The Mammoth Book of Hot Romance is now up for
pre-order. Which means I need to add a book page and an excerpt. But in the meantime:
Wolf at the Door
copyright 2011 Charlene Teglia
Karen parked by her cabin overlooking Lake Crescent and nearly ran from her car to the front porch. Once she had the heavy wooden door bolted behind her, she did a quick visual check of the cabin’s interior. The woodstove sat at the center of the open floor plan. Her living space circled it, beginning with the kitchen area that gave way to a trestle style table with two benches on either side, then a faded couch next to two tall and overstuffed bookcases.
Nothing looked out of place. She checked the bathroom that was pretty much a closet on the far side of the kitchen, the only room with a door. It, too, was empty except for a small sink, toilet and shower stall.
She climbed the ladder up to the half-loft that served as her bedroom. The big log bed covered with a bright quilt, night stand and dresser all looked just the way she’d left them before she’d headed out for a hike in an effort to find some peace or at least wear herself out. On impulse, she opened the deacon’s bench at the foot of the bed. Tucked under neatly stacked clean sheets and an extra quilt, an antique dagger rested. She covered it back up and closed the bench, exhaling relief.
The cabin and its contents had been left to her when her employer, an eccentric collector and historian, passed away. Jobless and bereft at the loss of the man who had been more like a grandfather than a boss, Karen had left Seattle for the rustic location to mourn and regroup.
When she’d taken possession, the post office had delivered the package they’d been holding for her. A package addressed by the man she’d just buried. She’d found the dagger inside, along with some notes about its history that read like the wildest fantasy.
Maybe Cyril Foster had started to suffer some insidious erosion of his brilliant mind towards the end of his life. Or maybe he really had left a genuine bone-handled Damascus dagger from the 1500s that contained the soul of a mad German werewolf in her keeping.
Since he’d also promised her that she’d be protected by a wolf guardian and warned her of dark forces that had hunted the dagger through the centuries, Alzheimer’s seemed more likely. Except that she’d just been saved by a guardian wolf.
Coincidence? Maybe. But the odd phone calls with nobody on the end of the line that ended with a disconnection, the men who had been waiting by her car and the frequent sensation of being watched that had dogged her since shortly after she’d arrived at the cabin meant something was going on, and that dagger was probably in the middle of it.
Cyril’s collection had been accounted for in his will. As his personal assistant, she’d helped catalog it. This piece hadn’t been included. She’d seen the dagger for the first time when she’d opened the package Cyril had mailed to the cabin the week he died. If nobody knew he’d had it, who would come looking for it? Somebody who knew it was in his possession, somehow. A piece that old, with a history that colorful, somebody must have known something about it. Maybe somebody suspected Cyril had kept it hidden even after his death.
“If you’d bothered to explain any of this while you were alive, it would make my life so much easier,” Karen said out loud.
But he hadn’t, and now he was beyond reach. She couldn’t ask him to explain, couldn’t demand that he tell her what was really going on. All she could do was carry out his final instructions to her and keep the dagger hidden.
The incident in the parking lot made her wish she’d rented a safe deposit box to stash it in. It had seemed safe enough hidden at the cabin before, when she’d believed nobody else knew about it.
She regretted her failure to find a more secure hiding place even more when the sound of an engine outside was followed by the crunch of booted feet on gravel and a knock at her door.
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