Teresa Medeiros (4 page)

“T
hat was one hell of a power surge,” Tabitha murmured, still too numb to move more than her lips.

Her eyelids refused to budge and an ineffectual twitch was all she could coax from her fingers. Her mouth tasted as if someone had been soldering inside of it. She sincerely hoped the singed smell in her nostrils wasn’t coming from her hair. Or her eyelashes.

A strange radiance bathed her in warmth. The heating unit must have been in worse shape than she realized. Its malfunction must have caused the surge protector on her computer to fail, leaving her vulnerable to a dangerous influx of electricity. But it wasn’t until the peculiar light flickered against her eyelids that she began to wonder if the penthouse was on fire.

Refusing to panic, Tabitha pried open her eyes and blinked up at the ceiling. Or where the ceiling should have been. In its place was a vault of dazzling blue, unsullied by even a trace of smog. She shaded her eyes against the ball of sunlight dangling directly over her head.

There must have been a fire
, she thought dazedly. The penthouse had burned, but some hunky fireman had
carried her down ninety-five flights of stairs and laid her on the sidewalk in front of Lennox Tower.

But where were the piles of grimy snow? The sirens? The rude gawkers who always materialized at the first sign of any disaster? Tabitha sat up, gingerly rotating her neck to see if it would support the weight of her aching head.

The surrounding landscape slowly came into focus. She was sitting in the middle of a meadow carpeted in minty green grass and springy clover. Its vast expanse was broken only by a sparse scattering of oaks. An array of colorful wildflowers sprinkled the field, dancing in the sultry embrace of the breeze. Tabitha ducked as a fat brown grasshopper whirred past her nose. The musical chirps of a nearby songbird drifted to her ears.

After months of bitingly cold temperatures and snow-laden skies, Tabitha’s senses were overwhelmed. It was like being dropped smack-dab in the middle of some eternal summer.

Her breath caught. What if this wasn’t eternal summer, but eternity? With a capital
£
. Perhaps there really had been a fire, but no hunky fireman.

“Don’t be silly,” Tabitha muttered. “God wouldn’t be spiteful enough to let you die a virgin. You’re simply in a coma. Or having an out-of-body experience.”

She spotted her glasses lying in a nearby patch of clover. She reached for them, but was distracted by the sight of Lucy hopping through the grass in pursuit of a bright yellow butterfly.

Kittens in heaven? It was a darling concept, but as Tabitha surveyed the pastoral paradise, a far less charming suspicion was beginning to dawn in her mind. What if this was nothing more than her parents’ elaborate little scheme to get her to take that vacation they’d been nagging her about for years? What if they’d arranged
the entire thing—the faux plane crash, Uncle Cop’s doleful performance, her mother’s poignant video? That would explain why the mysterious “amulet” appeared to contain technology far beyond anything that should have been possible.

Tabitha uncurled her stiff fingers, realizing that she was still clutching the necklace. Sunlight struck the emerald, splintering into fragments. The gem’s mischievous sparkle seemed to taunt her.

It wouldn’t be the first time her mother had tried to manipulate her with magic. All for her own good, of course, like the time Arian had cast a love spell on Brent Vondervan when Tabitha was seven. The poor besotted boy had followed Tabitha everywhere after that, fawning over her with such drooling adoration that she could no longer respect him, much less like him. Her own mother had believed she could only win a boy’s heart with charms of the supernatural variety. The humiliation still stung.

Tabitha’s sense of betrayal flourished. Why, her parents and Uncle Cop were probably back at the Tower right now, toasting their cunning and sharing a hearty laugh at her expense! She started to toss the counterfeit heirloom away, but a pang of doubt stopped her. What if it was her only ticket back to her cozy penthouse?

Seething with anger, she slipped the necklace on and scrambled to her feet. “Mother,” she yelled at the sky. “I am
not
amused.”

Lucy paused in batting around a cricket to blink at her, and Tabitha realized she was standing in the middle of a meadow wearing nothing but an antique necklace, her L.L. Bean flannel pajamas, and a pair of chipmunk slippers.

“You couldn’t just buy me a ticket to Club Med, could you?” she muttered.

She stuffed her glasses into her pajama shirt pocket and tried to figure out which way she should march. Her parents never left anything to chance and she doubted it was a coincidence that the meadow was bordered by a forest primeval identical to the ones in all of those silly fairy tales her mother had always insisted on reading to her.

The trees were taller than any Tabitha had ever seen, their trunks nearly as broad as California redwoods. Shafts of sunlight pierced the leafy canopy woven from their boughs, transforming the forest floor into a dappled cathedral. Motes of pollen drifted through the air like fairy dust, but Tabitha was too disgruntled to be charmed by their sparkle. Only her mother could have conjured up such an idyllic setting. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see Bambi and Thumper come bounding out of the forest, followed by Snow White trilling “Someday My Prince Will Come.”

“Oh, no,” Tabitha whispered, her spirits plummeting even lower as a dreadful new possibility dawned in her mind. There was only one thing her hopelessly old-fashioned mama might want her to have more than a vacation.

A man.

Despite Tabitha’s flawless arguments, she had never managed to convince her mother that a modern woman no longer needed a man to achieve happiness and fulfillment. Perhaps somewhere in the most secret corner of her heart, she’d never quite convinced herself either.

Tabitha glared at the forest. She had far more to fear from Prince Charming than Snow White. If this was her mother’s misguided attempt to set her up with a blind date, it should be only a matter of minutes before some simpering oaf came prancing out from the trees on his white horse.

She frowned. Was it her imagination or had the bird-songs dwindled to silence? A waiting stillness seemed to have fallen over both forest and meadow. Even Lucy crouched in the grass. The sun ducked behind a wisp of cloud, sending an odd chill—half anticipation, half foreboding—down Tabitha’s spine.

She cocked her head, listening intently. Instead of the dainty clip-clop of silver-shod hooves, she heard a low-pitched roar, like the rumble of distant thunder. The earth beneath her feet began to shake.

The roar swelled, sweeping toward Tabitha like an inevitable tide. Stricken by primitive terror, she backed away from the woods. She would have fled, but there was nowhere to hide. Her chipmunk slippers were not made for the uneven terrain. She stumbled and fell to her back just as a snorting black monster came thundering out of the forest.

Before she could unleash the scream from her throat, the monster reared over her, deadly forelegs slicing at the air, nostrils flaring. Tabitha squeezed her eyes shut and waited to be trampled.

She didn’t open them until she felt the blade at her throat. Her bewildered gaze traced the length of the shimmering sword up to a gauntleted hand, then higher still to an implacable face haloed by an unruly mane of dark hair. Golden eyes, as voracious and pitiless as a tiger’s, surveyed her unblinkingly.

This was no prince, she thought dazedly, but more of a beast than the nightmarish creature he was riding.

Making a valiant attempt to swallow around the knot of terror in her throat, Tabitha timidly croaked, “Excuse me, sir, but have you seen my mother?”

CHAPTER
4

H
e thought the creature was female, but he couldn’t be sure. Any hint of its sex was buried beneath a shapeless tunic and a pair of loose leggings. It blinked up at him, its gray eyes startlingly large in its pallid face.

“Who the hell are you?” he growled. “Did that murdering bastard send you to ambush me?”

It lifted its cupped hands a few inches off the ground. “Do I look like someone sent to ambush you?”

The thing had a point. It wore no armor and carried no weapon that he could see unless you counted those beseeching gray eyes. Definitely female, he decided with a grunt of mingled relief and pain. He might have been too long without a woman, but he’d yet to be swayed by any of the pretty young lads a few of his more jaded comrades favored.

He steadied his grip on the sword, hoping the woman hadn’t seen it waver. His chest heaved with exhaustion and he was forced to shake the sweat from his eyes before stealing a desperate glance over his shoulder.

The forest betrayed no sign of pursuit, freeing him to return his attention to his trembling captive. “Have you no answer for my question? Who the hell are you?”

To his surprise, the surly demand ignited a spark of spirit in the wench’s eyes. “Wait just a minute! Maybe the question should be who the hell are
you?”
Her eyes narrowed in a suspicious glare. “Don’t I know you?” She began to mutter beneath her breath as she studied his face, making him wonder if he hadn’t snared a lunatic. “Trim the hair. Give him a shave and a bath. Spritz him with Brut and slip him into an off-the-rack suit. Ah-ha!” she crowed. “You’re George, aren’t you? George … George …?” She snapped her fingers. “George Ruggles from Accounting!” She slanted him a glance that was almost coy. “ ’Fess up now, Georgie boy. Did Daddy offer you a raise to play knight in shining armor to my damsel in distress?”

His jaw went slack with shock as she swatted his sword aside and scrambled to her feet, brushing the grass from her shapely rump with both hands. “You can confide in me, you know. I promise it won’t affect your Yearly Performance Evaluation.”

She was taller than he had expected, taller than any woman of his acquaintance. But far more disconcerting than her height was her brash attitude. Since he’d been old enough to wield a sword, he’d never met anyone, man or woman, who wasn’t afraid of him.

The sun was beating down on his head like an anvil. He clenched his teeth against a fresh wave of pain. “You may call me George if it pleases you, my lady, but ’tis
not
my name.”

She paced around him, making the horse prance and shy away from her. “Should I call you Prince then? Or will Mr. Charming do? And what would you like to call me? Guenevere perhaps?” She touched a hand to her rumpled hair and batted her sandy eyelashes at him. “Or would you prefer Rapunzel?”

His ears burned beneath her incomprehensible taunts.
He could think of several names he’d like to call her, none of them flattering. A small black cat appeared out of nowhere to scamper at her heels, forcing him to rein his stallion in tighter or risk trampling them both. Each nervous shuffle of the horse’s hooves jarred his aching bones.

She eyed his cracked leather gauntlets and tarnished chain mail with blatant derision. “So where’s your shining armor, Lancelot? Is it back at the condo being polished or did you send it out to the dry cleaners?”

She paced behind him again. All the better to slide a blade between his ribs, he thought dourly. Resisting the urge to clutch his shoulder, he wheeled the horse around to face her. The simple motion made his ears ring and his head spin.

“Cease your infernal pacing, woman!” he bellowed. “Or I’ll—” He hesitated, at a loss to come up with a threat vile enough to stifle this chattering harpy.

She flinched, but the cowed look in her eyes was quickly replaced by defiance. “Or you’ll what?” she demanded, resting her hands on her hips. “Carry me off to your castle and ravish me? Chop my saucy little head off?” She shook that head in disgust. “I can’t believe Mama thought I’d fall for this chauvinistic crap. Why didn’t she just hire a mugger to knock me over the head and steal my purse?”

She marched away from him. Ignoring the warning throb of his muscles, he drove the horse into her path. Before she could change course again, he hefted his sword and nudged aside the fabric of her tunic, bringing the blade’s tip to bear against the swell of her left breast. Her eyes widened and she took several hasty steps backward. He urged the stallion forward, pinioning her against the trunk of a slender oak. As her gaze met his,
he would have almost sworn he could feel her heart thundering beneath the blade’s dangerous caress.

A mixture of fear and doubt flickered through her eyes. “This isn’t funny anymore, Mr. Ruggles,” she said softly. “I hope you’ve kept your résumé current, because after I tell my father about this little incident, you’ll probably be needing it.”

She reached for his blade with a trembling hand, stirring reluctant admiration in him. But when she jerked her hand back, her fingertips were smeared with blood.

At first he feared he had pricked her in his clumsiness. An old shame quickened in his gut, no less keen for its familiarity. He’d striven not to harm any woman since he’d sworn off breaking hearts.

She did not yelp in distress or melt into a swoon. She simply stared at her hand as if seeing it for the first time. “Doesn’t feel like ketchup,” she muttered, her words even more inexplicable than her actions. She sniffed at her fingers. “Or smell like cherry cough syrup.”