Page 5 of Lachlan

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 inorder 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 findwould 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 howdampthe 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’tintended 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.

---