LITMIR.BIZ

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      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘WHAT the devil…!’

      He had to be imagining things, Carlos Ortega told himself. He couldn’t actually be seeing what was ahead of him.

      Easing up on the throttle, he slowed the powerful motorbike to an almost crawl that was far more suited to the narrow country lane he had originally been riding down at a speed that much better expressed the turmoil of his inner feelings and stared straight ahead, frowning. But no matter how he blinked or adjusted his vision, the sight remained the same. The same impossible, unbelievable image just ahead of him. One that set his bemused mind wandering down strange and over-imaginative paths and into crazy ideas.

      He’d heard stories of local ghosts. His companions in the bar last night had been only too keen to regale him with them over a pint of beer. This road, the villagers said, was haunted. By a bride who had been left at the altar, and had died broken-hearted, pining away for the man she had once loved but who had deserted her so cruelly. At least, that was the way that the traditional story went.

      Not that Carlos believed in any such thing. The small, sleepy backwater of a place he had stayed in for the past couple of days was obviously riddled with stories and superstitions, some of which had been amusing enough last night while propping up the bar in the black-beamed old-fashioned inn where he had been staying. But now?

      ‘No way!’

      He found he was shaking his head inside his crash helmet and almost laughing as he had done last night when they had first fed him the story, obviously thinking they needed to earn the drinks he had bought them.

      He’d gone down to the bar from his room because for the first time in a long while he’d wanted company. He’d moved from the point of being alone and finding that that was the way he wanted things to be after all that had happened, to feeling strangely lonely, which wasn’t something he’d expected. He was used to his own company and he had, after all, come here deliberately to be on his own, to get away from the mess he had left behind him. He had wanted to be as far away from that—as far away from home as possible.

      Home. Argentina wasn’t any sort of home to him, but then, where was? It had hit with a wrenching jolt that there was now nowhere in the world he could call home. Oh, he had houses of course, several of them in the most expensive and exclusive parts of the world, and any one of them he would be happy to live in. But none of them was where he had any roots; where he thought he truly belonged. Where his family…

      ‘Hah! Family!’ His laugh was harsh, raw.

      What family? He didn’t have any family any more. Everything he had thought was his had been taken away from him at a blow. And the only thing he had been left with was his mother. His lying, cheating, unfaithful mother. The mother who had made him a bastard right from birth and who had never wanted him in her life after that. He didn’t even know who he was any more. His whole life had apparently been a fiction, his background, his ancestry, turning into a lie in the space of the time it had taken his grandfather to tell him the truth. A truth that had left him with precisely nothing of everything he had once valued, and once thought was what made him who he was.

      So the stories he’d heard had been an amusement, a distraction from feelings he wasn’t used to dealing with. They’d helped him pass an unexpectedly restless evening. But this morning in the very cold light of an early April day, belief in ghosts, ghouls and things that went bump in the night was very far from his mind.

      And yet…

      The freezing fog was shrouding the edges of the road in swirling shadows, occasionally drifting to obscure the vision on the grass verge on the left-hand side. It came and went so that he was forced to blink hard to clear his vision and make sure there actually was anything up ahead.

      And it—she—was still there.

      A woman. Tall, curvaceous, pale. Hair a rich honey gold—what he could see of it through the mist. And because it was pulled up in some ornate style on top of her hair, most of it was covered by the filmy veil—white like the ankle-length dress—that covered her face and fell down her back. Her arms were bare, as were her shoulders, the pale skin almost as white as the fitted bodice that shaped her high, rounded breasts.

      A bride?

      The figure of a bride, in full wedding regalia. Just as in the legend of the ghostly bride that had formed part of the evening’s entertainment in the bar. But this was definitely no ghost because this particular bride was standing at the side of the road—incongruously clutching a bright blue very modern handbag.

      And with her thumb raised in the time honoured gesture of someone hitching a lift.

      ‘What the…?’

      This time he slowed the bike to a complete halt, coming to a careful stop just a short distance away from the woman.

      ‘Oh, thank God!

      The voice was real. Not just something he had heard in his imagination or inside his head. Soft and slightly husky, it sent a shiver through him that had nothing to do with the paranormal ideas he had been conjuring up just moments before. A response that was all to do with the very real world.

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