Kidnapped (The Marine's Love 1)

By Alexandra Bell

Sienna Brooks became a photojournalist to help the rest of the world understand the plight of people in danger. So when she's offered a chance to travel to Somalia to photograph the civil war taking place there, she jumps at the opportunity.

Little does she expect to be kidnapped and held hostage, not knowing if each day will be her last, not knowing if she'll ever see the sun again. But when she escapes and runs into a US Marine, will he leave his post to help a complete stranger, or will she find herself alone in a strange and dangerous land once more?

This 15,000 word story is the first part of a trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diamond Star Publishing
• Release date: Sep 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502221940

Book preview

Kidnapped (The Marine's Love 1)

Alexandra Bell

Published by Diamond Star Publishing, 2014.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Kidnapped (The Marine’s Love 1)

Kidnapped (The Marine’s Love 1)

When the men shot Salad, her translator, Sienna decided that her mother had been right after all: she should have married the hippopotamus. When she decided to become a photojournalist, she had made a lifetime decision against marrying the hippo. Now she wondered if being a photojournalist wasn’t worse.

The hippopotamus was the nickname she’d given the man her parents had wanted her to marry. He and her father had been buddies in Vietnam and they had continued to be close after the War.  Her father had returned to a secure job in his father’s business in Denver, while the hippopotamus had become very rich in some kind of business that Sienna never learnt the details of. Looking back, she wondered if it had been entirely legal, but it was really only his reluctance to discuss it that made her think that.  At the time, she didn’t wonder much about it because she wasn’t interested.

He wasn’t such a bad fellow, she decided afterwards, aside from being unpleasantly fat and old enough to be her father; he treated her with tact and consideration. He had surely known what her parents were planning, but hadn’t pushed the agenda in any way. Obviously he had conveyed to them that he wasn’t opposed, but to Sienna, he didn’t let on that marriage was a possibility.

But in the first place, Sienna, having graduated from South High School, had had enough of her parents managing her life.  They had it all planned out: she would get a degree of some sort, make a successful marriage to a rich man, and enter politics.  That was not a trajectory that she wanted any part of, if only because it was being forced on her.

What she liked was taking pictures. Since her father had first given her a camera when she was six, she’d been fascinated with photography. She had filled scrapbooks with her snapshots. When her first camera wouldn’t deliver what she wanted, she had saved up her pocket money to buy another. She had taken Photography and Photojournalism at school and had done a lot of the photos for The Rebel News and the The Johnny Reb, the yearbook. Her teachers had been free with their praise, and encouraged, she had gradually developed a passion for seizing the right moment and finding the right angle from which to record it.  Her dream was to become a freelance photographer, and after she had captured on film the drug dealing going on in a remote corner of the South High grounds, enabling the administration to effectively stop it, her dream was refined. She wanted to go into the remote areas of the world where there was suffering and conflict that the American people knew nothing about because it was not being covered by the mainstream media. She loved being the first person to let others know something they ought to know. Doing that gave her a heady sense of power.

Aside from photojournalism, her only strong interest was gymnastics, and she represented South High in several gymnastic meets, placing second in the annual statewide meet in her senior year.  But she knew she would never make a living as a gymnast, and besides, though she enjoyed it, it didn’t give her the sense of accomplishment photojournalism did.

She’d never been a campaigner, had never joined a student protest, and had, in fact, no real ideological platform.  Her part in the busting of the drug ring at South had started out merely as an interest in the challenge of taking the pictures.  But the praise she got for doing that was heady stuff, and having tasted the excitement and even danger of investigative photojournalism (she’d been threatened by the drug dealers when they discovered what she was doing) – the ideas of college and politics, let alone a cushy luxurious life,  didn’t feature in her plans at all.

She didn’t have a lot of close friends in High School, but was popular and had a lot of colleagues who liked and appreciated her.  She was active in Southern Masqueraders, the drama club, and