Stranded with Her Rescuer
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Nikki Logan
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Prologue
Five years ago, Pokhara, Nepal.
WILL MARGRAVE LEANED a shoulder against the rounded earthen interior wall of his villa overlooking Pokhara and peered through the window down to the terrace flats below. The topmost flat was furred with the gentle, swaying grasses native to this part of Nepal, peppered with small clusters of shrubs and fully fenced all the way around to the kennels out back of the house. The yard had to be large, to do its job housing his sixteen rescue dogs.
Maybe it was the richness of the light, or the majesty of the mountains or the mirrored reflection of Phewa Lake but everything in this environment just sat so...comfortably in it.
Including him.
Will leaned forward into the window’s curve to watch the solitary woman below mingling with his dogs. Kitty Callaghan liked to start her day early and she liked to start it outside. On her second day here, he’d spotted her halfway down the terraces, meditating under the watchful protection of the Annapurnas as the sun rose behind the mountain range, doing her best impersonation of a normal, still person. Usually she was anything but, and today she was clearly in a more active mood, jogging back and forth in the fenced-in yard, tapping the noses of one dog then the next and darting back out of reach as they joined the game, drawing a canine cluster back and forth with her as she ran, not minding how silly she might look or how much dirt they kicked up.
Dogs and dirt didn’t bother Kitty any more than the looming mountains and composting toilets did. It was one of the things he liked about her best.
Not everybody loved the silent granite sentinels that marked Nepal’s border. Mountains were dominant, powerful forces—for better or worse. Some people found them oppressive and ominous, almost claustrophobic. People like his wife. Though how Marcella could stand anywhere on this hillside under these vast, wild skies and feel closed in was a mystery to him.
Like so much about her.
That mystery had once intrigued him—back when he’d assumed her secrets would unfurl like a lotus as the months and years passed—but intrigue had a way of losing its appeal when your marriage eroded as steadily as the rock beneath your feet.
Down below, Kitty laughed as one dog got the better of her. She arched back when Quest reared up and placed his paws on her slight shoulders, her face turned up to the gentle morning light—twisted away from Quest’s errant tongue—and the magic of her laughter cascaded like water down the terraced hillside.
And like warm breath down his spine.
Ugh... Moments like this one didn’t help his resolve. Looking at those wide grey eyes in perfect pale skin and not wanting to just...dive right in to see what curiosities lay behind them. Sitting up late at night by the fire, hovering on the precipice of the kind of conversations he missed so desperately, lying to himself that he could get a handle on the feelings that had been escalating ever since she arrived ten short days ago to film her series of freelance pieces in Nepal.
Ten long days knowing that Marcella was the kind of woman he’d always wanted—glamorous, talented, creative—but beginning to fear that Kitty was the kind he actually needed.
And he didn’t want to need anything from anyone who wasn’t his wife.
Eleven months ago he’d given Marcella his promise along with his heart, and he was not about to betray either of those. If he had to break his word to a woman, it wasn’t going to be the one he had pledged himself to in front of God.
They could make this marriage work—he could make it work.
Will shoved the ache down deep inside as he withdrew from the window. Kitty Callaghan needed to go. She didn’t have to leave Nepal—she could finish up her work—she just had to get out of this house. This town.
This marriage.
And she needed to do it soon, before the questions her presence raised began to eat away at the foundations of his already shaky relationship.
Will balled his fingers into fists and headed for the stairs.
He wasn’t even halfway down before his heart started hardening against her.
* * *
The slow rise of her head, the easy, surprised-to-see-you smile she offered him... It was all fake. Kitty knew the precise moment Will stepped out of his house, even as she had her back to him and the massive Annapurnas towering up behind him. She didn’t need Quest’s excited stare to tell her he was approaching, either.
She could feel him.
She could always feel him; in the tickle of her neck hairs and the tightening of her belly. Some kind of primitive intuition doing its thing. Still, she gave him her brightest, most welcoming smile. Because it was something she could do. A gesture that celebrated the bond she’d formed with him, in a perfectly appropriate way. One that said she knew exactly how lucky she was to be here.
‘Morning, Will.’
‘Got a moment, Kitty?’
There was something in the hard shadow in his eyes, the stiff way he was holding himself. The same way he did when one of his dogs indicated positive on a shard of clothing during a missing-hiker search. His tension infected her, too, and Quest fell away from their game, disappointed but accepting.
‘Sure.’
Will held a courteous hand low to her back as he guided her out of the dog yard, then seemed to think better of it and tucked it down behind his own body. As if she were tainted.
‘Something wrong? Is Marcella okay?’
Because some mornings his wife really wasn’t. Those mornings she looked as if she hadn’t slept more than an hour. If at all. And not in a good, first-year-of-marriage, up-all-night kind of way.
‘Marcella’s fine. I just need to speak to you.’
Instinct told her to get ahead of this conversation, to get some control over it. She spun to face him and he nearly barrelled into her. He caught himself just before impact, then stepped back as though—again—she were infected with something nasty. He backed up a little further for good measure.
That extra step particularly hurt.
‘Something you didn’t want the dogs to hear?’ she joked, though it cost her.
‘Kitty, I...’ He glanced out at the mountains all around them for inspiration. This wasn’t like him. The two of them had had nothing but easy conversations in the ten days she’d been in Nepal. Easy, deep, fabulous talks that felt as if they were continuing old exchanges from years ago.
‘You’re making me nervous, Will. What’s going on?’
‘I need to ask you to leave,’ he blurted.
How embarrassing that her first response was to misunderstand him. She frowned and glanced back at the dogs. ‘The yard? I thought it would be okay to—’
‘Pokhara, Kitty. It’s time for you to go.’
She blinked at him. ‘No, it’s not. I have nearly three weeks before it’s time.’
And, boy, she was not looking forward to that day.
‘Marcella shouldn’t have invited you to stay the whole month. It’s...’ He gazed back at the mountains. ‘It’s too much, Kitty. Too long.’
An awful kind of humiliation washed through her. That she had presumed he would be okay with it just because his wife was. Or seemed to be.
‘You said I was welcome,’ she breathed.
In his own words, with no one twisting his arm.
‘That’s what you do say, in this situation, isn’t it?’
When someone makes a horrendous presumption, did he mean?
‘So...’ Her head spun, and not just from the altitude. ‘Was I never welcome or am I no longer welcome?’
She didn’t really want to know the answer, either way, but she absolutely wanted to hear it from his lips.
‘You’ve finished filming our rescue operation...’
Part of the heat that rushed up her throat was because, to an extent, Will was right. She’d finished the main filming for the dogs, she’d been enjoying Pokhara and getting a feel for the country since then. Imagining what a fantastic piece it was going to make, visually.
And spinning out her time with him.
‘And we’ve got too much going on—’
‘No, you don’t.’
Marcella barely painted, never went out if she could avoid it; she lurked around their property alternating between long bouts of flat melancholy and excited bursts of energy. Meanwhile, Will trained every day but he had a comfortable routine that didn’t wear the dogs out. And only two emergency calls in the ten days she’d been here.
His lips thinned as he stared at her. The first time he’d made actual eye contact.
‘Kitty—’
‘I pick up after myself. I went to the market on Monday to save Marcella the trouble.’ And—PS—paid for a carload of supplies. ‘So what’s the real issue?’
Of course, a dignified person wouldn’t ask. A dignified person would just accept that things had changed and head off to start packing. Smiling, thanking them and giving her hosts a modest gift when she went. But there was nothing dignified about the panic that Kitty was starting to feel at Will’s decree, and not just because of the humiliation. Sometime between arriving and now, she’d realised that she was the happiest she’d ever been in Pokhara. Having that taken away was terrifying.
And the thought of never seeing Will again only compounded it.
‘You can’t really want to stay,’ he urged. ‘Knowing we don’t want you here.’
Something told her that ‘we’ was actually ‘I’, because his wife had clung to her since the day she’d arrived, and Marcella was too Southern and too well brought up to renege on a promise.
‘No,’ she snorted. ‘I don’t. But I’m not leaving without knowing what I did to get myself banished.’
She had a sneaking suspicion, actually, and a whole new flood of shame went on standby, ready for his answer.
For the first time, he softened, and it was so much worse than the hardened exterior he’d presented up until now. Because it was Will, not this icy doppelgänger.
‘You must know, Kit. You’re doing it right now.’
She lost her grip on the humiliation and it flooded her face. For ten days she’d worked so hard to keep a lid on her inappropriate feelings. To pretend the emotions didn’t exist. But they had a habit of leaking out when she was with him. Any time she wasn’t totally vigilant. Talking, laughing.
Or just standing very close, like this... Peering up at him.
‘I...’
Really, what could she say? She knew she was feeling it, and she knew what she was feeling. She would be naïve to imagine she wasn’t showing that at all, but Will hadn’t let on before, or objected to the conversations, the shared space, the accidental body contact passing on the stairs.
She’d even begun to think he might have enjoyed it. Just a little bit.
Obviously not.
‘It’s okay, Kitty, I get it. We’ve been spending a lot of time together—’
Her heart hammered.
She wasn’t about to be condescended to like a teenager. If he’d picked up on her feelings, why had he indulged them? Why not just shut them right down?
Shame ached through her whole body.
This was him shutting them down.
‘I just think it would be better for everyone if you headed off to do your own thing,’ he said.
Get the heck off his mountain, he meant.
‘We were friends,’ she said, numb and flat. Too hurt and too confused to even put any energy behind the accusation.
His eyes darkened and swung away from her. ‘You must want to see the rest of Nepal.’
No, not really. She’d been happy here, happier than any other time in her life. It was this mountain she loved, not just any Nepalese mountain. This town. This man.
That was why she had to go.
She could not love Will Margrave, and he certainly couldn’t love her, even if he wanted to, which—judging by the enormous tension in his body—he did not.
‘I’m married, Kitty.’
Yes, to the woman who’d invited her into their home. Was this how she’d repaid Marcella’s kindness? By making her husband uncomfortable enough to ask her to leave?
She dropped her eyes to the dark, rich earth. She’d caused this. She had to be the one to fix it.
‘Okay,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll go.’
She stumbled away from Will without raising her eyes again. And she didn’t look at him as she wrestled her stuffed backpack down the stairs, or as she hugged a weeping Marcella, or as she closed the door of the aging taxi behind her.
In fact, she didn’t raise her gaze until she was safely away from that Pokhara hillside, just in case he saw something there she would never recover from. Something worse than love.
Shame.
Which made that pitying gaze out by the dogs’ yard the last of Will Margrave she would ever see. And pity the last thing he would ever feel for her.
And she promised herself, in that moment, never to drop her eyes again.
