Charmed by His Love (45 page)

“Wait,” she said when he walked down the steps, making him turn back. She rose up on one elbow, causing the towel to fall off her hair. “I don’t … Could you please not …” She took a deep breath. “Please don’t call the authorities. I don’t want anyone to know I’m here.”

“You can’t be serious,” he said, scaling the steps to crouch
down beside her again. “Your family must be going out of their minds looking for you.” He touched her bruised wrist. “You’ve obviously been missing for several days.”

“But nobody knows I’m missing,” she whispered, clutching his arm. “Please, could you let me stay here with you for a few days, just until I get my strength back and can decide what I need to do?”

Was she serious? “Hell, woman, for all you know I could be more dangerous than the bastards who had you. You don’t know a damn thing about me.”

“I know you didn’t hesitate to save me from two armed men.”

“The wolf took care of one of them,” he snapped, standing up. Why in hell was she asking him to stay? Was someone still after her? Or was that bump on her head making her delirious? “What’s your name?”

Her gaze lowered. “Jane.”

“Jane what?”

“Smith,” she said, her cheeks darkening with her obvious lie.

“Well, Jane Smith,” he muttered, walking off the platform again. He stopped and looked at her. “We’ll discuss your staying when I get back from dealing with the trash before it crawls away.”

“You could just kill them,” she said quietly, “and bury their bodies under a rock.”

Okay then,
he
must be delirious, because he’d swear she’d just asked him to commit murder. “No, I can’t,” he said just as quietly, “because then I would have to kill any witnesses.”

She didn’t even bat an eyelash. “I won’t watch.”

At a complete loss as to how to respond, Alec strode off—only to stop when she called to him again. “I have a couple of bags,” she said. “But I had to leave them when I realized the men were gaining on me. Could you get them for me, please?”

“Are they full of gold? Stolen art?
Drugs?
”

“No,” she said, startled. “They’re full of my clothes.” She reached behind her and gave the wolf a shove. “Kitty knows where they are.”

Alec closed his eyes. “Please tell me ye didn’t just call that noble beast Kitty.”

“And could you feed me when you get back from dealing with the … trash? I haven’t eaten for three days.”

She was a rather bossy victim. “I’ll see if
Kitty
and I can’t hunt down a squirrel or two while we’re at it,” he said, turning away to hide his grin and jogging down the trail before she thought of something else she’d like him to do—other than commit murder and find her clothes and rush back to feed her.

Oh, but he was tempted to let her stay, if for no other reason than to keep himself entertained for a few days. That is, until he remembered her battered though otherwise flawless body and felt his groin grow heavy. Hell, spending even one night in the same lean-to as the beautiful woman would likely test the noble intentions of a saint, much less a man who’d been alone in the woods all summer.

Alec followed the wolf into the forest from where they’d emerged onto the trail earlier and tried to remember when the last time was that he’d been so immediately captivated by a woman. Especially an obviously high-maintenance princess who’d given him a fictitious name, who didn’t want anyone—including her family—to know where she was, and who woke up from a nightmare and started issuing orders.

He found the men right where he’d left them, the only problem being the bastards were dead. Hell, one of them was actually smoldering, as was the exploded tree he was crumpled against. The other guy was riddled with shrapnel, a large piece of wood so forcibly driven into his chest that it was sticking out of his back.

Alec crouched to his heels and rubbed his face in his hands, then stared at the men in dismay. This ought to be interesting to explain to the sheriff: two fried corpses that upon closer examination would show cracked ribs and broken arms and a knife wound, and also a discharged gun nearby. Oh, and a battered, not-missing woman in his sleeping bag going by the name of Jane Smith, who also happened to have an illegal pet wolf named Kitty.

Speaking of which, where was Kitty?

Alec scrubbed his face again, undecided about what to do, then suddenly stilled. Well hell, it wasn’t his fault these two idiots had chosen this particular piece of wilderness to settle their differences, was it? In fact, he could think of several
scenarios for their being out here, from a drug deal gone bad to a botched smuggling trip to … to an execution interrupted by a thunderstorm that had killed both executioner and executee.

As for the beautiful princess in his sleeping bag … well, what princess? He could let her stay a few days to get back her strength, then run her down to Spellbound Falls in his boat in the middle of the night, hand her a few dollars, and kiss her saint-tempting mouth good-bye. Hell, he used to make his living orchestrating damage control—on damage he’d caused, usually. In fact, he’d been so good at it that he’d had to leave the game before he’d irrevocably damaged himself.

Alec went over and started carefully rifling through their pockets, only to come up empty-handed. He didn’t find a wallet, money or loose change, or even any lint—which meant they weren’t going to tell him what was going on any more than the woman was. But just as he started to stand he noticed the odd-looking burn mark on the smoldering bastard’s shirt, unbuttoned a couple of buttons, and pulled away the material.

“Bingo,” he murmured, taking his knife out of its sheath. He cut the leather cord and peeled the still hot-to-the-touch medallion off the charred skin before buttoning the guy’s shirt back up and standing.

Alec studied what appeared to be an ancient coin of some sort as he walked to the other man and crouched down, used the tip of his knife to snag the cord around the bastard’s neck, and lifted another medallion out of his shirt. He sliced the cord then held the coins beside each other, frowning at the identical symbols crudely stamped into what he suspected was bronze, before turning them over to see writing in a language he didn’t recognize.

Okay then; these weren’t telling him anything, either, since he didn’t have a clue what the symbol was. Could it be the calling card of some criminal organization? Or judging by the men’s plain, almost crude clothes, maybe a cult? Hell, for all he knew these two bastards could be members of an arcane fraternity he’d heard about a few years back that got its jollies pulling elaborate international crimes, and Jane Smith could be nothing more than the innocent victim of a pledge prank that had gone bad when she’d escaped.

Alec shoved the medallions in his pocket as he walked a short distance away, deciding to keep them his little secret until he got more pieces of the puzzle to put together. He sat down, slipped off his pack, then reached in past the now-useless rope and medical kit and pulled out the satellite phone—because the resort owner and his boss, Olivia Oceanus, had decided
cell
phones ruined the wilderness experience for her guests and had talked her wizard husband into blocking reception in the resort’s backcountry. He dialed 911, dutifully reported the
accident
he’d stumbled across—because he really didn’t want to bury the problem under a rock—and gave the dispatcher the coordinates. He also gave his satellite phone number, saying the sheriff could give him a call when he arrived so Alec could lead him to the bodies.

He shoved the phone back in his pack, then started walking the area looking for wolf and smaller shoe tracks in the scattered patches of mud. He erased them all the way up to where she’d collapsed before he backtracked through the scene and headed down to the fiord, again leaving only the tracks the men had made. He eventually found where they stopped—or rather had started—at the inland sea’s high tide line; the problem was that he didn’t find the boat they must have used to get here. He saw only his boat, which was pulled into the trees and turned over, its motor stowed beneath it. He looked out at the fiord, wondering if the storm’s waves had set their boat adrift. But if the men had been chasing Jane, then there should be two boats floating out on the water instead of none. That is, unless she’d escaped the moment they’d stepped ashore and the storm had sunk their boat.

Alec faced the looming mountain at the end of the fiord and frowned. He knew the water was more than two thousand feet deep in the unnatural waterway, and that the underground saltwater river ran up from the Gulf of Maine before it continued north all the way to the St. Lawrence Seaway. The twelve-mile-long fiord had been added to Bottomless Lake when an earthquake had pushed several mountains apart two and a half years ago, at the same time turning Maine’s second largest freshwater lake into the new Bottomless Sea—all compliments of Spellbound Falls’s resident wizard, Maximilian Oceanus, who also happened to be Olivia’s husband and Alec’s other boss.

None of which explained how Jane and Kitty and the two dead men had gotten here. But at the moment he honestly didn’t care, as he had damage control to see to, a woman to hide—and feed—and two bags to find. He’d found her missing shoe when he’d followed their trail down, making him realize that she’d traveled over half a mile wearing only one shoe.

Which meant Jane Smith was one hell of a
tough
princess.