Season of Storm (5 page)

"Don't touch me!" she commanded with a catlike hiss. She could not control her voice. "Don't ever touch me again!"

He stood up, looking at her for a long, considering moment, his own breathing unsteady. "Try to get some sleep," he said, and left her.

Four

Smith heard him lock the door.  Maybe he assumed she had little experience of boats, because there was a hatch above the bed that almost certainly was locked only on the inside. But then, there was probably no point in trying to escape, anyway. She scrambled up and looked out the porthole. Nothing to see except water and sky. In the near distance a couple of tankers lay at anchor. Beyond, she could just see the winking skyline of Vancouver, and mountains silhouetted against a pink sunrise.

She was an excellent swimmer, but she knew from long experience that the water of Georgia Strait was very cold. Stressed as she was, she wouldn't be able to swim any distance without hyperthermia setting in. 

Smith sighed, turned exhaustedly away from the view and sat down on the bed again. Then she stopped abruptly as she caught sight of her reflection in a mirror on the wall.

Her face was filthy, grimed with dirt and tears and sweat. On one of her cheekbones a long graze was lightly crusted with blood. Her eyes seemed sunken and bruised, a haunted look that reminded her of pictures of herself at the unhappy age of nine. On both sides of her mouth a raw redness that the gag had caused stained her skin, and across her finely tapered chin was a black smear of grease. Her hair clung in damp tendrils to her forehead, ears, cheeks and neck, and fell over her breasts and down her back past her waist in thick rat's-tail tangles. The white eyelet lace of her bodice was torn, and the soft green cotton of the skirt was stained and dirty.

She looked awful, and her mirrored image was a sharp and brutal reminder of what had happened tonight and of what might yet happen. Her father—where was he now? A hollow sob rose from deep within her, and Smith pressed a fist against her mouth to hold it back.

He had kissed her. After doing this to her, he had kissed her! She wanted to be sick, or scream. She wanted to claw his eyes out, to beat him with her fists, to pour out this overwhelming anger and hatred on his head. Whirling with a force that made the cloth of her nightdress whip around her legs, Smith ran to wrench at the door handle.

Locked. No surprises there.  But she already knew her abductor had slipped up. She leapt onto the bed and dragged at the hatch levers.  She made no sound as she carefully lifted the hatch and stood up into the morning.

He was at the wheel, his right hand on the wheel, his left stretching out to adjust the genoa sheet. Above her the sails billowed out on two sides like wings: a following wind. Now the man turned his head toward the noise she made, but she was on him like a wildcat before he could react.

"What the...?" he exploded in surprise, while Smith, half on his back, half on his arm, clutched his hair and dragged him back. Immediately he loosed the wheel and grabbed at her.

She saw her chance. Letting go with one hand she reached out and jerked the wheel hard to starboard. The moaning
thwack
of the boom sweeping over announced its instant response to its changing angle to the wind, while under her, her captor lost his balance.
 

They fell together with an awkward force that nearly threw her overboard. Smith caught herself on the lifeline and scrambled back to the cockpit. Hoping her abductor was unconscious, but not wasting time to find out, she stepped over his body to the wheel.

He was not unconscious. Catching her ankle, he brought her down on the seat and flung himself on her.

"You bloody fool!" he shouted in her ear. "Do you want to get yourself killed?" His body was heavy on her, and she was winded by her fall; she didn't answer. In another moment the dark man was on his feet and jerking her up after him. With a grip so strong his muscles were quivering he held her against him, one arm behind her back, and grasped the wheel.

The sails were luffing badly; she hoped they would tear. But with another shuddering whack the mainsail moved to catch the wind again, and the yacht was no longer at the mercy of the battering waves but running before the wind.

His angry eyes were on her as he took his arm away from her body, but he kept the merciless grip on her wrist behind her back.

"Get below," he said through his teeth. "Any more tricks like this one and I'll tie you to the goddamn mast."

The genny was still luffing, and he eyed it impatiently. "Get below," he repeated sharply.

Suddenly Smith knew, as clearly as if he had told her, that the situation was not at all to this man's liking. Whatever his plans had been, she was not part of them. She looked at him over her shoulder as he held her arm, an idea taking shape in her brain.

"You're stuck with me," she said slowly. "You don't want me. You wanted my father, and you're sorry you took me instead."

He said nothing. He was watching the genny, unable to adjust it as long as he held her. Smith bit her lip, eyeing him. "If you take me back no one will know. I'll jump over half a mile out. I could swim half a mile, I'm a good swimmer. You don't have to worry about me." Her voice was softly persuasive, as persuasive as she knew how to make it. "You could tell the others I got away from you."

She waited, but his grip did not slacken, and he said nothing.  There was only the sound of the genny's soft complaint overhead.

Smith took a breath. All her anger was gone. Now she was only afraid. "I'll...I have money of my own," she said tentatively. "Not a lot, but...my father won't pay a ransom for me, you know. That's the truth," she said urgently, unaware that the sound of pain in her voice had already testified to the truth of what she said. "Not for me as his daughter, and not for me as an executive of the company. But if you let me go now, I'll pay you. I'll find a way to get the money to you, I promise. And I won't ask questions."

"No," he said, his voice harsh with a suppressed anger that surprised her.

"Please," Shulamith whispered, finally and utterly at the end of her tether.
"Please."
 

He stared up at the sails, his jaw tight. He made a minute course alteration that seemed to require all his attention.

"Get below," he repeated, his voice resigned. "There's coffee in the galley if you want a cup. Then I suggest that you get cleaned up. You'll find some clothes in the aft cabin."

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, nor were his eyes mocking. If anything they grew more sombre, and his jaw tightened.

She stared helplessly over her shoulder into the dark gaze, and it was a sensation like drowning. She felt 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.

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

***

She took a shower, and came up on deck wearing a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt she had found below, her long hair combed and tied back.

He wasn't going to sail around waiting for her to be ransomed. He was docking at what looked like a small island. A canoe lay keel up on the dock, and a black speedboat was moored on the opposite side of the dock. Her heart contracted: how many others were here waiting?

Then she looked more closely.  The speedboat was firmly tied at bow and stern, its fenders neatly fixed all along the lifeline, its fitted tarp firmly drawn over wheel and cockpit.  It didn't have the appearance of recent use.  There was no paddle by the upturned canoe.

Which didn't mean there weren't others waiting for them, but still Smith could draw breath and calm herself a little.

She watched him furl the sails, her tired brain trying to think of some escape.  The speedboat was not an option right now—he would be on her before she had the cover half off, and who knew if the key would be handy?  As for the canoe…how far would she get before he had the speedboat going?

She could leap ashore and run—but where to? It looked a very small island, possibly privately owned. Maybe even uninhabited. There was nothing that looked like a road. And she was barefoot. Smith sighed and resigned herself to waiting.

A few waking birds were lazily querying each other's existence, the water lapped softly  around the hull beneath her feet, and she wondered why these sounds of nature should only emphasize the perfect stillness.

Her captor was tall and broad, but not the giant that she had imagined when he held her and his hand was suffocating her. She watched silently as he worked, taking a curious pleasure in the sight of the play of his muscles, the efficient motion and interplay of arms, hands and feet. He was an experienced sailor, and that merely added to the mystery.

When at last all was fast and they climbed together onto the dock, his weary sigh was very human. But as soon as they reached the end of the wooden dock, he bent to pick her up in his arms.

"The path is rough. You would cut your feet," he said, then set off with her along the path and up the hillside. She did not resist. 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 strides, as though her hundred-ten-pound weight was not much of an encumbrance. He did not look down at her: his eyes 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 the 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 we?  Where are you taking me?" she asked. Her voice was almost a whisper; she was mentally exhausted and hardly cared what was going to happen to her. She couldn't fight anymore.

"Wait," 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 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. Above her, clinging to the hillside like a staircase in glass and cedar and stone, was a structure so individual, so beautiful, that she could hardly believe it was a house.  It might have been produced by the land itself, so perfectly did it merge with its surroundings. On one side water fell gently over the levels of the hillside to end in a large reflecting pool by the rock-hewn steps. The glass, where it was touched by the rising sun, was lightly golden, and on all sides trees grew close to the house. It was almost like coming upon an Aztec ruin in an overgrown jungle.

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

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

"Is it yours?" she asked at last.

He spared her a glance from under his lids. His profile was as strong and roughly hewn as the rest of him. It occurred to her suddenly that he was vibrantly handsome.

"Of course it is," 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
—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.