Page 3 of Lachlan

Their parents had met and were mated by the time they were both a thousand years old. The brothers were now two hundredyears 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.

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 outof 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 ofThe 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.

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