An Enigmatic Man

‘But—’

‘You and I both know what he is,’ the man cut in impatiently. ‘Merlin is the one who has doubts, and I think it better if we humour him—don’t you?’

Crys glanced down at the slavering animal. ‘Exactly what sort of…what breed is he?’ she amended, opting on the side of caution. After all, Merlin had only just stopped growling again.

‘Irish Wolfhound,’ the man supplied. ‘Now, I’m sure it’s been very pleasant passing the time of day with you—’ his tone implied otherwise ‘—but, as you can no doubt see, I have a grave to finish digging. So if you wouldn’t mind—’

‘It really is a grave?’ she gasped, her grey gaze once again wide with apprehension. The damp of the fog seemed to have seeped into her very bones and she gave a slight shiver.

Good heavens, perhaps she really had stumbled on Dracula’s castle, after all? Although she’d thought vampires only came out at night. Well, the heaviness of the damp fog hardly made it daylight, did it? She had been driving with her headlights on for the last two hours!

‘Who—er, I mean, what—?’ Crys began to take small steps backwards even as she formulated the question, positive that if she attempted to run the dog would have her down on the ground in seconds. The hound was obviously completely obedient to his master. A master who seemed more menacing by the second…

Not that he had looked particularly inviting in the first place. How to make a dignified exit? That was the problem.

Forget dignified—she just wanted out of here!

‘You’re right, Mr—er—I have taken up enough of your time.’ She tried to smile as she spoke, but her cheeks refused to comply with the instruction, her lips twisting into a grimace rather than a smile. ‘I’ll just be on my way—’

‘Where?’

She blinked at the abruptness of his question. ‘I’m sorry…?’

The man scowled darkly. ‘Not too many people come down this lane, let alone down the driveway; I asked where you were going,’ he snapped.

Were going…!

This was obviously the cue for Crys to ask for directions to Sam Barton’s house and be on her way. But now that it had come to the crunch she found she didn’t want to tell this man exactly where she was going. Or why. But she had to say something!

She shrugged, shivering again as the damp fog penetrated her woollen jacket. ‘I’m on my way to stay with friends.’

That was it; make sure that he knew she was expected somewhere, that someone would notice and call the police when she didn’t arrive at her destination. Not that she was altogether sure Molly would go to that extreme; her friend would probably just assume Crys had changed her mind about coming to Yorkshire, after all. But this man didn’t have to know that!

‘I must have just taken a wrong turning in the fog,’ she tried to dismiss lightly. ‘I won’t trouble you any further—’

‘As I’ve already pointed out, Merlin is more troubled by your presence than I am,’ the man drawled.

‘He seems—calm enough now,’ Crys attempted pleasantly. She remembered reading somewhere—she had no idea where!—that it was harder for someone to harm you if you established some sort of rapport with them, that an attacker was caught off-guard if the victim—

She was not a victim, damn it! She was merely a lost traveller who had stumbled upon—well, she wasn’t sure what she had stumbled upon. But it was unnerving enough for her to know she wanted to leave. Now.

‘Looks can be deceptive,’ the man told her. ‘Irish Wolfhounds, as a breed, are born hunters,’ he continued almost conversationally. ‘Instinctively trained to—’

‘Are you deliberately trying to frighten me?’ From somewhere—probably that same article that had advised building up a rapport!—she recalled that it was always better to attack rather than let oneself be attacked.

The man’s mouth twisted into the semblance of a smile. ‘Do I need to try?’ he taunted.

Her cheeks coloured fiery-red at his obvious mockery. ‘I’m not scared of you—’

‘Aren’t you?’ He grimaced. ‘Then you’re giving a very good imitation of it!’

She gasped at the deliberate cruelty of his jibe. ‘I am not—’

‘There’s a vein pulsing erratically at your left temple,’ he cut in. ‘Your pupils are dilated, the muscles in your face refuse to obey your commands, your body is tensed to rigidity, your hands are clenched so tightly into fists that you’ve probably made puncture marks in your palms with those nicely painted nails—’ his gaze returned to her face ‘—and, unless I’m mistaken, despite the fact that you’re obviously shivering with the cold, there’s a very unbecoming bead of perspiration on your top lip.’

Everything he had said was true, Crys knew. But the fact that he was so aware of them too only served to make her angry at his unnecessary taunting.

‘Women don’t perspire—they glow!’ she bit back, two bright wings of colour in her cheeks now, annoyed that, despite all her efforts, he seemed to have so easily gauged her emotions. ‘This place is like something out of a Gothic horror story, guarded by the Hound of the Baskervilles. You step out of a grave to greet me, looking every inch as wild and savage as your—your hound—’ she amended her words in an effort to stop the dog from growling once again ‘—and you expect me to look calm and collected!’ She was breathing hard in her agitation, her fists clenched in frustrated anger now.

The man shrugged, apparently completely unperturbed by her outburst. ‘I don’t expect you to be anything,’ he replied scathingly. ‘I didn’t invite you here. I have no idea who you are. Nor do I have any interest in knowing,’ he finished insultingly.

‘And you have a grave to finish digging!’ Crys inserted disgustedly.

‘For a relation of Merlin’s,’ he explained. ‘An Alsatian. We found him in the woods this morning.’ He nodded tersely in the direction of a tarpaulin that lay on the ground several feet away, unnoticed by Crys until that moment.

A tarpaulin that obviously covered the body of a dead dog…

She swallowed hard. ‘Doesn’t he, or she, have an owner? Someone who—who needs to know about—? They might want to bury their pet themselves.’ She couldn’t take her gaze off the tarpaulin, her knees shaking in reaction, that shaking moving up the whole of her body as she spoke, even her voice beginning to quiver over the last few words.

‘It probably did have an owner at one stage, but to my knowledge it’s been living wild in the woods the last few months. The local farmers have been trying to capture it for weeks, because its been bothering sheep that are in lamb.’ His mouth thinned. ‘I guess one of them must have caught up with it.’

Crys’s startled eyes searched the hardness of that partly obscured face. ‘You mean—is that legal?’ she choked as the full realisation of the dog’s death began to hit her.

‘Probably not. But proving it would be a problem,’ he replied grimly.

Crys knew she had gone very pale—could feel the blood draining from her cheeks even as her fascinated gaze returned to the tarpaulin. ‘I—do you think it was—quick?’

The man frowned his irritation. ‘How should I know? Although, I doubt it. Poison is usually slow and insidious.’

‘Poison?’ Crys echoed faintly, eyes now huge in the paleness of her face, the band of freckles across the bridge of her nose standing out in stark relief.

He nodded abruptly. ‘There are no wounds, no sign of any injury, in fact; poison is as good a guess as any for the cause of death.’

Death, death, and more death. Everywhere she looked—everywhere she went!—there was death!

It was Crys’s last agonising thought before blackness engulfed her and she crumpled down onto the damp earth…

CHAPTER TWO

CRYS came back to consciousness feeling something rough against the side of her face and a rocking sensation which, since her head was already light and disorientated, threatened to bring on a bout of motion sickness.

She opened her eyes to find herself elevated off the ground, obviously being carried, her gaze widening with horror as she found herself looking up into the fiercely grim face of the man she now remembered owned an equally savage-looking dog. A dog that padded along at its master’s side.

Crys opened her mouth—

‘Don’t you dare scream!’ the man muttered between clenched teeth.

Crys closed her mouth as abruptly as she had opened it, totally startled by the fact that, even though he wasn’t looking at her but grimly ahead, the man had realised she was once again fully conscious.