Page 19 of Lachlan

There was only one way to find out. “Okay,” she sighed. “But I think it will be easier if I show you.” She unzipped her backpack to look through the contents for Sister Agnes’s journal.

To look and look again.

Belle’s movements became more and more frantic as she realized the journal was no longer in there.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Belle?” Lachlan voiced his concern with the increasingly desperate way she was looking through the contents of her backpack, her face growing paler by the second. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“It’s gone!” Her wild eyes appeared a deeper blue against the pallor of her cheeks. “How is that possible when I— That bastard!” Glittering anger shone in her eyes when she looked up at them. “The sneaky, thieving bastard!”

“Who is?” Hunter pressed.

“Ben.” She spat out the name. “It has to have been Ben.”

“What did he do?” Lachlan prompted gently.

“Stole the journal from my bag.”

“He stole your diary?” Ranulf frowned.

Belle shook her head. “Not my diary, someone else’s.” The backpack slipped off her knees and onto the floor, obviously no longer holding the same importance that it once had. “That backpack hasn’t left my sight except for the short time I wentdown the hall to the bathroom on the two nights I stayed in the McGregors’ house. It didn’t seem like a good idea to take it with me where there was water, so I left it in the bedroom. The second night I returned from my shower it was to find Ben lying on my bed waiting for me. He told me he was there for sex but now I know the journal is gone I realize that must have just been a cover for my having caught him in my bedroom.”

“I’m sure he would have accepted the sex too if you’d been willing— You’re so damned easy to wind up,” Hunter mocked when Lachlan gave another low growl. “Obviously Ben’s real purpose in going to Belle’s bedroom was so that he could take whatever she was guarding so fiercely in her backpack.” He turned to look at Belle. “What was in the journal that was so important Ben McGregor stole it from you?”

That was a question Lachlan was also curious to know the answer to.

Belle was still in shock, after discovering the disappearance of Sister Agnes’s precious journal, that she couldn’t readily find an answer for Hunter.

Ben had to have taken the journal. She had no doubt about that. There was no one else it could have been.

But, like Hunter, she had no explanation as to why he would have done such a thing.

Ben was a medical student, so what interest could the contents of an eight-hundred-year-old journal, written in Old English bya nun who had long since crumbled into dust, possibly be to him?

Maybe it wasn’t the contents of the journal he was interested in, but the fact that itwaseight hundred years old and so possibly of value to someone who collected such things?

Despite receiving money from his parents every month, Ben was always complaining about being broke, so perhaps he thought he could make some easy money by selling the old journal. It was unusual for poorer people to be able to write eight hundred years ago, which probably made Sister Agnes’s journal very valuable.

Its value to Belle was far more aesthetic.

Because,dragons!

But the fact the journal was now missing and Ben the likely candidate for stealing it begged the question as to whether the intrusion into her bedroom during the Christmas party had been as random as Belle believed it to be.

As far as she’d been able to tell at the time, nothing had been taken. So, apart from the fact she was angry at the thought of one of the couples at the party intruding into her bedroom so they could have some privacy to do God knows what, Belle had mainly chosen to forget the incident.

Perhaps too readily?

If it had been Ben who broke into her room and he’d been looking for the journal, then he wouldn’t have found it. Belle had taken it to the library with her that evening.

Ben's unexpected invitation for her to come to the Highlands for Hogmanay had to have been for the same reason. The two of them had certainly never been friends.

He’d led her to think, when she came back from the bathroom that night and found Ben waiting for her in her bedroom, that sex was his reason for being there.

She no longer believed that to be the case and now thought it was Sister Agnes’s journal Ben had been looking for all along.

“Ben must also be responsible for breaking into my room before Christmas,” she stated flatly. There could be no other explanation for his behavior, both then and now.

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