Patricia Rosemoor - Stealing Thunder

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Cover Page

Title Page Stealing Thunder Patricia Rosemoor www.millsandboon.co.uk

About the Author Patricia Rosemoor has always had a fascination with dangerous love. She loves bringing a mix of thrills and chills and romance to Intrigue readers. She’s won a Golden Heart from Romance Writers of America and Reviewers’ Choice and Career Achievement Awards from Romantic Times BOOKreviews. She teaches courses on writing popular fiction and suspense-thriller writing in the fiction writing department of Columbia College Chicago. Check out her website, www. PatriciaRosemoor.com. You can contact Patricia via e-mail at Patricia@PatriciaRosemoor.com. Thanks to the writers who are always willing to brainstorm with me – Marc for the movie set and Sherrill, Cheryl and Rosemary for the big finish.

Epigraph June 22, 1919 Donal McKenna, Ye might have found happiness with another woman, but yer progeny will pay for this betrayal of me. I call on my faerie blood and my powers as a witch to give yers only sorrow in love, for should they act on their feelings, they will put their loved ones in mortal danger. So be it, Sheelin O’Keefe

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Copyright

Patricia Rosemoorhas always had a fascination with dangerous love. She loves bringing a mix of thrills and chills and romance to Intrigue readers. She’s won a Golden Heart from Romance Writers of America and Reviewers’ Choice and Career Achievement Awards from Romantic Times BOOKreviews. She teaches courses on writing popular fiction and suspense-thriller writing in the fiction writing department of Columbia College Chicago. Check out her website, www. PatriciaRosemoor.com. You can contact Patricia via e-mail at Patricia@PatriciaRosemoor.com.

Thanks to the writers who are always willing to brainstorm with me – Marc for the movie set and Sherrill, Cheryl and Rosemary for the big finish.

June 22, 1919

Donal McKenna,

Ye might have found happiness with another woman, but yer progeny will pay for this betrayal of me. I call on my faerie blood and my powers as a witch to give yers only sorrow in love, for should they act on their feelings, they will put their loved ones in mortal danger.

So be it,

Sheelin O’Keefe

Bitter Creek Reservation, South Dakota

“Come out and meet your accusers, sorcerer!”

The deep voice rumbled through the crowd. Thirteen-year-old Ella Thunder felt a cold lump in her chest as her father jerked her away from the window and the sight of angry faces surrounding the house. Half the people who lived on the rez awaited him.

“Go to your room, Ella!”

Trembling, Ella backed into the doorway of her bedroom, but she refused to go inside. She wouldn’t abandon her father!

A rugged man with features as craggy as the South Dakota Badlands, Joseph Thunder radiated power as he stepped toward the front door. Ella only hoped his power was strong enough to save him.

“Joseph, no,” Mother said, her delicate white hands catching on her husband’s muscular bronze arm. “They’re beyond reason! We should have left once the rumors started.”

Ella had heard the disgusting rumors. How her shaman father was secretly doing bad things. How he’d taken Nelson Bird’s mind from him because Nelson had caught him.

Lies!

“Out, sorcerer!” thundered the voice. “Before we burn down your house!”

As Father reached for the handle, Ella rushed past him and threw herself against the door. “No!” Her heart was beating as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. “Let me go. I’ll tell them they’re wrong!”

“Ah, Ella. There was never a braver girl.” Father’s dark eyes filled with sadness, and he kissed the top of her head. “Someday you’ll have great need for that bravery, to get you through a journey of terrible danger. But not this day. This day is mine alone to suffer.”

She fought him, but she couldn’t stop him from pulling her away from the door. A lump in her throat threatened to choke her, and her eyes burned.

Mother’s blue eyes filled with tears as she pleaded, “Joseph, please do something. Use your power to stop them!”

The request shocked Ella and made her recognize the depth of Mother’s desperation. Her mother believed in Christian teachings, not in the mystical powers of the Lakota.

“Some things are predestined and no power is strong enough to stop them.”

Ella knew her father never used his power for himself, but only to help others—and wondered if that was a personal decision, or something not of his choosing, that he was bound to.

His forehead drawn into a scowl, Father stepped out onto the dirt road and spoke to the crowd. “Don’t let wild talk overcome your good sense!”

Seeming as if they were struck speechless by this horror, the grandparents huddled together at the kitchen table, holding on to her younger sister, Miranda, as if waiting for the judgment call of the crowd.

Ella wasn’t going to wait. She ran out into the street in time to hear Roderick Bird, Nelson’s older brother, accusing her father.

“What you did to Nelson is proof enough for me that you practice sorcery!”

“I did no evil to Nelson—”

“Liar!” came a chorus of voices.

“You’ve brought disease and poverty to the rez,” one woman yelled, “so we have no future!”

“The future is in the earth beneath your feet,” Joseph said. “You must believe—”

“Get him!”

The crowd surrounded her father and dragged him toward the church. “No!” Ella screamed, trying to reach him. “No!”

“Leave Joseph alone!” Mother yelled. “He is innocent!”

But the crowd was too frenzied to listen. Wearing a venomous expression, Ami Badeau shoved Ella out of the way, and an elbow to her chin from another woman made her see stars. She tripped over a rut in the road and fell to her knees. Dazed, she saw Mother chase the crowd.

This wasn’t happening, Ella thought, her chest squeezing tight. Their neighbors…people who’d come to Father for help when they were sick or needed spiritual or practical advice…they weren’t themselves. Their faces had changed, their eyes burned with madness. Only her father’s apprentices Leonard Hawkins and Nathan Lantero, who was also her cousin, appeared sane.

“Let him go!” Leonard yelled.

“Stop and think what you’re doing!” Nathan added.

Jimmy Iron Horse, Father’s third apprentice, was part of the angry crowd. He shoved Nathan out of the way. “We know what we’re doing! Getting rid of a sorcerer who is bringing his evil to the rez!”

Nathan and Leonard physically tried to get to Father, to stop the mob, but they were only two and were easily shrugged away.

It was up to her to do something! Ella thought, vaguely noting the green tinge to the sky. She scrambled to her feet, but the earth itself seemed to have shifted, and the air felt thick, as if it was trying to hold her back.

As if someone had cast a spell…

Concentrating on parting the dense air like she would a curtain, she plunged into the crowd. Voices rose into a chant, and she smelled smoke. She shoved one dancing woman out of the way and squeezed past another who was singing a death chant. Then she stumbled into the open circle where her father was already bound to a post, his hands behind him, wood stacked around his legs, the track of a raven—a long line intersected with an upside down V—drawn on his forehead in black. Father appeared stricken at her presence.