Page 17 of Lachlan

In Old English, the name would have been Draca.

In Old Norse, it had been Draki.

But both those names translated to dragon.

Belle stilled before slowly turning to surreptitiously study the three brothers.

Tall. Check.

Stern featured. Check.

There were three of them. Check.

What the fu…fudge, she substituted for the word she’d been about to use to describe her obviously ridiculous thoughts, when normally, she was so pragmatic and practical.

She’d had to be to survive after her parents died. She’d been so young that she no longer remembered what they looked like.

Yes, the Drake brothers were tall and large—very large—and equally as imposing.

Yes, their features looked as if they had been hewn out of a rocky crag on the mountain that abutted their home.

And yes, their name in Old English and Old Norse meant dragon.

But none of those things meant they had any connection or were related to the men Sister Agnes had met eight hundred?—

“What do you have in the bag?”

Belle’s thoughts came to a screeching halt at Hunter’s lightly asked question. She glanced up to see all three brothers looking at her with the same curiosity.

Her arm tightened instinctively about the backpack resting on her thighs. “Just my clothes and toiletries, plus a few books. I brought them with me for my stay at the McGregors’ home.”

“I sent word to Hamish that you’d found their missing lamb,” Hunter told Lachlan dryly.

Sent word when? She and Lachlan had entered the kitchen only a few minutes earlier, and no one had left the room since then.

Lachlan dropped his spoon noisily into his almost empty bowl. “She isn’ttheirmissing anything,” he snapped, his eyes once again seeming to flare with that inner fire as he glared at his brother across the table, his hands now clenched into huge fists on the tabletop.

Belle’s eyes widened in alarm at the sudden tension she sensed in the room.

A fierce and challenging tension as Lachlan continued to glare at his youngest brother.

“Lachlan, Hunter was just being his annoying self,” Ranulf quietly interjected into the rising tension between his two brothers.

Belle was Lachlan’s, damn it.

His true mate.

His Belle.

His!

Ours, his dragon purred.

“It’s okay, Lachlan.” Belle placed a soothing hand on top of his. “I’m not in the least offended by what Hunter said.”

Lachlan couldn’t take his eyes off that small hand voluntarily resting on top of his.

Or, after her down coat had been removed, how slender she was in a fitted blue sweater and black low-rider jeans.

---