by Zoë Archer
Hastings, eager to shine in the eyes of his superior, pulled out a notepad from his pocket. “A scientific expedition, all the way from London,” he read.
“Scientific,” repeated Williamson. “Botany? Zoology?”
Hastings flushed. “He wasn’t specific, sir. I tried to get more details but he gave me a lot of bluster, saying he was a very important man in England and he didn’t have time to waste on”—he cleared his throat and turned redder, matching his jacket—“‘boys in pretend uniforms.’”
All the Mounties grumbled at this.
“But they did hire three mountain men as guides,” Hastings added. “And I heard they’re heading west at first light.”
“Good work, Corporal,” Williamson said, and Hastings beamed. He turned to Nathan. “Are you sure you want to leave tomorrow, Lesperance? It’s jolly exciting around here. Always something going on.”
“I’m sure,” said Nathan, thinking once more of Astrid Bramfield’s silver eyes. A welcome distraction came when something brushed against his leg. He glanced down to see an enormous orange tabby cat twining between his boots. The cat placed its paws on his knee and chirped. Nathan stroked the cat’s head and was rewarded with a series of purrs.
“That’s Calgary,” said Mackenzie. “I named him after the place in Scotland where my pa is from. He isn’t usually this friendly. Just eats and sleeps all day. Terrible mouser.”
“You’ve got a way with animals,” Williamson noted as Calgary tried to climb into Nathan’s lap.
“Except those Brits’ falcon,” Nathan said.
The men continued to share stories until darkness fell completely, and the only light came from their pipes and the lantern on their table. At last, aching with fatigue, Nathan stood, dumping the irate Calgary from his lap, and bid the Mounties good night. Tomorrow would be another long day.
Once outside, Nathan took a deep breath of night air. Most everyone at the trading post was either asleep, passed out, or had since left, so the evening was cold and silent. Hardly any light penetrated the darkness, save for the glinting stars and waning moon. Yet Nathan felt them, just the same, the huge, dark forms of the mountains, pulling on him like a lodestone. He’d struggled against it all evening, and now that he was out of doors, their draw became sharp, insistent. He gritted his teeth against it. Come to us. We await you.
So strong was their pull, Nathan didn’t notice the shadowed forms creeping up behind him. By the time he became aware of them, it was too late. He felt several men leap upon him, binding him, forcing a gag into his mouth. He struggled fiercely, almost dislodging them, but there were too many. A falcon cried. Something exploded behind his eyes and then he was swallowed by nothingness.
Chapter 2
Solitude Shattered
Morning frost turned her lungs brittle, each inhalation a reinforcement that she continued to breathe and live.
There was a time when even that reminder would have been too much. Astrid had hated the fact that, despite everything, her body persevered, pressing on, a machine with no consideration for her heart or soul. Each dawn had proven again and again that she must go on without Michael, regardless of what she wanted. So she did. She awoke and moved and, eventually, fed herself, dressed herself, and went about the business of being alive. In time, living no longer was an effort of titanic proportions. Birthdays passed. She turned thirty-three last May. She went forward.
Now she rode through the low mountain pass leading to her homestead, glancing about her. Gold-glimmering mountains rose out of the morning mist that seeped up from the evergreen woods. In the scrub, animals returned to their burrows after their nighttime forays for food. Thrushes sang to each other. And nowhere could be heard the sounds of human habitation.
Being out in the expanse helped. In this wild place, every day she fought to survive. No room or time to huddle into herself. Self-pity opened the door to disaster. She pushed herself ahead and had done so for four years. She would continue to do so until she stopped appearing at the trading post, and some curious trapper or dutiful Mountie made the trip out to her cabin to find what remained of her. But her loss wouldn’t matter, because she had been careful, very careful, to form no attachments.
Something shifted in her peripheral vision. Astrid swiftly took up the rifle slung over her shoulder, then lowered the gun when she saw it was only a fox trotting home from a nocturnal hunt. A beautiful creature, sleek and red, all economy and motion. The animal barely sent her a glance—it had too little exposure to man to see her as a threat—before darting into the brush to seek its den.
“A wise choice.” Astrid chuckled to herself. Thoughts of her own secluded homestead, as comfortable as a place could be well away from civilization, had her urging her horse on. She’d spent the night sleeping on pine needles with her rifle cradled in her arms. Her bed at home offered better rest.
Her solitary bed.
Against her will, her thoughts turned back to the man she’d met at the trading post yesterday. Nathan Lesperance. Just thinking his name sent a shiver of heat and awareness through her. There were men in these mountains who were bigger and brawnier, but the raw masculinity of Lesperance’s lean and muscular body, even underneath his heavy traveling clothes, hit her at once with the strength of a hot avalanche. A striking man, with high cheekbones, aquiline nose, and full mouth, his skin the color of cinnamon, sculptural in his virile beauty. Hair and eyes as black as mystery. Her own body, so long used to its seclusion, thrummed into wakefulness, stirred by the male splendor of him. Even the sound of his deep, smoky voice enthralled.
An attorney from genteel Victoria. She never would have believed it. Not because he was Native, but because she sensed it at once, the elemental wildness in him, barely contained, glittering in the jet of his eyes.
There had been something else, too, a kinship. She felt instantly that he knew her, knew her innermost self—the hurt, the anger, and, yes, even the fire that burned in her deepest recesses, the fire for life itself. That fire had brought her to the Blades, made her love her work with them. To seize the world with both hands and never let go. She’d tamped it down after Michael’s death. But it never truly extinguished. Lesperance, somehow, had seen it. He’d done the impossible, piercing the fortifications she had raised. No one, not even her closest friends or her family, had been able to do that in all this time. She could not fully understand how Lesperance managed it, only that he had.
He had looked into her. Not merely seen her hunger for living, but felt it, too. She saw that at once. He recognized it in her. Two creatures, meeting by chance, staring at each other warily. And with reluctant longing.
Yet it wasn’t only that immediate connection she had felt when meeting Lesperance. There was magic surrounding him.
Astrid wondered whether Lesperance even knew how magic hovered over him, how it surrounded him like a lover, leaving patterns of nearly visible energy in his wake. She didn’t think he was conscious of it. Nothing in his manner suggested anything of the sort. Nathan Lesperance, incredibly, was utterly unaware that he was a magical being. Not metaphorical magic, but true magic.
She knew, however. Astrid had spent more than ten years surrounded by magic of almost every form. Some of it benevolent, such as the Healing Mists of Ho Hsien-Ku, some of it dark, such as the Javanese serpent king Naga Pahoda, though most magic was neither good nor evil. It simply was. And Astrid recognized it, particularly when sharing a very small space, as the Mounties’ office had been.
If Nathan Lesperance’s fierce attractiveness and unwanted understanding did not drive Astrid from the trading post, back to the shelter of her solitary homestead, then the magic enveloping him certainly would. She wanted nothing more to do with magic. It had cost her love once before, and she would not allow it to hurt her again.
But something had changed. She’d felt it, not so long ago. Magic existed like a shining web over the world, binding it together with filaments of energy. Being near magic for many years had made he
r especially sensitive to it. When she returned from Africa, that sensitivity had grown even more acute. She had tried to block it out, especially when she left England, but it never truly went away.
Only a few weeks earlier, Astrid had been out tending to her horse when a deep, rending sensation tore through her, sending her to her knees. She’d knelt in the dirt, choking, shaking, until she’d gained her strength again and tottered inside. Eventually the pain subsided, but not the sense of looming catastrophe. Something had shaken and split the magical web. A force greater than anyone had ever known. And to release it meant doom.
What was it? The Blades had to know how to avert the disaster. They would fight against it, as they always did. But without her.
A memory flitted through her mind. Months earlier, she’d had a dream and it had stayed with her vividly. She dreamt of her Compass, of the Blades, and heard someone calling her, calling her home. Astrid had dismissed the dream as a vestige of homesickness, which reared up now and again, especially after she’d been alone for so long.
The jingle of her horse’s bridle snapped her attention back to the present. She cursed herself for drifting. A moment’s distraction could easily lead to death out here. Stumbling between a bear sow and her cub. Crossing paths with vicious whiskey runners. A thousand ways to die. So when her awareness suddenly prickled once again, Astrid did not dismiss it.
A rustle, and movement behind her. Astrid swung her horse around, taking up her rifle, to confront whoever or whatever was there.
She blinked, hardly believing what she saw. A man walked through tall grasses lining the pass trail. He walked with steady but dazed steps, hardly aware of his surroundings. He was completely naked.
“Lesperance?”
Astrid turned her horse on the trail and urged it closer. Dear God, it was Lesperance. She decocked her rifle and slung it back over her shoulder.
He didn’t seem to hear her, so she said again, coming nearer, “Mr. Lesperance?” She could see now, only ten feet away, that cuts, scrapes, and bruises covered his body. His very nude, extremely well-formed body. She snapped her eyes to his face before they could trail lower than his navel. “What happened to you?”
His gaze, dark and blank, regarded her with a removed curiosity, as if she was a little bird perched on a windowsill. He stopped walking and stared at her.
Astrid dismounted at once, pulling a blanket from her pack. Within moments, she wrapped it around his waist, took his large hand in hers, and coaxed his fingers to hold the blanket closed. Then she pulled off her coat and draped it over his shoulders. Despite the fact that the coat was quite large on Astrid, it barely covered his shoulders, and the sleeves stuck out like wings. In other circumstances, he would have looked comical. But there was nothing faintly amusing about this situation.
Magic still buzzed around him, though somewhat dimmer than before.
“Where are your clothes? How did you get here? Are you badly hurt?”
None of her questions penetrated the fog enveloping him. She bent closer to examine his wounds. Some of the cuts were deep, as though made by knives, and rope abrasions circled his wrists. Bruises shadowed his knees and knuckles. Blood had dried in the corners of his mouth. Nothing looked serious, but out in the wilderness, even the most minor injury held the potential for disaster. And, without clothing, not even a Native inured to the changeable weather could survive. He was in shock, just beginning to shake.
“Lesperance,” she said, taking hold of his wide shoulders and staring into his eyes intently, “listen to me. I need to see to your wounds. We’re going to have to ride back to my cabin.”
“Astrid…” he murmured with a slow blink, then his nostrils flared like a beast scenting its mate. A hungry look crossed his face. “Astrid.”
It was unexpected, given the circumstances, yet seeing that look of need, hearing him say her name, filled her with a responding desire. “Mrs. Bramfield,” she reminded him. And herself. They were polite strangers.
“Astrid,” he said, more insistent. He reached up to touch her face.
She grabbed his hand, pulling it away from her face. At least she wore gloves, so she didn’t have to touch his bare skin. “Come on.” Astrid gently tugged him toward her horse. Once beside the animal, she swung up into the saddle, put her rifle across her lap, and held a hand out to him. He stared at it with a frown, as though unfamiliar with the phenomenon of hands.
“We have to go now, Lesperance,” Astrid said firmly. “Those wounds of yours need attention, and whatever or whoever did this to you is probably still out there.”
He cast a look around, seeming to find a shred of clarity in the hazy morass of his addled brain. Something dark and angry crossed his face. He took a step away, as if he meant to go after whoever had hurt him. His hands curled into fists. Insanity. He was unarmed, naked, wounded.
“Now,” Astrid repeated.
Somehow she got through to him. He took her hand and, with a dexterity that surprised her, given his condition, mounted up behind her.
God, she didn’t want to do this. But there was no other choice. “Put your arms around my waist,” she said through gritted teeth. When he did so, she added, “Hold tightly to me. Not that tight,” she gasped as his grip turned to bands of steel. He loosened his hold slightly. “Good. Do not let go. Do you understand?”
He nodded, then winced as if the movement gave him pain. “Can’t stay up.”
“Lean against me if you have to.” She mentally groaned when he did just that, and she felt him, even through her bulky knitted vest, shirt, and sturdy trousers. Heavy and hard and solid with muscle. Everywhere. His arms, his chest, his thighs, pressed against hers. Astrid closed her eyes for a moment as she felt his warm breath along the nape of her neck.
“All set?” she asked, barely able to form the words around her clenched jaw.
He tried to nod again but the effort made him moan. The plaintive sound, coming from such a strong, potent man, pulled tight on feelings Astrid didn’t want to have.
“Thank…you,” he said faintly.
She didn’t answer him. Instead, she kicked her horse into a gallop, knowing deep in her heart that she was making a terrible mistake.
Her cabin sat in an isolated meadow, a flat expanse of grass that rested in the shelter of the mountains. A small creek ran through the meadow, cold with melting snow, and spruce trees dotted its banks. In spring, the meadow was dotted with snow lilies and cow parsnip, but now, in the first weeks of September, the blossoms were already gone. Feed for her horse was abundant, though, and it made for a good place to situate herself. She had the creek for water, the mountains shielded her from cold winds, and she was utterly alone.
Until now.
“Lesperance, wake up,” she said over her shoulder. She slowed her horse to a trot, and it snorted with relief. The poor beast wasn’t used to carrying two people. It couldn’t be more uncomfortable than she was, though. She’d endured hours with Nathan Lesperance pressed close, his weight and muscle tight to her, his cheek resting on her shoulder. “We’re here.”
He stirred behind her, muttering something in a language she didn’t recognize.
Astrid brought the horse up to the step leading to the low porch at the front of the cabin. She dismounted, slinging her rifle onto her back, and was relieved to see that Lesperance had enough strength now to sit up on his own. The blanket had loosened from his grip, however, giving her far too good a view of his flat, ridged abdomen.
“Can you get down?” she asked, forcing her eyes up to his face.
He nodded and awkwardly lowered himself from the saddle, with Astrid providing support. As the blanket at his waist slipped farther, she lunged, grabbing it and hauling it up. She closed his grip around the blanket.
When he swayed on his feet, Astrid stepped to his side and draped his arm over her shoulder. “There’s a step here. Lift your foot. That’s right.” She guided him up the step and across the porch. “Wait here.” She leaned him ne
xt to the door frame. Satisfied that he wouldn’t topple over, Astrid pulled her revolver and carefully opened the door, using the wood to shield herself.
She peered into the cabin, just as she always did when returning. A quick scan revealed everything exactly as she had left it: a single room, sparsely furnished with a table, one chair, her bed, a cupboard, and three shelves holding her books. At the foot of her bed stood a small chest, where she stored shells for her rifle and bullets for her revolver. A quill-and bead-decorated elk hide on the wall was the cabin’s only adornment. The wood stove that served to heat the cabin and cook her food was cold—no trapper or squatter or anyone else had moved in while she had been at the trading post. And no opportunistic raccoons or hungry bears had plundered her larder. Muslin covered the small windows cut into the log walls. She had never put glass into the window frames. Too expensive, an unnecessary luxury. In the depths of winter, she simply wore several layers of clothes and huddled close to the stove.
It was so far removed from what she had been raised in, Astrid almost smiled.
There was no time or room for remembrance. Satisfied that her home was undisturbed, she fetched Lesperance from where he was propped against the door frame. With him leaning on her, they stumbled into the cabin. She glanced around, looking for a place to set him down. There was only one option, an option she hated.
They staggered toward her bed, and she tried to lay him down carefully across the quilt covering the mattress. Gravity worked against her. Lesperance went down heavily onto his back, and the momentum took her with him. She sprawled on top of him, their legs tangling together, bodies pressed close. She braced her hands on his broad, smooth chest and glared down at him as his arms came up to wrap around her waist. Even through her coat and the blanket, she felt his hips against hers.
“Let go,” she growled.