Season of Storm

He took her hostage—could he ever let her go?

As the daughter of a ruthless West Coast lumber baron Shulamith St. John had lived with the threat of kidnapping  for most of her life, but that didn't make her situation when it happened any less terrifying.  Especially as she knew what her kidnapper did not—that her father would refuse to pay any ransom for her.

Johnny Winterhawk didn't believe that—but he was no ordinary kidnapper. He didn't want money, he wanted to protect his tribal lands from her father's chainsaws. And then, it seemed…he wanted
her
.
 

Shulamith responded to her captor's touch with a yearning fire that made her feel she could trust him with her life.  Their deep passion shook her, body and soul. And that was the most terrifying thing of all…

SEASON OF STORM

Alexandra Sellers

YouDon'tOwnMe Books

London

Grateful acknowledgement is extended to the following:

Mel Hurtig Publishers, for the quotation from THE UNJUST SOCIETY: THE TRAGEDY OF CANADA'S INDIANS by Harold Cardinal. Copyright 1969 by Harold Cardinal. Used by permission.

Oxford University Press, Inc., for the quotations from "No Worst There is None" and "Pied Beauty" in THE POEMS OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, THIRD EDITION, edited by W.H. Gardner. Copyright 1948 by Oxford University Press.

Used by permission.

McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto, for the quotation from "As the Mist Leaves No Scar" in SELECTED POEMS 1956-1968 by Leonard Cohen. Copyright 1968 by Leonard Cohen. Used by permission.

Dorothy Poste for the lyrics "Wake Me Up to Say Goodbye".  Copyright 1983 by Dorothy Poste and Alexandra Sellers. Used by permission.

First published 1983 by Worldwide Library

This revised edition published 2013

ISBN 978-1-78301-159-9

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, to business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Copyright
©
1983, 2013 by Alexandra Sellers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
 

Alexandra Sellers has asserted her right under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

YouDon'tOwnMe Books

Revised edition copyright © 2013

Cover by Kim Killion
www.thekilliongroupinc.com
 

for

Glen Sorestad

Donald James King and

Doreen Allen

my Golden Year

SEASON OF STORM

Prologue

The Watcher was still, watching. A perfect, vital stillness held him, as though a statue pulsed with life. His skin was the colour of cut trees—cedar or oak—and his high-bridged nose and angled cheekbones gave his face a cast that men of other races would call noble. His eyes, like his hair, were black, and no emotion troubled their gaze as he watched what he watched.

The Watcher stood on a low promontory of rock above an ocean, and what he watched was in the water, below and beyond him: a woman, struggling against the sea. She was naked, and her long hair was the colour of foxes, or of fire.

Something flickered behind the Watcher's eyes: regret that the woman would die. Never had he seen hair of that colour; and her skin was pale. He would be sorry to kill the woman.

It was evident that the waves would not kill her. The woman struggled valiantly to keep her head above the water, and although she was exhausted, the tide was with her.

The spirits, too, were with her: in all this rocky coast she was being carried towards the flat sandy stretch of shore below the promontory on which the Watcher stood. She would not be broken against rocks.

When the water was thigh deep the woman found her feet and stood up. Her long hair fell dripping down her back and over one full breast; water droplets clung to her chilled skin.

She was exhausted but triumphant, and the Watcher felt a distant admiration for her, as he might for one of the Swimmers evading his trap, or the Bear his arrow. He wondered fleetingly if she were one of the Swimmers, taking human form. In that case perhaps he ought not to kill her.

The woman paused for a moment, lifted her face to the heat of the sun and gasped deeply for air. Now that her goal was so close exhaustion seemed to grip her more surely.

She staggered once in the breaking waves, the water alternately pushing and pulling at her strong thighs, then moved forward again. For all her exhaustion the motion of her naked hips was smooth, the glistening sway of her silky-wet breasts hypnotic.

When she stepped onto sand and moved above the water's reach she lifted her arms and cried aloud her gratitude to the sea and the land.  Then her triumph was overcome by fatigue, and she dropped to the sand and lay drinking in the heat of the sun with her body. Her long hair was splayed out beneath her, and her body heaved as she gasped for breath.

Something stirred in the Watcher then: a fire that had not troubled him before lighted in him now. It flickered up behind his black eyes as he gazed at the woman on the sand. He would not kill her yet, he thought. Not yet.

The Watcher moved.

One

Something woke her up. Something frightening, because her heart was beating as though she had just had a brush with death. Shulamith sat upright in the silent gloom, her ears straining for the repetition of a sound she did not want to hear.

The drapes and her window were open as they always were at night—she could feel the sea-scented breeze stroke her forehead as she strained to hear, but the noise hadn't come from outside the protective shell of the house. It had come from within.

It came again, after a long moment when she hardly breathed; and with the sharp grace of a cat Smith turned her face towards the noise, as though drinking in its location as much through her wide eyes, even in the dark, as through her ears. The sound was muffled, certainly not as sharp as the one that had awakened her, but still unmistakably threatening: a noise of quiet scuffle, and single, low-voiced command.

"Daddy!" she called wildly into the night. Her voice came out as a whisper, a cat's frightened hiss, but there was no point in calling again—she mustn't waste time. Shulamith ripped back the light blanket covering her legs and was running as soon as her feet hit the soft thick carpet.

A gleam of light showed beneath the door to her father's room, she saw when she reached the doorway, and the sight quickened her breathing and her pace, because the door should have been open. She sped around the wide balcony that overlooked the large front hall, terror snapping at her heels, clutching her throat. 
He should have listened to me, he should have hired a nurse,
she thought, and then, 
I should have argued more, I should have insisted.
 

She had convinced him to sleep with his door open, and that was all.

But the door was closed now, the fine thread of light beneath proof, at this hour in the morning, that whatever had caused her to start up out of a sound sleep, heart pounding, had been no nightmare. Smith bit her lip. Why was the door closed? Who had closed it? She realized she had already begun a prayer in her head. Prayers were so simple after all. 
Please, God, please don't let him be dying. Please.
 

She was almost crying the last words aloud as she fought for a clumsy second with the door handle, and then the door flew open under her determined, desperate hand. 

And then she screamed.

It was a pipeline of sound from the deepest reaches of terror within her, an icicle of comprehending-uncomprehending horror that destroyed the close hot silence of her father's room at a stroke. The scream lasted only a moment before abruptly dying, and in its frozen aftermath Smith felt her body begin to shake, felt her muscles quiver, and then a chill sweat beaded from every pore.

Around her father's bed four dark-clad men wearing black balaclavas stared at her in mute surprise. On the bed lay her father, his pyjama top drenched with perspiration, or water, or both; his face sickly grey and beaded with the same icy perspiration that was forming on Smith's own forehead. His breathing was shallow and fast. For one second there was no motion, no sound in the room. Then some movement on the periphery of her vision released Smith from immobility, and she whirled to see that a fifth man, his eyes fixed on her, was replacing the phone receiver in its cradle.