The Unicorn's Secret (Burns! Mystery 5)

By Erin O'Quinn

Is this the end, or merely the beginning?

The fifth mystery in O’Quinn’s Burns! series takes place on the occasion of Hogmanay, New Year’s Eve in Scotland, 2014.

A chance assignment in Stirling finds Thomas and Burns in a medieval castle, on a perilous hunt for a suspected bomber. Burns’ final secret may be revealed when two unusual sleuths follow their own private mystery to its conclusion.

Don't miss the first four exciting M/M novellas: Burns Too Deep...The Dundee Law...Red, Red Rose...The Devil in Falkirk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erin O'Quinn
• Release date: Jun 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311101860

Erin O'Quinn

Erin O’Quinn sprang from the high desert hills of Nevada, from a tiny town which no longer exists. A truant officer dragged her kicking and screaming to grade school, too late to attend kindergarten; and since that time her best education has come from the ground she’s walked and the people she's met.Erin has her own publishing venue, New Dawn Press. Her works cover the genres of M/M and M/F romance and also historical fantasy for all ages.

Book preview

The Unicorn’s Secret

Burns! Mystery 5

Erin O’Quinn

Copyright © 2016 Erin O ’ Quinn

New Dawn Press

ISBN:  9781311101860

First electronic edition published by New Dawn Press

Published in the United States of America with international distribution.

Cover Design by Erin O’Quinn

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author ’ s imagination or are used fictitiously; and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

WARNING: This writing contains explicit sexual descriptions and is intended for a mature audience over the age of 18.

Dedication

To you, Robert Burns. Your rich Ayrshire accent has been in my head, and in my heart, for many long months. May it always speak there.

This story is for you, sir, for auld lang syne.

Introduction

Is this the end, or merely the beginning?

The date is Hogmanay…New Year’s Eve in Scotland, 2014. A chance assignment in Stirling findsThomas and Burns in a medieval castle, on a perilous hunt for a suspected bomber.

Burns has always been a man of mystery, but now his final secret may be revealed. What will Thomas find in the famous Hunt of the Unicorn when he and his partner follow their own private mystery to an astonishing conclusion? Or as Thomas once noted, could this adventure be both an alpha and an omega, the infinite circle of life…?

Chapter One

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A Plain Fellow

Thomas Fitzgerald considered himself a rather plain fellow.

He hated underwear and wore jockeys only rarely, when he needed to dress in a constable’s uniform pants. Department regs.

He owned two pairs, and two colors, of socks: dark brown and black. Most of the time he didn’t bother to wear them at all. Today, with temps in the minus Celsius, he’d submitted to a pair of wool calf-highs.

He favored loose trousers, nondescript shirt, and scuffed brogans. Even when he didn’t need a jacket, he wore a black hoodie to cover up his hair and to pull down below the bridge of his nose. He knew some men would make fair use of vivid blue eyes under a cloud of blond hair. But an undercover cop who flaunted those physical traits was asking to be transferred to a desk job, or to roadway patrol.

So he hid everything an onlooker could use to pick him out of a crowd. If someone were to know him casually…like his colleagues at work…he’d even camouflaged his growing interest in history, simply by not speaking very often.

His schooling had ended abruptly when he’d run away from his home in Ireland at age fourteen. So his speech was as unadorned as his education. Not rough, not ungrammatical, but straight to the point.

His interest in past events—up until he’d met a certain pesky scholar—had been confined to wrap-ups of last week’s news on the telly.

Only a few suspected he was gay. ’Speck had never brought it up directly, but he was the type of leader who knew his men damn well. Roddy McCormack knew—or hoped—but Thomas had never returned the detective constable’s wishful flirting. Thomas simply considered his sexual preference to be no one’s goddamn business.

And he’d fooled most people on most counts during his four years with Police Scotland’s Criminal Investigation Department.

Except for one person. That university fellow. The man he called Burns.

Even after knowing the dark-haired Scot almost a year, Thomas still wondered how the man had cracked open most of his secrets within hours of their chance meeting.

Burns… The raven-haired enigma with midnight shadows chasing across gray eyes, dimples dancing around a mobile mouth…

Sitting in the Dundee CID office listening to the morning briefing from Inspector Ainsley, he’d allowed his mind to wander just enough that his damned cock jumped under the corduroy trousers. He leaned forward at his desk, his arms crossed on its surface, and tried to focus on the matter at hand, willing his his mind to lose the poetic images of artful fucking. Commanding his greedy prick to stay under firm control. Burns was waiting for him at his flat, just a five- or ten-minute drive from this concrete cubicle. That’s all he needed to feel an unaccustomed sense of ease. Happiness, even.

He was a plainclothes cop. But Burns had told him he was not as plain as he felt. Not by any man’s measure, lad.

…run all these creeps to ground. Understood? You won’t find them in an uptown pub, so expect to get dirt on your hands and knees crawling under rocks. Word is, they’re trying to unload a million pounds worth of heroin during Hogmanay celebrations. Starting tonight, and over the next four days. Not going to happen in Dundee. Not on my watch.

’Speck had pinned the mug shots of four men on the large bulletin board under the utilitarian clock, which read eight-thirty a.m. Three of the smudged photos were out-of-towners, drug runners. The ugliest one, a local they’d nicknamed Jack Spratt, was a skinny, dark-skinned man whose Adam’s apple protruded from his collar like he’d just