Free My True Love by Karen Ranney Page A

cried aloud that day and wished him far from there and to safety.
    She knelt on the floor, her hands tracing the line of bricks. He’d hidden his sketches here so that they would not be destroyed. A hidey-hole to protect what was most precious to him. She’d created one for herself, too, although she’d no need. But she’d searched through the clearing on the island for the perfect tree and hidden her best drawings in the knot created by a fallen branch. In prior years it might have been used as a nest, but from that moment on, she’d placed her treasures there, feeling a kinship with the boy she’d seen all her life.
    Her fingers trembled as she found the brick, coaxed it out bit by bit. Behind it was a rectangular space where, as a boy, Stephen had kept his drawings. She reached inside and found it empty. She hadn’t expect it to be otherwise, but she smiled at her optimism.
    The wind was rising, soughing around the curve of the tower, keening like a piper’s lament. She glanced up. The sky was black and angry, the storm no longer approaching but directly above her. A spear of lightning darted from one cloud to another, followed by a rumble of thunder that seemed to praise the show of light.
    Her hand trembled around the brick even as her stomach clenched. A child’s fear. One the woman had not quite outgrown.
    It is God’s way of talking, Anne .
    A giant lives in the clouds, Anne, and his breath is the wind .
    Don’t be afraid, my child. It is but the rain come to nourish the flowers .
    Somehow those kind words had not eased her terror. Not then. Not now.
     
    She should not have been here, but she was.
    He stood disbelieving, half in and half out of the opening to the roof.
    Finally, he pulled himself up, stood defiant against the growing storm.
    She looked up at him. Her skin was tinted by a rosy blush, her brown hair blown by the wind. Her eyes were made almost black by the encroaching darkness.
    She knelt before the hiding place he’d made for himself as a boy. He’d laboriously removed a brick from the inner wall and hollowed out the space behind it. A place to store his most precious things, his treasures. No one knew of it. How had she known?
    Her lips appeared tremulous, as if they captured a sound and hid it trapped inside. His name again? Or had that been merely a fevered dream? This might be one. But he felt the wind blowing against his face, could feel the sudden chill of it. From somewhere close he heard thunder.
    She stretched out her trembling hand, the second time she’d done so. Just as before, he held out his own, touched her fingertips.
    The moment was important, portentous. He did not speak, could barely breathe in the spell of it. Once again, he felt as if he should know her, should say something to her, but the words escaped him. The moments stretched between them so strong and real that he might have reached out with his hands and touched them. Wrung them into tiny seconds. But instead, his fingers barely touched hers.
    Impatient to end his confusion, he reached out and gripped her wrist so tight that he could feel the blood pound there, could measure the warming of her hands.
    He took one step toward her. Then another. She closed her eyes as a rumble of thunder overhead shook the tower. Her fingers trembled against his wrist. Fear of storms? Or of him? He let loose her hand, stepped back.
    She stood, faced him. The wind pressed her skirts against the long line of her legs, blew her hair behind her so that there was no subterfuge, no shadow to his study of her. Only the line of cheek and chin, the sweep of a throat and a pulsing beat there.
    She came too close, her hand once again breaching the distance between them. A look of compassion flickered over her face even as her fingers brushed tenderly against his folded arm.
    The thunder sounded like cannon fire. Her eyes closed; her fingers curved against his shirt. It was not him she feared, then, but the storm. The wrath of nature