Page 2 of Hotshot Mogul

Gen sobbed and let me go. I ran to Nigan and pressed my face into the strong column of his neck. He freed my hair from its cap. It fluttered to the ground. “Mon amour,” he spoke against my ear.

I put his hand over my stomach. “Bébé.” I felt his grin, the one I fell in love with. “Es-tu heureux?” I asked. Are you happy?

“Oui.”

I pulled his head down and kissed him, not caring if Gen would see. I poured my love for him in every sip and thrust and pressed my tender breasts against his hard, honed chest, only lifting my mouth to drag air into my lungs.

“Lise?” Gen cried out. Her tone was urgent, the same as it was when we discovered our maman and papa had died. “J’entends des gens.” I hear people.

Nigan pulled me behind him. He had no long gun, only his bow and arrows. I stood close, shivering in the summer heat.

My true mate, my heart, stepped away from me and picked up his knife. The other Natives descended like flies on deer flesh. Why? I hid behind the oak. The arrow pierced my beloved’s neck. His red life force spurted. He fell. I dragged him behind the tree and held him until he stopped drawing breath.

My sister found me. Several had to take him from me. A couple of nights later, the baby inside me left my body. I did not take food or speak until I begged a medicine woman from Nigan’s tribe to hear my plea. She agreed to meet me in the glade.

“I ask the sun, moon, and the earth that sustains us to release me from this crushing ache inside my heart,” I told her.

When she left, I shut my eyes and fell into a slumber so deep, I sank into the earth where Nigan had last drawn breath. My spirit ebbed from my body. I sank hard and deep into the roots of the white oak. I was joyously encased within the branches—finally free of pain.

***

Anneliese

Present Day (2040)

My mouth was dry, and not just because I was in a human body again. My female parts throbbed in desire just looking at the man through the wild lilac bushes. And I couldn’t even see his face. He turned away from me. His body looked strong. He moved with grace and agility. He had to be rich from the cut of his clothes. He meant to destroy the white oak and white pine forest, everything that I loved and belonged to.

It was true, all of Kiera the Celt’s wild tales about Green Man—Grenmann—and the fairy realm. Isolde, the fairy queen, pointed to the man. He moved like Nigan. Desire, sharp as arrows, boiled low in my spine, tightening my core as if my body knew him.

“Focus!” Isolde scolded me in the language of the fairy realm I had come to know. My French words had faded as I’d settled joyfully into my roots and branches and into the rhythms of the glade for centuries. “You have only five days,” she said, softening her tone. The man attached a sign that said Rezoning to the massive oak tree that my tree-spirit soul had inhabited for hundreds of earth revolutions. For now, I was a tree spirit in a human body. No, nothing strange was happening….

Isolde, the fairy queen, took my hands in hers, her face etched in concern. She was as beautiful as the dawn with dark skin and eyes, lush red lips, and hair the same brown as willow bark. “Dearest Anneliese, you are gentle and kind. I’m not sure you can do battle with him or be strong enough to stop him. And you had an…attachment to him when you both last walked the earth. Yet, this is the only way.”

“Attachment?” So that explained it.

“When you last walked the earth, he and you were together in this place. He was killed before you could be his mate in the eyes of his people. He was skilled in trapping fur for the trading outpost where you and your husband once lived. Your husband by law was not good. You longed for the other man, carried his baby for a short time. Best not to revive that attachment, or become attached to humans again at all.”

I knew what happened before when I watched someone I loved more than my life die. “You said I have only five days,” I said. “What happens after that?”

“You will be trapped in this body. And he will desecrate our sacred trees.”

“A tree spirit trapped in a human body forever?” I looked down. “How unpleasant.” Had this happened to other tree spirits? I took stock of my form. I had pale skin and was slender with curves. My hair was different than before. It was lighter and hung just past my shoulders. I stood taller than Isolde.

“How did this happen? Why am I in this body?”

Isolde glanced at Grenmann. He nodded. “Another lost soul, trapped in her grief, begged to be released, as you did. Her beloved parents and brother were killed. She had no one else.” She shuddered. “It was a horrific accident. She was granted her petition, as you were. Her spirit will heal in time, and she lives joyously in nature, as you did. It will take hundreds of earth rotations, as it did for you.”

“Won’t the humans who knew her know that something is amiss?” I asked.

“No. She had no one,” Isolde said. “She found her way somehow to this glade.”

I took a step toward the man. The wind gusted cold against my soft human skin.

“Wait, my child!” a low voice rumbled through the trees. It was Grenmann, the ancient tree spirit, guardian of the forest. “You will need clothes, and money.”

“And lessons in language, and, well, everything,” Isolde said.

CHAPTER ONE

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