The Devil Wears Plaid - By Teresa Medeiros Page 0,15

mother’s table while playing at being pirates or fairy princesses. The sheltering branches of elm and oak were spaced widely apart there, inviting in glowing shafts of sunlight. The mossy hollows and gentle glades seemed more like a park than a wood.

This place resembled the forest in some dark and forbidding fairy tale—a place where time had stood still for centuries and some slavering ogre might spring out at any minute to devour you.

The thickly laced branches over Emma’s head allowed in only grudging flashes of moonlight. As she scrambled down a slick, mossy bank, the rasp of her own breathing echoed in her ears like the panting of some desperate wild thing.

She’d yet to stumble across anything even remotely resembling a road or a path, which was probably for the best. The last thing she wanted to do was make it easy for Sinclair and his men to track her.

Branches lashed at her as she ran, their bony fingers stinging her cheeks and tearing at the fragile silk of her gown. A sob of pain escaped her as her left foot came down squarely on a jagged stone. The thin soles of her kid slippers provided little protection for her tender feet. She might as well have been barefoot. She winced as she splashed through the icy water of a shallow creek, knowing it was only a matter of time before the slippers gave way altogether, leaving her completely exposed to the elements. What she wouldn’t have given for the pair of sturdy old half-boots she’d left tucked beneath her bed at home! Her mother had refused to let her pack them, insisting that the earl would buy her all the elegant slippers she would need once they were wed.

She glanced behind her. It was impossible to tell if she was being pursued or if the sounds she could hear over the rapid throb of her heart in her ears were simply the echoes of her own clumsy thrashing through the underbrush. She wasn’t about to stop long enough to find out.

She had no desire to find out just exactly how Jamie Sinclair might punish her for refusing to heed his warning. Judging from the icy composure he had demonstrated in the abbey and the authority he exerted over his own men, he wouldn’t take kindly to being defied.

Doubling her pace, she dared another desperate look over her shoulder. The moon was sinking in the sky and the shadows themselves seemed to be chasing her, the billowing clouds of darkness threatening to swallow her whole, leaving no trace behind.

She jerked her gaze back to the path ahead of her only to find herself heading straight for the edge of a steep bluff. It was too late to slow her forward momentum. Too late to do anything but make a frantic grab for the slender trunk of the birch tree overhanging the rocky gorge far below.

The smooth bark slid right through her hands, offering her no purchase and no hope. A shriek escaped her lips as she slid over the edge of the bluff and into thin air.

JAMIE FROZE IN HIS tracks, his ears echoing with a cry so sharp and brief he might have imagined it. Or it could have simply been the night cry of some animal, either predator or prey.

He cocked his head to listen but heard only silence, unbroken except for the mournful sigh of the wind through a nearby copse of pines.

That’s when he realized something was wrong. He had been tracking Emma for nearly an hour, tracking her with his ears and eyes but also with some sense deeper and more primitive than hearing or sight. No matter how far or fast he traveled, he’d known she was there… somewhere ahead of him, out of his reach but still within his grasp. But now that awareness of her was gone. It was as if an invisible thread had been cut, leaving him dangling over a dark precipice with no bottom in sight.

Biting off an oath, he broke into a run, heading in the direction of that helpless cry. He paid no heed to the branches that slapped at his face or sought to trap him in their thorny embrace. He’d gone charging through these same woods dozens of times before, usually with a pack of Hepburn’s men hot on his heels.

This time he wasn’t running away from something but toward something. Unfortunately, that something turned out to be a downward slope that came to