Intertwine (House of Oak Book 1) Read online

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  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  Upcoming Books

  Author's Note

  Reading Group Questions

  Preview of Divine: House of Oak Book 2

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To Erin,

  because it all began with you,

  my dearest and oldest friend.

  And to Dave,

  throughout all eternity,

  heart of my soul.

  Love ya, babe.

  Prologue

  The obsession began on June 12, 2008 around 11:23 a.m.

  Though secretly Emme Wilde considered it more of a ‘spiritual connection’ than an actual full-blown neurosis.

  Of course, her brother, Marc, her mother and a series of therapists all begged to disagree.

  Thankfully her best friend, Jasmine, regularly validated the connection and considered herself to be Emme’s guide through this divinely mystical union of predestined souls (her words, not Emme’s). Marc asserted that Jasmine was not so much a guide as an incense-addled enabler (again, his words, not Emme’s). Emme was just grateful that anyone considered the whole affair normal—even if it was only Jasmine’s loose sense of ‘normal.’

  Jasmine always insisted Emme come with her to estate sales, and this one outside Portland, Oregon proved no exception. Though Jasmine contended this particular estate sale would be significant for Emme, rambling on about circles colliding in the vast cosmic ocean creating necessary links between lives—blah, blah. All typical Jasmine-speak.

  Emme brushed it off, assuming that Jasmine really just wanted someone to organize the trip: plan the best route to avoid traffic, find a quirky restaurant for lunch, entertain her on the long drive from Seattle.

  At the estate sale, Emme roamed through the stifling tents, touching the cool wood of old furniture, the air heavy with that mix of dust, moth balls and disuse that marks aged things. Jasmine predictably disappeared into a corner piled with antique quilts, hunting yet again for that elusive log cabin design with black centers instead of the traditional red.

  But Emme drifted deeper, something pulling her farther and farther into the debris of lives past and spent. To the trace of human passing, like fingerprints left in the paint of a pioneer cupboard door. Stark and clear.

  Usually Emme would have stopped to listen to the stories around her, the history grad student in her analyzing each detail. Yet that day she didn’t. She just wandered, looking for something. Something specific.

  If only she could remember what.

  Skirting around a low settee in a back corner, Emme first saw the antique trunk. A typical mid-nineteenth century traveling chest, solid with mellow aged wood. It did not call attention to itself. But it stood apart somehow, almost as if the air were a little lighter around it.

  She first opened the lid out of curiosity, expecting the trunk to be empty. Instead, she found it full. Carefully shifting old books and papers, Emme found nothing of real interest.

  Until she reached the bottom right corner.

  There she found a small object tucked inside a brittle cotton handkerchief. Gently unwrapping the aged fabric, she pulled out an oval locket. Untouched and expectant.

  Filigree covered the front, its gilt frame still bright and untarnished, as if nearly new.

  Emme turned the locket over, feeling its heft in her hand, the metal cool against her palm. It hummed with an almost electric pulse. How long had the locket lain wrapped in the trunk?

  Transparent crystal partially covered the back. Under the crystal, two locks of hair were woven into an intricate pattern—one bright and fair, the other a dark chocolate brown. Gilded on top of the crystal, two initials nestled together into a stylized gold symbol.

  She touched the initials, trying to make them out. One was clearly an F. But she puzzled over the other for a moment, tracing the design with her eyes. And then she saw it. Emme sucked in a sharp breath. An E. The other initial was an E.

  She opened the locket, hearing the small pop of the catch.

  A gasp.

  Her hands tingled.

  A sizzling shock started at the back of her neck and then spread.

  Him.

  There are moments in life that sear into the soul. Brief glimpses of some larger force. When so many threads collapse into one. Coalesce into a single truth.

  Seeing him for the first time was one of those moments.

  He gazed intently out from within the right side of the locket: blond, blue-eyed, chiseled with a mouth hinting at shared laughter. Emme’s historian mind quickly dated his blue-green, high collared jacket and crisp, white shirt and neckcloth to the mid-Regency era, probably around 1812, give or take a year.

  Emme continued to look at the man—well, stare actually. His golden hair finger-combed and deliciously disheveled. Broad shoulders angled slightly toward the viewer. Perhaps his face a shade too long and his nose a little too sharp for true beauty. But striking. Handsome even.

  Looking expectant, as if he had been waiting for her.

  Emme would forever remember the jolt of it.

  Surprise and recognition.

  She knew him. Had known him.

  Somehow, somewhere, in some place.

  He felt agonizingly familiar. That phantom part of her she had never realized was lost.

  The sensation wasn’t quite deja vu.

  More like memory.

  Like suddenly finding that vital thing you didn’t realize had been misplaced. Like coming up, gasping for air, after nearly drowning and seeing the world bright and sparkling and new.

  She stood mesmerized by him until Jasmine joined her.

  “Oooh, you found him.” The hushed respect in her voice was remarkable. This was Jasmine after all.

  Emme nodded mutely.

  “Your circles are so closely intertwined. Amazing.”

  Jasmine turned the locket in Emme’s hand.

  “What does this inscription say?” she asked.

  Emme hadn’t noticed the engraved words on the inside left of the locket case. But now she read them. Her sudden sharp inhalation seared, painfully clenching.

  Oh. Oh!

  The words reverberated through her soul, shattering and profound.

  Emme didn’t recall much more of that day—Jasmine purchasing the locket or even the little restaurant where they ate lunch. Instead, she only remembered the endless blur of passing trees on the drive home, the inscription echoing over and over:

  To E

  throughout all time

  heart of my soul

  your F

  Chapter 1

  Herefordshire, near the village of Marfield

  Duir Cottage

  Beltane

  April 30, 2012

  Emry Wilde was
a disaster magnet.

  She admitted it freely.

  It was like she wore a t-shirt with the words “I attract acts of God” and a red bullseye. Basically, if the media coyly ended a disaster with -mageddon, Emme would find herself in the middle of it.

  She planned. She prepared. Emme tried to anticipate every travel contingency. She hated the unexpected. But somehow the unexpected always found her. The universe took perverse pleasure in finding the most arbitrary calamity and thrusting her into it, front and center.

  It wasn’t as if she were normal-adverse. More like adventure-prone. Highly, unanticipated adventure-prone.

  All of which explained her current situation.

  Powerful winds lashed her rented English cottage as rain pounded the roof. Emme gave a resigned sigh, grimacing at the water streaming down the windows. Thunder rattled the doors, shaking the ground. Outside, an oak tree creaked in the garden, branches groaning in protest. She had experienced horrific storms often enough to know that this one portended no good. It was an angry beast, growling to be let in.

  It was all a terrible disappointment.

  Freddie was supposed to help prevent travel disasters.

  Mmmmm, no, not Freddie. Emme did a mental hunt. Who should F be today? Felix? . . . Francis? . . . No. She thought further. Finn. Yes, definitely still Finn, just like he’d been all week.

  She sat in front of a roaring fire, curled up in blankets on a comfy velvet sofa, nursing a hot cup of tea in her hands, her feet warm in pink satin ballet-like slippers with wide ribbon ties and cushy soles. She wriggled her snug toes. Seriously, best packing choice ever.

  After days of lovely English sun, the weather had turned, unleashing an impressively ferocious summer storm, which was a pity. She had been looking forward to seeing the Beltane fires and other festivities planned for the evening, hoping to use them as part of her sabbatical research. Jasmine called Beltane one of the most powerful spirit days on the Celtic calendar. Though, trust Jasmine to take something as innocuous as May Day and make it arcane and mystical.

  Oh, and to insist on using its Celtic name, Beltane.

  But the bonfires had been canceled, rescheduled until the weather improved. Emme snuggled deeper into the plush sofa as a loud boom of thunder emphasized her thoughts.

  Things had been going so well. No ash-spewing volcanoes. No random-illness quarantines. Remarkable, really, considering what usually happened when she traveled.

  Her travel issues had started as a teenager on the evening ferry from Cozumel to Cancun. She didn’t remember much about that night—just angry shouting, the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic weapons and hiding underneath the bench with Marc. Waiting. Terrified that the gunfire would come closer.

  Then, after so much noise, sudden pounding silence. No hum of the motor, no buzz of the overhead lights, just pitch blackness and the sobbing whispers of other frightened passengers. After hours bobbing adrift, they were pulled ashore by a tugboat. Frightened but unharmed. Piratas. Pirates, the police said. Bandits after the payroll bag the ferry was carrying.

  Of course, Marc being Marc had found the whole event wildly exciting. Typical. The lame pirate jokes had gone on for months. (Emme, you look sad. Is something the matt-arrrrh?)

  So even in this day and age, Emme had to add pirates to her list of “Things to Worry about When Traveling.” Seriously? How does one plan for pirates? Were there brochures on the topic? Danger on the High Seas: Ten Steps to Avoiding Pirates While in the Caribbean.

  After the pirate incident, the travel disasters had come relentlessly. There were the standard hassles: lost luggage and delayed flights, being stranded by a winter storm, that lady in the seat next to her giving birth over Atlanta. Emme rarely batted an eye at such pedestrian events.

  It was the true random acts of God—the travel disruptions that were outside anyone’s realm of normal—that got her full attention. Arrested and questioned for two days by the Peruvian TSA about possible nefarious terrorist activity. (Emry Wilde = Terrorist? Really?) Quarantined with the swine flu in Mexico. Trapped on a farm in rural Hungary for two weeks due to a volcanic ash cloud. Escaping a military coup in the Philippines.

  Ironically, none of these events had stopped her from traveling. Emme loved to see new places, new people. Raised by a single mother who worked as a flight attendant, Emme was well-versed in travel. Most school vacations had involved flying with Marc to meet their mother somewhere. With a never-ending supply of buddy passes at her disposal, reaching some exotic locale had never been particularly expensive. Just time-consuming. And, at times, life threatening.

  After she had been trapped for several weeks in the mountains of Guatemala (worst flooding in a century, they said) without her luggage (of course) or any way to contact family, Marc had stepped in. He had jokingly enrolled Emme in a month-long survivalist camp run by one of his martial art friends. But Marc hadn’t fully appreciated Emme’s almost obsessive love of planning. Her need to be prepared.

  So she had happily made her lists and packed her bags and headed off to Rod’s Awesome Mind and Body Overhaul camp. With classes like “Assess! Arrest! Assist!” (a.k.a. first aid) and “Perp Recon and Neutralization” (a.k.a. self-defense). Only after arriving did she realize that the camp acronym was RAMBO.

  Marc really had a sick sense of humor sometimes. And, quite frankly, a questionable taste in friends. But she had come home able to light a fire in any condition, as well as flatten someone twice her size.

  Of course, disasters never hit at home. Mt. Rainer remained docile; the long overdue Cascadian super earthquake didn’t happen; tsunamis never materialized. Home was always safe and blessedly calamity-free.

  Which had made the relative smoothness of this current trip somewhat unsettling, if she didn’t count the rental car fiasco—which she didn’t. The car had been insured, after all. Emme jumped as a particularly violent gust of wind shook the whole house, causing an errant draft to slam one of the bedroom doors upstairs. Loudly. The heavy beams above her creaked in protest.

  Emme shook her head, took a sip of tea and tried to think positively. If the whole house came down, at least when rescuers pulled her from the rubble, her feet would look stylish in uber-cute, pink satin slippers.

  Of course, Finn had always been a good luck charm. Disasters were never quite as awful when Finn was with her, as this trip had already proved.

  Jasmine had analyzed this ad nauseum, ever since Emme had found him. Why did disaster avoid Emme when she had Finn along? Jasmine attributed it to ‘the bond’ that tied them. Insisting that Finn—as the destiny of Emme’s soul—was home for her.

  Emme wasn’t quite sure she understood. The soul or the home part.

  “You’re tied to him,” Jasmine would say. “Life forces intertwined. Your circles definitely overlap.”

  This was Jasmine’s favorite theory.

  Time is not linear like a river but instead is an enormous sea, with all events occurring at once.

  All things are present, Jasmine would patiently explain. No past and no future. There is only now. Time is merely a construct of our minds. Any current action impacts not only the present but also the past.

  To her, the lives of everyone who had ever lived existed simultaneously as rippling concentric circles on the surface of some vast cosmic ocean. And from time to time, the rings of a person’s expanding circle would intertwine with those of someone else, and they would be linked. Cosmically tied to each other.

  For Jasmine, it made no difference that this person might have lived a couple hundred years ago. In a different country. On a different continent.

  Emme still didn’t quite accept it all—Jasmine’s sense of reality was loose at the best of times.

  This current trip was a last-ditch effort to reclaim Emme’s emotional life. A final expatiation, a way to purge her soul of this impossible sense of connection—no matter what Jasmine might say. Technically on a research sabbatical, Emme had deliberately structured her trip to take Finn’
s history as well. A wise faculty mentor had once suggested she choose her research interests based on where she wanted to travel. Good advice indeed.

  Emme startled as the rain suddenly shifted, rapping sharply against the window, begging for entrance. A gust of wind whistled down the fireplace, causing the flames to flare erratically. Emme took another sip of tea.

  She would conquer this obsession. Once and for all.

  Herefordshire

  Near the village of Marfield

  Beltane

  April 30, 1812

  James Knight ached for adventure.

  He admitted it freely.

  He longed to brace his boots against the rolling deck of a ship, sails snapping, wind buffeting his body. He yearned to memorize the smell of an Eastern Orient market. Or the sound of a hot summer breeze rustling through sugar cane in the West Indies.

  Poets wrote odes to those born under a wandering star. But James was quite sure he had been born under the most boring, most staid star in the entire heavens. If there were mayhem and adventure to be had, he would find himself a hundred miles away and riding in the wrong direction.

  James planned. He plotted. But somehow, life always found a way to tether him to home, to responsibility. Not that he didn’t love his home. Not that he shirked responsibility. But sometimes when he stared at the predictable rolling fields of Haldon Manor, the tired draft horses bringing in yet another harvest, he felt that he had been born for something more.

  James had long pondered the problem. Perhaps not all of him wished for change. His head and most of his left hand did seem generally free of wander lust. Perhaps his elbow too. But both his feet and his heart—yes, most definitely his heart—itched for adventure. Ached to stride out the front door of Haldon Manor and keep walking to the ends of the earth.

  It wasn’t as if he were adventure-adverse. Just more normal-prone. The unexpected never found him.

  All of which made his current situation somewhat ironic.

  Wind clawed at the trees and howled around him. Rain lashed against his caped greatcoat, streaming over the brim of his wide hat. James reached up and tucked a sodden lock of blond hair out of his eyes. Lightning regularly flashed through the dark night, brilliantly illuminating the muddy road in front of his horse. Though the lightning itself was actually helpful. At least he could see the road every other minute or so, keeping his horse from wandering into the night.