Dragons and Highlanders, A Match Made in Heaven

by Isabel Cooper

I grew up in the country, and I mean seriously in the country: from eight to fourteen (and then eighteen, on vacations) I spent my time in a place where you needed to drive twenty minutes to buy a quart of milk, where we only got three TV channels and two of those were fuzzy most of the time, and where getting to school sometimes involved wading across a creek. While the other places my folks lived weren’t quite as remote, we were never city people, or even suburb people. Going up to visit my parents during college involved taking a bus for six hours, to the point where the stops weren’t so much bus stations as gas stations (and, in one case, an unlit covered bridge), and then driving for another forty-five minutes.

There’s a lot of space in places like that. You can get lost—people do, and did, all the time—and you can also hide things. “Things” might be objects, or secrets, or yourself. The small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business might be real, but once you get a lot of room and not that many people, there’s some business maybe nobody knows.

I’ve never turned into a dragon, nor have I ever met anyone who did. (Weirder parts of the Internet, please refrain from comment.) If I did, though, I don’t think I’d have an easy time doing it in Boston: city people (which I kind of am now) are good at minding our own business, but there’s only so much you can ignore something of that size, and cities don’t have a lot of space to transform in secret. Plus, the more populated a place is, the more likely that what happens there hits the rest of the world—and that was true even back in the 1890s, when the hot new technology was the telegraph.

Now, the Highlands certainly have cities, particularly these days, and technology gets around pretty well, as does news. But the Highlands in popular culture are isolated places, places separated from the rest of the world by geography, history, and a certain independence of spirit. Space makes it easier to keep secrets—even dragon-sized secrets—and so does age, and centuries of having and guarding their own traditions. That made the Highlands a good place to hold a mystery, or to be the homeland of men and women whose background includes more secrets than most people’s.

About The Highland Dragon’s Lady

Regina Talbot-Jones has always known her rambling family home was haunted. She also knows her brother has invited one of his friends to attend an ill-conceived séance. She didn’t count on that friend being so handsome… and she certainly didn’t expect him to be a dragon.

Scottish Highlander Colin MacAlasdair has hidden his true nature for his entire life, but the moment he sets eyes on Regina, he knows he has to have her. In his hundreds of years, he’s never met a woman who could understand him so thoroughly… or touch him so deeply. Bound by their mutual loneliness, drawn by the fire awakening inside of them, Colin and Regina must work together to defeat a vengeful spirit – and discover whether their growing love is powerful enough to defy convention.

Available at: Amazon and Barnes & Noble

Don’t forget to check out Nikyta’s review of The Highland Dragon’s Lady to see what she thought of it!

About Isabel Cooper

Isabel Cooper lives in Boston with her boyfriend and a houseplant she’s kept alive for over a year now. She maintains her guise as a mild-mannered project manager working in legal publishing. She only travels through time the normal way and has never fought a demon, but she can waltz. For more visit isabelcooper.wordpress.com.