Chapter 1: Mid-November

The first that Doctor Ian Cameron, MD, knew of the vicious and vindictive assault upon his person was when the twelve-year-old girl, who had been comfortably sleeping on his shoulder under a comforting blanket, was wrenched from under his protective arm.

As he blinked his bleary eyes open from his utterly exhausted sleep, they were suddenly filled with a stinging irritant, in the form of pepper spray. Cameron cried out and brought his hands up to his face. Almost immediately he was struck on the side of the head by a blow powerful enough to knock him off the sofa onto the sitting room floor. He later learned that he was cruelly struck by his very own heavy medical bag, which had been handily left next to the sofa.

As he lost consciousness from this single blow, Doctor Cameron was aware of one girl screaming high pitched in the background and a woman’s voice cursing him in what seemed to him to be a deeper and fiery Mediterranean tongue. He was simultaneously conscious as he slipped into unconsciousness that his torso was at the complete mercy of and being subjected to a number of sharp kicks calculatedly aimed at his trousered manhood.

For some unfathomable reason, once his body had reached that numb, painless stage, for just a moment before his consciousness turned inky black, the incongruous thought occurred to Cameron that the woman’s voice was ... well, actually, quite sexy.