The Hostage. Сьюзен Виггс

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СКАЧАТЬ gave a shriek and scrambled for the door. He grabbed a handful of her hair and used the knife to slice off a thick blond lock. “This’ll do,” he said, sheathing the knife.

      She moaned, sinking to the bench and clutching at her ruined hair.

      He left her sitting alone in the cramped galley, struck speechless and motionless by the fact that she had lost everything in the world and was bound on a journey into the wilderness with two madmen.

      Chapter Eight

      Smokestacks and grain elevators rose ghostlike through the mist enshrouding the city of Milwaukee. At the stern of the trawler, Tom felt the presence of the girl like the weight of an albatross tied around his neck. He understood all too well that long poem Frère Henri had studied with him one winter. A man had to wear the evidence of his deeds, and he could never go back to what he was before.

      He had abducted the woman on impulse, but now she was his, totally dependent upon him. Holding the daughter of Arthur Sinclair as a hostage on the boat was sheer idiocy, but as a means of revenge it might just work. Lord knew how this would turn out. The whole damned thing made his head ache, a common occurrence since he had been whacked in the skull by Deborah’s father. The swelling had subsided, but not the pain.

      His hostage was in the pilothouse, pacing back and forth, stopping occasionally at a portal to look at the city. He found himself thinking of a time, when he was a boy, that he had caught a butterfly. It had been beautiful, yellow and royal blue, with long-tipped wings and antennae as delicate as a silk thread. He had put the creature in a glass jar, adding a branch of honeysuckle for it to feed on and carefully poking holes in the metal top of the jar. In the morning he’d found the butterfly dead, its wings ragged from beating against the jar, the honeysuckle wilted and brown.

      Deborah Sinclair hadn’t eaten in days.

      He wondered why she hadn’t tried to escape again. After that first attempt, she seemed resigned, defeated. Either it was a ruse, and she was biding her time, or she had surrendered. He stalked across the deck and yanked open the door of the pilothouse. When he stepped inside, she turned a cool gaze upon him. The dog she called Smokey lifted one side of its mouth in a snarl, but otherwise didn’t move from its favorite napping spot on the galley bench.

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