Page 1 of Lost with a Scot
CHAPTER1
September 1821
Ruritania
Anna Zelensky was lost. Dark branches reached overhead to block the crescent moon. Roots protruded from the black soil to trip her as she tried to run. She couldn’t say what she was running from, but she knew if she didn’t escape it she would die.
“Help.” Her voice was reduced to a raspy whisper. “Someone, please, help me.”
It seemed she was always running from something in her dreams. Something was coming. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
The shadows of the trees lengthened, and she heard breathing in the dark wood.
She started to run again, fleeing whatever now lurked in the dark.
She skidded to an unceremonious halt as her eyes lit on the old oak tree. She knew it, had passed by it many times throughout her childhood. It was a marker for...
“The enchanted well,” she breathed in relief knowing where she was now. She changed direction toward where she knew the oak marked the well-worn path. Her gaze darted about, searching for the circular cairn of stones, knowing she should have seen it by now, but it remained out of her reach. Her lungs burned and her feet were bruised from the uneven path, but she pushed herself to reach the well. Most people avoided it—it was said to have been created by vengeful fairies, full of dark magic. But she had never feared it. She’d been told that there was magic in her blood. The well would help her—it always had before, at least in the land of dreams.
In the midst of a clearing, the gray stone well was revealed to her desperate eyes. She ran toward the edge, her hands gripping the cool rocks. She peered over the edge into the water below, which was still and glossy as a mirror. Her face was reflected back at her.
The surrounding woods trembled with the howls of the beasts that were now close enough to smell her fear. She knew she had but moments before she was attacked.
“Help,please...,” she whispered to the water. The surface rippled, and her reflection vanished. A tall, dark-haired man with solemn gray-blue eyes peered back at her. He was beautiful, his face full of hard angles, strength emanating from his features as he gazed back at her through the water. Her lower belly quivered in a foreign longing that she’d never known before she first saw this man in the water.
Slowly, he reached for her through the water. His hand broke the magic seal between his world and hers. Milky water droplets from the crescent moon shining above dripped down his hand, making her realize he was truly reaching for her, that she couldtouchhim.
“Take my hand, lass,” the man urged in a low, rich voice with a Scottish accent. She’d never been to Scotland, but she knew of it from tales her mother told her. It was a wild, faraway land that matched the man in the water.
The howl of beasts in the woods made her suck in a breath in terror. She glanced at the woods, then back at the man in the water.
“I don’t know how to leave. I don’t know how.”
“Ye’ve got to trust me,” the man said. “I canna protect ye if ye arna willing to take my hand.”
Anna thrust her hand out, grasping his and pulling hard.
She flew awake with a little cry, and it took her a moment to remember where she was. Her silk nightgown was damp with sweat, sitting up in a plush four-poster bed. Her heart was still beating hard in her chest, but her brain was catching up and realizing,It was just a dream. It was just a dream.She wasn’t in the woods; she had been dreaming. Anna was in her large four-poster bed at the Summer Palace, her family’s royal residence. She was safe. No beasts were hunting her, no branches had caught and torn her clothes. She hadn’t really been in the forest; it was just a dream like all of the others. She’d dreamt so many nights of the man’s face in the well. But tonight’s dream felt more...real. As if it had truly happened.
She stared at the embers burning in the hearth across the room as her mind seemed to finally accept that she was safe.
“My lady!” Her lady’s maid, Pilar, a dark-haired Spanish woman, appeared in the doorway that linked their rooms. Pilar stared at her with worry. The candle she held illuminated her in the dark.
Anna rubbed at her face with her palms, gently massaging her cheeks. “I’m all right, Pilar, truly. It was just a terrible dream. I’ve had so many of late.”
Her maid came to her bed and set the candle down on the nightstand, then eased beside her and put an arm around her shoulders, giving her a gentle squeeze. Pilar had been her maid for ten years. She’d come to work at the palace when Anna was only twelve, and Pilar had been a girl of sixteen then. Pilar was more like a sister to her than a maid in many ways, and she trusted the woman with all her secrets. Along with her parents and her twin brother, Alexei, Pilar was one of the people Anna trusted most.
“It was that dream, the one where I’m in the woods and the man in the enchanted well tries to save me.”
Pilar was silent a moment. “Your grandmother had enchantment in her blood. Perhaps you do as well. She was gifted with the sight, and most of her visions came to pass. Do you believe what you saw was something that will happen?”
Anna considered it. Was she like her grandmother? She’d always been told she was. But visions of the future? A man couldn’t reach through the water like that and save her.
“I don’t think monstrous beasts in the woods and the wishing well are real, at least not as they are in my dream,” she admitted. “Perhaps my imagination is overactive.”
“Water is a powerful thing to dream about, milady. Do you trust the man you see in the water?” Pilar asked.
“I... I do.” Was it possible to trust someone she had never met and likely wasn’t even real? She’d seen him so often and for so long that she could answer no other way. Trusting him was like trusting herself.
