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Category: Historical Fiction/Romance
Description: Tina's life is turned upside down when she discovers she is not the free spirited gypsy girl she thought she was, but an heiress to a small fortune and a stately old mansion. But as she returns to her roots to claim her life and her inheritance, she finds danger around every corner. Jason Ward is taken by the dark haired beauty he meets on a train, but more intrigued by the men following her. She's oblivious to the danger she is in and he welcomes the opportunity to get closer by providing his protection while keeping his own secrets safe. But the tarot cards say that deception is in Tina's future. Will Jason be the one who will betray her?
eBook Publisher: Champagne Books, 2007
eBookwise Release Date: April 2007

3 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [312 KB]
Words: 69017
Reading time: 197-276 min.

"You must do whatever has to be done," Pitar would have advised me. That meant I must reach and board the train, no matter what had happened to Zurka, nor how many or perilous the obstacles. Zurka was beyond my help.

What will be, will be.

I crossed a square, hurrying beneath a statue of a soldier mounted on a horse, his sword raised to heaven. The fog thinned, giving me a glimpse of carriages waiting in a row some distance ahead in front of a small wooden building. The station house.

As I drew nearer I saw, on the other side of the depot, globed lights shining down on a waiting train. A whistle shrieked and white steam billowed from the gigantic black locomotive. Behind the hissing engine was a string of yellow and green cars--coaches, I'd heard them called. I'd never been close to a train--Grandmother MacArthur and I had lived in a secluded valley in Virginia--watching them always from a distance, hearing whistles calling their messages of loneliness in the night. Now I must escape on one. Alone.

I took another deep breath, trying to banish the image of a heartbroken Sasha when she heard that Zurka had made the journey from life to death. To save me.

The heels of my gaje shoes clicked on the cobblestones as I ran across the road and up stone steps leading to the top of a small embankment. From there I climbed wooden steps to the platform. Faces, white and disembodied, stared down at me from the coach windows. Smoke drifted around me, bringing with it the sharp choking odor of cinders. Steam hissed from the side of the locomotive and sent wraith-like tentacles curling across the platform.

The bleak gray of the dawn and the smoke and the steam reminded me of a picture in one of Grandma MacArthur's books, a drawing of naked men and women writhing in agony in an inferno of flame and smoke. Belatedly, I saw that the train was moving. Was I too late?

A man's figure appeared in the midst of the steam, a vague distorted blur, a wavering shape that seemed to dissolve and then reform in the mist as he walked toward me. I stood frozen when, with an accompanying rush of terror, the rest of my dream came back. Unlike my dream, steam, not fog, hid this man who stalked me.

The outline of a tall man in gray materialized from the enveloping whiteness, a man striding rapidly toward me, his eyes fixed on mine. I swallowed, in my fear unable to retreat, unable to move at all. He grasped my arm, pulling me with him, willy-nilly, as he strode toward the moving train. Terrified, I wondered if he meant to throw me under its huge iron wheels.