Over at The Heroine Addicts, we’ve been talking about settings (my favourite) and it’s evolved into a little writing challenge.  We want to see how different authors approach different settings, especially a setting that’s strongly evocative, that means so much to so many… in this case, Frenchman’s Creek.

To find out more, visit us on the blog, but for now, here is my offering – and – oh! – how I enjoyed writing it!

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She undressed slowly, letting the clothes lie where they dropped. 

She’d dressed with such care that morning, but now it hardly mattered.  Her cream linen trousers were wet, stained with the salty liquid that soaked the bank of the creek and lent a sharp tang to the air.

Breathing deep, she slipped free of the last, carefully functional and conservative flesh-coloured scraps of underwear and stood shivering.  The breeze had been silent when she’d arrived – now it sifted the hair brushing her shoulders, sent the grasses sighing and the leaves of the oaks whispering among themselves.

Her heart was hammering.  Anyone could come, could see… she rubbed her arms, felt the roughening of goosebumps she hadn’t noticed rise.

Toeing off her sandals, the grass felt strangely sharp and strong under her feet.  She stepped forward, laying a hand on the sun-warmed stone beside her, basking like a seal where the emerald flies buzzed in lazy circles. 

As always, the first touch of the water was achingly cold.  She took a deep breath against the shock, forcing herself to take another step.  Estuarine mud oozed between her toes, but the bank sloped steeply and with another step she was deep enough to simply fall forward and slip beneath the surface.  She fought the urge to gasp, to choke.  Instead she let the current turn her, bringing her face naturally to the surface.  Ducking her head back, she washed the hair from her face, slicked it back with hands that trembled. 

Oh, but it was so good.  She ran her hands over her skin, feeling everything lift away, feeling immersed in the power of the water, washed clean by it.  Then she let herself gasp, let herself laugh.  A heron, far down the opposite bank, flapped into the air and drifted away upstream, leaving her alone.

Rolling with the current, she struck out, slicing the water with arms that quickly warmed to the work.  Stretching to the stroke, she swam downstream, past the elderly oak dipping its gnarled branches into the brine, past the fallen tree, lying like the bleached bones of some old leviathan.  Beyond the mouth of the creek, blue sky and blue sea met and melded, mirroring each other’s vastness, a heart-breaking promise of endless adventure.

She’d come here to draw a line, to put all of it behind her.  The swim hadn’t been part of the plan, but it had been an obvious choice, standing there on the bank, knowing all the terror of the past year was over.  The water had called to her.  She’d wanted nothing more than to plunge into its healing depths, to let the coldness wake her, the current cleanse her.

She’d come to Frenchman’s Creek seeking an ending.  She’d never expected to find a beginning, too.

The smile that curved her cheek felt unnatural, unaccustomed.  She felt clean.  Alive.  Free. 

Breathing hard, she angled close to the bank, seeking the slack water.  There she idled a while, sculling languidly back to where she’d started, feeling the delicious contrast the cold water and sun on her face, her breasts and belly.  When she reached the sun-warmed stone, she lifted her head to look.

He was still alive, just.  Sprawled on the rock by the water’s edge, dripping blood that bloomed into russet roses in the living water.  It didn’t matter.  The water would wash that clean, too.  She could hear him breathing, a sound like waves on a shingle shore. 

As she watched, the last drop eased from the scarlet ribbon that painted his arm.  It gathered in the dark hairs at his wrist where the broken watch gleamed silver.  But it did not fall.

An oyster catcher skimmed by, calling, a flash of black and white and scarlet beak.  She breathed deep, tasting sea air and sweet-sharp water.

Smiling, she let her arms drift wide, fingers teased and tugged by the outgoing tide, her palms cupping the force of it.  She lay back, till the water in her ears silenced all sound but the song of the sea itself, and let the current take her.

It’s funny, but the cover for my June release, DANGEROUS LIES, was sent to me at the same time I was launching RUN AMONG THORNS, so I didn’t really celebrate it then, busy as I was with the first one.

And then the moment passed.

And although I posted the cover on the Books page, I never really got to go, TA DAAAAAAAAAAAAA here’s my new cover..!

Which is a darned shame, you know, because (and I know everyone says this) it’s GORGEOUS!  I mean, not only is it visually stunning and intriguing, but it is an exact representation of the opening scene.  Don’t believe me?  Okay, I’m going to post the cover, and post an excerpt of the opening scene and you can make up your own mind…

Chapter One

She shouldn’t have come.

There were doves in the courtyard, snowy white and silent.  They slept on ledges and in niches, on the roof above the pointed Arabian arches, even on the bowl of the broken fountain.

In Marianne’s mind’s eye, and in her grandfather’s photograph, the arches, the walls, and the fountain were bright and blinding white.  Nearly seventy years ago they would have been, but now they were grey and peeling, and here and there a dirty orange stain showed where some elaborately carved bracket had rusted into memory.

Marianne folded the map she held with careful fingers, and stowed it in her shoulder bag.  For years she’d dreamed of visiting Morocco, the country her grandfather had loved so much.  He’d only lived here for a few years, but the place had burrowed itself into his soul, and woven its thread into the stories he told her years later at home in England.
When her father’s death had dealt her grief and freedom in equal shares, Marianne had taken that rare and precious commodity in both hands, packed new clothes and a new courage, and booked her flight before she’d changed her mind.

Sighing, she stepped forward out of the shaded doorway into the courtyard proper, the rough render catching at the long sleeve of her tunic.  In that cherished photograph, the decorative tiles around the fountain lay in a neat order that contrasted with the wild exuberance of their design.

Now they were cracked, lifted, and scattered underfoot.  But the black-and-white print could not have shown the depth of the cerulean blue that dust and debris were working hard to conceal.

It was like the photograph, and it wasn’t.  The false memory that picture and her grandfather’s tales had painted for her hadn’t anticipated the decline, but it hadn’t shown the colour, either.  Hidden good, concealed evil.

She nudged one loose tile with the toe of her cork-soled shoe, absently settling it back into its place by the fountain’s weed-covered plinth.  Her movement startled the sleeping birds, who rose in flustered and flapping cooing, swirling the dust with their feathers, and clapping away into the sunlight.  With them gone, the space was dead and still, smelling of hot dust and a little of guano.  It was a forgotten space, abandoned.  Decayed.

It was a mistake, though, to think that the house had been left empty when her grandfather had left.  The agents, eagerly anticipating an impulse buy from a gullible tourist, had told her the dwelling had stood empty only for a year or two.
“More like five,” she sighed, running a wary hand down the pillar of one stately arch.  The rust stains and broken tiles told of a neglect even older than that.

She tipped her head back, letting the sun’s heat brand her face.  Her skin was pale, the sun was strong.  She’d stayed in the shade at the hotel pool, and even now she wore a wide-brimmed hat and sunscreen.  I am sensible, she thought, even when being reckless.  She didn’t much like the notion.

The doves had settled somewhere out of sight.  Their cooing floated down to her, and her mind conjured the soft sound of water playing in the fountain, which now stood dry.

The water was long gone.  Her grandfather had died years ago, before her mother.  And her father . . .

“Damn.”  She flicked sudden tears off her chin with fingers that shook.  “Damn.”

She shouldn’t have—

“Should you be here?”

She spun on one foot, half tripping on the loose tiles, and steadied herself with one hand on the fountain edge.

The man who had spoken stood in the shadows of the doorway, and for a moment the contrast made him appear dark, as Arabic as any other resident of Rabat, Morocco.  Then he stepped forward, and the sun claimed him as her own.

He was fair . . . no, he was golden, gilded, bright.  Tall, slim, with a grace of movement that made her stomach clench.  His hair was short, tousled, but his grooming was impeccable.  Blue eyes, a face lined in the shape of a smile, even now, as he frowned at her.  Surfer dude meets the City of London.  The debonair beach bum.

She’d seen him around the hotel, here and there.  She’d felt his eyes on her, too.  Once she’d thought he might have approached, her but he didn’t.

She frowned.

He smiled.  “Are you lost?  I couldn’t help see you come this way, and I was wondering—“

“The agents know I’m here,” she snapped, more breathlessly than she’d have liked.  She tightened her grip on her bag and edged towards the doorway.  “So does the hotel.”

His brows went up, but he was still smiling.  “That’s good.  Good precautions.”  He gestured towards the street outside, turning a little so he stood sideways in the doorway.  Blocking it and yet not blocking it.  “But this is still not a good place for a lone female tourist.  You’re well off the tourist trail here.”

“I wasn’t sightseeing.”

“But you are a tourist?”  The blue eyes were open, his gaze straight and honest.  The mouth was smiling, the posture was nonthreatening.  But her steady heart rate had gone the way of her breath and the sun beating down on her head, hat or no hat, made her light-headed.  At least, she chose to blame that light-headedness on the sun.

“I think I should get going,” she said, squaring her shoulders, and making an obvious move towards the entrance.

“Ah,” he said, shaking his head a little.  “I’m being dense.  I should introduce myself.  I think you’ve seen me at the hotel?  I saw you—”

I saw you.  She closed her eyes for an instant, bathing in the illicit, tempting thought that he meant that how it sounded.  That he’d really seen her.  But, then, there wasn’t anything to see.

I saw you, too, she thought.

“—by the pool,” he continued, “although we never spoke.”  He held out his hand, steady and strong.  “I’m Alan.  Alan Waring.”

I’m still way too excited about Medallion Press working on my cover.  In celebration of that fact, let me give you an (unedited) excerpt of the scene they’re thinking of basing the cover on.

Jenny has been Kier’s prisoner in a lonely Scottish longhouse for several days.  She makes a break for freedom through the pine plantation surrounding them…

Run Among Thorns – Excerpt

Jenny clutched at the rough bark of a young sitka spruce, and tried not to make too much noise breathing.

The silence of the forest was oppressive.  It seemed to catch sounds and swallow them, so that even the ragged sound of her breathing was pressed down on, and subdued.

Still, she tried to regulate it, because the hammering of her heart in her ears was deafening her, and she couldn’t hear if she was being pursued.

Feeling sticky resin against her palm, she lifted her hand and absently rubbed it down her leg.  It was much darker here under the dark shroud of sweeping boughs, and Jenny waited for her eyes to adjust.  With a sinking feeling, she realised she could see very little, only a sense of deeper and shallower shadows.

She took a deep breath, and squared her shoulders.  Her heart quieting, she could hear nothing else but the light whisper of a breeze among the tops of the trees, and her own breathing.  Not a sound of someone charging after her, on the ground littered with dry, sharp twigs.

The sharp pine scent, mellowed by the smell of damp earth was all around her, and she welcomed it, because it was so different from the last few days.  It was true, incontrovertible evidence she was out and away.  In the dark.  Alone.

She tightened her hands into fists, fingernails digging painfully into her flesh.  Dear Lord, what has he done to me?  She used to be capable, unflappable, unafraid.  Alone in a dark forest at night used to be an adventure, not an ordeal.

Her fear was out there, though, stalking her like a living thing moving among the trees.  Intangible, incorporeal.  There was also a man out there, probably, hunting her down as well.  But the man didn’t scare her half as much as the faceless spectre of her own emotional self, conspiring against the mind God gave her, to bring her down, body and soul.  Jenny closed her eyes to it, closed her mind to it, and concentrated.

She knew the trees were planted in rigid rows, and that she stood facing in the direction the rows ran.  She put her hand out again to the sticky tree, and stepped away from it, until only her fingertips grazed the bark.  Her feet dipped down into the shallow ditch between rows, springy with years of slow-rotting pine needles.  Here, looking straight ahead, the darkness was more silvered with moonlight, percolating through the branches overhead.  Jenny could see the trees as shadowed sentinels either side of a gap about six feet wide, unobstructed but for a few stray low boughs reaching tentatively across the void.  Glancing once over her shoulder, she tried to pierce the darkness behind her and see her enemy.  There was no-one there.

She started to run.

Slowly, at first, then gaining more momentum as she found her footing more easily.  The soft ground muffled her footfalls, but she tried her best to miss the tell-tale little firecracker twigs that would snap loud, and ricochet like a rifle shot around the woods.  They were just visible as an interruption of the texture of the carpet of needles, like the protuberant roots that were waiting to trip her.

Her breath, after her first initial rush to the trees, was steadying, coming easier.  Muscles, for days in forced idleness, stretched and flexed, waking to work as if nothing unruly had happened in the interim.  The heady mixture of adrenalin and exercise fizzed in her blood, and her spirits rose.

She’d not been running long when she came to an open ride.  It slashed through the forest, straight as a die, a silvered, grassy track, lying across her path like a wide river.  Pushing through the bushes at the edge of the ride, Jenny paused, still in shadow, listening for sounds of pursuit.  Heaving air into her protesting lungs.

There were none, and she turned, straining her eyes, searching through the tree trunks that barred her vision.  Still no sign.  Starting to relax, she was turning back when she saw something out the corner of her eye.  It was only a shimmer of movement, a distant shadow slipping between the dark trees, a moment’s blurring of the forests stark lines.  It could have been anything.  But it sent her hurtling out and across the ride, bursting through into the trees on the other side as if the hounds of hell were after her.

She picked another clear row and ran on, every sense alive, reaching for any hint of pursuit.  When it came, it stopped her dead in her tracks.

A loud crack of dry wood, cutting through the silence of the forest as viciously as a chainsaw.  The sound echoed round the trees, divorced from a direction.  For a moment Jenny hesitated, trying to sense which way to run.  Pinned in a second’s indecision, panicking, she guessed he must be coming straight from the cottage, from her left.  Wheeling, she picked a clear row on her right, that sloped away downhill, and set off again.

An unseen branch whipped her cheek, the stinging pain bringing tears to her eyes and forcing her to bite down on her lip, hard, to stop from crying out.  She pressed on, her arm held up in front of her to ward off another blow.

Jenny knew she was nearing the end of her strength.  Her legs hurt, her back ached from bending under the branches and her lungs were burning, a tight knot of pain in her chest.  She wasn’t thinking beyond the moment anymore, only concentrating on staying upright and keeping moving.  Don’t fall over, don’t fall over.

She tried to jump a twisted root but misjudged it, tripping and sprawling on a tangle of old broken branches.  Through the rising panic she was aware of sharp stabs of pain in her side and leg, but with a ragged, sobbing breath she threw herself to her feet again and kept on.  Her knees were rubbery now, though, her vision starting to blur.

Through the thunder of her heart and blood, she was straining her ears for sounds of pursuit.  All thought of keeping quiet had gone, she was just trying to get away, get away.  Her feet pounded on the forest floor.

Something big leapt at her from out of the trees on the right, colliding with her side with bruising force and knocking her clean off her feet.  She screamed, but the sound was broken off as they hit the trunk of a tree together, and ricocheted off it.  In the same split-second, the sense of solid heat, frightening speed and looming power resolved itself into the recognisable form of McAllister.

She landed on top of him, feeling rather than hearing the breath go out of him in a whoosh.  She bucked and jerked, trying to get free.  But hands closed on her in a hard grip, and he rolled her beneath him, using his weight to press her into the ground and pin her down.

She struggled for breath, hemmed in and crushed and overwhelmed.  What she had intended as a shout came out in a thin, pathetic thread of a voice, and she hated it.  “Get off me!”

She dragged in another painful breath.  “Get off me!”  she screamed, and her voice echoed across the hillside, barely muffled by the trees.  She swore at him, hysterical and desperate, but all he did was rear back off her, dragging her to her feet by his grip on her wrists.  He swung her back out from under the tree, spun her round and took a grip of her jumper at the back of her neck.

“Move,” he said, using that hand to push her forward back the way she’d come.She didn’t co-operate.

She pulled forward, jerking on the grip at her nape, threw herself backwards, using her weight to make him stumble, shouted and screamed at him with what breath she had.  Once she snapped a dead branch off a tree and tried to hit him with it, but he jabbed at the back of her knees with his own, making them buckle, and calmly twisted the branch out of her hand.

When they broke free from the cover of the trees she was conscious of a sense of relief to be out in the open again.  But then she saw the cottage, seeming so peaceful down by the beck, and threatening her with everything she’d tried to escape.

She gave way to the pain in her legs and sank to the ground, resisting his attempts to pull her up again.  She was all out of everything.  Hope, courage, sense.  Her heart and soul were long gone, and had a terrifying feeling she knew who’s custody she’d given them into.

Swearing under his breath, McAllister bent and lifted her bodily, hoisting her over his shoulder.  He shifted her once, to get balance, the solid breadth of his shoulder digging into her abdomen.  He wrapped one arm like a hard band across the backs of her thighs and set off.

Jenny suddenly had an upended view of his long legs and jeans clad backside, moving as he walked.  She closed her eyes.  He’d flung her over the shoulder like a sack of grain.

Outraged and well beyond any self-imposed control, she reached down and bit him on the backside, hard as she could through denim.

He yelped and Jenny clutched at him for balance as he swung her down again.  He shook her by the shoulders.  “There is a time and a place for that sort of play, Jenny, and it is not now,” he ended on a shout.

“Get a grip, Jenny,”  he said.  “You’re losing it.”

It was the last straw.

“Isn’t that what you want?” she gasped.  “Isn’t that what you want!”

He jerked back from her as she shrieked, hands dropping to his sides.  Sobbing for breath through trembling fingers pressed to her mouth, Jenny looked up at him.

The moonlight caught his face.  It was stark and breathtakingly beautiful.  But it wasn’t that which shocked her into silence, although it made her stomach turn clean over, it was the anguish imprinted in every harsh line.

Jenny cried, then, so far gone off the end of her tether, she didn’t even know in what direction to reach for it.  She covered her face with her hands and sobbed.  Her knees buckled, and she would have fallen, but he caught her.  This time the heat and strength of him was a comfort and a balm, something solid to hold onto.

He scooped her up in his arms again, cradling her like a child against his chest, and set off across the heather to the cottage.

I’m looking down the double barrel of a 14 hour work-day today, and a trip to l’hospital tomorrow for day surgery, so I’m going to post a couple of things and leave you all to amuse yourselves until, say, Weds.

Enjoy!

Excerpt – DANGEROUS LIES

I’ve known for a while that I needed a, “not quite a kiss,” moment in chapter one of DANGEROUS LIES, but I’ve been struggling with getting the words down. The other day, in a lovely coffee house in Keswick, over lunch, I got it.

Waddya think?

Alan and Marianne are escaping some rioters. They hide in a tiny, gated alleyway in Rabat, Morocco. They’ve only just met. *VBG*

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“In here.” Alan flicked a latch on a narrow gate of planks, paint peeling red and green, and pushed her through it ahead of him. It was little more than a narrow space between two houses. Not even wide enough to earn the name alley, just a gap, with a wavering channel running down the centre, where water would run in the rains.

He crowded in after her, bending close to the gate to close it, one palm braced on the splintering wood, one easing the latch into place silently. The mob passed, a shadow at the gate, a shouting and thundering, shivering a skein of sand from the back ledge of the gate.

The noise outside went away, the noise inside was only their breathing, her feet shuffling on the ground as she tried to edge her way to some personal space, somewhere she could breathe.

She was immediately half blinded in the shadows and half stifled in the still, hot air. She braced one hand on the rough rendered wall opposite – with her back against the other wall, she couldn’t even straighten her arm. She dragged in hot, dusty air, choking on the racing of her own heart, and tried not to panic.
Looking around, she saw that the other end of their hiding place was blocked by piles of something like boxes. Oh God. “Where—”

Alan whirled on her, plucking her close, wedging her between his chest and the wall, one arm immobilising her, one hand hard across her mouth. Outside there were shouts, a distant cacophony, unreal and distorted.

Everything was unreal. The shafts of light piercing the rickety door were like golden blades. The dust motes that danced on them were gods and angels, djinns and genies. She was blinded with light and dazzled with darkness in one breath.
In the stuttering dark he was a wall of heat, pressing her back, holding her in place. Adrenaline surged in her, heightening her senses, making her want to shout against his hand, making her want . . . .

One of those golden blades sliced across his throat, where the collar of his pale shirt was undone. It gleamed on his damp, tanned skin, and glinted on the bead of sweat that was travelling – now fast, now slow – down the rough stubble underneath his jaw.

Her breathing had steadied, but her heart was still racing. There was no sun, now, on which to blame her light-headedness.

He was golden, gilded, bright.

His palm against her mouth smelled of him, and of spice and heat. She dragged the scent in, her eyes fluttering half closed. His skin would taste of salt, she knew . . . it would taste salty and hot and intense.

It would taste . . .

She put out her tongue, half dizzy, half dreaming, and tasted him.

His body jerked against hers. His eyes were glowing in one of those brilliant beams from the broken door, all white and blue, like a clouded summer sky. They fixed on her, holding her more effectively in place than the hands that gripped her and the body that pinned her.

He ducked his head. The hair at her temple snagged on the roughness of his jaw, and his breath spilled down her neck. “Mari,” he whispered, a word of warning, but his grip on her changed, gentled. His thigh brushed hers, his chest pressed against her breasts. Outside, distantly, a crowd roared, but the sound of her blood drowned out their hate.

She tasted his skin again. He snatched his palm away.

She was afraid. But this was the other reason she was here, wasn’t it? In fact, if she was honest with herself, following in her Grandfather’s footsteps was the excuse for this . . . meeting men, a man, finding out . . . . Eight years, more, of the most contained, confined life that life could deal you, willingly, if not gladly, caring for her father . . . and now.

Now the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen was pressed up against her in the dark, and her head was spinning with recklessness. She arched her back and pressed closer.

Infinitesimally, his position changed, his body somehow cupped around hers, not the position of a guard and a captive, but the pose of a man encompassing a woman.

She lifted her hands. They weren’t hers. Not when they brushed against his shirt to feel the way his chest rose and fell with his breathing. Surely they weren’t her hands, those hand that tested the tension in his arms, tracing the bulk of bicep and shoulder, that touched the skin of his neck where the sunlight stroked it.

The points where they touched were the only parts of her that existed. Breast to breast, thigh to thigh. His hands on her waist. The brush of his jaw against her skull. It was as if she was a join-the-dots picture. For a wild, irrational moment, she felt that if he touched her everywhere, she would burst into being. If all of him touched all of her, she would come alive.

There was a burning in her that beat back the sun. The bead of sweat on his neck trickled down to touch her fingers, and at that hot, wet touch, she raised her head, turning, reaching for, longing for, his mouth.

His hands had moved. They cradled her head, spiking through her hair. Her eyes were open, but she couldn’t see. There was only the touch of his body, the stroke of his breath across her lips, a heat that was almost flesh.

Almost his mouth. Almost a kiss—

And then he moved, a moment of disorientation, his hands dropping to her waist again, his head sliding away.
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I never knew I was such a tease…