Light shone through my closed eyelids in a warm but intrusive red glow. I groaned softly and snuggled deeper beneath a heavy wool blanket, vexed at whoever had lit a candle in the middle of the…
My eyes flew open, confirming a dreadful instinct that fluttered in my gut like butterflies with razor-tipped wings.
Not candlelight.Daylight.
I was late. Even worse, some veiled obligation tugged at my mind like a string tied around my finger. I’d left something unfinished.
No…not quite. There was something I was supposed todo, first thing in the…
I bolted upright and threw back the blanket; as I stood, the stone floor cold and smooth beneath my bare feet, I realized with a sudden and near-blinding panic that I had no idea what I was late for.
Or…where I was.
My hands opened and closed around nothing but the cool morning air as I surveyed my surroundings, trying to make sense of a room that didn’tfeelunfamiliar, and yet…was.
Clarity refused to rise through the fog of slumber. My heart raced.
Focus on the facts.
The room was small. A narrow bed took up a third of the space, and the rest was occupied by worn but serviceable furnishings, including a desk cluttered with heavy books—real bound volumes—as well as individual sheets of fine parchment covered in writing. There were inkwells—one overturned and empty, the other seated squarely in its cutout and properly covered—and several quills, one neatly trimmed and clearly well-used, the others whole and still clean.
The desk chair was wooden and plain. Functional. An armchair sat in the corner opposite the bed, close enough to touch from the desk because of the narrowness of the room. It was plush, with faded green upholstery. Opposite the desk, a tall wardrobe stood half open, but my gaze refused to settle on the neat collection of mostly dark clothing hanging inside, or on the lighter-colored underclothes folded and stacked at the bottom.
As I mentally sorted through the observable facts, assembling a hypothesis about where I was and how I’d come to be there, I noted several soft voices speaking indistinguishable words through the walls. And that told me more than the furnishings had.
I was in some sort of small tenement: a single-room apartment, adjoining two others.
Though inky darkness leaked beneath the door, a brilliant line of daylight shone through the vertical seam between the shutters on the opposite wall, lighting the pillow precisely where my head had been moments before.
Iron hinges groaned as I threw open the shutters, and…
I stumbled backward, shocked not just by the burst of cool, salty air and dazzling sunlight, but by thestunningvista!
Water. Crystalline blue and endless.Water, to the very edge of the world, sparkling in the sun. Wind stirred it in rhythmic waves that looked gentle from my vantage, but were probably crashing against…
I leaned out the window for a glimpse of the ground below, but therewasno ground. I sat on the very edge of a cliff, perched upon a drop so sheer I could see nothing below my room except for several floors of the tower I was in and a few outcroppings of the rocky ledge it stood upon. The ocean crashed against the base of the cliff with no shoreline to speak of.
My fingers curled around the wooden window frame, fear slamming against the ramparts of my mind like waves against the cliffside, and I lurched backward into the safety of the room.
A soft groan startled me, and I spun to find the lump of blankets on the far side of the narrow bedmoving.A moment later, a man sat up and the bedclothes fell away, exposing his broad shoulders and sculpted chest, laying bare his narrow waist and just a glimpse of one pale hip.
My breath seized in my throat.
He wasbeautiful. Earnest blue eyes blinked at me beneath straight, bushy brows two shades deeper than his shaggy dark blond hair, still tousled from sleep. He smiled, a sheepish expression, as if he were unsettled to be staring at me with so much flesh exposed. Or perhaps embarrassed to still be abed, with the day already started.
I gathered from that look that he knew me. Yet I did not know him.
This was his room, surely.Thatwas why I didn’t recognize the furnishings or the stunning, terrifying view.
Which left several very important questions, the most important of which wereWhose bed have I woken in?andWhy can I not remember taking to it in the first place?
“Amber?” The man’s brows dipped toward the center of his forehead, and it was the familiarity of that expression, as much as his question, that cleared the tiniest bit of the fog shrouding my memory.
Iwas Amber.
Amber Fallbrook…of Innswood Township…three days’ carriage ride from the eastern coast.
“Are you okay?” As the beautiful young man tossed back his blankets and rose, for a moment he seemed to wobble. His face paled and his eyes closed. One hand reached for the simple wooden headboard, sturdy musculature standing out in his arm as he regained his balance.
