Page 1 of Curves for the Mountain Man

Chapter

One

GINGER

Click.

A car door opens. My heart slams against my ribs.

One imperative throbs through my brain, one obsession steels my focus…

Survive.

Last night and today blur together. So do life and death. Only before and after remain, fracturing the timeline of my life…

Before a clammy, large hand gripped my mouth, stifling my screams as I frantically awoke from sleep. Before a violent male arm locked around my waist, yanking me, kicking and screaming from my bed, silencing the few cries I managed with a smack of duct tape. Before I stared into the inky, evil eyes of a masked assailant as he hauled me by my long hair through the house, glancing at the lifeless bodies of my two roommates on the kitchen’s ancient linoleum.

Before my sight disappeared beneath an opaque blindfold, and the intruder bound my hands and feet in the back of a vehicle, hog-tying me so that I can’t sit up. I envision myself in the trunk of an SUV or similar vehicle, though this is only a guess.

The trunk latch closed, and “after” began… The interminable drive as I counted the seconds, hoping for some indication of how far we traveled. After, with ears straining and senses honed for any clue, any hint at our final destination. After the car stopped moving, the engine cut, and the door opened.

How long have I been missing? Why am I still alive?

Hours ago, I quit fixating on the most obvious question: Why me?

What did I do to deserve this? Ginger Harper—the good girl, the rule follower, the virgin, the goody two-shoes. The one who focused on her studies and her career and doing everything right … by the book and with superstitious precision, mistakenly assuming it guaranteed a safe, vanilla future.

If I knew then what I know now, how brutally short my life would be, I’d have done things radically different. Taken chances. Fallen in love. Gotten my heart broken a time or two. Bent rules and lived brazenly on my own terms instead of the world’s.

Because all of the rule-following, all of the cautious decision-making, all of the doing things by the book … coloring inside the lines have still culminated in this present horror.

I stopped feeling my hands a while ago, the rope digging into my wrists and cutting off the blood supply, so they got grainy and fell asleep. I would give anything—maybe even my soul—to move them again. Or to have even one drop of water on my tongue.

One drop.

A luxury beyond imagining.

I would cry if I had tears left. Instead, I pray for mercy, the kind that brings swift death.

Minutes pass. I hear vague noises. The rustling of fabric. Heavy footfalls. Heavier breathing. Metal hitting metal.

The wind blows in great gusts outside, and the car shudders. A winter storm warning is predicted for this evening. I made a point yesterday to get extra groceries, some candles in case the lights went out, hot cocoa, and a few logs for the fire. I even added new romances to my Kindle, fully ready to enjoy the blizzard…

The blood roars through my veins, my pulse fluttering, and I feel lightheaded. I remember a white-crowned sparrow my childhood cat, Macy, caught. It trembled and died between her paws from a heart attack long before the calico sunk her teeth into its fragile neck. “Please, God, show me mercy. Let me die of fright.”

The trunk latch sounds, and I hear whistling. “Yellow” by Coldplay.Skin, bones…The lyrics wash over me, terror rushing behind them.

The kidnapper tugs on the bindings around my ankles, his clammy hands grazing over my flesh. I grimace, registering every movement with startling clarity as time crawls to a stop.

He frees the bindings around my wrists, and I tentatively move my arms, deep aches shooting through the fronts of both shoulder joints.

The blindfold flies away, and I squint in the harsh light of early afternoon that pierces the shrouded forest canopy. My eyes narrow on his maskless face—revulsion, anger, and terror twisting me.

Asher Scofield.

A mass of thick hazelnut curls crown his head, and his black eyes scrutinize me, oozing frigid superiority. His thick eyebrows form an unkempt unibrow, and his cheeks bear days worth of stubble. An acquaintance of my roommates, we attended the University of New Brunswick together before my graduation last year.

Asher always creeped me out. He told sick stories, stories that made me wonder if the biology grad student perceived fellow humans as individuals or test subjects. He spoke cruelly of animals, nauseating me on several occasions with depraved jokes about experiments he ran. His presence raised the hairs on the back of my neck and twisted my stomach. I did everything in my power to avoid him.

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