like the beat of an ancient war drum, Damien crept back to consciousness. His skin stung as the icy chill receded, chased away by the warmth of a blazing fire and a scratchy wool blanket. He knocked the blanket aside as he lifted his hand and pushed his shaking fingers through his still-damp hair.
“It was real,” he murmured, his throat raspy with shock and cold.
“It was stupid,” a deep voice grumbled as a man kicked shut the door of the small cabin and dropped chunks of wood onto the floor near the mammoth stone fireplace. “What the hell, man? What were you thinking?”
“Nathan…” Damien recognized the rough-hewn pine boards of the ceiling and the log walls of his cousin’s cabin. The structure in the woods was even older than the house sitting on the rocky edge of the Lake of Tears. “You pulled me out?”
“Again,” Nathan said.
He had been there last time—six months ago. He had dragged Damien, kicking and swinging, from the water and convinced him it was pointless to search for Olivia. He hadn’t even known for certain that she’d drowned.
But Damien had found her robe and her shoes on the rocky shore. And he had guessed where she’d been.
And tonight, he knew for certain. She hadn’t run off as Nathan had tried to convince him she had.
She was dead.
“You were there,” Damien said as he pushed himself up, bracing his elbow on the arm of the couch on which he lay. “Again…”
“Lucky for you,” Nathan said.
For a man who made his living gambling, Damien was actually remarkably unfortunate—in love. “Yeah, lucky for me…”
His cousin turned to him, his dark gaze penetrating. “Were you trying…to kill yourself?”
“God, no.” But Olivia had tried to kill him. Why? Had she only grown to hate him that much after her death, or had she hated him before? Had her love been a lie?
“Then what the hell were you doing out there, in the lake,” Nathan demanded to know with anger and concern, “in the middle of a storm?”
Head still pounding, Damien winced at the volume of his cousin’s voice, and the memory of what had compelled him to risk the storm and the icy water of the Lake of Tears.
Her…
Not willing yet to share what—who—he had seen, he asked instead, “What were you doing out in the storm?”
“My job. I’m the caretaker here,” Nathan reminded him. “Your caretaker.”
Damien suspected his cousin didn’t refer to the fact that Nathan worked for him but that he was worried about him, about how he’d been living, actually barely living, since Olivia had disappeared nearly six months ago.
“If you weren’t trying to kill yourself,” Nathan persisted, “what the hell were you doing? You know the lake is bottomless. Some of our ancestors believed it to be the portal to the other world.”
“Hell,” Damien uttered the word as more than a curse, as a destiny. He should have known better than to think he could ever find happiness. “Hell is where this place always sends me. I never should have brought her here—not after—”
“She wanted to come. You told me that,” Nathan remembered. The man never forgot anything, nothing from his lifetime or from the lifetimes of the ancestors who had lived before him and Damien. “You said she wanted to spend your honeymoon here in the house on the lake.”
And like a damn fool Damien had wanted to give her everything she wanted. “I should have told her no.”
“But it was where you met….”
The first time he’d seen her had been on the rocky shore of the Lake of Tears. For years he had hated coming to the Victorian house on the lake, and he had only visited when absolutely necessary to meet with Nathan. If not for his cousin, he would have sold the estate long ago. But Nathan had convinced him it was Damien’s legacy and that he was honor bound by their people to care for the lake and the property.
Damien had been cutting around the lake, heading to the woods and Nathan’s cabin, when he’d come upon her standing on the rocky shore. Even then he hadn’t believed that she was real; she was far too beautiful to be simply human.
The summer wind played with her hair, whipping platinum-blond locks across her face and around her shoulders. She wore a linen vest, sleeveless and low cut that revealed the shadow between her breasts, and pants in the same pale blue of her eyes. The wind molded the linen to her curves, revealing more than it covered.
“You are the most beautiful trespasser I’ve ever had,” Damien remarked with an appreciative whistle, drawing her from her contemplation of the lake.
Startled, she jumped and then turned toward him. And her eyes widened with surprise and something close to recognition, as if she knew him even though they had never met before.
The same sense of recognition jarred him. She looked like a legend, the spitting image of the woman whose story had been passed from generation to generation in his family. She looked like the woman whose tears over her murdered lover had created the lake. And whose supernatural ability to resurrect the dead had brought the Indian warrior—whose mission had been to kill her—back to life. A life they had shared on the rocky shore of the Lake of Tears.
“I’m not trespassing,” she insisted, her chin lifting with pride and indignation.
Because the land had been hers first?
He shook his head, shaking off the fanciful thought he blamed on his cousin’s fascination with the past. If not for his having to visit Nathan, Damien would not have even thought of the legend. But he wouldn’t have met this woman, either. And, as a shiver of foreboding lifted the hair on the nape of his neck, he considered that not meeting her might have been a good thing. With a flash of prophecy to which he would never admit, he sensed that his life was about to change…because of her.
“Then what the hell are you doing on my property?” he asked, growling the question as he did when he wanted to intimidate someone.
She didn’t lower her chin. She only narrowed her eyes and met his hard stare, unintimidated. “I’m checking out the wedding package.”
“Wedding package?” He repeated her ridiculous excuse, almost disappointed that she hadn’t come up with something more plausible.
“Yes, wedding package,” she insisted. “The ad described it as a wedding ceremony on the shore of the beautiful Lake of Tears, performed by a real Indian shaman. And the reception in the dining room of the house.” She gestured toward the Victorian on the hill. “And a honeymoon in the bridal suite in the second story of the turret.”
Damien’s breath caught with a stabbing pain in his chest. Damn, now he knew why Nathan had insisted on a meeting. He’d hatched another of his hairbrained schemes. But this one…
How could his cousin have ever considered opening up the lake and the house to the public a good idea? How could he think Damien would go along with such a thing…? How would reducing their heritage to
