Season of Storm by Sellers Alexandra

small operation, as her father's European manager had soon shown her. Smith felt suddenly as free as her hair.
    Smith laughed into the wind and turned to meet Johnny Winterhawk's eyes. "This is one beautiful house," she said, and smiled at him in real admiration.
    The kitchen had two large windows—one facing on the same view, slightly below the balcony. The window opposite looked out over the rock staircase they had arrived by earlier.
    Johnny Winterhawk made the best scrambled eggs she could remember eating since her favourite cook had quit at the St. John logging camp in Dog's Ear four or five years ago.
    "Are you an aficionado of scrambled eggs?" he asked her when she told him this.
    "I was hooked on them that summer," Smith remembered with a smile. "Big Ben was a fantastic cook, and scrambled eggs were his forte. He used to put tarragon or something in them." She sighed, scooping up another mouthful of the brunch Johnny Winterhawk had just cooked. "He quit in the middle of that summer. After working for my father for years, he quit the only summer I was at Dog's Ear. The cook who came after Big Ben left was terrible," Shulamith wrinkled her nose. "Just my luck," she laughed.  
    "Are you unlucky?" he asked with a smile of disbelief. "You seem to lead a pretty good life. Sounds as if you're being groomed to take over your father's business."
    Fleetingly she wondered if he had any reason other than conversational interest in the answer to that. Was he trying to judge her value to her father and St. John's Wood?
    "I went to my first logging camp the summer I was sixteen," Smith recalled. "That was sort of a test: I had one more year of high school and had to decide whether I wanted to go on to study forestry in university. That first summer I was just a worker, a lumberjill, but after that the grooming started. I worked in a different logging camp or sawmill or pulp-and-paper mill every summer while I was taking my forestry degree. I was always in some position in charge—first assistant and then foreman or supervisor. My father believes in the deep-end theory."
    Johnny Winterhawk bit into a piece of warm buttered toast and looked inquiring.
    "You know—throw them in at the deep end. I think I've done half the jobs there are in the forestry industry—some of them only for a week or two, of course, just long enough to learn the work. And I've been in charge of a minimum of fifty men since I was twenty." She laughed shortly. "And if you think the boss's son has trouble with the employees, you should try being the boss's daughter!"
    Johnny nodded slowly as he poured coffee. "I imagine you have to prove yourself constantly."
    That was exactly what she had to do, but not many people understood that. Most people she talked to imagined that her biggest problem in such a male-dominated industry was sexual harassment. But in fact the opposite was true. Now and then one of her father's employees would ask her to go out with him, but not one had ever had the temerity to make a physical pass at her. Smith was no ordinary woman trying to break into male-dominated ranks: she was the boss's daughter. There had never been any question in Cord St. John's company that that would be a very quick way to get fired. If they wanted her to prove herself to be as tough and as smart as any of them, well, Cord St. John had started in the camps himself. He understood that. But as to "proving" anything else....
    That first summer—the summer she was sixteen—there had been a young man. A student like herself, but he was already in university, working his way through, and in a strange and sometimes hostile environment Shulamith had found him a comforting symbol of the kind of life and people she was used to.
    They were drawn to each other. He was a big shy boy who played the guitar, and in the evenings they sat out under the stars, and he played to her.
    It had been as sweet and simple as childhood friendships, though of course, given time, it