Hero's Bog: Paden Winters

My problem started when I was about fifteen.  I tried to pretend I was an ordinary guy living an ordinary life, going to high school, worrying about my geometry test and wondering if I would be able to pass my drivers test.  But I wasn’t normal, though many didn’t know what had happened to me five years before, when I had been ten and abducted from school.  My parents tried very hard to keep it all secret from the media.         

Before the abduction, I lived in a bubble, surrounded by loving parents, a privileged life.  My father built yacht’s for a living so I didn’t have to question or think about what it meant to be surrounded by the ocean, by boats and all that went with that lifestyle.  But it all came to a halt the day I was taken by a monster.

For ten months I was locked on a dirty, dingy twenty-four foot sailboat, handcuffed to the table.  Every week we’d travel to another port, pull in and set anchor.  I was told that my parents didn’t want to pay the ransom, and then, later, told they were having trouble raising the money.  Of course, that wasn’t true.  My parents had paid the money right away, but my captor liked having a little boy around and so he kept me.

I was never raped, but what he did was worse.  I was never the same after that.  Just when my old life had started to fade from my memory, someone saw me through an open window and called the police.  I was reunited with my family and though I was happy, but inside me everything had changed.

And that became all too apparent when I began to get interested in girls.  This…thing... inside of me taunted me to cut myself, to cut it out of myself, and so I did.  What followed was years of therapists, institutions, behavior modifications, medicines…it all became too much.  Then one day I read about a new way to treat cutting, by distancing yourself from the trigger.  And so I moved to a place so remote and far reaching that I’d never have to worry about sexual desire again.  And for ten long years I lived alone, isolated except for the briefest moments of human contact.

Until she came and turned my world upside down.  Panthea Snow.  I'd never seen a more beautiful woman.  She released the monster again, and as much as I hated her for that, eventually I came to love her for freeing me from my demon.

{To find out how Panthea Snow saves Paden Winters from the nightmare of his past, pick up LOVE STORY FOR A SNOW PRINCESS here: http://www.bookstrand.com/love-story-for-a-snow-princess }

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