Burns! Box Set Two (Mysteries 5-6)

Copyright © 2016 Erin O ’ Quinn

New Dawn Press

ISBN 9781370612420

First electronic edition published by New Dawn Press

Published in the United States of America with international distribution.

Cover image © Erin O’Quinn

Box set design © Alex A. Akira, author service alexaakira dot org

All cover art © 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.

Note that the contents of this box set are also available as two separate novellas ( The Unicorn’s Secret and The Burns Enigma ). The present edition is a reflection of the natural couplet formed by the final two novellas in the Burns! series and represents a half-price savings for the reader.

Introduction to the Burns! series of gay erotic mysteries

There are six novellas in the Burns! Mystery novella series, and a *final novel, as follows:

Burns Too Deep

The Dundee Law

Red, Red Rose

The Devil in Falkirk

The Unicorn’s Secret

The Burns Enigma

*Come Again, My Love

A reader may purchase the first four as a box set; and now, with the present edition, the final two as another box set, representing a significant savings over buying each one as a separate novella.

The story line is as follows:

When two men meet on a lonely road, how can they guess their destinies will be woven so tightly together?

BURNS TOO DEEP :  An undercover cop encounters a very desirable man who’s running from the law.

THE DUNDEE LAW :  The men step far too close to a shallow grave, on an ancient burial mound in Dundee.

RED, RED ROSE :  Under the roof in a gabled Victorian house in Edinburgh lie old crimes and new desires.

THE DEVIL IN FALKIRK :  The men spiral apart, felled by the devil of distrust and misunderstanding. **Originally titled A Kilted Christmas

THE UNICORN’S SECRET :  The Hunt for the Unicorn on the cusp of a new year brings someone even closer to the edge of another shallow grave.

THE BURNS ENIGMA :  Searching for a man he thought forever lost, Thomas finds that a new lover is even better—and more imperiled—than he could ever imagine.

*A full length novel, Come Again ,My Love, combines romance, mystery, and action in a paranormal trip back to the Edinburgh of Robert Burns. Readers may consider it the capstone, the conclusion to the unique union of Thomas and Burns.



The Unicorn’s Secret

Burns! Mystery 5

Erin O’Quinn

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

______________________

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 swallowed a ping-pong ball. Jack was the middleman for a local dealer in meth, and Thomas thought he might be able to follow him through a crack in the sewer, once he put out feelers to his informants. And he already had a hunch where to find him. He didn’t know the man personally, but he knew his weaknesses.

At the desk closest to him, Keith MacKenzie—Mac—had tipped his chair back and was rocking back and forth, his eyes on the clock, not concealing his boredom. The man’s bushy eyebrows and mop of uncombed hair gave him the look of a scrapyard dog, an impression Thomas thought the thuggish man probably cultivated. He needed just a spiked collar and a muzzle to complete the picture.

Thirteen other officers in the room, most of them detective sergeants from both shifts, were trying to keep up a semblance of interest. But Mac, still besotted with his own year-old senior status, was the only one who rolled his eyes and picked his nose. As usual. The man was asking to be taken down a few notches.

Thomas had also been promoted a few months back, at ’Speck’s insistence. But he tended to wear the new rank the same way he wore his haphazardly-laced brogans and his oversized trousers—without much thought to how his personal style must look to anyone else.

Ainsley tucked his notes in his pants pocket and looked around the room. "Nice work on that pyro case, all of you. And the damned Rottweiler attacks…you, Brian, especially…good work. Now let’s round up these fucking drug pushers. I also want two volunteers to help shore up the traffic constables along the A92 tonight, before the fireworks show at Broughty Ferry. Leave your names on the roster, and I’ll get you a holiday bonus for your trouble. Night shift, in half an hour you can go home and get a few hours’ sleep. That’s after the drug team is named.

Keith and Thomas, see me in my office, now.

Thomas was puzzled. He thought Ainsley would certainly tap Mac just now to head up the drug investigation. The unsubtle man had been wheedling for a chance to make a name for himself beyond the confines of the Dundee CID. But ’Speck had not named a team or a leader in the meeting, as he normally would have done.

He and his sour colleague shuffled down the stairs behind Ainsley, one floor beneath the detectives’ large shabby office. Settling onto the arm of the worn leather chair across from his superior’s desk, he allowed Mac to plop his meaty butt onto the seat. No sense vying for position in the Inspector’s office. He was confident enough in his own abilities to take each day with a measured pace and a great deal of forethought.

Meter by meter, life is sweeter.

He felt the ghost of a smile play around his mouth, imagining his lover stretched out at his flat with his ankles crossed and his hands clasped behind his head…thinking about Burns’ nineteen centimeters…and then he snapped his attention back to his boss.

The thirty-something Inspector, looking as though he’d slept in a hay bale for a week, had filled his large coffee mug from the urn behind him and was hunkered over it, scowling. Thomas and his fellow officers knew his frown was part of Alan Ainsley’s many facial tics, his way of making a statement without speaking.

The drug thing. I want you to head it up, Mac. But I do not appreciate your attitude. I’ll tell you in semi-private…in front of your fellow senior detective here…and I’ll say it only once. Bust the bastards, and do it without grandstanding, or else go back to playing regular detective. Or maybe a sodding uniformed constable. Am I fucking clear?

MacKenzie’s ragged brows climbed to his hairline.

But Inspector, I—

Butts are in over-abundance in this room, Senior Detective Sergeant. I want detectives who help keep up morale. Ones who can crack a case without cracking other fellows’ nuts along the way. Detectives who don’t give the impression they’d rather be some fucking-where-else. Gather a team of five and get busy, starting now. And do not name Thomas Fitzgerald.

He looked at Thomas through beetled brows. I have another assignment for you. So stay put for a while. That’s all, Sergeant MacKenzie.

Thomas froze on the chair arm, hesitant to take Mac’s place after he’d left the room. ’Speck seemed in no