* * *
THE next day, the swelling in her ankle was noticeably less and Jenna was able to make her way to the outhouse and back with the promised walking stick, which Mick had carved the evening before as they sat by the fire. Jenna was impressed by his skill and unanticipated artistic ability; she’d expected a simple staff but instead had been presented with a piece of wood almost as tall as she was, carved with detailed fanciful creatures like dragons and tiny sprites and other things she couldn’t even identify.
The rain had finally stopped and the daylight hours were warm and pleasant enough to only warrant having the fireplace going at night. She figured that she could soon be back on her way. She was almost, but not quite, sorry.
Despite their occasional moments of détente, Mick was mostly sullen and withdrawn, simply ignoring her presence whenever possible. She still tensed whenever he moved too fast, and she kept the Mace in her pocket at all times. Just because he’d taken care of her didn’t mean he couldn’t still turn out to be a crazy murdering rapist instead of just a cranky hermit. He clearly couldn’t wait to have his solitude back. Which was okay with her—she had a mission to accomplish, and she wasn’t getting anywhere sitting on his couch and watching the most gorgeous man in the world read a Donna Andrews mystery.
Today she was determined to make herself useful, so she’d started preparing lunch while Mick was outside chopping wood. Jenna stood for a moment at the window over the sink, still leaning most of her weight on the counter while she gazed out at his strong, manly form, clad in only a pair of jeans and some work boots. The movement of his muscles under his skin as he swung the axe was almost graceful enough to be a dance, and the breeze through the open window brought with it the sharp scent of freshly split wood, and just a hint of tangy sweat.
She took a deep whiff, enjoying the aroma. Which turned out to be a mistake as the outside smells mixed uncomfortably with the tuna salad she’d just put together for their sandwiches. She’d barely been tolerating the canned fish by trying not to breathe too deeply, and now her stomach rebelled, roiling like the ocean during a squall. She just managed to stagger lopsidedly to the doorway before losing the remains of her breakfast all over the ground.
Surprisingly gentle hands held back her hair until she was done and then handed her a pristine white cloth to wipe her mouth with. Day brought her back inside and set her down on the couch—mercifully far from the aggressively smelly tuna—and brought her a glass of water. Then he pulled a chair up and sat in front of her.
“How long have you been sick?” he asked. He glanced over his shoulder at the kitchen, brows pulled together. “I hope I didn’t give you food poisoning. I feel fine, but that doesn’t mean much, since I have a pretty tough constitution. Do you think it was the eggs I made for breakfast? They seemed okay to me.”
Jenna sighed. She’d hoped to be gone before there was any need to have this conversation again. It hadn’t gone well the last time, and that was with someone who supposedly knew and loved her. On the bright side, since Mick clearly didn’t like her much or want her around, hopefully he’d just shrug and send her on her merry way.
“It’s not food poisoning,” she said, wadding his handkerchief up in a ball between her hands. “And I’m not sick.”
“Of course you’re sick,” he said, a trifle impatiently. “You just threw up all over my front steps.”
“Yeah, well, sorry about that. I’ll try not to do it again.”
“That would be good,” Mick said. “But that wasn’t my point. You’re obviously ill. Maybe I should take you down into the nearest town to see a doctor. I have to warn you, though, it is quite a haul, and my transportation is pretty basic. It may be kind of a rough ride if you’re not feeling well.”
Jenna’s stomach gave another heave, but this one was due more to panic than to morning sickness. “NO,” she said more sharply than she’d intended to. “I can’t go into town. It isn’t necessary anyway. I’m not sick. I’m pregnant.”
* * *
YOU have got to be kidding me, Day thought. “No,” he said. “Hell no.”
Jenna blinked at him. “You’re telling me I’m not pregnant? Because I’m pretty sure I am.”
“Oh, I believe you,” Day said bitterly. “I was just talking to the universe.”
“Uh-huh. And do you do that a lot?”
“Only when provoked,” he said.
Jenna looked a little concerned, one hand sliding into her pocket and her eyes going to the door and back as if trying to figure out if she could make it outside if it turned out he was a madman. “I don’t know what kind of a reaction I expected,” she said. “But this isn’t exactly it. I don’t know whether to be insulted or alarmed that you consider the fact that I’m pregnant to be a personal affront from the universe. After all, I’m the one who is pregnant.”
“And you showed up on my doorstep,” Day said. “In the middle of nowhere.”
“Well, it was the middle of nowhere,” Jenna pointed out in a reasonable tone. “Yours was the only doorstep there was. I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“Which?” he asked. “Show up on my doorstep or wind up pregnant?”
She blinked those big, icy blue eyes at him again. “Both, actually.”
“Well, that was careless of you,” Day said, knowing that he sounded rude and cold and not knowing how to stop. It felt like the gods were taunting him: taking away his ability to help those he was supposed to, and then mocking his vow to stay away from damsels in distress by having one arrive literally at his door. After everything that had happened, he didn’t think it was too much to ask to just be left alone. He didn’t want anything to do with this woman or her problems. Clearly she’d brought them on herself, and she could solve them herself.
“Careless?” Jenna repeated. “It was careless of me?” She made a choking noise that surprised him by turning into laughter. Gales of laughter, followed by more laughter, so that every time she came close to stopping she’d look at him and say, “careless,” and then be off again. Eventually, she subsided into hiccups, wiping her eyes with the back of one hand.
“Sorry,” she said, biting her lip. “But honestly, that is the least appropriate word to apply to me. I used every form of birth control known to man, plus the guy I was dating had a vasectomy. I was anything but careless. Not that it is any of your business.”
“Oh.” Day didn’t quite know how to respond to that. “Then how did you end up pregnant?” he asked.
Jenna looked down at the now-twisted lump of cloth in her hands, dark lashes hiding her eyes. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
She raised her head and stared at him defiantly. “Fine, then. No amount of birth control worked because I’m under a curse.”
A curse. Of course there would be a curse. Day got up from his chair, walked over to the door, opened it, and stepped outside to yell at the sky, “What part of NO did you not understand?!”
Then he went back to his seat and said in a calm voice, “So, what kind of curse? Evil witch? Offended faery? Enchanted object?”
Jenna’s jaw dropped and she tried to speak a couple of times before words actually came out. “Uh, offended faery. You . . . you believe me?”
Day sighed. “I do.”
“But why?” Clearly she’d been braced for ridicule or skepticism; it seemed she didn’t know how to handle his easy acceptance of her circumstances. “Why would you?”
He shrugged. “Let’s just say that I have some familiarity with the veracity of certain fairy tales.” As in, he’d spent most of his life as part of a particular Russian one. The Riders had always been associated with the Baba Yagas, and the stories about them had been around for a very, very long time. Some of the stories were even true, more or less.
“So you believe me when I say I’m cursed,” Jenna said in a small voice, and then
surprised him by bursting into tears as copious and unexpected as her laughter had been a few minutes before.
Day patted his pockets desperately for a handkerchief before remembering that he’d already given her the one he’d been carrying. He loped across the room to pull another one from a drawer and then handed it to her. He couldn’t stand the sight of a woman crying; it made him want to punch or stab whatever or whomever had caused it. Which might be a little difficult in this case.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said, snuffling in a way that shouldn’t have been adorable and yet somehow was. “Hormones are evil. Just ignore me. I’m okay, really.”
“You don’t seem okay,” Day said doubtfully. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” Well, maybe he had, but not to the point of crying, for goodness’ sake.
“I’m not upset,” Jenna said. “The opposite. I’ve been carrying this damned curse around my whole life, and since my mom and grandmother died I haven’t had anyone I could talk to about it. The couple of times I tried telling people I considered friends, they either laughed at me or thought I was crazy. I eventually learned not to tell anyone. I feel . . . lighter somehow, having someone else who knows.”
“That’s great. But I can’t help you,” Day said briskly. “I believe you, but that doesn’t make it my problem.”
Jenna scowled at him. “Did I ask you to help? I don’t think I did. I just said I was glad you believed me, that’s all. God, you’re an even bigger jerk than my ex-boyfriend, and that takes some doing.”
It was nice to know he’d accomplished something today, anyway. “I’m going to go chop some more wood,” he said, getting up and heading for the door. “Don’t worry about lunch. I’ll finish making it when I’m done.”
And then, like the big, strong hero he was, he bolted for the outside as if the devil was behind him, carrying a pitchfork with Day’s name on it in blazing letters.
CHAPTER 3
JENNA felt like she was on a roller coaster, and not just because of her out-of-control hormones. She stared blankly at the doorway, through which she could see Mick chopping wood as if he had a personal grudge against each log. The man clearly had baggage. And not only didn’t like women, but hated the idea of babies too. Swell.
She sighed and got up to hobble across the room to her duffel bag, now only a tiny bit damp after sitting next to the fireplace for a couple of nights. Her clothes were completely dry, so she packed them all, folding each piece as carefully and methodically as if it were a puzzle piece that had to be slotted precisely into its own designated space.
If only her life could be arranged as neatly. And the puzzle that would save her baby could be solved by simply rearranging things. The truth was, she had no idea where to start, other than with the riddle that held the secret to breaking the curse, and her grandmother’s journals, which contained the other woman’s lifetime of searching—and failing—to find the answer.
Of all the women in Jenna’s family, her grandmother had come the closest to solving the riddle. But even she had been forced to give up a child in her turn, as did her daughter, Jenna’s mother, after her. Jenna was determined to escape their fate, even if it meant spending the next six months finding some way to survive in the woods while she went over the riddle and the journals until the answer somehow became clear to her.
A gigantic yawn escaped from her lips as she set the bag down behind the couch. The book on pregnancy she’d bought before she left town had said that women in their first trimester were often tired, but it hadn’t prepared her to be wide-awake one moment and ready to nod off the next.
Mick walked in from outside just in time to catch her in another yawn.
“Not my usual effect on women,” he said, smiling at her. It seemed as though taking his tensions out on poor innocent pieces of wood had helped his mood.
Either way, she was relieved. Jenna got that he had come out here to be by himself and then she’d shown up and thrown herself on his mercy, strained ankle and all. He’d made it pretty clear he was just counting the minutes until he could have his privacy back, but for both their sakes, it would be easier if the little time they had left together wasn’t spent with him being grumpy and bent out of shape.
“I was just packing up my stuff,” she said. “I figure if I rest my ankle for another couple of hours, I’ll be able to leave this afternoon.”
Mick nodded. “You’re probably right. As long as the place you’re heading to isn’t too far from here. Did you ever figure out where it was?” He asked the question idly as he went into the kitchen to finish making the lunch she’d failed at so miserably.
Jenna yawned again. “I’m pretty sure it is a couple of miles farther down this road. If you can call this deer track you live on a road.”
“Does your hiding out in the forest have something to do with this curse of yours?” he asked, plopping a plate of sandwiches on the table. Jenna noticed he’d exchanged the tuna for peanut butter and jam on whole grain instead, for which she was grateful. She thought, not for the first time, that Mick was a strange mix of consideration and kindness and what seemed like deliberate coldness and cruelty.
“It does,” Jenna said. “There is a riddle that can break the curse. My grandmother tried her whole life to find the answer, but like all the women in our family before her, she failed. I’ve got all her notes and I’m hoping that if I can buy myself some time, I can figure out the answer.” She tried nibbling her sandwich, but she couldn’t keep her eyes open. “Sorry,” she said, yawning again. “I think I might take a nap and then eat my lunch later, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t care one way or the other,” he said, devouring most of a sandwich in a single bite. “Go ahead and use my bed in the loft if you like. It’s a lot more comfortable than the couch.”
There he went again. Rude in one sentence, thoughtful the next. If pregnancy was a roller coaster, being around Michael Day was like a trip through the house of mirrors. It was hard to say which man was real and which wasn’t. Either way, she was happy to take him up on his offer.
* * *
JENNA wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep when the sound of knocking woke her up. For a minute she thought Mick was out chopping wood again, but then she heard him mutter, “Seriously? Is there a neon WELCOME sign outside my house that I don’t know about?” from underneath her as he stomped to the door in his bare feet.
Jenna was debating whether or not to get up and go downstairs when she heard a musical voice say, “Mikhail Day! What are you doing here?” She froze, flattening herself to the bed. As far as she knew, she’d never heard the voice before, but something about it sent cold chills down her spine.
“I live here, Zilya,” Mick said, sounding about as happy to see this new visitor as he had been to see Jenna that first night. “But I might ask you the same thing. You’re a long way from home. And as I recall, the wilderness isn’t exactly your style.”
The woman he called Zilya let out a chiming laugh that sounded like bells. “Dear me, no. I much prefer civilization, if you can call anything on this side of the doorway civilized. I suppose Paris is quite nice, all things considered.”
“Then perhaps you should go there,” Mick said rudely. “I’m not entertaining these days.”
Upstairs, Jenna stuffed the edge of the pillow into her mouth to keep from crying out. She might not know the voice, but the name had been etched into her brain since she was old enough to be told the stories. Zilya was the name of the faery who had cursed her family and stolen her older brother. What were the odds that there were two women with that name? And why did it seem as though Mick knew her?
Panic sent waves of adrenaline flooding through her system, making her heart beat fast and her legs want to run, run, run. Instead, she pressed herself even deeper into the soft bed and prayed that her temporary savior wouldn’t turn out to be in league with the one person in the world she feared th
e most.
* * *
MIKHAIL stifled a sigh. He supposed the Queen had sent someone to check up on him, although why she’d chosen Zilya, he couldn’t imagine. They knew each other, of course. The royal court was small enough, and all those who came and went lived long enough that sooner or later you got to know everyone, at least superficially.
Day had even flirted with the faery at the occasional ball or festive event, but she was a little too sharp edged for his tastes. He went more for cuddly blondes. Or passionate redheads. Or agreeable brunettes. In truth, his conquests were many and his women eclectic, over the centuries. But Zilya had never appealed to him.
Not that she wasn’t attractive enough; all the faery people tended to be tall and beautiful and graceful. She had short silver hair that curled around her head like an undeserved halo, bright inquisitive eyes like a crow, and always wore clothes that flowed around her model-thin form as if they were wafting on an unseen breeze. Beautiful, but too cold to be called pretty. An unlikely choice for a nursemaid or whatever else it was the Queen had in mind.
“It is kind of you to stop by,” Day said, still standing in the doorway and pointedly not welcoming her in. “But you can return to the Otherworld and inform the Queen that I am quite well and have no need of any assistance. Or company.”
Zilya shook her head, making the silver curls bounce. “My dear White Rider, I have no idea what you are talking about. The Queen did not send me.”
Mikhail thought about correcting her; he was no Rider, not anymore. But he decided not to waste his breath. “If the Queen didn’t send you,” he asked instead, “then what are you doing here?”
“Ah,” Zilya said. “I’ve misplaced something, and I was looking for it. Someone, in point of fact.”
“Here?” Mikhail glanced around at the endless woods that surrounded his cabin. “Really. Here.” He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, but he kept his face impassive. Centuries of practice helped with such things.
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