Someone -- or something -- is causing magical blizzards at Fairleigh Hall. The estate is suffering, and the Earl has requested assistance. Constable Kit Thompson, of Bow Street’s Preternatural Division, isn’t especially thrilled to be sent out to the country. At least the assignment gets him away from fashionable London society and his own unwanted celebrity after successfully solving a notorious case. Of course, he’s now trapped at a country estate due to closed roads, snowstorms, and magic, but Kit’s always liked solving puzzles. He’s good at using empathic skills for investigations, and this is definitely a challenge. Besides, the Earl’s younger brother is an irritating and delicious temptation, all blue eyes and muscles and boundless enthusiastic optimism. Kit wants to either shake sense into him or kiss him senseless -- and can’t trust him, either, because if someone’s genuinely sabotaging the weather, everyone’s a suspect. Harry Arden, younger brother of the Earl of Fairleigh, has never met a Preternatural Division constable before, much less a famous and celebrated one. He wants to help. And he wants to make that attractive but cynical constable smile, at least once. But the estate hides a family secret, and Harry knows perfectly well Kit doesn’t trust him ... and for good reason. Still, Harry offers to do what he can to assist with the investigation, and if that means spending more time with Kit, that’s a bonus. When Harry and Kit end up caught by those magical storms, snowed in together at the old hunting lodge, they’ll have to trust each other with their secrets ... and their hearts.

Snowed In: Kit and Harry

He glanced at Harry. Harry’s gaze was resolutely turned away.


The path was disappearing fast, conquered by deadly white heaps. Kit stretched out senses, searching, feeling.


Ice swallowed his magic. Ate up empathy, any hint of warmth, any vitality. Drank down life and possibilities and emotion, and turned them all to frozen rigid crystalline structures. The earth where the ice elemental lay had become barren as arctic seas; the elemental itself dreamed, curled up in a hollow, of green growing things and summer and delicious feasts. It was not by nature cruel; it was only acting the way it knew. And these lands, bursting with rich fields and running streams and happy inhabitants, everything ripe and radiant and always put to rights, had been so tempting…


Something about that kicked Kit’s investigative brain, but he couldn’t place it. Pieces that almost lined up. An explanation that would’ve made sense if he could frame it the right way.


Chapter 23