One thing on our side was that my father wouldn’t have known which direction we’d gone from the compound. We could have climbed the wall from any spot, apart from right at the front where his men had been manning the gates, and taken off in any direction. I hoped that would cause enough confusion for him to limit being able to track us.
I still didn’t want to get complacent, however, and the thought of curling up under a tree out here and getting some sleep, only to wake up with my father standing over us, pointing a gun at Catalina’s head, filled me with dread.
I held her hand as we walked, no longer pushing her to run. Her fingers were small and warm in mine, and my heart filled with protective love for her. Maybe what we were doing was crazy, but there was no way I could let Torres take her now. She was mine, and though I’d been blind and hadn’t seen it over all these years, she always had been mine.
“It’s starting to get light,” she said, lifting her face to the canopy of tree branches above us.
Sure enough, the sky was no longer a deep black, but had lightened to cobalt blue. Around us, the forest was waking up. Nocturnal creatures slunk back into their burrows, while the air began to fill with the tweeting of birds waking on their perches, and insects buzzed near our heads.
My stomach churned with nerves. Morning meant that everyone would be waking up back at the compound, and they would notice we had gone. I imagined the initial confusion, the search around the property, followed by realization and fury as my father pieced together what had happened.
“Torres will be on his way to get me,” she said, glancing up at me, her expression taut with worry.
She’d echoed my thoughts. “He won’t be coming to get you if my father has already realized you’re gone.”
“Do you think he’ll call Torres and tell him?”
“Yeah, he won’t want Torres coming to the compound only to be faced with bad news. Not that it will stop him, I’m sure. Torres will not be a happy man when he finds out.”
Catalina chewed at her lower lip, her smooth brow furrowed. “Is it bad that I feel guilty?”
“Why do you feel guilty? You don’t have anything to feel guilty about.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know... Torres just seemed to be so looking forward to me going to live with him.”
“Yeah, because he wanted to fuck you, Catalina. No other reason. Don’t think for a minute that he had any real feelings for you.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t. I guess I just hate letting people down—even if that person is someone who paid money for me.”
I tugged on her hand and pulled her to a halt. “Hey, you’re not regretting us running away together, are you?”
Sudden dread lodged like a rock inside me. I remembered hearing her with him, how she had sounded as though she’d been enjoying him touching her, and the blinding jealousy I’d experienced at the thought. Had I pushed her into this? I hadn’t exactly given her much of a choice. Once I’d taken her virginity, I’d known there was no going back. Hell, I’d known that before we’d had sex, but I was so caught up in the moment, carried away on a tide of jealousy and lust, that I hadn’t really thought it through properly. All I’d known was that I’d have given up absolutely everything and anything for her, and I still felt that way now. But what if she didn’t? What if she’d enjoyed her time with Elliot Torres as much as it had sounded like, and I’d taken away the option for her to go to him, if that was what she’d wanted?
She turned to me and lifted her hand, her fingers lightly brushing my cheek. “No, Angel. Never. I’ve loved you for as long as I can remember. I feel bad for all the trouble I’ve caused, but I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief. It wasn’t only the worry that she might have some kind of feelings for Torres that had bothered me; it was also the possibility that I’d taken her choices away from her. Men had done that to her for her whole life, and I didn’t want to be like either Elliot Torres or my father.
Her fingers remained against my cheek, and I lifted my hand and covered them with my own, pressing her skin to mine. I wrapped my other hand around her waist and pulled her closer, her body fitting me perfectly. I lowered my forehead, pressing it to hers, and we just stood that way for a moment, as though we were absorbing love and strength from one another, simply by connecting. We were in the middle of nowhere, with hardly any belongings, no home, and only a few hundred dollars to our name, but right then I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.
She tilted her face to mine, and I responded, kissing her, soft and slow at first, but when she parted her lips, her tongue eagerly seeking mine, I kissed her harder. My body reacted to her immediately, blood rushing to my cock, my balls tingling. I slipped my hands lower, cupping her ass and yanking her against me. Her arms wound around my neck, and she crushed her breasts to my chest. We were breathing hard, grinding against each other.
We’d gone from love to lust in a matter of seconds.
It hadn’t been long ago that I’d been worried I wouldn’t be able to think of her as anything other than the little girl I’d grown up with, but that was no longer a problem for me. I’d seen her naked, stroked her curves, tasted her pussy, and though I loved our shared history, and that she knew me better than anyone else, I was also crazy for the woman she’d become.
We were on the run, but that didn’t stop me wanting her. Together, we sank to the ground. I sat back on my haunches and pulled her onto my lap, so she straddled me. I yanked her long-sleeved t-shirt up over her head and dropped it to the forest floor. It wasn’t quite daylight yet, and the little darkness remaining offered us some privacy.
My lips left hers, and I trailed kisses across her jaw and throat, then down to her breast. I ducked my head to suck her nipple over the top of her bra, drawing the damp material into my mouth, together with the hard nub beneath. Catalina arched her back, pushing her tits up toward me. I responded, yanking down the top of her bra with the hand that wasn’t supporting her, and feasting on her breast. She let out a little moan, and my cock grew even harder. I knew we shouldn’t, not here, not when we had people after us, but it was like I had no control when it came to her.
I pulled her back up, her naked breast still half cupped by the bra, her skin dotted with goose bumps from the cool air and my saliva. Her hands went straight down to my pants, yanking at the button of my jeans, and I knew she wanted me as much as I wanted her.
“Oh, God, Catalina,” I groaned as her hands made contact with my cock. “This is nuts.”
She kissed me again, biting my lower lip gently and tugging, gazing down into my eyes. “We’ll be quick. I want you.”
I’d have needed to be a saint to have said no, and a saint I most certainly wasn’t. She lifted herself off me slightly to yank off her jeans. There was no chance of anyone stumbling across us. We were in the middle of nowhere, in the early hours of the morning. The only people who would come across us were the same ones who were hunting us.
Catalina pulled my dick from my pants then climbed back on me. Keeping hold of my shaft, she rubbed herself up and down my length, smearing me with her wet heat and getting herself ready. I imagined she would still be a little sore from yesterday, and while I wanted to take this slow, I was also aware of our current situation. She positioned me, my head already vanishing between her folds, and then, with excruciating slowness, sank down my length.
“Oh, fuck,” I moaned.
I grabbed her ass with both hands, wanting to help. She had a bad ankle, and I didn’t want her to take all the strain. She sank right down to my root, and I held her there, loving how she felt wrapped around my cock. It was like finding my own little piece of heaven, and I’d have happily died in her arms like this.
I lifted her up again, watching how my erection, coated in her juices, slowly slid from her body, reappearing inch by inch. When I was almost out, I pushed my hips forward again and let her drop back down, her pussy swallowing me.
“Watching my cock pushing inside you like that is about the hottest thing I’ve ever seen,” I told her.
Her full lips were parted and swollen from the kissing, her chest and cheeks flushed. “Me, too,” she gasped, her hair falling around her face as she looked down to see where we were joined. “This is turning me on so much.”
I dug my fingers into her ass cheeks, my backside clenched as I thrust into her from my kneeling position. I was so deep, I felt as though I was in the very center of her. I reached between us and used my thumb on her clit, just applying pressure at first, but then rolling the nub of nerves in a circle. The effect was instant, and she bucked on my lap, her pussy clenching harder around my cock. I liked her like this, a little wildcat bucking and thrashing, with my dick impaled deep inside her. Her breathing grew faster, the moans she made with each thrust getting me even hotter.
“Oh, God, Angel. I’m going to come. I’m going to come.”
And she did, her head flung back, her breasts heaving as she cried her release into the forest. I couldn’t hold back any longer. With her internal muscles rippling around my cock, I let go. The world shrank down to that one moment of pleasure as I released the pressure that had been building, and surged inside her, stream after stream jettisoning from my cock and coating her inner walls. Hot wetness flooded over me, and she folded back against me, her arms around my neck, her face pressed against the hollow of my throat. We were both breathing hard, the pounding of our heartbeats racing together.
Sex with Catalina didn’t just feel like sex. It felt like a real connection, like we were giving a piece of ourselves to each other, joining us physically and emotionally. I’d had sex with plenty of women, but I’d never felt that way about fucking before. Now it was like we were sharing energy, building each other up, and making each other stronger. I knew it would sound stupid if I said how I felt out loud, but that didn’t change anything. And I loved that I was the only man who had ever been inside her. Maybe that made me too much like Elliot Torres, but it was different for us. I’d known Catalina her whole life, and she’d chosen to be with me. We were in love. That was very different than a man she didn’t even know who had paid to take her virginity.
“Are you okay?” I asked, lifting her face from my shoulder, pushing her dark curls away from her face.
“Yes, that was amazing. I just wish we had a big comfortable bed we could collapse into now.”
I kissed her. “Me, too.”
I was suddenly tired, but I knew it was partly down to the rush of hormones—though both of us had gone all night with no sleep. I wanted to spread my clothes on the ground for her and create a nest we could both crawl into, but we couldn’t risk it. We’d already wasted too much time.
Planting a kiss to her nose, I lifted her off me. She reached for her bag and pulled out a wad of tissues.
“Sorry.” I wrinkled my nose, feeling bad that I’d left her in a mess. Then I thought of something else. “We’re okay, aren’t we? For birth control, I mean?”
She held her arm out to me. “Your father made sure I had the contraceptive implant put in last month in preparation for me going to Torres.” Her lips thinned. “I guess he didn’t want me going the same way as my mother.”
I didn’t know what to say. “I’m so sorry, Catalina.”
“What, that I’m on birth control, or that I killed my own mother when I was born?”
Her words shocked me. “You didn’t kill her. She died giving birth, that’s two very different things. And if you’d been born in a hospital with proper medical attention, she might not have even died. It was the circumstances of your birth that killed her, not you, and you can hardly blame yourself for something that was happening even before you were born.”
She sighed. “I wish I could think like that, but I’ll never get away from the fact that if I wasn’t alive, then my mother would be.”
“You don’t know that. None of us know what might or might not have been. But your mom wanted you, Catalina. She hid her pregnancy, even though she knew how much trouble it would get her in. She wanted you, which is more than I can say about my own mother.”
She reached out and took my hand, and immediately we switched from the comforter to the comforted. “You don’t know what happened to your mom, Angel. She might have wanted you, but your father prevented her from keeping you. You know your father. He gets what he wants, and if he wanted you but not her, then that’s exactly what he would have taken.” She gave a rueful smile. “Did he never tell you anything about her?”
I shook my head. “Nothing substantial. Only that she was a woman he met on a business trip. He never even told me her name.”
“Surely there must be some kind of documentation? A birth certificate or something?”
“I guess so, but if there is, my father made sure to hide it well enough that I’ve never seen it. He must have been made to produce something when I was at school, unless he paid someone to forge paperwork, but back then I never thought to ask for it or look for it among my papers. There’s no chance of me ever finding her, and if she was going to try to find me, she would have by now.”
“Maybe she did try, and your father stopped her.”
“Yeah, perhaps. I guess I’ll never know for sure.”
She locked eyes with me. “You could always get the information out of your father, somehow.”
I gave a cold laugh. “I don’t think so, Kitty. We’re currently on the run so he doesn’t kill us both, remember? I don’t think he’d be too keen on answering questions about my mother.”
“No, I guess not.”
We finished dressing and picked up our bags from where we’d discarded them on the ground. I opened my rucksack and took out a bottle of water, handing it to Catalina for a drink before taking one myself.
We started walking again, me with my arm slung around her shoulder, hers around my waist. The sun was almost up fully now, the day warming. I knew we wouldn’t be able to walk like this for long, but for the moment I was happy having her squashed into my side, her hair right under my nose.
Chapter Three
Fourteen Years Earlier
THERE HAD BEEN SNOW on the ground for several weeks now.
I liked the snow. Things changed in the compound when there was thick snow on the ground. People became more playful, and sometimes even my father would come out and help me build a snowman, or charge around the grounds with me, yelling wildly and throwing snowballs.
No vehicles could reach the compound when the weather got bad, so we all had to hunker down and make do with whatever was in the pantry. Maybe some people would think it wouldn’t be fun to go without, but we never went hungry. I enjoyed it, too, because men would stop coming to the compound—the trek to the compound becoming too treacherous unless you had a vehicle that was good in the snow, and even then, was it really worth taking the risk? Because the men weren’t visiting, the women all seemed much happier. They were freer with a hug, and would play games, if I asked them to.
“You know it’ll be Christmas soon,” Yolanda said to me one day.
I scuffed my foot on the floor. “My father doesn’t believe in Christmas. He says it’s nothing more than a fairy story.”
She smiled. “There’s nothing wrong with fairy stories.”
“Strong men don’t believe in stories,” I said, parroting his exact words. My father wasn’t someone you nagged at for anything. Once he said no, that meant no. I knew what happened if I pushed him, and the outcome was never good for me.
But Yolanda nodded toward a little figure in a wooly hat and gloves, who was scooping up snow from off the plant pots in the courtyard. “What about little girls, though? Are they allowed to believe in fairytales?”
I screwed up my face. “I... I guess so.” My father had never said anything to me about little girls not believing in fairytales, so I guessed that would be all right. I didn’t want to do anything to make him mad, but I wouldn’t be doing it for me, I’d be doing it for Catal
ina.
A little buzz of excitement went through me at the idea of being able to have Christmas. I’d read about it and seen pictures of trees and sparkling lights, and piles of presents. I wasn’t stupid—I knew the kind of Christmas Yolanda was suggesting wouldn’t be anything like the kind I’d heard about, but the idea of celebrating was still exciting.
I thought of something and frowned. “What about Santa? How can we tell Kitty that Santa is coming when we don’t have any presents to leave under the tree?” I twisted my lips. “We don’t even have a tree.”
She smiled at me encouragingly. “We’ll figure it out. Maybe you could make something for Catalina. You know she would love anything you gave her.”
“But isn’t it supposed to be from Santa? How can it be from me and Santa?”
“Christmas is all about magic,” she told me. “The presents can be from whoever we want them to be.”
I grinned, liking that idea. My world was constrained by facts and rules, and the idea of something being whatever we made it was dizzyingly freeing. I was excited to tell Catalina about Christmas, too. I’d never had anyone to do this for me—the women who lived here would never have overstepped the line with my father like that—but it was different if it was one kid doing it for another.
Making up my mind, I went out to join the little girl in the snow.
“Hey, Kitty-cat. Have you ever heard of Christmas and Santa Claus?”
She screwed up her small face. “No. Who are they?”
Did I go down the religious route and talk about the birth of Jesus? Religion wasn’t something we did here either, and I figured it would only confuse things further if I brought it up. “Well, it’s a special, magical day that happens once a year, where someone called Santa brings presents to all the boys and girls all over the world.”
“He does? I’m a girl. He’s never brought me a present before.”
Unbound for Him Page 2
