Dougal finished off the chunk of granola Laura had handed him and tossed the wrapper aside. His lips pursed as he considered how much to tell her.
She was a stranger, yet she claimed to be a descendant of the woman who had damned him to this unending life of hell on earth. He had spent the last hundred years alone, in hiding, with only himself for company, yet the pain of that isolation was quickly giving way to the desire to speak, to share, to take advantage of the opportunity to converse with another human being.
And if he understood her earlier remark correctly, at the same time he’d been watching her—watching her pleasure herself while he, in turn, pleasured himself—she’d been dreaming of him, as well.
She’d never seen him before, had certainly never seen his markings and disfigurement, yet her subconscious had apparently caused her to dream of him in a most erotic manner. Not once, but multiple times.
Like a match tip flaring to life, heat raced through his body, bringing his shaft to rock-hard attention. His blood boiled with want and need and memory, and a sense of possibility he hadn’t experienced in a century.
Swallowing hard, he drew his attention back to her face, even as his mind lingered on thoughts of yanking down her trousers and having his way with her, pinning her to the wall and taking her until every ounce of pent-up passion and desire poured out of him.
“I was young,” he began. “Young and arrogant and foolish. I was the firstborn son of the great Laird MacKay, and I thought I had the right.” How wrong he had been. But then, with age came wisdom, and though his physical body showed no signs of the span of his life, he certainly had the years to claim great insight.
The wild yearning humming in his veins slowed to a low simmer as he spoke, and he expected the second, less pleasant memory he was being forced to recall to begin a sour roil in his gut and burn his tongue like acid. But a hundred years had apparently dulled the pain and degradation of that moment, for he felt himself relating the story as though it was just that—a story, an unfortunate incident that had occurred to someone else.
“It was a harsh winter that year, with little food to be found, and when I discovered a band of gypsies…” he cocked his head and met her eye, “your ancestors, I presume…hunting on my family’s land, I tried to drive them off. One of the old women—your great-grandmother—was not impressed by my grandiose behavior or my threat to remove them bodily if they refused to leave of their own free will. She cursed me. Threw a bottle of some thick, amber liquid at my chest, which she claimed were dragon’s tears. It soaked immediately through my clothes and onto my skin, not burning, but tingling. I could feel it seeping into my pores, spreading through my body.
“That was when she began to chant. A language I couldn’t comprehend at first, followed by one that I could. She told me I would be forever hunted, trapped in a form between man and beast, the bodies of man and dragon becoming one until I learned the gifts of kindness and generosity, of putting others’ needs before my own.
“Almost immediately, I began to change. I grew hot, nearly unbearably so. My flesh, my blood…I could barely breathe from the heat and the pain, but when I did, those breaths hissed with smoke and sometimes fire. I could feel my eyes changing. To this,” he said, waving a hand in front of his face to encompass what he knew Laura saw when she looked at him.
“At some point, I lost consciousness. When I woke, the gypsies were gone, as though they’d never been there to begin with. I staggered home, thinking I’d imagined the whole thing, or perhaps that whatever the old crone had thrown at me had caused me to hallucinate. It wasn’t until I arrived back at the keep—not this one, but one built later, where my family resided—that I came to understand it was all too real. By then, the scales had broken out to cover most of my body. As soon as the villagers and my family saw me, they began to scream, and cast me out for the demon I had become.”
Story told, he fell silent, and for a moment, Laura remained so, too. Then her brow puckered and with censure clear in her tone, she said, “Your own family did that to you? Couldn’t they understand? Didn’t they at least want to know what had happened to you?”
He shook his head, once again stunned by her quick acceptance of both him and his accounting of past events, as well as the fact that she instantly jumped to the defense of the youth he’d once been.
“It was a different time. Things that today would be considered merely unfortunate were then thought to be the work of the devil. They ran me off with curses and prayers in the middle of the night. I came to this keep, which had been empty many years by then, to hide, and have been here ever since.”
“Still…”
Laura didn’t know what else to say after that, so she let her words trail off, her mind racing with the comparisons between her great-grandmother’s version of the incident with Dougal MacKay and what he had just told her.
She’d listened to Dougal’s deep, Scottish brogue with keen interest and more than a modicum of exhilaration, not doubting his claims for a second. Any other sane person might have, but she knew better. Though his tale had been flavored by his personal viewpoint, the details were too close to what she already knew of the legend not to believe and know that what she’d heard all of her life had really happened. That this man, cursed to life in the skin of a beast, really existed.
There was no denying that the markings on his body and the vertical slits of his eyes made him look like a dragon, which had been one of the hardest parts of her great-grandmother’s story to believe. But if that could be true, then everything else could be, too.
“Can I see?” she asked, slowly climbing to her feet and drawing him up with her. Her palms gently explored every inch of bare skin she could find.
She found him fascinating, and handsome beyond belief. It didn’t help, either, that she remembered every touch, every kiss, every moan and thrust from the many erotic dreams he’d starred in while she slept.
Dougal didn’t move, didn’t tell her she could or couldn’t look her fill, so she continued to explore, loosening the ties at the front of his shirt.
Everywhere she glanced, there were scales. The flickering, orange-ish glow of the candle still burning in the middle of the room actually accentuated the colors, making the pale greens, blues, pinks, lavenders, and yellows glitter and glow. It was like staring into a bowl of precious gems or standing directly before a disco ball.
Wanting to see it all, she slipped her hands beneath the bottom hem of his shirt and peeled it slowly upwards. He raised his arms without prompting, letting her lift it up and over his head.
She bit back a gasp at the sight of him. He was glorious, a true masterpiece. And it was only moderately due to the dragonlike markings lining his chest and abdomen, wrapping around his waist to his back, spreading down beneath the waistband of his pants.
They were beautiful and fascinating, no doubt, but his body would have been a work of art even without them. He was sculpted and firm, each muscle smooth and well defined. He was the epitome of manliness, every woman’s fantasy.
Her fantasy come to life.
Her hands trailed along his washboard abdomen, around his waist to his back, where the same rough texture of scales covered the skin there, as well. She let her fingertips drop lower, just inside the top of his pants.
His stomach muscles tightened as he inhaled sharply, and a thrill rolled through her own belly. She was being exceptionally bold, not at all like her usual self, but she simply didn’t care.
She knew what she wanted…Dougal, again, just like last night.
“Laura…” His voice was a harsh whisper of sound through clenched teeth.
His hand clamped on her wrist, keeping her from dipping any lower, but she flexed her fingers, tugging against his hold in an attempt to delve deeper beneath his waistband.