university to study mythology had been accepted. But in order to pay some of her living expenses, she worked weekend and evening shifts in a coffee shop. The rest of the fees she'd needed had been taken out in student loans.

All the other students in the house had their fees and living expenses paid by their parents.

The high cost of living in London meant Belle didn't go out much. Instead, she read a lot and mainly kept to her room in the evenings when the others watched reality television while drinking beer and wine.

She always made sure to lock her room and be out whenever the others hosted a party in the house. She usually spent the beginning of the evening at the library, then moved into an all-night coffee shop once the library closed for the night.

Although the last time there had been a party in the house, a Christmas celebration before the others departed to spend the festive holiday with their families, she'd returned to find that someone had broken the lock on her bedroom door and gone into the room.

Her clothes and books had been scattered over the floor, and she didn't want to even think about what they might have done in her bed. Just in case, she'd immediately stripped off the bedding and put it in the washing machine.

Her housemates had denied knowing anything about the break-in when she'd questioned them the following day.

Frustrated and annoyed, Belle had gone out and bought a new lock and an extra padlock to stop anyone from going into her bedroom uninvited again.

She definitely hadn't been expecting Ben to assume he could share her bed on the second night after her arrival in Scotland!

Ben hadn't taken her rejection graciously. He'd called her a cock-tease before noisily leaving her bedroom. Belle had felt uncomfortable at this unexpected development, but she'd genuinely had no idea Ben had a romantic interest in her.

Well, perhaps romantic interest was stretching things a bit. Ben obviously just wanted into her panties.

The following morning, she'd set out to walk up the mountain in search of evidence that dragons had once lived in the area.

It had been impossible for her to get away from the McGregor household before that, Ben's parents having arranged a large drop-in party that many of the villagers had attended. They had all drunk and eaten copiously for hours before returning to their homes to begin the strange practice of first-footing.

Belle didn't drink, and, having met the majority of the villagers already, she had no interest in visiting any of their homes for the tradition of first-footing.

Or joining in the even more drinking and eating that had then occurred throughout that night and into the following day.

It had been very frustrating and hard for Belle to keep smiling when she could literally see the mountains in the distance that she wanted to explore. Once she was closer to them, she hoped it wouldn't be too difficult to find the mountain Sister Agnes had described in her journal where she believed the dragons had been living eight hundred years ago.

If Belle could just find something, anything, to show that dragons had once existed, then the paper she wrote on that find would ensure her a first-class degree and lead to her being able to do further research when she obtained her master's degree.

Belle had brought sturdy boots with her for that intended trek up the mountain. Plus, a down jacket that the hype assured was guaranteed to keep its wearer warm in below-zero temperatures. She'd also purchased a thermal hat and gloves that claimed to do the same.

What she hadn't considered was how damp the snow would be, rather than dry and crisp, both on the ground and still heavily falling. It was the sort of dampness that seemed to literally enter Belle's bones and freeze her from the inside out.

Nor had she realized wearing jeans wasn't at all suitable for keeping her legs warm or dry when walking through heavily drifting and falling snow that settled on her clothing before melting.

Or that, having walked several miles from the village and partway up a mountain, she wouldn't be able to find her way back again in what had suddenly become blinding blizzard conditions.

Finding this cave had been a godsend, providing her much-needed shelter from the swirling snow. It was also a little warmer inside the cave out of the biting cold wind.

A thorough search of the cave, while the light on her cell phone still worked, had dashed her hope that this might be an entrance into the network of caves where the nun had claimed the dragons lived. There were just solid, if uneven, walls and no opening to go deeper into the mountain.

Sitting against one of the side walls, shivering from the extreme cold, was when Belle had also realized that because she hadn't intended to be on the mountain for more than a few hours, she hadn't brought anything to eat.

Nor the means to light a fire to keep warm.

Not that there was any visible or dry wood near or inside the cave to put on that fire if she had.

Wet and shivering, her teeth almost chattering loose inside her mouth, she'd also had to acknowledge the stupidity of not telling anyone of her plan to go walking in the mountains.

As that orphan with no close family or friends, she'd never been in the habit of informing people of where she was going or what she was doing.

But she should have made an exception on this occasion.

The primal roar she'd heard minutes ago had only added to her misery. Although, she was pretty sure there were no bears or wolves in Scotland. Maybe once upon a time, but not now.

Once upon a time…

It sounded like the opening line of a typical fairy tale.

One that went, Once upon a time, there was a girl called Belle—no, not that Belle! This Belle didn't have a father who loved her. In fact, she didn't have anyone who loved her?—

Oh God, this wasn't a fairy tale. It was a pity party!

Could she possibly be becoming delirious from being in the cold and damp for so many hours?

Was she going to fall into a cold-induced coma next, from which she never awoke?

One day, one spring or summer, would an innocent tourist be walking these mountains and find Belle's preserved body inside this cave?

Would it still be preserved once the temperature rose and the snow melted?

She wrinkled her nose at the thought of someone finding her decomposing body.

Unless the animal that she'd heard roar found her first and, viewing her as fresh meat, decided to eat her?

Good God, her thoughts were turning hysterical, not delirious?—

"Don't be frightened."

Belle was slow to react to that growly voice.

Firstly, because it was a very deep and growly voice.

Secondly, because she was so stiff from the cold, she wasn't sure she'd be able to turn her head to look at whoever or whatever that voice belonged to.

Thirdly, and most worrisome of all, the growly voice had come from behind her and not the mouth of the cave she'd been staring at for hours.

Behind her, where there wasn't an opening that led deeper into the mountain.