Authors: Alexandra Sellers

Fire in the Wind (46 page)

Shulamith raised a self-conscious hand to her lace bodice, suddenly remembering that it was torn. Suddenly remembering what an utter mess she must look altogether. To her amazement, she felt a blush staining her cheeks.

She hadn't blushed for years, since before she'd entered college: in logging camps and sawmills and sales meetings it was better for the boss's daughter if she did not blush. The knowledge that she was blushing now confused her and made her want to escape.

Her captor did not smile at her, however, nor were his dark eyes mocking. If anything they grew more sombre, and his jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.

She stared helplessly over her shoulder into his dark eyes, and it was a sensation like drowning. She felt oddly shaken. Her lips were dry. Nervously she licked them.

He looked away to the water ahead. He breathed once and let go of her wrist.

"Please go belowj" he said evenly, and Shulamith scrambled down the companionway as though she had been standing on the brink of an abyss.

* * *

He wasn't going to sail around waiting for her to be ransomed, Smith discovered when her captor docked at a small island some time later. She came up on deck barefoot and wearing a pair of too-large jeans and a sweat shirt she had found below in a locker. Her long hair was finger-combed and tied back, and she had taken a shower. The silence of the place fell on her ears as she watched him bring down the sails, and Shulamith breathed deeply in unconscious release from the intolerable tension that had gripped her ever since she had entered her father's bedroom. She heard a few waking birds lazily querying each other's existence, sensed the water's quiet lapping around the hull beneath her feet and wondered bemusedly why these sounds of nature should only emphasize the perfect stillness.

She watched him silently as he worked, taking an immediate pleasure in the sight of the play of his muscles, the efficient motion and interplay of arms, hands and feet.

He was tall and big, but not the giant that she had imagined when he held her and his hand was suffocating her. When at last the boat was ready and he came to stand beside her on the dock, his weary sigh was very human. But he was certainly strong enough to carry her, and she realized that was his intention as he bent to pick her up in his arms.

"The path is rough. You would cut your feet," he explained tersely, then set off with her along the dock and up the hillside. He had one arm under her knees, one supporting her back; Smith felt the warmth of his hand against her ribs, his thumb just pressing the fullness of her breast. After a moment she felt the thumb move away.

He carried her up the steep path in long easy strides, as though her hundred-ten-pound weight was not much of an encumbrance. He did not look down at her; his eyes, hooded, were on the path ahead. It was long, steep and overgrown, meandering through the dark green rainforest. The hush of nature was over them—Smith felt they could be anywhere, in any time. Nothing had meaning except that particular, soothing

calm. She heard a birdcall she did not recognize, but she felt sure that the man carrying her could identify it. He walked so quietly, so surefootedly.

"Where are you taking me?" she asked. Her voice was almost a whisper; she was mentally exhausted and no longer cared what was going to happen to her. She couldn't fight anymore.

"You'll see," he said.

She felt an odd intimacy settle on them, a feeling of closeness that might exist between brother and sister, she thought, or between lovers who have known each other long and well. Shulamith had had neither a brother nor a lover she had known long and well, and it was years since she had learned how little her father loved her. She had experienced a certain amount of camaraderie with the men she had worked with and later supervised in her father's logging camps and sawmills, but what she felt now was very different. It took her a moment to sort it out, and it was with an odd little jerk that she realized that what she was feeling was a sense of comfort and security she hadn't known since early childhood.

Even more oddly, the feeling brought a lump to her throat.

There was no clearing to give advance warning of a human habitation; merely, the forest stopped and the house began. Her captor paused beside a tree, and when he set her down, her feet touched the cool rough stone of a step carved into rock.

Shulamith looked up. She saw an incredible, unique house that ran on level after level up the steep hill away from her. It was made of glass and weathered cedar and was hung with vines and green plants. On one side of the house water fell gently over the levels of the hillside to end in a large reflecting pool by the rock-hewn steps. The glass, when it was touched by the sun, seemed lightly golden, and on all sides trees grew close to the house, so that she felt like someone coming upon an Aztec ruin in an overgrown jungle.

Shulamith breathed through open lips. "What a beautiful house," she said softly.

The dark head was inclined. "Thank you," he said, with a slightly ironic emphasis. She gazed avidly around as they mounted the rock steps toward the door.

"Is it yours?" she asked at last.

He spared her a glance from hooded eyes. His profile was as strong and roughly hewn as the rest of him. It occurred to her suddenly that he was extremely good-looking.

"Of course," he said.

There was no
of course
about it, that she could see. A man who owned a house like this—and, presumably, a boat like the Outcast II—was not your normal run-of-the-mill kidnapper of lumber barons. Or their daughters. Shulamith wrinkled her brow.

"It's a Winterhawk design, isn't it?" she said, for something to say.

"What?" he asked, stopping on the top step and turning sharply to look at her.

"The house," she said. "It looks as though it was designed by Johnny Winterhawk. Wasn't it? I've seen a few of the private residences he's done, and—" She broke off and looked at her abductor. He was rigidly immobile, looking at her with the oddest expression in his eyes.

"What's the matter?" she said impatiently. "Don't you know who designed your house?" Johnny Winterhawk wasn't exactly a household name, but she would have expected at least a spark of recognition. Winterhawk had very original ideas about awkward locations and natural sites, and he had already designed a number of public buildings in Vancouver and a university in the States that they were still talking about. "He's very good, isn't he?" Her glance wandered to the house again. "I wanted a Winterhawk house when we built the house we're in now," she remembered wistfully. "But Daddy...."

As the realization crystalized in her brain Smith's voice died, and her lips parted on a soft gasp. Slowly, slowly she turned her head to look at her dark, hatchet-faced abductor. He was staring at her, his eyes filled with mingled amazement and disbelief. He looked thunderstruck.

No more thunderstruck than she.

"You can't be. You can't be!" she said slowly, her voice a whisper, her turquoise eyes mirroring his amazement. "But you are! You're Johnny Winterhawk!"

"Damn it! Damn it to hell! You mean to say you didn't know?" Johnny Winterhawk thundered, looking as though he wanted to hit something
.

Alexandra Sellers is the author of the award-winning Sons of the Desert mini-series. She has written over two million words for print, including 40 romantic novels. She is the recipient of the Romantic Times' Career Achievement Award for Series (2009) and for Series Romantic Fantasy (2000). Her novels have been translated into over 15 languages. She divides her time between London, Crete and Vancouver.