Woken By The Highlander - Rebecca Preston Page 0,1

she'd encountered seemed sober enough to hit anything at all, much less the swift wildlife she was encountering. Still, she whispered silent prayers of protection after every encounter with a bird or an animal, hoping against hope that her will could somehow keep the animals safe from the hunters and their rifles. She grimaced now as she heard another few shots echo through the trees, closer now. They must be following the same trail as her.

Well, it had been a long and very successful day… and if she was about to get caught up by a pack of noisy hunters, it might be best to call it quits for the afternoon. The shadows were getting long, and she'd already gotten a good range of dusk shots over the last few days. And she was pretty worn out. She'd been pushing herself pretty hard the last few days, trying to get as much work done as possible, and she could tell by the way her thoughts were growing anxious and repetitive that the strain was hitting her. Maybe that was why her mind kept returning to Joseph…

Was it really too much to ask for a little romance? she wondered. Her boots crunched through the fallen fall leaves as she set off walking again, this time making her way toward where she'd parked her hire car – she'd been doing loops of all the various walking tracks this particular part of the national park offered, and had just about covered the whole park's worth. She was more than earning the big meals she was putting away at the bed and breakfast she was staying at – maybe all the extra walking was why her athletic figure wasn't yet showing the pints of ice-cream she'd been treating herself to as breakup consolation prizes. Ice-cream treated her better than Joseph ever had… and satisfied her a lot better too, she thought savagely, a smile coming to her lips as she headed down the gradual incline of the trail she'd hastened up earlier that morning.

He'd regret it, she knew that much. She was out of his league, professionally and physically. He was some boring finance dude with a FiDi job he hated and a beer belly that didn't seem to budge no matter how much he bragged about biking to work every day. She was a cute-as-a-button redhead who still got flirted with on the subway just about every day… often with words a lot sweeter than the ones her so-called boyfriend used for her. Great job, great personality, great figure… how the hell had she let herself settle for someone as shitty as Joseph for so long? Some kind of spell he'd cast, no doubt… some kind of weird attraction he'd exercised, something about how distant he'd seemed, how she'd had to work for every scrap of affection, to pierce his gruff, disinterested demeanor. Well, his gruff demeanor hadn't hidden a heart of gold – it had hidden yet more asshole. Asshole all the way down. He'd done her a favor by dumping her.

Which didn't mean it didn't hurt… and didn't mean that the pint of Ben and Jerry's in the minifridge in her room wasn't going to get absolutely demolished tonight.

The sun was lower in the sky than she'd thought, and she was just thinking that it was a good thing she was heading back – the air was beginning to get that tell-tale chill that spoke of winter being on its way – when she heard a sudden fluttering of wings in the trees to her right.

Julia automatically lifted the camera around her neck, knowing even as her muscles leapt into action that it was too late to get the shot… but something was wrong. The sounds the birds were making were urgent, desperate… and her eyes widened when she heard the sounds of crashing footsteps close to her. Had the hunters really caught up with her that quickly?

No – she realized the footsteps weren't coming from the path behind her. Had they cut through the forest? Julia frowned at the thought of the damage they were probably doing with their enormous boots, turning and striding away toward the carpark, knowing that if they caught up with her properly she wouldn't be able to resist picking a fight…

Then an unbelievably loud noise went off, so close to her that she felt her whole body flood with adrenaline. Like it belonged to another person entirely, she felt her body hurl itself to the