State of Grace (Resurrection) (5 page)

The
re was also the possibility the men, ashamed that their egos had taken a battering by running away from one feeble, unarmed woman, would return. I had to get away from here. Unfortunately I had no idea where ‘here’ was, and even less idea of which direction I should go to find people. If I could find a farm house or cottage I could persuade whoever lived there to at least lend me some clothes and perhaps they would allow me to use their phone. I knew I wasn’t thinking clearly because to all intents and purposes I was still at the firework display and this incident was all in my head, but the normal twenty-first century reaction in our society is to pick up the phone and call for help, so that’s exactly what I would do: if I could find a phone.

I considered my options.
My father loved watching survival guides on TV and I tried to remember what Ray Mears had said about orientating yourself if you were lost. Huh! Old Ray would have whittled himself a two storey house, complete with furniture, and be tucking into a dinner of mealy grubs and pheasant feet already. The house sounded good, but I would pass on the dinner. For now, anyway.

After half an hour I had to admit I was lost. That was
n’t strictly true, I amended, since I had been lost the minute I got here, wherever ‘here’ was.  I swore, quietly, because I didn’t want to wake anything that might be sleeping: silly, I know, but being alone, naked, frightened, and cold in an unfamiliar place could do that to a person and my imagination was in overdrive. I was starting to become seriously concerned that if I didn’t find shelter soon I would die of hypothermia. The temperature could be no more than five degrees Celsius, my skin was icy and I hadn’t felt my feet in a while. Keeping moving was the only thing keeping me conscious. I had an urge to lie down, curl up in a ball and go to sleep, but I had a horrible suspicion if I did that I would never wake up again. At least if I felt cold I knew my body was reacting to the cold in the way it should; the minute I stopped feeling cold I knew I was going to be in serious trouble as hypothermia sets in.

I came to a standstill
and lent against a tree, shivering violently and considered my options. The only thing I could do was to continue my search and I steeled myself to move, but first I needed to catch my breath. I let my head rest against the tree, feeling miserable. I wanted to stamp my feet to try to get the circulation back into them but I simply didn’t have the energy.

There was no warning, no sound to gi
ve him away, no sixth sense to indicate I was no longer alone. I screamed and fought like crazy when I was grabbed from behind, the tree trunk like a cheese grater on the skin of my back. Hard, powerful hands held me fast. I couldn’t move my arms and kicking out at my assailant only hurt my toes, so I tried to bite one of the hands that held me but I couldn’t get my head down far enough. I twisted and writhed, to no avail: he was too strong. I had no doubt it was a man; too tall and muscular for a woman, and infinitely stronger.

He growl
ed in my ear, his breath brushing my neck, and suddenly all the fight went out of me, and I deliberately went limp. Surprised, he nearly let me fall to the ground, but recovered quickly and his arms went round me as he supported my weight, pulling me away from the tree. Heart pounding, my breathing coming in ragged gasps, I relaxed against him. The way he had hold of me, there was little else I could do: I felt like a Barbie doll being held by a three year old.

For a second to two we
remained motionless. I don’t know what he was thinking but I was trying to get my breath back ready to make a concerted effort to get away. I must be a real pushover because he wasn’t even breathing hard. In fact, I couldn’t hear him breathing at all. Disgusted with my performance, I took a breath and held it in surprise: I could smell him, and his scent immobilised me. Musk, wood-smoke, the outdoors, a clean man smell with no hint of aftershave or deodorant, and something else that I couldn’t define: a sweet, heady scent that filled my head. I wanted to bathe in that smell, to rub up against him like a cat. He smelt like every attractive man I had ever met, and then some. I let the breath out slowly and took another one pretty quickly when he turned me around.

‘You!’ I gasped. It was my dark-haired fighter from two weeks ago. He didn’t seem in the least surprised to see me. Well, he had just crept up on me, so he
probably had gotten a good look before he grabbed me and knew what he was getting. He smiled, a slow, wry, confident smile. I glowered back at him, trying not to look in his eyes, aware I should be very scared. Last time he had a sword in his hand and hadn’t flinched about using it, but there was no sword this time, or at least, none that I could see, and if he had wanted to kill me he could have done so by now. I guessed he had a reason for keeping me alive but I didn’t want to think too much about it because I could too easily imagine what it was.

The really strange thing in all this was that my fear had retreated to somewhere deep inside m
e. I had an awful suspicion I knew what he was going to do to me, and a quick glance at his face, seeing the hunger in his expression, confirmed it, but I wasn’t scared, not on the surface. A small part of me was shrieking at me to run, to fight, to do anything but let him do what I knew he was going to do, but another part of me, a part I didn’t recognise, was wondering what it would be like to be taken by this man with the magnetic, hypnotic eyes. Eyes a woman could lose her soul in, eyes that promised heaven. His pupils were huge and black and seemed to be expanding to fill their irises and I was drawn into them, falling into their depths, being sucked down into him.

My freezing body abruptly snapped me back into myself as t
he shivering started again and he shook his head, as if to clear it, and released me, taking a step back. The run or flight response kicked in again, but I sensibly did neither; he was far too powerful for me to fight, and I guessed he was much faster than me, too. The compulsion to run was almost overwhelming, though, some deep instinct telling me I needed to get as far away from this man as I could. I fought it, knowing how useless running would be, not wanting to trigger his predatory reflex. I stood still. Almost. Some movement, like the shivering, was automatic. As before, his gaze swept down my body, but he couldn’t see me as well as last time because the minute he let go of my arms I wrapped them around myself. If he wanted an eyeful he was going to have to work to get it. Anyway, I was cold. Really cold. Except for that rather feminine part. That bit was hot… really hot. I was utterly confused by my reaction to him. I knew I was in mortal danger yet he was having an effect on me totally at odds with the situation. I blushed furiously as his eyes stared with fascination at the juncture between my thighs. Oh dear god, no! I was actually becoming aroused.

As if he could read my thought
s his eyes flew up to meet mine. I gulped and turned my head away, before risking a quick look. Smiling sardonically he reached to his neck and unfastened his cloak. I shook my head slightly: why the hell would anyone be wearing such an old-fashioned thing as a cloak? Patiently he held it out to me and as I reluctantly reached to take it, the cold overcoming any inhibitions to put myself in his debt, I saw him focus on my tattoo again.

‘Eryres,’ he muttered, his voice soft and low, and oh so sweet.

‘Ur-ur-es?’ I stumbled over the unfamiliar word.

‘Eryres,’ he repeated and pointed at my hip. I quickly covered my body
with the cloak, and when I had finished wrapping the rough, scratchy material around me, I looked up at him again, and was alarmed to catch a glimpse of emotion on his face. He looked savage, like he wanted to eat me, or kill me, or rape me (or maybe all three at once). He smoothed his expression so swiftly I wondered if I had imagined it, and then I was struck anew by just how beautiful he was. At least six foot two, he had broad shoulders, and muscles rippled under his…. What was that
thing
he was wearing? It was a tunic of some sort, reaching down to the top of his legs, which were well shaped and long and… oh crap! I had ended up looking at the same place on him as he had been staring at on me. And boy, I could tell he was all in proportion and then some.

This was becoming farcical. Here I was, at the mercy of a man who, last time we had met, had wanted to kill me, and now I was studying the size of his package
. As dreams go, this was a dilly.

I struggled to return to his face. He was smiling knowing
ly, and then he reached for my cheek and stroked it with one pale finger. A hot tremor lanced through me. I was terrified, yet I wanted more and he seemed to know it. His eyes fastened on mine and caught my gaze and I couldn’t look away. My ragged breathing slowed, as did my heartbeat, and I immediately became calmer. The image of a rabbit caught in headlights flitted across my mind. He held me motionless with the touch of one finger on my face and those incredible eyes.

H
e growled unintelligibly and his gaze flickered away from me. Released from the depth of his stare, I staggered and my calm vanished. I didn’t know whether I was terrified or turned on. Both, perhaps. This man radiated danger and sex appeal at the same time. He was the ultimate bad boy many girls couldn’t resist. But it was more than that: he reminded me of a leopard I had once seen in Kenya. I was on an impromptu safari during a stopover and had hired a jeep and driver, and we had come across, by sheer luck and accident because I had been assured they were very difficult to spot, a leopard dangling languidly on a branch. The impression that had stayed with me was its stillness, belying the savagery and menace lying just below the silken spotted fur. I remembered the insane urge to stroke the huge cat, to touch those large, soft paws and pretend the finely-honed predator I could clearly see beneath the beauty did not exist. This beautiful man was exactly like that. My instincts told me that he was a killer. Hell, I had witnessed him doing just that, yet I wanted to stroke him, too.

Heat surged through me once more
, and I breathed deeply, trying not to give in to temptation. Big mistake. The scent of him filled my nose again like a drug, and I closed my eyes in despair, trembling with fear, the tiny movements causing my cold-erect nipples to brush against the course fabric of the cloak. They were on fire. All of me was on fire.

I opened my eyes to read his reaction, hoping that he could not sense my feelings.

He was gone.

‘Grace? Grace!

‘Hmmm?’

‘Are you alright?’’

Gradually Sarah came into focus. She was standing anxiously in front of me
. For one second my friend was superimposed over trees and stillness, then the noise and lights of the firework display crashed into my awareness.

‘Are you ok?’ she demanded again.

‘Uh, oh, yeah, sure,’ I replied, frowning. ‘Just thinking.’ I winced as a headache sliced my temple.

‘Thinking?’ she echoed, dubiously. ‘You were really out of it for a minute,’ she added with concern.

‘What do you mean ‘out of it’?’ I asked quickly, trying to think around the pain.

‘You were, like, in a trance
or something’, she replied. ‘I’ve been talking to you for ages and you didn’t even notice I was there’,

‘Sorry. I was day dreaming.’ I wasn’t lying, either. My mind had been elsewhere
, just not in the way that expression normally implied. I had been in a tumour-induced elsewhere.

A thought occurred to me. ‘A minute, you said?’

‘Yes.’ Sarah was still looking at me strangely. I smiled at her in what I hoped was a reassuring way, but I suspected was actually a grimace. I was right: my smile must have been a little off because Sarah wasn’t fooled, but to my relief she let the subject drop for the time being. A conversation was almost impossible with the explosions, the music and the appreciation of the crowd, anyway. I knew I would have to come up with an explanation for her but wanted to give myself time to think of something that sounded plausible. At the moment I was struggling to deal with the headache, which had transmuted from lancet stabs to a pernicious ache behind my eyeballs. I plastered a grin on my face which I knew didn’t reach my eyes, and pretended to enjoy the rest of the evening.

I managed to avoid the invitation to have a swift drink or two in the pub afterwards, pleading a headache (true) and having to get up early in the morning (not true). Sarah was still unconvinced, which was no surpr
ise considering it was only eight thirty. Was I six years old, to be considering going to bed at this time? Even Ben looked sceptical: an early night for most adults of our age would be around ten thirty and Sarah well knew that me and ‘early night’ in the same sentence was an oxymoron. I was a night owl, preferring to sleep late and stay up late, so an early night for me would generally be anything before midnight. I could have tried to come up with a better excuse but the constant pain in my head wouldn’t let me think straight. Sarah, bless her, realised the headache bit was true and let me off the hook with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, and a promise to meet up soon.