Bride for the Billionaire Werebear
Chapter 1
Alicia Clarke was cold, tired, and hungry, and not necessarily in that order. The drive up north had been long and tiring, the towns growing further apart, and the tar road had petered out into a track. Yet, the GPS had not lost its signal, and she was on the right route, albeit one that seemed to be unused. The light snowfall she was driving in had turned to sleet, making conditions worse, and she soon found it increasingly difficult to see or maintain her control over the little Honda she was driving. She soon had to put all her attention into staying on the road, thoughts of the elusive businessman who had hired her services as his personal assistant, soon gone. As she rounded a bend, she could finally make out the lights of a house in the distance, but a large, white form hurtling across the path in front of her, made her jerk the steering wheel sideways, and she landed up in a drift on the side of the rutted lane she was traveling on, her head bumping the steering wheel painfully. Thankfully, the collision had not been bad enough to cause the airbags to pop, and she was able to free herself from the seatbelt before opening the door and getting out. Warily, she looked around, but no sign of the animal was in sight.
‘What the hell?’
Leaning into the car she gathered up her bag and poked around in it for her cellphone. Damn, no reception! Finding the lights that emanated from the house, and which she took to be her destination, she wearily started trudging through the cold and wet night, determined to make her way there, shaking off the dizziness which had ensued as a result of the accident. She prodded at her forehead and felt the bump. ‘Wonderful, Alicia, first you see things and now you have an egg stuck to the front of your face! What next?’
The words had hardly left her mouth when she felt her ankle give beneath her as she stepped into a hole. The pain shot through her and she fell to her knees.
‘Fuck!’
Alicia tried to stand and put some weight on the hurt appendage, but almost doubled over in pain. She determined to hobble her way forward, as there was no way she could sit and wait for help to arrive, she knew. She would probably be frozen to death by the time her new boss finally realized she was late, which she was, but not yet unduly so. Finally, giving up walking as a bad job, she resorted to crawling on her hands and knees, the material of her jeans soon sopping wet due to her efforts to keep moving. I should have stayed with the car, the thought hit her. Looking back, she realized that the vehicle was about the same distance from her as the house, and decided to push on forward, her hands numb through the wool of her gloves. The cold had worked its way through her clothing, into her bones, and the sleet beat down incessantly, giving no quarter, as she shuffled her way through it on all fours.
***
Lionel Eckhart ran from his room, grabbing a blanket from the foot of his bed as he did so, and made his way out of the house, the faces of his two servants staring after him in surprise. It had been a long time since they had seen him in this state; his eyes were wild and his breathing labored. The old husband and wife looked at each other in amazement. All he had said as he had come back inside was to make sure the girl’s room was warm and to heat up some soup. Shrugging, Mike Carpenter nodded at his wife, who went back into the kitchen which was the warmest room in the old mansion, opened a tin of soup, and put it in a pan on the old coal stove to heat up. It seemed as if things were to become quite interesting.
Lionel raced down what was left of the driveway, his eyes scanning the ground as he went. Was the woman stupid enough to have left the car? Was she on her way there, partially frozen? He had no idea of knowing. Scaring her had been an accident, not one he often made. Then he saw something move in the snow, a red, gloved hand. He had found her.
***
It was cold, so cold. Alicia’s movements had become slower and slower, as the sleet had morphed into snow. Each lungful of breath she took hurt, as she started cooling down inside and out, and her movements became more and more lethargic. Tired! Want to sleep! The thoughts of giving up and giving in would not leave. She had to move on, forced herself, in fact, to do so. To stop would mean death, and safety was near, yet so incredibly far! What might have been a fifteen minute walk under normal circumstances, felt like a thousand miles away in the state she was in. She concentrated on pushing one hand, followed by a leg, forward, one painful step at a time; until her arms and legs refused to move any further, and she fell into the snow, face first. She tried forcing her small frame to rise, but her body refused to obey, even when she used every bit of willpower at her disposal. Nothing happened. She could not rise, her body disobeyed each command. She closed her eyes, and allowed the numbness of sleep to take over.
“Wake up! Wake up, girl!” she heard a voice through the fog that had become her mind. Struggling, she managed to flutter her eyelashes, and saw a dark form looming over her, but fell back into the arms of sleep once more, unsure whether she could believe anything her ears were hearing or her eyes had seen. Sleep was the haven she longed for, a sweet oblivion, away from the cold that cut through her like a razor.
“Wake up, woman! Now! Do as I say!”
Alicia managed to crack open her eyes, and became aware of being carried in strong arms, the heat of the chest against which she was snuggling was blissful, and his smell! It was so familiar, yet she was sure that it was not a scent she had ever smelled before, except, perhaps, in her dreams; a mixture of spice, mint, and something undeniably wild. It was, her fuddled brain managed to discern, a scent which was unique to this individual with his deep, raspy voice.
“Poor lass,” she heard a woman’s saying as they entered the doorway to what she surmised was a front door.
“Her room is ready, I turned up the heat in there a notch, or would ye prefer tea take her tea the fire in your study, Sir?”
“The study, I think. Bring some towels, she is drenched, and that soup, please, Mrs. C. And please, could you find her something warm to wear? We can go see about her bags and car in the morning. It’s snowing a storm out there at the moment.”
Alicia was aware of being set down on someone’s lap and her clothing being removed amidst cussing and exclamations of disgust at the amount of clothing a woman deemed it necessary to wear. Her fuddled brain realized that a stranger, no, a strange man was busy undressing her, but her cold limbs were not able to function in cohesion, and she was so cold and so tired.
Her next lucid moment came when she felt something soft being drawn over her head, and being commanded to lift her arms. She tried, but they felt like lead. There was more cussing and swearing and finally, she felt herself cradled against the warm body again, while someone took one of her hands and started rubbing it. Her feet, she felt, were starting to tingle, due to the fire in front of which they were sitting. “Where…”
“Ah,” the deep voice next to her ear exclaimed. “You are with me again, are you? Good. I need you to get warm and to get some warm soup into you. It’s only tinned, but it should do the trick. Your ankle is twisted, but there will be no real damage. Tomorrow it should be just a twinge, nothing major.”
She heard the clink of crockery and a pre-emptive “open your mouth!” coming from her savior. Without thinking about it, she complied, letting him spoon some of the warm liquid into her. The warmth spread through her body as it went down her throat and into her stomach. She was hungry, she realized, and let him spoon more of the liquid nourishment into her waiting mouth. When it was finished, she nestled against the warm chest that had become her beacon, and fell asleep again.
***
“Well now,” Mrs. Carpenter said to her husband who was perched next at his favorite spot in front of the large kitchen fire, his pipe dangling from the corner of his mouth and a book in his hands, “Would ye believe it? Lionel be sitting in that chair with the wee lass cradled in his lap like she was a little girl, and himself fast asleep, he is!”
Mike Carpenter looked up at his wife and grunted, that being his usual means of saying either yes, no and oh. He was a man of few words, but his wife’s tidbit of information brought a smile to his lips and a gleam to his eye. “Think she’s the one, then?”
“Eh, I have no idea I am sure, but ‘tis not like him to be doing that now is it?”
Mike grunted again. “We’ll see how it goes.” And that, as far as he was concerned, was the end of the conversation.