A Lesson in the Storm: Season of Desire: Part 1 (Seasons Quartet) Read Online Free Page A

has a metallic quality with notes of burnt rubber and I realise it’s fuel. I try to open my eyes. The world outside is a sharp jumble of black and white. It hurts to try and understand it, so I shut my eyes again. Oh, I’m so tired. I want it all to go away. I want to sleep and I will too, even though it’s so cold…
      ‘Wake up, sweetheart!’ It’s that voice again, close to my ear this time. ‘Don’t go to sleep, do you hear me? You’ve got to put your arm around my neck.’
      A strong hand grips my left wrist and lifts up my arm. The pain in my chest bolts through me again and I cry out, but he ignores it, pulling my arm around his neck despite my sob of agony. Then his arm is underneath me, another around my back, and I’m being lifted up. My head lolls onto a broad shoulder as he stands up, taking my weight with ease. Then we are moving with difficulty, jolting and swaying with every unsteady step. He’s carrying me through a deep snowdrift, the white blanket masking the rocky, uneven ground beneath. I shudder with cold. In fact, I’m freezing. Why have I not felt this cold before now?
      We’re moving faster now, we must be out of the deepest drift. I’m being jolted in his arms as he strides through the snow, holding me tightly as he goes. The pain in my chest is agonising, each step stabbing me. There’s a sound behind me, a creaking, sliding, crunching noise, and I open my eyes and blink, looking back to where we’ve come, straining to focus. He stops and turns so that we can both watch. I can see the car now, a concertina’d, broken wreck of bent metal that makes me gasp. The black, twisted body is moving, slowly at first, grinding over the snow-covered stony ridge like a dark glacier, and then gathering pace until it slides over the edge of the plateau and crashes down a hundred feet in a shower of falling snow, hitting the white carpeted valley below. The impact sends up a flurry of snow as the car vanishes into the whiteness.
      I can feel the bodyguard’s chest rise and fall in sharp breaths, and almost hear his heart thumping.
      ‘That was a close one,’ he murmurs, more to himself than to me.
      Now I begin to understand our situation. The wild panic of those last few minutes before the car left the road starts to come back to me. I don’t know how long it has been since I felt that fiery pain in my chest and lost consciousness, but here we are now, in the freezing wintry afternoon, without our car. I’m rapidly losing body heat. One side of me is warm from the proximity of the guard’s body, but the other is chilled and I’m shaking with cold despite my puffy jacket.
      He feels my body trembling and with one arm tries to wrap my scarf a little more tightly around me. ‘Is that better?’
      I can’t feel any difference at all, except for a scrap of comfort from the softness of the scarlet cashmere, but I nod anyway.
      He looks at me seriously. His face is so close to mine, and I can see right into the depths of his eyes. They are a bright blue with dark rims around the iris, and steely with determination. ‘Do you have your phone on you?’
      I shake my head. ‘It was in my purse,’ I manage to say, drawing in enough breath to speak but not so much that it triggers the pain in my chest. ‘In the car.’
      We both look down again to the place where the car landed. Only a few dark flecks on the snow show its resting place; to anyone ignorant of what it happened, it looks more like a couple of jagged dark rocks emerging from the whiteness than a buried Mercedes.
      ‘Right.’ He gives nothing away in his voice but I can guess that this not the answer he hoped to hear.
      ‘Where’s your phone?’ I ask in a husky whisper.
      There’s a pause before he replies, then he says, ‘Charging on the front seat.’
      ‘Oh.’
      ‘Aye. Not ideal.’
      Until now I’ve been too dazed by my situation to feel much more than relief that I’m somehow still