Authors: Lou Harper
Secrets and Ink (16 page)
“Sorry.”
The guy cracked an eye open and looked up. He was pale, even for a vampire.
“I’m Harvey,” he said weakly. He moved his hand as if for a handshake, but seeing it covered in blood, he pulled it back.
“Gabe.”
“Gabe, I need to feed.”
With the sudden agility of a man who’d just about stepped on a rattlesnake, Gabe snatched his hand away and sprang to his feet.
Harvey pursed his lips. “Don’t get your panties in a twist. Just get me a bottle from the fridge, okay?”
After a moment of hesitation, Gabe edged to the refrigerator, keeping an eye on Harvey. When he opened the door, he saw about a dozen plastic bottles filled with liquid the color of rusty tap water. Definitely not blood. He saw an already half-empty bottle, so he grabbed it.
Harvey downed the liquid in one continuous gulp. He let out a relieved sigh. “That hit the spot.” He dropped the bottle on the floor and squinted up at Gabe. “You stink,” he said.
Without clarifying if he meant it literally or figuratively, he closed his eyes, and his body went limp.
Some memories are better off lost in the mist…
Fall Hard
© 2013 JL Merrow
Eight months ago, British academic Paul Ansell lost his lover—and all the memories of their time together—in an accident at Iceland’s Gullfoss Falls. Returning to the misty island country to resume his study of the bloodthirsty Viking Egil Skallagrimsson is tough as he struggles to pull his life back together.
First, there’s his colleague, Mags, who treats him like glass, and summer student Alex, who peppers him with discomforting questions. Then there’s Icelandic jet-boat driver Viggo, a tattooed, modern-day Viking who won’t say much about how they know each other. Leaving Paul to wonder if their volcanic attraction is fuelled by a desire to make a fresh start, or desperation to forget the past.
As more fragments of his lost memories fall into place, Paul is unsure if he can trust himself, much less anyone around him. And he begins to suspect his accident was nothing of the kind.
Warning: Contains a modern-day Viking whose boat has V8 engines for oars, and a harsh land of hot springs and hotter passions that won’t forgive any false steps.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Fall Hard:
I left London sweltering in a heat wave, the burning August sunshine an incessant, aching glare—I might have been stretching the truth just a little when I’d assured Gretchen my headaches had gone—and landed in Iceland to find the rain coming at me sideways. Keflavik airport was cool and spacious, seeming several times bigger than it needed to be—even now, at the height of summer, there was hardly anyone there.
Maybe they’d seen a weather forecast.
I walked down miles of gleaming corridor, the tapping of my stick on the floor beating time to the rumble of the wheels of my suitcase. Halfway down, I stopped to admire a scale model of a Viking longboat displayed in a glass case, wondering if I’d seen it the last time I was here. A smart young woman in uniform popped out of nowhere to ask pointedly if I needed assistance. Her Viking genes coming out, perhaps, I thought wryly as I allowed her to shepherd me through the corridor. An ancestral impulse to protect the boat from foreigners.
Out in the foyer, a middle-aged woman with a thin, anxious face was holding up a handwritten sign for Dr. Paul Ansell. Me. I recognised her from the photo I’d seen online: Dr. Margaret Kettle, my colleague and fellow English ex-pat at the Snorri Sturluson Institute for Icelandic Studies. She spotted me an instant after I’d seen the sign. “Paul!” she cried out, waving frantically.
I smiled back and returned her wave, relief washing over me. She was shorter than I’d imagined, a head smaller than me, with her mouse-brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, a pair of unfashionable plastic-framed glasses on her nose, and no makeup to accentuate her plain, friendly features. The hair, I realised as I approached her, was greying in streaks. She looked around fifty, but I knew from my online reading she was actually almost a decade younger than that.
I’d be lying if I said I knew her, precisely, but either her smile or some familiarity buried in my subconscious made me warm to her. “Margaret, am I right? Paul Ansell. Um. You already know that, of course. Sorry.”
“Oh, please!” Her pale blue, almost grey eyes were moist. “Mags. You’ve always called me that.” She gave me a hesitant look. “Can you…?”
I shook my head. “It’s still all blank, I’m afraid. I’m hoping being back here will jog my memory.”
She nodded, but her smile quivered. “It’s so strange, seeing you and knowing you can’t… I so badly want to give you a hug, but I suppose you’d just think me terribly forward.”
Touched and a little overwhelmed, I opened my arms. “Of course not.” As she clung to me, I breathed in her scent, a curiously appropriate mix of musty old books and herbal shampoo. For a moment I felt a brief flicker of familiarity, of comfort, and my heartbeat quickened.
Then she released me and stepped back, sniffing. “Sorry. Don’t mind me—just being silly. It really is awfully good to see you back here, looking almost as good as new. But let’s get out of here. Shall I take your suitcase?”
“No, I’m fine, thanks.” Luckily for my masculine pride, it wasn’t that heavy.
As we stepped through the glass door, the wind hit with enough force to whisk my breath away. Rain whipped at my face and hair, making me blink at the onslaught. My thin jacket, a hot, heavy burden in London, was wholly inadequate here. The air, when I could catch my breath, smelt fresh and of the sea.
“The car’s just over here,” Mags yelled, seeming unbothered by the weather even as the wind plucked stray tendrils of hair from their moorings and set them dancing across her face. Trying not to lag behind as I battled with the wind to retain control of my suitcase, I followed her brisk pace. We crossed the road to the airport car park, where she unlocked a four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi, and again I felt that nagging sense of familiarity.
“Have I been in this car before?” I asked, once we’d shut the doors on the wind and I could breathe again. The sudden stillness in the air was almost jarring.
Mags looked delighted. “Yes—well, actually, it’s yours. I’ve been keeping it going a bit. My little Skoda is getting awfully unreliable—but obviously, it’s all yours now you’re back.”
“Thanks,” I said, touched once more. “I knew I must have had a car, but I just assumed it’d been left to rust wherever I last parked it.” Buying a new one had been top of my To Do list, in fact. It was a relief not to have to face either the expense or the hassle.
“Oh, don’t be daft—it was at least as much to my advantage as it was to yours.” She hesitated. “And it seemed such a shame about the flat—I mean, obviously they had to find other tenants; they couldn’t afford not to—but it seemed horrible, leaving you with no home to come back to.”
“I was told all my things were in storage?” My breath hitched at the sudden, irrational fear I’d been misinformed, and all the traces of my life here wiped out as thoroughly as my memories.
She nodded, pulling out onto the main road. “We got the furniture out, of course, to put in the new flat—well, most of it, anyway—but I thought you’d prefer to sort out the more personal items yourself. Just let me know when you’d like to go and fetch them.” There was a pause. “I’m afraid a lot of Sven’s things are there too. His mother came over from America, of course, to collect the…to take Sven home, but she left most of his things behind. And, well, I didn’t like to get rid of anything without asking you. In case you wanted it as a memento.”
“I suppose it’s possible seeing things that were his might bring some memories back.” My voice sounded doubtful in my own ears. Staring at his photograph back in Gretchen’s chaotic living room hadn’t helped at all. Sven Halvorson—my late lover—who, despite the name, had apparently been as American as they come, had been a broad-shouldered, somewhat swarthy man with dark, curling hair and full, sensual lips. Not a classically good-looking man, I supposed, but definitely an attractive one. But I’d looked at him, and I’d felt nothing.
Nothing but a vague sense of guilt, that was. And this was the man I’d shared a flat with—shared my life with? I’d wondered if my accident had somehow left me incapable of emotion. But the warmth that had suffused me when I’d met Mags, the genuine pleasure I had in seeing her again, seemed to refute this.
“Or, you know, for when you’ve got your memory back,” Mags was saying. “A keepsake, I meant.” She seemed a lot more certain than I was that my lost year would eventually return. “Do you… Do you remember anything at all? Anyone?”
“Plenty,” I said with a rueful smile. “Just nothing and no one to do with my time in Iceland.”
“So strange that it should hit you like that,” Mags mused. We were speeding past garages and other businesses, Reykjavik Bay to our left. A tautology, as my mischievous memory reminded me. Reykjavik itself meant bay of smoke. It seemed fitting. Everything that wasn’t man-made was in shades of monochrome—the skies like a dove’s wing, the roads a fresh black and the countryside—if you could call it that—a mass of charcoal-coloured rocks, overgrown with greyish-green moss. It was a soothing, calming antithesis of London’s bright, bustling streets.
I shrugged. “The doctors seemed to think it might be a self-preservation thing,” I admitted. “Losing my…losing Sven, and nearly dying at the same time—I guess it’s not surprising I didn’t want to remember.”
Secrets and Ink
Lou Harper
When Karma writes you a ticket, pay up or else…
If life was like the movies, Jem Mitchell’s wouldn’t be such a mess. In LA’s glittering world of dreams, he works an unglamorous job at a gourmet grocery store. His past is so deep and dark, the details are lost even to him. All he knows is he was once cursed by a meter maid, and ever since, his love life has sucked.
When Detective Nick Davies becomes a regular at the store, Jem dares to hope he’s un-hexed at last. He should have known that sex with a remarkably normal guy, devoid of weird fetishes and fatal personality flaws, was too good to be true.
During a post-encounter cuddle, Nick recognizes the tattoo on Jem’s back—and remembers him as a young hustler he arrested nine years past.
As Jem’s memories come crashing back, he flees from Nick, but fate contrives to keep pushing them back together. And when Jem’s old partner in crime is found murdered, the stakes are raised for life, for love, and a dangerous drama with no guarantee of a Hollywood ending.
Warning: Stars a mild-mannered store clerk with a shady past, a hunky cop whose passion in the bedroom is as big as his passion for justice, and celebrity sightings you won’t see on TMZ.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B
Cincinnati OH 45249
Secrets and Ink
Copyright © 2013 Lou Harper
ISBN: 978-1-61921-874-1
Edited by Linda Ingmanson
Cover by Angela Waters
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: December 2013
www.samhainpublishing.com
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