Page 1 of Victorian Bride

Prologue

Mya ran.

Behind her ribs she could feel the beat of her heart, steady and strong. Her legs pumped, carrying her, swift and easy. The sensation of air flowing over her skin and filling her lungs made her light. Beside her, she could feel another presence, matching her stride. They ran for the joy of it, just because they could, and it filled her up, overflowing in her chest. She bounded over a rock, and he jumped at her side.

Her footing faltered.

Mya stumbled. Something in her body shifted, and her feet became clumsy. Her legs would not obey her commands. The world looked strange around her, seen through eyes that were unfamiliar. She managed to catch herself before falling. It took a moment but she was able to start moving again.

Overhead, thunder crashed, unrolling itself across the clouds with a deep, displeased rumble. Lightning forked down, burning the skeletons of trees across the backs of her eyelids in silhouette. Her companion was gone. He hadn’t stumbled. He’d run ahead, and in the darkness she had lost him. She ran on alone, because she had to. Fear drove her forward. There was no time, and she could not remember what she searched for.

Rain fell, sharp as needles. It pricked against her skin and chilled her through. To her left, she could hear the sound of surf falling against shoreline, violent and ragged as the wind that drove it. She shivered, and pushed her stumbling legs forward. Wet hair tumbled into her eyes and clung to her cheeks, obstructing her vision. She reached up to push it back.

Thunder boomed, and the earth split. The ground went out from under her feet.

Mya fell.

There was nothing for her grasping hands to catch. Only emptiness beneath her, and pain. Stabbing. Tearing. Pain that ripped through her chest and left her gasping in shock, struggling to breathe. Worse than anything she’d ever experienced. Enough pain to tear a heart. It burned along her veins.

A scream forced its way up from the depths of her, but no sound escaped, all the air gone from her lungs, her throat tight.

The pain dragged her up toward the light.

She woke.

Chapter 1

Mya came slowly up from the depths of unconsciousness.

Her first awareness was of quiet. Her ears rang with echoes of thunder she didn’t remember. She let her senses roam outward, trying to determine her position without opening her eyes. There was something soft beneath her. A bed, maybe. The warmth of a heavy blanket covered her.

She took a deep breath, smelling clean linen, and the faint scent of cooking drifting into the room from somewhere else. For a moment, she simply lay still, basking in the peace of it. That didn’t last long.

There was something whispering at the back of her mind. A worry that she couldn’t quite put a name to. When she tried to reach for it, the warning slid further from her reach. The last vestiges of a dream, maybe, lingering at the edges of her thoughts before the daylight melted it away completely. It was not enough to aid her, in any case. Mya shook off the concern and opened her eyes to discover her surroundings.

The room wasn’t what she had expected. Though what, exactly, she had thought it would be, she couldn’t have explained. Smaller, maybe. Some part of her had thought it would be… Not this. She couldn’t pinpoint more than that.

It was spacious, papered in cream and sky blue, and paneled in wood that gleamed the color of honey in the light spilling through the windows. A chest of drawers in the same wood sat against one wall, topped with a tall oval mirror. Next to the bed was a cabinet with a washbasin and pitcher sitting atop it. A pair of pastel pink chairs faced each other in front of the high arched windows, a little table between them. Through the glass, Mya could see a sloping yard set here and there with trees, and behind it purple hills rising up toward a blue and cloudless sky.

Mya didn’t recognize it.

How had she arrived there? She tried to think back, to trace memories that might have led to the bed she was lying in, but there was nothing. Just blankness. Emptiness. It was as though all the time before that moment when she first returned to awareness had never existed at all.

She knew her name, and the names of the things around her, but she could not remember where she’d learned them. Or when. It was a disconcerting realization.

“Oh. My.”

The voice from the door startled her, and Mya levered herself upright on one elbow, turning to see who spoke. Or, at least, she attempted to. The motion sent a jolt of pain through her shoulder that had her collapsing back to the mattress with a gasp, panting for breath.

“You ought not to move, dear,” the voice that had spoken before said, low and worried, just as its owner bustled into Mya’s view.

She was tall, clad in a gown patterned with sprays of pale green leaves and belted at her waist. As she reached Mya, she laid a hand on her forehead, tutting at whatever she discovered there.

“You are meant to be resting,” she said as she turned to the basin sitting beside the bed and wrung water from the cloth sitting in it. “Young Lord McGregor found you in our back field, badly injured. It was quite uncertain for a time whether you would wake at all. Lottie was quite firm in her belief that you would, but even Doctor MacAslan had his doubts in the first days of your stay with us.”

She was, Mya thought, rather pretty, perhaps a few years older than Mya herself, her pale hair touched with red. She laid the damp cloth over Mya’s forehead, and stroked her hair gently back from her face so it would not catch.

“I need to take a look at your shoulder,” she went on while Mya was still trying to process everything she had just learned. “If it will not trouble you for me to do so?”