Valois is a rich ski resort town in Colorado. It’s also my last name. That’s right, my ancestor founded this town. My great-great-great-grandfather pissed off a French lord a hundred and fifty years ago—they hunted down Jean George Valois and threw him off a cliff. But he lived. The Valois men are survivors. He booked passage on a ship to America and then followed the gold rush up into the Rocky Mountains. My family has never lacked ambition—when Jean George’s claim dried up, he paved roads and built hotels and saloons and churches. Then, when he was in his nineties, he built the first ski resort in the Rockies. The wealthy followed.
I have fourteen cousins and three brothers, and I’m the oldest male. And I could have ended up one of those spineless, sniveling, special-snowflake trust fund kids, but my dad is Brahm Valois the First and he didn’t raise spoiled pansy boys. I’ve camped in freezing temps, in ten-foot snow. I killed my first buck when I was five and then helped skin it afterward. I spent my summers at hard-core wilderness survival camps, where I was dropped in the woods alone for a week with nothing but the clothes on my back and a hunting knife. I spend my days in five-star restaurants with pretentious one-word names, but I have also eaten squirrel, and possum, and jackrabbit, and swamp rat. I have nibbled on frog legs roasted over a spit in the wild . . . as well as fried in panko and served with lemon, grass-fed butter, and frites at the downtown Fourchette restaurant.
I saved our town from a forest fire two years ago. Me and my younger brothers—Jean George, Philippe, and Luc—were in the front lines, battling the flames day and night, no sleep. We turned the tide. We saved our town and Broken Bridge—the other rich ski resort twenty miles over. We rescued half the county from the burning inferno.
We were heroes.
Me and my brothers owned Valois, ran Valois, saved Valois . . . and my life could have gone on like this forever and forever for all I cared. Once I killed the Beast I’d have everything I wanted from life and could just coast on a wave of glory and self-fulfillment until the end.
That was how it was supposed to go, anyway. And then I met Indigo.
The first time I saw Indigo Beau she was sitting smack in the middle of the Hush Woods, not half a mile from where I saw the Beast a few weeks before.
I was half naked, stripped to my waist, wearing nothing but my muscled abs and my designer jeans and my recurve bow. I liked to slay creatures the way my French ancestors used to in their dark, black forests hundreds of years ago. Just me and sky and trees and arrows.
Indigo gasped when she saw me. Of course she did.
I have gorgeous blond hair, thick and glossy—it curls up at the ends like little twists of sunshine. I have sea-green eyes and healthy, glowing skin. I’d been running and hunting and fighting since I was a kid, and I looked like a god—tight waist, long legs, big pecs, boom, boom, boom.
Indigo was nestled into a pile of green ferns and a slanting stretch of sunshine. She had thick brown hair that draped halfway down her back, and she wore a yellow dress with a long blue scarf folded around her neck. She had a book in her lap, sky-blue cover with a red moon in the center.
I stared at her, rooted to the spot, hunter and prey.
There was something unnerving about her. I noticed it straight off. The way she sat in those ferns, pliant and nimble but also tense . . . I thought maybe she was a dancer. I’d been to NYC and seen ballet—the Valois boys were cultured, even if we did live on a mountain. There was something of those sinewy ballerinas about her.
“Bonjour, ma belle,” I said finally, in my sexiest, French-iest voice.
Her gaze lingered over me, and I let it. I was used to this kind of attention. I rolled my neck and then my shoulders, like I was sore from hunting primevally with my bow in the savage wilderness. She stood up and raised her face to mine. Her eyes were a light, pearly blue, and they were sparkly and bright . . . but with something deep in them, too, deep and melancholic. She had a sweet, heart-shaped face and high-arched eyebrows and plump lips. She was gorgeous. I’d dated prettier, but not often.
I smiled at her, my thousand-watt Valois grin, but her body stayed tense and strained, as if I were an unpredictable wild creature that might attack at any moment, rather than a glorious specimen of refined masculinity. Her eyes kept shifting to my bow, like it made her uneasy, like she could see the ghosts of all the animals I’d slain, lining up behind me.
All right, then, time to get civilized.
“Hello there, stranger. I’m Brahm Valois the Second . . . Valois, like the town.”
She stood up and put her palm in mine. She shook firm and quick, and then pulled her hand away and went back to clutching her book. She still hadn’t said a word.
She looked at my bow again.
I narrowed my eyes. “I hope you aren’t one of those tree-hugging vegan types. Because I’m a hunter and proud of it.”
“I’m not.”
“Not what?”
“A tree-hugging vegan.”
“Good.” I relaxed and flashed her another Valois smile. “Is that a romance?” I nodded my chin at her little novel.
She shook her head, and her long dark hair swished side to side.
“What, then? A book of spells? Are you reading about herbs and potions and boiling cauldrons? Because a girl would only hide in the woods to read a really dirty romance or some New Age Wiccan piece-of-trash spell book.”
She laughed.
She had a nice laugh. A lot of girls don’t. A lot of the girls I’d been with had laughs that were feeble or fake or forced. But hers . . . it was genuine. Genuine and fierce as a Rocky Mountain winter snowstorm that dumped three feet of snow in twenty-four hours.
“I’m Indigo Beau,” she said, and her voice was genuine and fierce, too.
She sat back down in her patch of ferns, and I plopped to the ground next to her, dropping my bow and arrows off to the side. I held out my hand, and she gave me the book. It had a vague title—The Lone Hunt. I flipped through it, expecting to find a steamy sex scene or an illustration of smug-looking women standing on a hill in the middle of a thunderstorm, chanting a spell about sisterhood. But it was a nonfiction book about wolves—their habits, descriptions of their dens, pack dynamics.
I handed the book back to her. “Why are you reading about wolves?”
She shrugged, shoulders nestling into her blue scarf. “I’m interested.”
“So . . . you in town for a while? Let me guess—your dad is a minor celebrity, like a professional golfer, and your family came here to rub elbows with the rich.”
She just smiled, her chubby lips tilting up in a pretty way.
“I figured. That’s why you don’t know about these woods. Me and my brothers are the only people around here brave enough to walk through them.” I pointed at a big, dead oak two dozen yards in front of us, its grey branches spreading out into the sky. “A hundred odd years ago they hanged three women from that tree, and now no one will go near this spot. They call it Hush Witch Glen.”
This wasn’t the whole story. People thought the woods were haunted, sure, but they didn’t go in them because of the Beast. I didn’t want to scare her, though. Not yet.
Indigo glanced around, as if searching for ghosts, blue eyes moving from shadow to shadow. The wind picked up suddenly and burst through the trees, shaking all the leaves at once. It was early October and the rustling was loud and crisp.