Ursus lunged like a charging bear. Cait screamed and swung the shovel. It connected with a force that jarred her shoulders, and Ursus bellowed and grabbed the handle and wrenched it from her grasp. Her arms stung. Her hands burned. She screamed again and spun around to run.
He clawed at her arm, jerked her jacket. His breath scorched her cheek. Fear rose, blinding, bright. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t think. She had to get away.
Tearing free, she flung herself forward and ran, her pulse pounding like a rabbit’s. She blundered through bushes and around trees, her heavy boots striking and sliding on rocks and leaves.
Ursus roared and lumbered after her.
The trail. She needed to find her way back to the trail, to Josh and safety.
But every time she turned, her pursuer veered to catch her, to cut her off. Roots tripped her ankles. Branches whipped her face. Her legs were tired. Her lungs labored, the cold air scraping her throat and stabbing her chest like knives. She had no breath to scream. She barely had breath to run. But she floundered on and on, driven by will and panic and the sound of crashing behind her.
The ground reared up, and she fell, hard, knocking the air from her lungs. Cait sprawled, clutching twigs and leaves between her fingers, her heart buzzing in her ears and black spots dancing before her eyes. The wood tilted and spun crazily as she gasped and prayed. Oh, God, oh God, oh God…
Gradually, the silence seeped into her senses.
No crashing. No grabbing. No roaring. Only the occasional rustle of a squirrel and the smell of leaf mold tickling her nostrils.
Cait breathed in and out as her heart drummed and the forest floor settled and was still around her. In. And out. Where was he?
Where was she?
Cautiously, she levered herself on her elbows and raised her head.
Nothing.
She crawled to a sitting position, taking careful inventory of her scratched hands and bruised knees. No broken bones, no twisted ankles. She was only breathless and shaken and scared. She scanned the silent, empty woods.
Scared and lost.
The first flakes fell as the shadows deepened under the trees. Cait felt the snow’s kiss on her cheek, cold and soft as dread, and shuddered.
She needed to keep moving to stay warm. But the longer she walked, the more difficult it would be for her rescuers to find her. Where the hell was Josh? Why hadn’t he heard her shouting? Why didn’t someone—anyone—come?
She had been hiking for what felt like hours, terrified she was wandering in circles. Hadn’t she passed those standing rocks before? And that stump looked awfully familiar.
Tears pricked her eyes. She willed them away, straining for a glimpse of the white and blue blazes that marked the trail and its connecting paths. Still nothing. She raised her pocketknife and dug her initials into a tree to guide whoever might come after her.
Too bad she didn’t have any bread crumbs to drop. She was starving.
Her hands shook as she returned the knife to her pocket.
Her maps and compass were in her pack, back on the trail. She climbed uphill toward the ridge line, trying to orient herself by the uncertain gray light. But every time she congratulated herself on her progress, the landscape shifted like a giant carpet shaken out and laid down in a new direction.
The trees crowded around her, dark and unfriendly. Their branches whispered and snickered together, and the shadows played tricks on her eyes. She kept turning her head to stare. A white blob of a face under a pointed red cap was only an odd fungus growing on a tree. Two menacing eyes resolved themselves into knot holes on a gnarled trunk. Cait couldn’t resist the feeling that the trees were moving just beyond the corners of her vision, herding her downhill.
Which was ridiculous. Maybe she was losing her mind. Not that going crazy would make dying of exposure any easier.
“Help!” She had yelled herself hoarse. Her throat ached with tears. “Hello?”
The forest swallowed her voice. Snow fell, big, wet, white flakes that clung to her hair and melted on her face like tears. Cait closed her eyes in despair.
She wanted her mother.
She wanted to open her eyes and find that this hike through hell was all some horrible dream. Her parents had been right. She only hoped she lived long enough to tell them so.
Straightening her shoulders, Cait opened her eyes and saw, flickering between the dark tree trunks, the red glow of a…fire?
Her heart pushed into her poor, abused throat. She blinked. The glow was still there.
Hardly daring to hope, she forced her heavy legs onward, slipping on wet leaves, grabbing at branches for balance. A path opened before her, as if the wood itself yielded her passage. Rocks and roots smoothed out of her way. Or maybe it was only her eagerness that made the going seem easier.
The smell of wood smoke curled through the trees. Cait sniffed. Somebody was cooking something over that fire. Her stomach rumbled. The last thing she’d eaten was a bowl of gluey oatmeal nine hours ago. Maybe whoever built the fire would be willing to share their dinner?
A rock face loomed out of the twilight, lighter than the bare, black trees, darker than the sky. The fire crackled at its base, protected by an overhang. Maybe she wouldn’t die of exposure tonight after all. Cait approached, feeling positively…Okay, cheerful was too strong a word. But she was definitely upbeat.
Until she recognized the tall, broad-shouldered figure feeding a stick to the dancing flames.
Rhys.
The air whooshed from her lungs. It was like falling all over again, first the blow to her chest and then the forest whirling around her while she fought for breath.
She must have made a sound, a gasp, a whimper, because he looked up and frowned. “Caitlin?”
She wanted to run. She didn’t think she could move. The energy drained through the soles of her boots, leaving her lightheaded and swaying on her feet.
Rhys straightened and took a step toward her. “Are you all right?”
She tightened her hand on the little knife in her pocket. Like that would protect her. “Where are your friends?” she croaked.
He stopped, still frowning. “Friends?”
“Those…the people you were with. Goodfellow and—and Ursus.”
Rhys paused before he answered. Taken aback? Or thinking up a lie? “They are not friends,” he said at last, carefully. “I travel alone. As you do.”
Relief made her wobbly. She wanted to believe him. Could she afford to trust him? Could she afford not to?
“Where is your companion?” he asked.
Cait opened her mouth and shut it again, because admitting she was lost and alone seemed like a really bad idea. But what could she say?
His mouth tightened. “Never mind. You look frozen. Come, sit down. Eat.”
Cait bit back a hysterical giggle. Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly…
She always figured the stupid fly got what it deserved. But what if the choice was between the tangled, sticky web and freezing to death in the wilderness? Could you really blame the fly for taking its chances with the spider?
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”
He had stacked wood under the overhang, out of the snow. He steered her to a log by the fire without actually touching her and seated himself at an angle, so she could keep an eye on him without having to stare directly into his face all the time. Sensitive of him. Or else really, really smooth. The fire beating at her exposed face and frozen toes made it hard to care. She hugged her arms, soaking in warmth, trying not to think about how she got here or what she was going to do next.
Rhys leaned forward, and she flinched. He gave her a long, measuring look before removing a heavy aluminum pot from the fire. Okay, so she was a little jumpy. She’d had a bad day, damn it.
She watched him ladle the whatever-it-was from the pot into two bowls. Why two, if he was traveling alone? Unless they’d been sold as a set. All his gear had that shiny, fresh-[ ]from-the-showroom look
, as if he had more money than experience. He knew his way around a campfire, though. The stuff in the bowls smelled delicious. After almost two weeks on the trail, Cait was sick of noodles and granola.
“Thank you,” she said again and dug in.
She identified onions and potatoes, carrots and barley. She poked cautiously at a mushroom cap, remembering the red-and-white fungus on the tree. But it tasted good. She noticed Rhys didn’t eat much. He didn’t talk much either, but that was okay. She was too hungry to make conversation.
The stew warmed her from the inside out. She nodded, lapped by the heat and lulled by the hiss and pop of the fire. Perhaps she even dozed, because the next thing she knew Rhys was taking the bowl from her hand, saying in his smooth, deep baritone, “You must sleep now.”
Uh oh. She struggled back to consciousness. “I, um, don’t have my sleeping bag.”
He studied her with his beautiful, golden eyes. “You are lost.”
Lost and alone in the woods with Tall, Dark, and Mysterious. She didn’t need her parents to warn her that was a dangerous combination.
She stuck out her chin. “I ran into a little trouble on the trail. I’m meeting up with my friends at the next shelter.”
“At the next shelter,” Rhys said, not quite making it a question.
She resisted the urge to squirm. “That’s the plan. Is it far?”
“Not far, but difficult to find. I could take you there tomorrow.”
If he were planning to rape her, murder her, and dispose of her body tonight, he wouldn’t talk about tomorrow, would he?
“That would be great,” Cait said. “So I guess we should, um…”
“Sleep,” he suggested, a gleam in his eyes that could have been amusement. She hoped it was amusement. “We will be cramped in one sleeping bag, but you will be warm.”
Cait ignored the flutter under her breastbone. “Or we could stay up and talk a while.”
“Talk.”
She wished he wouldn’t repeat everything she said. It sounded even more inane the second time around.
“Yeah. Generally I like to know somebody before I crawl into bed with him…. That was a joke,” she explained, incase he didn’t get it. In case he got the wrong idea. “Tell me about your family.”
“I have no family,” he said in this very flat voice.
Okay. Good to know he didn’t have a wife and kiddies tucked away somewhere (and never mind why), but what about parents? Brothers and sisters?
“Then we can sit around the campfire and tell ghost stories,” she said.
“Do you know any ghost stories?” Maybe she’d imagined that end-of-subject tone, because he definitely sounded amused now. A current of laughter ran under his dark voice like a stream in the earth.
“Actually, no. My mom didn’t like me reading anything supernatural. Which is funny, because she’s a librarian and totally against censorship, you know?” Cait shifted on her log. It steadied her to think about her parents: her cheerful, practical mother; her calm, strong father. “She read to me, though. Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables. But no woo woo stuff, no ghost stories or even fairy tales.”
“She is unimaginative,” Rhys said.
Cait found herself jumping to her mother’s defense. “Not unimaginative. Just…”
Scared.
It was a disconcerting thought. An old memory surfaced of the day her mother discovered The Faerie Queene was required reading in Cait’s sophomore English class. Cait didn’t recall the story itself that well—something about a knight and a lady and lots of enchantment and honor and violence—but she remembered her mother’s reaction.
“She’s just protective, I guess. Maybe she was afraid they’d give me unrealistic expectations.” Cait shrugged. “Or nightmares.”
“She may be wise. Dreams have power,” Rhys said.
He really talked like that, as though he wasn’t used to expressing himself or English was his second language or something. It should have sounded hokey. But remembering her erotic dreams of the night before, dreams in which he had played a starring role, Cait blushed. “Yeah.”
“Would you like me to tell you a story?” he offered unexpectedly.
Cait was grateful to be rescued from her embarrassment. “A ghost story?”
“A folk story. Although I think it has sufficient—what did you call it?—‘woo woo.’”
She laughed. “Bring it on.”
Rhys stared into the heart of the fire and then took a deep breath. “There was ere now a Pooka—”
“What’s a Pooka?”
“I’m telling you. It’s…Well, it looks like a wild black horse. A pony.”
“Why don’t you say pony, then?”
“Because it’s not a pony. It’s a…it’s something else. Do you want a story or not?” Frustration edged his tone.
Cait grinned, unrepentant. “Yes, please. Sorry.”
So he told her the tale of the Pooka, who would invite you to mount for a ride and then throw you into a ditch or off a cliff. She listened, enthralled, to his dark, liquid voice. His stilted, slightly formal speech only added to the magic of his tale.
He would have been a big hit at the preschool story hour at her mother’s library.
“Do you know any more?” Cait asked when he was done.
He nodded and launched into another story, about the small brown Oakmen in red, pointy caps who turned the axes of careless woodsmen to chop off their own legs, and of the will-o’-the-wisp who led travelers astray to drown, and of the Wild Hunt that harried the damned across the sky.
Cait was whirled up in the world he described. Carried away by his voice, she heard the nasty snickers behind the trees, smelled the despair of the decaying bog, cowered at the clamor of the Hunt. His world was magical. Vivid. Evocative. And all his stories ended in death or disaster, at least for the people involved.
No wonder her mother hadn’t liked them.
“Don’t you know any nice stories?” Cait asked at last, torn between amusement and dismay.
Rhys gave her a sidelong look. “The sidhe are not nice. They just…” For the first time since he started his tale, she saw him struggle for words. “…are,” he finished finally.
Are what? Cait wondered.
“Who are the shee?” she asked.
“The people of these hills.”
“That makes sense. It sounded Scottish.”
His eyebrows lifted. He did it beautifully. He must practice in a mirror.
“The word,” Cait explained. “Isn’t it Scottish? This area was settled by the Scots, a long time ago.”
Rhys shrugged. “Whoever crawls on the surface, they are the same mountains.”
“What do you mean, the same?”
He leaned forward to add a log to the fire. Sparks flew into the night. Beyond the overhang, snow drifted down, heavy white flakes that clung to the trees and melted in the draft of the fire. “Longer than your long ago, these hills were a single mountain range that stretched over half of the earth. In time, the lands drifted apart and an ocean came between. But the mountains remember. In their bones and in their heart, they are still the same.”
“What are you, a geologist?”
He shook his head. “No. But I have studied…certain things.”
“So you’re a student.”
He smiled faintly, with a gleam like moonlight on the snow. “Sometimes.”
Cait exhaled in frustration. Talking to him was like trying to catch a fish with your bare hands. “I just graduated,” she said. “This trip is my present.”
Some present. Although now that she was safe and fed and sitting by a warm fire with a hot guy, it almost matched her mountain fantasy.
“You said your parents didn’t want you to come.”
A hot guy who listened. Cait was impressed.
“They didn’t.” She grinned. “It’s more like my present to myself. I’m supposed to start graduate school in the fall. I just wanted some time to cl
ear my head and figure out what I want to be when I grow up without all the parental pressure, you know?”
Rhys was silent so long she was afraid she had offended him.
Cait bit her lip as realization struck. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I forgot you don’t have any family.”
His mouth twitched. Was he annoyed or amused? “Not like your family. But I understand perhaps better than you think.”
“I doubt it,” she said gloomily. “Not unless your father changes the oil in your car every three months and your mother ends every phone call by reminding you to take your vitamins.”
“I haven’t seen my father since I was eight years old.”
Sympathy wrenched her. Eight? Poor kid. Poor baby. She wondered how old he was now. He had the grace and arrogance of a young man, the smooth complexion and shining hair of a child.
Rhys met her gaze, and the glitter in his eyes stopped her breath in her throat.
Not a child, she acknowledged.
“Sorry,” she repeated.
“Don’t be,” he drawled. “It was a long time ago.”
Cait couldn’t imagine her own childhood without her father’s steady, loving presence. “So you’re just…over it?”
Rhys’s face was cool and smooth as marble. “Yes.”
Right. Maybe he believed what he was saying. She did not.
She tried again. “You know, it’s only human to miss him. To care.”
He gave her another of those dark, unfathomable looks. She didn’t want to be attracted to him, damn it. It made an already awkward situation unbelievably uncomfortable.
“What?” she demanded.
He shook his head. “It’s not important. We can talk again later. You must be tired after all you’ve been through.”
And how did he know that? she wondered. Sure, she’d admitted running into trouble, but she hadn’t breathed a word about Ursus.
On the other hand, Rhys wasn’t stupid. And she had practically fallen asleep in her soup.
He smiled, still gazing deep into her eyes. “You should rest.”
In the one sleeping bag. His sleeping bag.
Her heart pounded against her ribs while her brain scrolled glorious, hot red, high definition images of all the things she was pretty sure she hadn’t done with him last night.
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