Try. For the love of God, try
. ‘‘Can the pact be broken?’’
Warlord shrugged. ‘‘It’s held for a thousand years. I imagine it’ll hold for another thousand.’’
Magnus’s head whirled, and the rice and lamb he’d eaten for dinner now warred with the Scotch. ‘‘But ye’re not like the other Varinskis I met. Are ye
sure
ye’re a Varinski?’’
‘‘I want you to reassure the men that they don’t have to worry. I can keep them safe from any enforcers the military has hired.’’ Warlord placed his rifle on the ground. He removed his boots, tossed aside his coat and shirt. He unbuckled his belt, dropped his jeans, stood up, and let the feeble moonlight bathe him.
On those long winter nights when the whores visited the camp, Magnus had seen Warlord naked and in action. He was just a man, a guy who made his living fighting.
But now, all around the edges, his form grew less . . . defined.
Magnus lifted the bottle to his mouth. His hand shook, and the glass rim clicked against his teeth.
‘‘I’m going to hunt . . . and kill.’’ Warlord’s bones melted and re-formed. His dark hair spread, sprouting on his neck, his back and belly, down his legs. His face changed, grew cruelly feline. His spine shifted; he dropped onto all fours. His ears . . . and his nose . . . his hands . . . and his feet . . .
Magnus blinked again.
A great, sleek ebony panther stood before him with white, sharp claws and teeth, and fur as black as a shadow. And his eyes . . .
Magnus found himself backing away, screaming and screaming, while the great hunting cat stalked toward him, his paws never making a sound, his familiar black Warlord eyes fixed on his prey . . . on Magnus.
She woke with a start. Her eyes popped open.
The darkness in her tent pressed on her eyeballs.
Impossible. Tonight she’d left a tiny LED burning.
Yet it
was
dark.
Somehow he’d obliterated the light.
The constant wind blew through this narrow mountain valley, buffeting the ripstop nylon canopy that protected her—barely—from annihilation, and ringing the holy bells hung across the tent flap. Her interpreter had left behind the scent of tobacco, spices, and wool. The menacing cold slipped its cold fingers into the tent. . . .
Karen strained to hear his footfall.
Nothing.
Still, she knew he was here. She could sense him moving across the floor toward her, and as she waited each nerve tightened, stretching. . . .
His cool hand touched her cheek, making her gasp and jump.
He chuckled, a low, deep sound of amusement. ‘‘You knew I would come.’’
‘‘Yes,’’ she whispered.
As he knelt beside her cot, she breathed in his scent: leather, cold water, fresh air, and something else—the smell of wildness. He kissed her, his cool lips firm, his breath warm in her mouth.
She hung suspended in time, in place, in an ocean of pleasure. As his kiss lingered her body stirred, her breasts swelling, the familiar longing growing deep inside.
The night she’d arrived here, she’d come awake to the touch of a man’s kiss. Just a kiss, tender, curious, almost . . . reverent. In the morning she’d thought she had dreamed it. But the next night he’d been back, and the next night, and every night he’d taken her further into passion. And now . . . how many nights had he visited her? Two months? More? Sometimes he didn’t come for one night, two, three, and on those nights she slept deeply, worn out by hard work and the high, thin air. Then he’d return, his need greater, and he touched her, loved her, with an edge of violence sharp as a knife. Yet always she sensed his desperation, and welcomed him into her mind . . . and her body.
This time he had been gone almost a week.
He slid down the zipper on her sleeping bag, each tooth making a rasping noise, each noise making Karen’s heartbeat escalate another notch. He started at her throat, cupping it, pressing on the pulse that raced there. He pushed the bag aside, exposing her to the cold night air. ‘‘You wait for me . . . naked.’’ He pressed his palm between her breasts, feeling her heart beat. ‘‘You’re so alive. You make me remember. . . ."
‘‘Remember what?’’ He sounded American, without a hint of accent, and she wondered where he was from and what he was doing here.
But he didn’t want her to think. Not now. Greedily he caressed her slight breasts, one in each palm. His hands were long, rough, calloused, and he used them to massage her while with his thumbs he circled her nipples.
She made a raw sound in her throat.
‘‘You’re in need.’’ His voice deepened. ‘‘It’s been a long time. . . .’’
‘‘I’ve been waiting.’’
‘‘And that was my torment, that I could not be here with you."
It was the first time he’d ever suggested he needed this as much as she did. She smiled, and somehow, in this pitch dark, he must have seen her.
‘‘You like that. But if you’ve tormented me, I must torment you in return.’’ His head dipped. He took one pebbled nipple in his mouth and suckled, softly at first, then, as she whimpered, with strength and skill.
He made her go crazy.
Yet any woman who welcomed a midnight lover was already halfway to insanity.
She grabbed a handful of his hair and discovered how very long it was . . . and soft, and silky. She tugged at him, pulling his head back.
‘‘What do you want?’’ His voice was a husky whisper.
‘‘Hurry.’’ She was chilled. She was desperate. ‘‘I want you to hurry.’’
‘‘But if I hurry, I won’t get to do this.’’ He pushed the sheet down farther, caressing her belly and thighs. Lifting her knees, he spread her legs, exposing her to the cold, shocking her, making her suck in a startled breath.
‘‘Let me see.’’ He tilted her hips up. ‘‘Are you really ready?’’
His fingers glided from her knees along the tender skin on her inner thighs to the dampness there. With a delicate touch, he opened the lips and dabbed a touch on her clitoris. ‘‘I love your scent, so rich and female. The first time, it was your scent that called me to you.’’
Horrified, she tried to draw her legs together. ‘‘I bathe every night.’’
‘‘I didn’t say you smelled. I said you have a scent that calls to me.’’ His nails skated up and down her thighs, pushing them apart again . . . and they were sharp, almost like claws. Almost a threat. ‘‘Not to any other man. Only to me.’’
‘‘
Are
you a man?’’ The question slipped out, and she regretted it. Regretted injecting reality into this delicate, lovely dream of passion.
‘‘I thought I had conclusively proved my manhood to you. Shall I do it again?’’ The hint of warning was gone; he sounded warmly amused, and the finger he pushed inside her was long, strong . . . and clawless.
The impact made her fling her head back, and when he pushed a second finger inside, her hips moved convulsively. ‘‘Please. Lover, I need you.’’
‘‘Do you?’’ Slowly he pulled his fingers back, pressed them back in, pulled them out . . . and as he pressed them in, he pinched her clit between his thumb and forefinger.
She screamed. She came. Orgasm blasted her away from this cold, bleak mountainside and into a fire pit. Her thighs clamped around his hand. Red swam beneath her closed eyelids. Heat radiated from her skin.
He laughed, one compelling stroke following another, feeding her madness until she collapsed, shivering and gasping, too weak to move.
He covered her with himself.
‘‘I can’t,’’ she whispered, and her voice shook. ‘‘Not again.’’
‘‘Yes, you will.’’
‘‘No. Please.’’ She tried to struggle, but he stretched out on top of her. Her head was buried in his shoulder; obviously he was tall. His body, heavy with muscle, pressed her into the cot. His flesh was cool and firm. His shoulders, chest, and stomach rippled with vigor, and his heart thrummed in his chest.
Power hummed through him, and he easily held her as he probed again . . . but not with his fingers.
She was swollen with need, and his organ was big, bigger than both his fingers. As he worked himself inside her she whimpered, her .body gradually adjusting to the width, the breadth, and all the while the aftermath of climax made her inner muscles spasm.
He held her wrapped in his arms, clutching her as if she were his salvation.
And she embraced him, her arms gripping him against her chest, her legs clasped around his hips, giving him herself, absorbing . . . absorbing all his ardor, all his need, knowing this was a dream and wanting nothing more.
When the tip of his penis touched the innermost core of her, they both froze.
Darkness held them in a cocoon of heat and sex and emotions stretched too tight for comfort.
Then their passion flashed bright enough to light the night.
He pulled out and pushed back in, thrusting fast and hard, dragging her with him on his quest for satisfaction.
She held on, rapture flowing through her with the heat and intensity of lava.
The tempo built and built until, above her, his breathing stopped. He gathered himself, rising high above her, holding her knees behind him . . . then plunged one last time.
Ecstasy exploded her into tiny fragments of being. She came, convulsing with pleasure, until she was no longer an austere, lonely workaholic, but a creature of joy and light.
Unhurriedly, he dropped back on top of her, bringing the silk sheets and sleeping bag up to cover them. Reaching down to the floor, he pulled a large blanket over them . . . but no. She touched it with her hand and discovered fur, thick and soft. A skin of some kind, then.
Had he taken her on a trip back in time, back to a century where a man brought the woman he desired proof of his hunting prowess? Wasn’t that a better explanation than madness?
As the perspiration cooled on their bodies, as their breath and heartbeats returned to normal, she slid easily into sleep.
She stood on the edge of the cliff, the blue sky surrounding her. The wind blew hard, tumbling her hair around her face, and in its voice she heard the wails of mourning women, the hoarse sobs of lonely men, and a child’s anguished wail. She tried to back up, to get away, but her feet were too heavy. She fell. . . .
Just before she hit, she started violently.
She woke to find him leaping to his feet. She heard the click of a gun’s safety.
‘‘What’s wrong?’’ he asked. ‘‘What did you hear?’’
‘‘Nothing. A nightmare.’’ A phantasm of her mind, one that had threatened her since she was a child.
Since the day her mother had fallen from that cliff.
Slowly her lover placed something beneath the bed—a firearm of some kind, she now realized—and slid back between the covers. ‘‘You weren’t completely asleep.’’
‘‘That’s when I . . . That’s when it always comes.’’
‘‘A monster?’’ He pushed the short, straight strands of dark brown hair away from her face.
‘‘Death.’’ Shivering, she wrapped herself around him.
She reclined on her narrow cot in her tent at the foot of Mount Anaya. The darkness pressed down on her; the sense of wrongness in this place oppressed her. She hated everything about it.
And tomorrow she would rise. He would be gone. And she would go to work, another day spent in hell.
So she wept.
He caressed her face with his fingertips, found her tears, said, ‘‘No. Don’t do that.’’
The tears only flowed more quickly.
He kissed her. Kissed the dampness from her cheeks, her lips, her throat . . . He kissed as if they hadn’t made love only ten minutes before. He kissed her with passion. He kissed her with intent. Finally she forgot to cry, and remembered nothing but desire.
Afterward, as she slid off to sleep, she thought she heard him say in a slow, hoarse voice, ‘‘You make me real again.’’
"Namaste
, Miss Sonnet.’’
‘‘Namaste.’’
Eyes closed, Karen waited tensely, but Mingma didn’t exclaim about a man in the tent, or comment on the new animal skin.
Karen opened her eyes and scrutinized the tent that had been her home for almost three months, and would be for another two, if the mountain was generous and didn’t chase her off with an early blizzard. The tent was five by seven, with enough room for her cot, a travel desk with her computer, and a trunk with her personal belongings. As usual, Karen’s secret lover had swept away all signs of his presence.
He was her secret, and he intended to stay that way.
‘‘Warm water.’’ Mingma, her cook, maid, and translator, held a steaming basin and bowed, then placed it on the small table below the mirror.
‘‘Thank you.’’ But although Karen knew the water would cool quickly, she couldn’t bring herself to leave her warm nest and leap naked into the cold.
Then Mingma said the magic words. ‘‘Phil is not here yet.’’
Karen flew out of bed. ‘‘What?’’
‘‘The men are here. Phil is not.’’
‘‘That worthless . . .’’ Digging down in the bottom of her sleeping bag, Karen found the long underwear she stashed there every night and dragged it on.
This whole project had been nothing but bad luck and trouble, requiring every bit of Karen’s concentration and every bit of Mingma’s diplomatic skills to keep the men at work. She’d never thought her assistant project manager, Philippos Chronies, would be the main delay. ‘‘Where is he?’’
‘‘He left the village last night. Was gone for hours. Returned, and now his tent billows with his snores.’’
Karen’s father never assigned his best men to her, but Phil was a new low. He knew the business, but made his contempt for the native workers clear. He tried to take imaginary Greek Orthodox holidays off, and when she pointed out that she had a satellite Internet connection, and research had turned up no holidays on that date, he sulked.
Karen did a quick PTA—pussy, tits, and armpits—and shrugged into her clothes: khakis built for warmth and constructed to stand up in the toughest conditions, a camouflage parka and wide-brimmed hat, and sturdy hiking boots. ‘‘All right. I’m going down.’’
She stepped outside. The bells chimed softly.
Mingma followed. The bells chimed again.
When Karen had first come to this place, she’d taken down the bells at her door. But Mingma had been so distressed, and so insistent that the bells kept the evil one away, Karen put them back. Because she didn’t mind indulging Mingma in her superstition. And because as time went on, anything that kept the evil one away was all right with her.
The day was calm. Still. Silent.
Karen had learned how little that meant up here.
‘‘The men are not happy,’’ Mingma said.
‘‘Neither am I.’’ Karen sighed. ‘‘What’s wrong?’’
‘‘They grow closer to the heart of evil.’’
Karen didn’t scoff.
Her father would have.
Her father owned Jackson Sonnet Hotels, a chain that specialized in adventure vacations. The resorts were in prime locations, and offered classes in flying, rock climbing, skiing, camping, river rafting, mountain biking— whatever an adventure enthusiast wished to learn, Jackson Sonnet Hotels could teach him. Whatever adventure a tourist imagined for himself, Jackson Sonnet Hotels offered a way to enjoy it.
Jackson Sonnet was a genius at knowing what the armchair adventurer craved, for he prided himself on being a man who could do it all, and he had made damned good and sure his daughter, Karen, had learned everything, regardless of her fears—or else. Because, by God, he wasn’t going to put up with a daughter who was a coward.
Climbers and trekkers looking for the ultimate challenge flocked to the Himalayas, to the world’s highest mountain range. They wanted rough and tough, and here they got it. The altitude was high, the air thin, and with the unexpected storms and the persistent rumor of international thugs, even the most traveled paths required stamina and courage.
So Mount Anaya, set high on the dry side of the Himalayas on the border between Nepal and Tibet, seemed to be the ideal site to build a boutique hotel—at least on paper.
Mount Anaya had a reputation for being unclimbable. That was its attraction.
All the eight thousanders—fourteen peaks over eight thousand meters above sea level— were tough, so tough there were charts showing the death rates per ascent.
Mount Anaya was different. Sherpa guides went up unwillingly, or not at all. Mountaineers spoke of the mountain in hushed tones as if it were a living being, using words like ‘‘malicious’’ and ‘‘malevolent.’’ The unlucky came down in body bags. Altogether, only fifteen expert climbers had managed to reach the top. Of those, six lost toes or fingers—one a foot—to frostbite. One had had his arm crushed by a rockfall, and amputated it himself. Two died within a month of their triumph. One went quite insane after reaching the peak. Among the climbers who attempted the mountain, legends were whispered of a siren’s voice calling a man to his doom, or an inexplicable fire in the storm, or a demonic face shining in the snow.
Every climber looked forward to the challenge. No one ever believed the stories . . . until they got here.
She certainly hadn’t. At twenty-eight, she had already supervised the building of hotels in the outback of Australia, on the African veldt, and in Patagonia in Argentina. Each one had offered its own challenges.
None had been like this.
‘‘While you comfort the men, I will fix your breakfast.’’ Mingma had simply appeared one day, installing herself as Karen’s assistant. Karen thought Mingma was anywhere between forty and a hundred, a sharp-eyed widow who had buried two husbands and now supported herself. Her teeth were stained with tobacco, her expression was serene, and her English was good.
‘‘I’ll do more than comfort them.’’ Karen strode across the high, flat area where she’d set her tent and down the path to the construction site. Gravel rolled out from under her boots and tumbled onto the site.
The stone roots of Mount Anaya grew around the spot where the hotel would be built. Once the foundation was properly installed, the hotel would be secure against earthquakes, or so said the architects and structural engineers.
She’d been here since spring, the start of the construction season, and immediately she’d realized that the architects and structural engineers hadn’t taken into account the mountain itself. Granite tumbled like giant building blocks throughout the long valley, legacies of rockfalls so massive they had obliterated the landscape. Here and there tiny green plants struggled to poke their heads up, but they were damned. The thin soil quickly loosened, slipped, and carried them away. Nothing was allowed to live here, for over it all the mountain loomed, massive, bleak, cruel.
Karen tried never to look at Mount Anaya, but as always the peak drew her gaze—up the side of the hill, up the sheer stone slopes, up the glaciers and snowfields, to the top of Mount Anaya. There the pinnacle stabbed the blue sky with a point of white and gray.
Mountains, all mountains, formed the stuff of her nightmares, but Mount Anaya . . . In Sanskrit, it meant ‘‘evil course.’’
The natives believed the mountain was cursed.
After two months of living in its shadow, Karen believed it, too.
The mountain ruined her days, and the midnight lover haunted her sleep. She was trapped here by her father’s expectations and her own sense of duty—and by Phil Chronies.
A dozen men lolled around, leaned against the two ancient and exorbitantly priced backhoes they’d hired from Tibet, petted their yaks, and chatted.
As she walked up, she smiled.
Their interpreter, Lhakpa, came forward and bowed.
She leaned forward and spoke to him only. ‘‘Thank you for taking command of my men until Mr. Chronies can arrive.’’
‘‘Yes. Of course. I command the men.’’ Lhakpa bowed again.
‘‘Last night, when Mr. Chronies reported to me, he told me there would be blasting today.’’
‘‘Yes. He tells us where to place the dynamite. ’’ Lhakpa beamed happily.
‘‘I tell
him
where to place the dynamite.’’
As she walked toward the locker containing the dynamite, Lhakpa’s eyes grew big. ‘‘Mr. Chronies will be unhappy if you—’’
She swung around and faced him. ‘‘Have you not seen Mr. Chronies report to me morning and night?’’
‘‘Yes, Miss Sonnet.’’
‘‘Have you not seen me direct Mr. Chronies every day, all day long?’’
‘‘Yes, Miss Sonnet.’’
‘‘Mr. Chronies obeys me in all things.’’ She smiled with toothy good humor.
It was true enough; Phil obeyed her grudgingly, but he obeyed her. She had a system, and she’d be damned if she would allow Phil and his laziness to put them farther behind; that would erode her already precarious position as a woman in a man’s occupation.
Besides, she’d learned her job from the bottom up. She knew how to do every task on the site. And performing the task of setting the dynamite, she knew, would gain her the men’s respect, because, like all men, these were very impressed by loud explosions that blew large boulders into small pebbles.
If she could only feel sure the mountain would be as impressed, and let her construct this cursed hotel.
He lay flat on his stomach on a boulder above the construction site, watching Karen Sonnet while resentment and lust roiled in his belly.
Why was she here? Why couldn’t it have been someone else? A man, preferably, some guy like all the rest, who knew hotel construction, who drank and smoked, who was amenable to a little graft and corruption.
Instead, he had little Miss Sweetness-and-Light.
The first time he’d seen her, he’d been waiting at the train station in Kathmandu. She caught his eye; pretty women did that, and she was pretty enough. Short, probably five-three, with a slender figure that looked good in khakis. Brown hair and perfectly tanned skin, the sort of skin they made commercials about. But he didn’t think much about her, figured she was just one of the thousands of trekkers who descended on Nepal every year to hike through the Himalayas. He did grin derisively as she directed the porters to load her huge stash of camping equipment. He amused himself by wondering how many porters she would have to hire to carry it up and down the mountain trails, if she had an industrial-size hair dryer in that mess, and where she thought she was going to plug the hair dryer in.
Just when he was transferring his attention to the next female, Karen did something extraordinary.
She looked right at him, and smiled.
She had the most extraordinary blue-green eyes he’d ever seen, with a fringe of long, dark lashes, and that smile . . . She tapped into some inner joy, and everything he’d thought about her changed.
She was beautiful.
He was stricken with need.
Her smile faded. As if his staring made her nervous, she glanced away. She spoke to the porters; she was patient with their stilted English, and she knew a few words of Nepalese.
He didn’t move, but called one of the pick-pockets who hung around the platform. Flipping him a coin, he said, ‘‘Find out who she is and where she’s going.’’ Not that it mattered; he had a job to do. He didn’t have time to obsess about a woman with aquamarine eyes.
Then, when he got his answer, he cursed a blue streak.
She was going to be right there at the base of Mount Anaya, within arm’s length, for months and months, building Jackson Sonnet’s hotel.
He had comforted himself with the knowledge that she’d never be up for the challenge.
Instead she bossed everyone around, and if they balked, she smiled at them. Look at Lhakpa, hovering close while she set the charges. Look at the other guys, all grinning and flirty while they got ready for the blast.
She was changing everything, and if he didn’t watch it, she’d change him, too.
He had to get her out of his life.