Free Stepping into the Prince's World by Marion Lennox

power...?
    He ended up in the basement and found his answer. Here was a vast bank of batteries, presumably linked to solar panels. This explained why the house was still warm, the refrigerators still operating.
    It still wasn’t safe for Claire to be here, he thought. Not alone.
    Which led to figuring out the radio. He’d found the second transmitter in the study. It was huge and it was useless.
    Frustrated, he found a torch and ventured outside. The wind was still up, catching him in its icy chill, but he’d been in conditions far worse than this during his service. The antenna had been attached to one of the outbuildings and it had crashed down during the storm. It lay smashed across the rocks, and with it lay the remains of a satellite dish.
    This had been some communications system. A much smaller one would have been far less prone to damage.
    Someone had wanted the best—so they could tune into a football game in Outer Mongolia if they wished. He stared bitterly at the over-the-top equipment and thought they could even have used this to talk to Mars if there had been anyone on Mars to hear.
    But not now. A small radio might have been within his power to fix. This, he hadn’t a hope of fixing.
    In this day and age surely there must be some method of communicating with the mainland.
    Smoke signals?
    Right.
    He’d seen the maps. This island was far away from normal shipping channels. There might be the odd fishing trawler around, but after the storm the sea would be churned for days. Fishing fleets would stay in port until things settled.
    He thought of his grandparents and felt ill.
    There was nothing he could do about their distress. Nothing .
    He could go to bed and worry about it there.
    He did go to bed—in the smallest of the over-the-top bedrooms. He lay in the dark and decided that worrying achieved nothing. He should turn his mind off tomorrow and simply appreciate that he was in a warm bed, his world had stopped rocking and he was safe.
    He did manage to turn his mind off worrying.
    He didn’t quite succeed in turning his mind off Claire.

CHAPTER FIVE
    S HE WOKE AND the sun was streaming into her little bedroom. She was safe in her own bed, Rocky was asleep on her feet—and she was sore.
    Very sore. She shifted a little and her arm protested in no uncertain terms.
    She opened her eyes and saw a note propped against a glass of water.
    Pills, it said. Pain. When you wake take these. Don’t try and move until they take effect.
    That seemed like great advice. She took the pills that were magically laid out beside the glass and forced herself to relax. If she lay very still it didn’t hurt.
    Some time during the night Raoul had come into her bedroom and left the pills. He’d checked on her.
    Maybe it was creepy.
    Maybe it was...safe.
    She let the thought drift and found it comforting. No, it was more than that, she thought. He cared .
    For Claire, the concept of care was almost foreign. She’d been an unwanted baby. Her mother had done her best by her, but there’d been little affection—her mother had been too stressed taking care of the basics. Claire had been a latchkey kid from the time she could first remember, getting home to an empty house, getting herself dinner, going to bed telling herself stories to keep the dark at bay.
    She’d gone to bed last night aching and sore and battered, but so had Raoul. She’d seen the bruises. She was under no illusion that he was hurting almost as much as she was, and he must be far more traumatised.
    And yet he’d taken the time to check on her during the night. He’d thought about her waking in pain and he’d done something about it.
    â€˜I’m a sad woman,’ she said out loud. ‘One act of kindness and I turn to mush. And he owes me. I saved his life. Or I think I did.’
    â€˜You did.’
    The voice outside the door made her jump.
    â€˜Can I come