“It’s too dark out here to see anything, Bobby,” Tiana Reid told her partner over their helmet coms as she tugged at her harness strap. Thanks to her wide shoulders and generous build, every seatbelt ending up squashing her breasts and sawing against her neck.

“Yes, ma’am, but it’s the highlands,” Ensign Robert Ervin said as he squinted through the helicopter cabin window. The interior lights made his face look slightly haggard, but they had both been on duty for sixteen hours straight. “When will we get another chance to see the place, unless you marry me and we honeymoon in Scotland?”

Tiana chuckled and shook her head. Since partnering up with her in the States during training, her EMT had been proposing to her on a regular basis, usually after a successful mission. Tonight they’d had to locate, treat and transport a trio of middle-aged campers too hurt to make their way to a hospital. The patients had blamed a sudden tumble in the dark for their injuries, which seemed unlikely to happen to all three at the same time. From the smell of alcohol, their lacerated knuckles, and sullen looks at each other, Tiana suspected too much whiskey by the campfire had resulted in a nasty drunken brawl.

They’d pay for their idiocy with the pain from their injuries, plus whatever their irate wives would do, which would probably be worse.

“Inverness in twenty, Lieutenant,” the co-pilot said, glancing back at her. “We’ve some lovely bridal shops in town if you’re needing a gown.”

“Only in his wildest dreams,” Tiana said, making him and the pilot laugh while her partner scowled.

Working with the Her Majesty’s Coast Guard had been a great experience, thanks to the international service exchange program she and Bobby had joined. Still, after a year away from the States she was ready to go home and spend the holidays sleeping in, not to mention hitting the books before reporting for duty after the New Year. She’d be testing in spring for Lieutenant Commander, and if she landed the promotion she’d be given a lot more responsibility.

All you care about is making Admiral or whatever, her ex-husband had accused her more than once.

Alex had never even bothered to understand her commitment to the service. It would be another ten or fifteen years before Tiana worked her way up to a shot at the highest rank in the U.S. Coast Guard, not that it had ever been a goal for her. She loved field work too much to give it up for a desk job. She also planned to spend as much time as she could in the service, as it was the life that best suited her.

Marriage had been the one big mistake Tiana didn’t intend to repeat.

She’d told Alex before they married why the Coast Guard had always been so important to her, and he’d promised to support her military career. With his nine-to-five job as a corporate manager he’d made a lot more money than she did, which should have made things easier for them. Instead Alex had assumed putting a ring on her finger would justify him expecting her to spend all her nights and weekends catering to his wants and needs.

The hard reality of being married to a search and rescue paramedic had sunk in quickly.

Tiana could be deployed anywhere at any time, often on temporary duty assignments that lasted for weeks. She had very few days off, and spent most of them sleeping or catching up on her mission reports. She also refused to drink in the event of a recall, which required her to report to base within twenty minutes. Likewise she had no interest in hanging out in sports bars with Alex’s friends, all of whom were only interested in sneaking looks at her breasts and ass, or making stupid jokes about the service.

The Coast Guard saved my life after Katrina, she’d reminded her husband one night during a particularly ugly argument over a deployment during hurricane season that would keep her in Alabama for a month. By serving I’m paying them back.

Too bad they didn’t get there before the rest of your family drowned, Alex had sniped in return. If they had, maybe your mother would have taught you how a wife should behave.

The fights had only escalated from there, and Tiana had started volunteering for whatever extra duty she could get to escape them, which hadn’t helped. She’d come home early one night to find Alex sitting on the sofa with his secretary, whose blouse had been buttoned crookedly. Later, when Tiana had asked him if he was cheating on her, Alex had immediately denied it. If she was paranoid about him sleeping around, he’d told her, maybe she should have sex with him more often.

He probably hadn’t gone too far with the secretary, Tiana suspected, but she didn’t need an STD to find out she was wrong. She’d grabbed her uniforms and go bag, and took refuge with a friend who lived on base.

When Tiana didn’t come back home after a week Alex had called to give her an ultimatum: leave the service or end their marriage. She should be home starting a family with him, he’d insisted, instead of flying dangerous rescue missions to save the lives of strangers. After she refused, he’d hung up and served her with divorce papers the next day. Although she knew she was to blame for their failed marriage, it was like someone had removed a two-hundred-pound barbell off her chest.

Tiana could finally breathe again.

The helicopter bucked suddenly, jolting her back to the present, and she glanced at the cockpit, where the pilot and co-pilot had suddenly become very busy. On the instrument panel she saw an amber bar-shaped warning light illuminate, which read MGB OIL PRES in big letters. That darkened just before a red version of it appeared.

At the same moment a droning mechanical voice came over the coms with “Gearbox pressure…gearbox pressure.”

“We’ve an emergency,” the pilot said just after the automated warning ended. “Doug, start the checklist, please.” He adjusted something on the instrument panel before he added in a louder, calm voice, “Mayday, Mayday, Inverness Tower, this is Foxtrot Seventeen, ETA ten minutes. We’ve an MGB oil pressure failure.”

Tiana looked over at Bobby, whose placid brown eyes had gone wild with fear. “We’re close, Ensign. We’ll make it.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He sat back in his seat and closed his eyes, taking and releasing a deep breath before he gave her a panicked look. “Shit. I can’t remember any crash landing procedures.”

He was just twenty-one, she remembered, and only two years into his enlistment. She reached over to take his hand in hers.

“Stay calm.” She squeezed his fingers. “Listen to the pilots and follow their instructions. If the coms go down, do exactly what I do.”

His head moved in a jerky nod, but some color came back into his cheeks as he clutched her hand tightly.

In the cockpit the co-pilot was flipping and reading from a ring-clipped set of index cards as the pilot adjusted the instruments. The helicopter began to vibrate slightly, and Tiana heard a strange grinding sound from the rear of the cabin.

“Better in water,” she heard the pilot say. “That loch by the ruins we passed on the flight out?”

“Not if the rotors fail,” the co-pilot replied, and then saw her watching and gave her a thumbs-up. “We’ll be making an emergency landing, Lieutenant. Please get into your immersion suits now. Quick as you can.”

They were talking about ditching in the water, Tiana thought as she reached into the storage bin under the seat and pulled out the big folded bundle of the high-visibility orange jumpsuit. It seemed like a smart move, given that water could be more forgiving than mountains and trees. It might also eliminate the chance of a post-crash fire. A lot would depend on the height and speed of the helicopter when it came down.

She looked over to make sure Bobby had his suit out before she released her harness in order to pull the immersion suit over her dark blue uniform. The cabin light flickered, making the patches of white reflective tape on the orange fabric shimmer. The lightweight but strong suit would be waterproof, and help prevent cold shock from the water when they hit the loch. She tested her personal locator light and then checked the pockets for her emergency supplies.

“Making the turn,” the pilot said, his accent thicker now as he struggled to control the aircraft. “Starting descent. Tail rotor?”

“Goosed,” the co-pilot said, his voice tight.

The helicopter pitched suddenly, the nose coming up and then dropping. Aside from training simulations Tiana had been through a half-dozen real emergency landings, and knew enough about the aircraft to realize they were in very bad shape.

“Don’t put on your gloves yet,” Tiana told Bobby when she saw he was about to do that. She needed to get his focus on her so she could assess his responsiveness; his lack of experience would make him more of a hazard than a help. “We have to strap in again before the pilots land. Gloves make it hard to release the seatbelt clips.”

He looked into her eyes, but he seemed calmer now. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

“We might.” As the cabin seemed to groan around them Tiana smiled at him. She also hated being lied to. “It’s more important to concentrate on doing what we can to survive. When we land it will be very rough. Water will probably flood the cabin. Your first job is to release your seatbelt, and follow me through this door.” She patted the emergency exit hatch beside her.

“Can’t we jump out before we hit?” Bobby asked. “That way we don’t get trapped.”

Before she could reply the pilot’s voice came over the coms. “Brace. Brace.”

The helicopter spun almost in slow motion as it began to rapidly descend. The yawing made Tiana dizzy, but she planted her boots and leaned over as far as she could, tucking her hands under her thighs. A sudden gust of wind slapped her in the face as the emergency hatch flew open, and frantic hands released her harness before yanking her out of her seat.

“Strap back in, Ensign,” she shouted, horrified.

Bobby put her med bag strap over her head and spun her toward the hatch. “We’re going to live.”

Tiana couldn’t get her hands up fast enough to stop him from pushing her out of the cabin, and then she was flailing her arms and legs as she plummeted through the darkness. Just before she hit the water she looked up to see the ensign flung back into the cabin as the helicopter rolled to one side.

Icy water engulfed her, boiling with bubbles and sound as she shot down into the depths, only to be buffeted by a huge force that pushed her back. Pain sliced across an arm and leg as she collided with sharp rocks, which she instinctively grabbed with her hands. Unable to see anything, she desperately pushed off the rocks and began kicking as hard as she could, hoping she was heading for the surface. A faint, rippling pale light appeared above her just before she surfaced in churning waves and smoke.

Alive.

Coughing and sputtering, Tiana thrashed for a moment before she calmed and looked around her. She had fallen near the edge of the water; she could see trees and grass only a few feet away. Several hundred yards from her position an emergency beacon light flashed, growing fainter with every pulse. The flashes showed only the helicopter’s tail section protruding from the dark water.

No one else had escaped the sinking aircraft.

She started to swim toward it, sure she could reach the aircraft before it dropped out of sight, and then saw the tail section do just that. Fresh pain sizzled up her right arm and leg, hampering her movements, and the flashing of her personal locator showed the water around her turning red now.

You can’t save anyone if you don’t save yourself first, one of her training instructors said from her memory.

Sobbing with frustration, she turned and headed toward the shore, staggering as she found her footing. The cold air made her head clear, and then her belly flip-flopped. She landed on her knees in the grass and threw up the water she had swallowed before pushing herself back upright.

“Help, please, help,” Tiana shouted. “There’s been a crash. Please call nine-nine-nine. Please help. Help.”

She called that out over and over, straining her raw throat as she assessed her own injuries. Hitting the submerged rocks had torn her immersion suit in several places, but her arm and leg wounds appeared to be shallow cuts and grazes. The silence that seemed to grow each time she yelled made it obvious no one was within shouting distance. She remembered the loch they had flown past earlier, and how it had been surrounded in darkness.

I’m all alone out here.

She slung her med bag over her shoulder and climbed up onto the rocks, forcing herself to move despite her unsteady legs, and squinting until her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Debris from the helicopter littered the surface toward the center of the water, but no signs of life appeared. Tiana calculated the time it had taken her to swim to shore, throw up, and climb: at least fifteen minutes.

By now anyone who had survived the crash would have drowned.

She rolled her grief into a tight ball and shoved it into the corner of her mind; she’d deal with her emotions later. For now she had to get out of the wind, which had grown so cold it made her teeth chatter, and deal with her injuries. Trees and more rocks hemmed the loch, and the only man-made structures were the ruins of an ancient castle partially enclosed by two crumbling stone walls. Most places like it were protected by fences to keep visitors from roaming around and causing more damage to the historic structures.

“Maybe there’s a tourist office and a phone.” Tiana climbed down and started heading in that direction, ignoring the pain as her injured leg protested.

Little white flecks began falling around her before she reached the first wall, and when she held out her hand she discovered they were snow, not ash. She closed her fingers over the flakes as she glanced up at the sky. The murkiness that blocked out all of the stars had swallowed the moon, too. She recalled the pilot talking about a storm system moving into the highlands that would make this their last flight until it cleared.

She couldn’t stay outdoors much longer; soaked and injured as she was, exposure to freezing temperatures would kill her faster than shock or blood loss.

“I’m going home in a few days,” Tiana reminded herself as she limped her way around the rubble of the wall, and walked up to an ancient, rusted gate made of twisted, blackened metal. It remained in a half-raised, skewed position, so she ducked under it and promptly found herself surrounded by waist-high weeds. “I’ll stay in bed and watch movies on my laptop, and eat all the ice cream I want.”

That wasn’t true, and she knew it.

Once the rescue team arrived Tiana would face ordeals almost as grueling as the crash. She’d have to report everything that had happened in detail to her commander back in Virginia as well as the Scottish transport authorities and the UK Coast Guard. Someone from the American embassy would likely arrive for a briefing as well, and then there would be the paperwork and testifying before the Air Accidents Investigation Branch.

Everyone would be polite, but no one would understand what Tiana had been through unless they’d survived a crash.

She’d stay to attend the funerals here before accompanying Bobby’s body back home, of course. That meant wearing her dress uniform to the services, no matter how serious her own injuries were. She’d likely have to speak to grieving relatives on both sides of the Atlantic, some of whom would blame her for surviving instead of their loved ones. Whatever they said she could not respond with anything except to offer more apologies and condolences.

I shouldn’t have lived, Tiana thought, glancing back toward the loch. How do I tell Bobby’s family that he died because he pushed me out first?

Wading through the weeds took her inside the castle ruins. Most of the walls still stood, but all of the roofs appeared to have rotted and fallen down. She skirted several broken beams and a few young trees as she found a passage she hoped would lead to an enclosed room. If water hadn’t seeped into her med kit she might even be able to build a small fire in one of the old hearths and warm up. She’d become so cold her nose and ears burned, and her hands and feet had grown stiff and clumsy.

“This looks okay,” Tiana said as she peered into one room that had a stone ceiling and a small hearth. The very dusty cobwebs draping the scattering of debris on the floor suggested the absence of rodents and snakes, but when she walked inside she saw stones scattered at the base of one of the walls, which had a large hole in it. “Or not.”

Her breath gusted out white in the still, frigid air as she went over to check the damaged wall, and stopped in her tracks as she saw bones. The stone and bricks that had fallen away when the wall had partly collapsed revealed a large space, in which a big skeleton now sat slumped forward. Some shreds of rotted fabric still covered the torso, and rusted daggers lay in the same position on both lower arm bones. She guessed they had once been in some kind of leather sheathing that had long since decomposed. The glint of long, red-gold hair made her wonder if the remains belonged to a big woman rather than a man. Tiana shuddered when she saw the sword sticking out of the skeleton’s back.

“Looks like you were a guy,” she murmured as she crouched down in front of the hole and saw the distinctive male identifier shapes in the pelvic area.

A terrible pity swelled inside her as she brushed away the dust from the bones, which still looked thick and strong. He’d been very big and likely healthy, and someone had stabbed him in the back and bricked his corpse in the wall.

“Someone killed you a long time ago, didn’t they?” Tiana sat back on her haunches, exhausted and so cold now her entire body seemed numb. “Didn’t even give you a chance to defend yourself, either. Bastard.”

The beauty of the sword caught her eye; it looked as new as if it had been used only yesterday. The scrolled inlay on the surface of the blade looked like real gold, and the hilt appeared semi-transparent, as if the flame shapes of it had been made from red, orange and yellow blown glass. A dramatic touch for the tourists, she suspected but something about it made her reach into the wall again. Touching the weapon made a strange warmth rushed through her, as if hypothermia had already begun to set in.

“Too bad you aren’t real fire,” she said as she caressed the hilt, which seemed as smooth as glass, too. Her fingertips found a gap, and when she slid her hand into it she was able to grip the blade.

Gently she tugged on the sword, unsure as to why she wanted to try to remove it. Had he been alive she might have been able to save him.

Tiny red and orange sparks pinged off the scrolled gold inlay on the blade, and suddenly Tiana’s personal locator went dead, plunging the ruins around her into blackness. She groped with her hands, trying to grab the skeleton’s arm for leverage, but she couldn’t find the bones.

It’s from the cold, she told herself, and stood, taking a step back from the wall.

Terror shot through her as a vision of her features literally frozen and her slumped body half-buried in snow loomed inside her mind. The ghastly image looked so real she forgot to let go of the sword, and pulled it out of the wall space.

I’ll rescue you now, lass, a deep, sorrowful voice murmured inside her ears. You must save him, so that you both may protect his brothers.

As she stared at the wall something big and dark loomed over her, as real and solid as a grizzly bear. Panicking, she turned and ran, colliding with walls and other things and making clouds of dust waft in her face, and then slipped and fell. Before she hit the floor strong arms closed around her from behind and pulled her upright. Big, gentle hands cradled her against what seemed like another wall, this one made of muscle.

“What was that?” she whispered against the chest in her face.

“Your doing, lass,” a deep voice said, with a Scottish burr that stroked her ears like an intimate caress. “No’ mine.”

A swath of fiery light swirled around the two of them, and the icy cold retreated along with the darkness.

Slowly her dazzled eyes adjusted to the new light. Candles and a fireplace provided it, showing a very different room around Tiana. None of the walls appeared to be collapsing, and a primitive wooden door stood partly open. Two long tables made of wood, one holding an odd collection of primitive pots and jars, stood on either side of her. Bunches of dried herbs hung by a set of long, narrow mats that moved with a strong breeze to show long hand-wide slits behind them. Someone had been winding long strips of torn fabric into rolls, and had something bubbling in a pot over the hearth flames.

“It can’t be.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Is this a dream?”

“You’d be mine,” that purring voice said.

Tiana looked up into a pale but intensely masculine face surrounded by a leonine mane of gold-streaked red hair. From the size and build she would have guessed him to be mob muscle, but his beautiful violet-blue eyes and the curve of his very full lips argued against that. No one with such gorgeous eyes and that wonderful smile could be a thug, she decided; he had to work as some kind of bodybuilder mag model.

What a gorgeous man.

Like her he had a big, wide torso and brawler’s limbs, but he also dwarfed her, something that as a very tall woman she’d only rarely experienced. He smelled of fresh pine and old leather, if both had been soaked in sunshine. Although he sported a serious, dedicated bench presser’s build, she suspected he hadn’t acquired his massive muscles at a gym. No, this guy had done the real deal—chopping wood, hefting steel beams, or something else just as tough—and for so long even his hands looked muscular.

The big man returned her scrutiny, and only then did she realize they were still holding each other like lovers.

“Lieutenant Tiana Reid, United States Coast Guard,” she said, too dazed and fascinated to let go of him yet. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Kendric MacRoss.” He brushed some strands of damp dark hair away from her cheek. “Tiana. ’Tis pretty. Forgive me, Lieutenant.”

Tiana watched him shudder, and caught him as he pitched forward. She eased him down on his side on one of the tables, which was when she saw the bloody hole in the odd shirt he wore.

Someone had stabbed Kendric in the back, just like the skeleton she had found in the wall.