It took me a good ten minutes of battling and pleading with Betsy before I got her safely into her stall in the barn. By then, my shirt and jeans were soaked and I was shivering from the brutal gusts of wind that seemed to cut straight through my wet clothes. The wind had risen to an ear-splitting screech and lightning flashed overhead. Rufus, who’d stayed loyally pressed to my side the whole time, was shivering, his coat sopping wet and heavy.

I’d seen plenty of big storms in Seattle, but I’d always been safely sheltered inside, watching the lightning while cradling a mug of coffee. Being out here in the wilderness was very different. The temperature had dropped and the wind was so cold, that my head throbbed. One second, a gust was trying to punch its way down my throat, the next, it changed direction and I could barely breathe. It was terrifying, and getting worse.

I raced back to where I’d last seen Hank, but as I rounded the corner of the cabin, a gust took me right off my feet and I went full-length in the mud. I lay there stunned for a moment, the cold ground sapping my body’s heat.

Rufus licked my cheek, worried. I hauled myself to my feet, one whole side of my body coated in glutinous, gray-brown mud, and started searching through the trees for Hank. But it was almost completely dark, now, and he could be in any one of the patches of thick shadow. Worse, the wind was picking up anything that wasn’t bolted down and sending it scuttering along the ground. A watering can bounced past me and hit a tree. Then a branch as thick as my arm was bounced along the ground, spinning and twisting, and I had to dodge out of its way. If something like that hit Hank, he could be killed. Or he could run off into the woods, terrified, and we might never find him. I ran back and forth, venturing further and further from the cabin, Rufus nervously trotting at my side. “Hank!” I hollered. Nothing.

There was a crack that could have been the world snapping in two, and I was thrown to the ground. The air smelled like the photocopier at the call center and all I could see was red: throbbing, violent scarlet with a purple-white blob searing through the middle. It took a while for me to realize that I’d screwed my eyes shut and I tentatively inched them open, but the after-image the flash had left was so bright, it took me a few moments of blinking before I could see again.

Lightning had struck a tall pine right in front of me, splitting it halfway down and turning the top into a raging orange plume too fierce for the rain to put out. Burning branches started to creak and thump to the ground. Rufus gave a whine of fear. I have to get him out of here. But I couldn’t leave Hank...

And then, in the flickering light of the fire, I saw two big, scared eyes peeking out from the middle of a bush.

I raced over there, stumbling on legs that had gone numb and shaky. I didn’t have any time for niceties: the tree was cracking and leaning, the wind finishing what the lighting had started, and we were close enough that I could feel the fire’s heat on my face. I reached in, scooped Hank into my arms and staggered away with him, Rufus running alongside me. Embers were falling all around me and the icy rain hadn’t let up: I could feel myself being singed and soaked simultaneously, water pouring down my face and making it difficult to see. But I kept my eyes on the silhouette of the barn up ahead and kept putting one foot in front of the other. Just as we arrived, there was a groan and then the sound of snapping wood, and the pine that had been struck toppled to the ground.

I got Hank into his stall and shut the barn doors tight, then ran for the cabin, staggering as the gusts caught me. I was almost there when a branch came sailing through the air and punched end-on into one of the windows, shattering the glass and leaving the branch wedged in the hole. The shutters! I have to close the shutters! I ran around heaving them closed but they were made of thick, heavy wood, and the wind was trying to tear them out of my hands. Twice, I nearly had my fingers broken when I lost my grip and a shutter slammed back against the wall. Rufus barked and butted up against me, trying to nudge me towards the door and safety. “I know!” I told him. “One more!”

Tags: Helena Newbury Romance
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