The closet was empty. Weird. Someone had to live here.
They did—a blast of icy air told Pepper whoever it was had returned.
Taking hold of her fear and confusion, she learned something about the person she was: she wasn’t scared, she had courage, and that courage was going to get her out of here. If she needed to get out of here. Screwing up her face, she tried to break through the barrier that encircled her thoughts. Pepper could almost feel them, like a living, breathing thing in her head, but they were out of her reach, she would have to go with what was real and tangible, and improvise.
Heading back out of the bedroom, she looked down the hallway. It was empty. Had she imagined the icy-cold blast? No, there were snowy footprints on the rug just inside the door; they led into the sitting room. What should she do? Make a run for it?
What if she knew the person, what if this was her home, and she opened the door and ran down the street like a lunatic wrapped in blankets?
Maybe if she went to the front door and checked to see if it wasn’t locked, that she at least had the means to escape if she needed to. Good idea. Tiptoeing, she ran down the hallway, put her hands on the door knob, and turned it.
At the same time a voice bellowed, “No.” She turned and saw the big bulking figure stood in the sitting room, looking down at the empty sofa. The ogre had returned!
Hauling open the front door, she was hit in the face by swirling snow and a wind so cold it could cut a person in two. Then the ogre was there, pushing the door closed, stopping her from escaping. But she’d had enough time to realize that there was no escape, there was no road leading from the house: all that was out there was snow, and cold, and death.
As the ogre whirled around, she wondered if death waited for her here too.
Chapter Three – Bas
She was screaming, the woman who had fallen out of the sky was screaming at him!
“Hey,” he said, dragging his hood down off his head. “Hey.” He held his hands out, and approached her slowly. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Funny, his bear said. Since she’s the one who knocked you over the head as she fell out of the sky. His bear sniffed the air. According to his bear, the woman before them smelled of sugar and spice and all things nice.
Which his bear loved, especially since she was their mate.
Yep, what were the chances?
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Who am I?” Bas asked. I’m not the one who appeared from nowhere on the side of the mountain. But he didn’t say that, knowing he needed her to calm down, and tell him what the hell was going on. “I’m Bas. Barnabas Manners. I’m an attorney, and this is my cabin.”
“And where exactly are we?” Pepper asked.
“The northern slope of Mistletoe Mountain,” Bas said.
“Mistletoe Mountain,” she repeated, her eyes unfocused.
“Yes. Where do you come from?” The question should have been, where did you come from. People, as far as Bas’s knowledge of them went, did not simply fall out of the sky, even in a snowstorm. Unless she was a shifter. That made perfect sense. “Are you a bird, were you brought down in the storm?”
She looked at him as if he were the crazy one. “Do I look like a bird?” she asked incredulously. “I don’t know what your game is, but I need to leave.”
“I don’t have a game, and you can’t leave…”
“Are you saying you’re holding me prisoner?” she asked hotly, and he saw the fist of her free hand, the one not holding the blankets around her curvy body, ball up, as if ready to fight.
“OK. You need to calm down. I have not kidnapped you, I’m not that kind of guy.” He took a step towards her, his hands still held up in surrender. “I found you out in the snow. Well … technically, you found me.”
“How?” she asked, her face thrust forward. “How did I find you? I don’t know you.”
“You just kind of fell on me.” Bas put his hand up to touch the lump on his head. “I don’t know where from.”
The truth was always the best way, that’s what he told his clients, unless they were guilty, of course. But Bas wasn’t guilty. He was confused, and bordering on annoyed that his mate was being so hostile, when he had done nothing wrong, but he wasn’t guilty. Except of lust, and a sprinkling of love, but he knew that was just the mate bond and it would take a lot more than the desire to claim her to make him act on any of his feelings right now.
Not when his mate was two sandwiches short of a picnic. The irony was not lost on him. Bas had spent enough years defending mentally impaired people and getting them the correct treatment, to know something was not right with this woman. Whose name he needed to know.
“Can you remember your name?” he asked gently.
“Of course I can,” she replied hotly. “My name is Pepper.”
“Nice to meet you, Pepper. Now, I’m not going to hurt you, but I think you need to come and sit down, I’ll make you some tea, and then you can tell me exactly what happened,” he said.
“What happened? What happened is you have kidnapped me, and brought me here. You drugged me! That’s why I can’t remember!” She advanced on him, all fire and flames.
Damn, don’t say he’d ended up with a dragon shifter as a mate; he’d heard they were high maintenance.
“I did not drug you, and I have not kidnapped you. If you want to leave, the door is there, but the temperature outside is cold enough to kill you.” Unless you have dragon’s blood. No, he couldn’t be that unlucky, and those things were rare.
“Handy, that you are telling me I can’t leave. But saying I’m not your captive.”
“OK.” He was exasperated, not an emotion he experienced often. Barnabas Manners had a reputation for being calm and level-headed. But this was too much. He’d longed for a mate all his adult life, and some of his juvenile life too. Now she was here, and treating him as if he were a bad person. Which he wasn’t. “If we want to start the accusations, we could begin with what you were doing here, on the side of the mountain, in a snowstorm. Then we could move on to how you managed to appear from nowhere and fall out of the sky.” He closed the space between them and bent his head down. “See this? This is what you did.”
She flinched at his voice, making him feel bad for raising his voice. Raising her hand, she touched the cut on his head. “I did that?” she asked.
“Yes. Although I have no idea how, since you are all…”
“All what?”
“Well … all soft.” He lifted his hand and waved it in the direction of her body, which was soft, and curvy and round in all the right places.
Then Pepper did something unexpected. The angry façade came down, and she erupted into tears.
“Hey. Pepper, it’s OK. Whatever it is, I can help you. But I need to know what’s going on here.” He didn’t touch her, didn’t want to upset her any more than she already was. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, I can’t.”
“You can tell me, I won’t repeat it, client confidentiality.”
“No, you don’t understand, I don’t remember.”
“Anything?” he asked.
“No, only my name. And vague voices in my head.” She whirled her hand around in the way people do when they call someone crazy.
“And what do the voices in your head say?” Bas asked, thinking he might need to hide the sharp knives before he went to bed tonight.
“They tell me how disappointing I am. That I had one job, and one job alone.” She sobbed again. “I think, whatever that job was, I messed it up. I messed it up big time.”
Bas did what any other human being with compassion would do; he gathered her to his chest and hugged her. Yes, it made him want her more than anything else in the world. Yes, her scent made his bear drool, and yes, he didn’t ever want to let her go.
But yes, he was a good man, first and foremost, and he would never act on all the incredibly arousing thou
ghts that were swimming through his head. Not until she knew who she was, and where she had come from.
Chapter Four – Pepper
She wasn’t the type of person who normally cried. Was she? That was just it, she didn’t know. She had an idea. It was as if she knew her inner-self, even if she didn’t know her outer-self.
“Please, sit. Let me take a closer look at you,” Bas said, and took her hand and led her to the sofa.
“Haven’t you already done that?” she accused, looking down at her body wrapped in blankets.
“No!” He blushed. “I mean, yes, I undressed you, but I didn’t … look.” He took a deep breath as his cheeks colored up some more. “You were wet, and unconscious.”
“So you took advantage of me?” Another voice in her head, telling her that people couldn’t be trusted, that they would try to take advantage of you first chance they got. And why? Because of something she knew. But what?
“No. I brought you here, and made sure you were warm and dry, and breathing, OK. You stirred, but didn’t wake up.” He was speaking fast. “I shouldn’t have left you, but I was only gone for five minutes.” He gestured to the pack, which lay by the side of the sofa. It hadn’t been there when she woke up here earlier. “We needed the pack.”
“We needed the pack?” she asked.
“Yes.” He frowned. “OK, the suspicion has to end. I don’t know you. I was on my way here, to this cabin, for a weekend on my own, hiking in the mountains.”
“In the snow?” she asked. Suspicion still laced her voice.
“I didn’t know the storm was going to be this bad, and I can cope with this weather anyway.” He dropped his gaze; he was hiding something. “I have food and clothes in my pack, that is why I went back for it. The cabin has some staples in the cupboards, but I can never guarantee they haven’t been eaten: people lost on the mountain, they sometimes wind up eating my food. So I always bring what I need.” He ran his hand through his hair. “And right now, I need coffee.”
“Where are my clothes?” she demanded, wanting to at least get out of this blanket.
Again, with the look that said he was hiding something, Bas said, “I’ve set them to dry.”
She looked around the room, but all she saw were a pair of thick, stripy woolen leggings and a green felt tunic. “Those are mine?”
Bas’s eyes followed hers, and he shrugged. “That’s what you were wearing. And a long red woolen coat. I left it to dry by the stove in the kitchen.”
Pepper sat back down on the sofa heavily. “What the hell was I doing up here in fancy dress?”
“I don’t know. But I’m going to help you figure it out,” Bas said, coming back to the sofa and kneeling before her. He reached out to take her hand, and she wanted him to. Pepper wanted to feel the warmth of his skin against hers, and when she looked into his eyes, she also saw he wanted more than that, and a stirring inside her told her she wanted more too.
Drugs. The only explanation was that he had seen her at a fancy-dress party, drugged her, and brought her here. The expression in his face wasn’t anything more than lust. However, when she looked deeper, she saw something more, she saw a kindness, and a sadness. Lifting her hand, she touched his cheek, and felt a frisson of electricity pass between them.
“Who are you?” she asked, with a sudden realization that maybe the answer would unlock her memory.
“I told you, I’m Barnabas Manners. I practice law. I’m a defense lawyer.”
“A lawyer? You mean the type of guy who gets people off whether they are guilty or not,” she accused.
“No. I’m the type of lawyer who works for free if my client has no money. My colleagues and I believe that money does not talk and everyone should have a chance to get their side across, and hopefully the truth will be heard.”
“OK, so what’s the truth here?” she asked, her hand leaving his cheek, and encompassing the room.
“That is not my area of expertise. I have a friend who can help, a detective who could piece your movements together, but I have no signal on my phone, and there is no way we’re getting off this mountain tonight.”
“I thought you said you could travel in any weather?” she asked, narrowing her eyes, wanting to catch him in a lie, because that would make it so much easier for her not to want to stare into his eyes, and fall into his bed.
“I can, you can’t,” he said. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Try me,” she said.
“You’d think I was making it up.”
“And you believe, I don’t think you’re making up the story, about me falling from the sky?” she asked.
He sighed and stood up, the expression on his face telling her it cost him a lot to move away from her. She decided this was the key; this was what she had to use to get him to open up to her. There was something between them, she could feel it, a thread linking them, but it affected Bas more. Why?
“You can believe it, or not, it doesn’t change the fact it happened. And I’m a lawyer, I work on facts.”
“Explain it to me. If those are the facts, help me reason it out,” she said, getting up and following him. “You said you looked up and saw me falling from the sky.”
“Yes.”
“There was no sign of anything, an airplane, an explosion.”
“Nothing. It was as if you were flying.”
“Hence why you thought I could turn into a bird…” She stopped, standing and staring at him. “That’s your secret. You can change into an animal.”
He spun around, his expression blank. “Why would you say that?” he asked.
She got it; he was trying to cover himself. “No one is supposed to know.”
“You are really good at guessing these things, since you aren’t supposed to remember anything.”
“It’s OK. I won’t tell.” She looked past him for a moment, her focus shifting as if she were looking into the past, seeing something. “I know others. Like you.”
“So you do remember something?” he asked.
“I do. And I don’t. I remember names of things, like airplane, sofa.” She put her hand on the back of the sofa, noticing for the first time how faded and threadbare it was. There was a throw covering it, but it couldn’t hide the shabbiness. Running her fingers over the roughened fabric she let her senses become immersed in the room. The smell of the wood burning in the grate, the sound of the wind and snow against the windows, the way the drapes moved as the wind crept into the smallest of gaps that weren’t sealed.
“That’s quite typical of amnesia. Or you may just have a concussion.” He pointed to her head. “You took a nasty bump.”
“Yes. I can feel it.” She brought her attention back to him. “So I might remember everything? Once my concussion passes?” Did she want to remember everything? Pepper let that thought go. She was scared and tired; her head ached and her brain was a fuzzy mess. Of course she wanted to remember. However, the voice in her head that spoke of disappointment and failure, made her question herself.
“Yes. A good night’s sleep—I have some painkillers you can take, and tomorrow you might wake up and remember everything. If not, as soon as it’s safe, I’ll take you to a hospital.”
“A hospital,” she repeated. “OK.”
“Let me make you some tea. Then you can try to get some sleep.” Bas left the small sitting room, and this time she didn’t follow. Instead she waddled back to the sofa and sat down.
Staring at the flames, she let go of the need to remember; she let go of her fear, and her confusion. Slowly, her mind emptied. If there were any other thoughts that she’d hoped would sneak back in, they didn’t. When Bas brought her a cup of tea, steaming hot, with a packet full of cookies he insisted she at least tried to nibble, for energy, she was no closer to remembering who she was.
For now, she’d do as Bas said. She allowed herself to trust him, because she had little choice. If he’d wanted to attack her, to rape her, then he could have easily overpowered her. He hadn
’t lied about them not being able to leave the cabin. He hadn’t lied about why he’d left her alone.
Everything he’d told her seemed to be the truth. So how come she’d fallen out of the sky?
She shut that question out of her head. She’d deal with it tomorrow.
The warmth of the fire made her drowsy: the snap and crackle of the wood, the warm orange glow, and the presence of Bas soothed her. And as she drifted off to sleep, her head nodding, he took her cup from her. Carefully, he stood up and lifted her legs so she was lying down. After covering her with a blanket, he moved to sit in an armchair and watched her.
All this she saw, then her eyes rested on the bright green felt tunic. Why the hell had she been dressed up as an elf?
Chapter Five – Bas
Had she been sent here to set him up? An old client with a vendetta perhaps?
Bas sat in the lumpy armchair watching Pepper as she slept. His emotions were mixed. They ranged from confused, to being ecstatic that she was here—his mate, the person he was supposed to spend the rest of his life with, she was here, there was no need for him to look anymore. His mom would be overjoyed.
But she’d fallen from the sky like some injured bird. Or an angel. She could be an angel, only she’d been wearing some kind of fancy dress. Maybe the angels had Christmas parties too, to celebrate the birth of their savior. It could happen.
Only he didn’t believe in angels: come to think about it, he didn’t believe in anything other than his two feet and four paws. That was as close to believing magic was real as he was ever going to get. Bas had seen too many bad things done by bad people. It had tainted him—no matter how hard he’d tried to keep it from affecting him, it had.
He got up and went to the kitchen, retrieved the bottle of scotch from his pack, and went back to the sitting room, stoking the fire before pouring himself a large glass and downing it faster than he should. The world, his world, at least, was seriously messed up.
Sleighed: BBW Holiday Bear Shifter Paranormal Romance (Christmas Bears Book 1) Page 2