Ritual Sins

by Anne Stuart

  She made an odd sound. In someone else he might have thought it was a laugh, but as far as he could tell Rachel Connery had absolutely no sense of humor.

  He could always see well in the dark, and even in the shadowy depths of the van he could see her martyred face clearly. Pale skin, trembling mouth, eyes tightly shut against the horrors she was about to endure. He was half-tempted to shove it in and get it over with.

  If he didn’t have an important agenda, that was exactly what he’d do. But screwing Rachel Connery wasn’t enough. He needed to subjugate her body and soul, and that was going to take a little more effort.

  He put his hands on her small breasts, covering them, and she jerked nervously, then settled back again, gritting her teeth. He was right, she was too thin. If she got a little meat on her bones her breasts would swell and plump up. He’d like to see her that way. Fat and sassy. It seemed a far cry from the skinny, angry woman lying in his bed, but he could still imagine it.

  He leaned over and whispered in her ear. “Roll over on your stomach.”

  He’d pushed her too far. She sat up quickly, shoving him away from her. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “I’m getting out of here.”

  “You’re staying.” He pushed her back down on the bed, allowing himself the slight relief of a little enthusiastic force.

  Anger was wiping out her fear. “If you don’t let me leave it will be rape.”

  He slid his hands over her shoulders, pinning her to the mattress. “So sue me.”

  Outside the thunder rattled the old camper. Inside she looked up at him, her defiance vanished. “Please don’t,” she whispered.

  “Sorry,” he said, covering her body with his, holding her there. “It’s too late to turn back.”

  * * *

  She despised herself, almost as much as she despised him. She’d chickened out, she’d begged for mercy, and all he’d done was laugh at her. They said rape wasn’t about sex, it was about anger. This horrible time in the cramped back of Luke Bardell’s old camper wasn’t about sex either, it was about intimidation and subjugation.

  She could turn off her mind. He was heavy on top of her, though not quite as heavy as she expected. If she thought about it she could probably feel his erection beneath the jeans he still wore, but she had no intention of thinking about it. She wouldn’t fight him anymore, since it did no good. She’d endure.

  He was hot in the damp warmth of the camper, his body hard against hers. His chest pressed against her breasts, the hair against her skin, as his hands slid up her sides, slowly, tauntingly.

  She shivered in the darkness, she wasn’t sure why. He didn’t kiss like anyone else. His kisses were damp, hot, strangely disturbing. They weren’t the wet, slobbering kisses she’d had to endure before.

  He covered her breasts with his big, hard hands again, and she held herself very still. Another unnerving sensation, one she had to get used to. Her skin felt hot and prickly, the sensitive flesh burning to the touch. She wanted to run naked in the rain, feel the cooling dampness soothe her. But she was lying pinned beneath a man who intended to have sex with her, and there was no escape.

  She knew he would put his mouth on her breasts, and she told herself she was prepared for it. She wasn’t.

  He flicked his tongue across her nipple, like the snake in the garden of Eden, and she could feel it harden in his mouth. She kept her hands still on the mattress, determined not to fight him, when all she wanted to do was punch him when he moved to her other breast, biting this time, lightly, just enough to make her arch her hips in angry retaliation.

  He probably didn’t think it was anger. He moved down her torso, kissing her belly, cradling her hips with his hands, and she shut her eyes again. Enduring. Enduring.

  He pulled her legs apart, and she let him, because she wanted him to get this over with, so that she could retreat safely back into her world. She waited for him to shuck off his pants, to push and probe and hurt her, and she braced herself, biting her lip in preparation for the assault.

  He put his mouth on her. His mouth, and his tongue, and she screamed in rage, hitting at him. He ignored her, clamping her hips with his hands, holding her still as she struggled in fury.

  She reached down and yanked at his long hair, but he paid no attention. “Stop it,” she screamed, panting in fury. “Don’t do that.” She tried to kick him, but he had her legs imprisoned with his body, and there was no way she could escape. She could only buck and thrash, trying to stop him, trying to hurt him, trying to blank everything out of her mind and ignore what he was doing to her.

  It was all part of the subjugation process, she tried to tell herself. He had absolutely no reason to want to do this to her, it would give him no physical pleasure. It was part of his plan to destroy her, and she wouldn’t let him.

  She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Her skin was on fire, her heart was racing, and all she wanted to do was get away from him. She bucked her hips, but it made no difference. Instead she felt him touch her, slide his fingers deep inside her as he used his mouth, and she wanted to scream.

  For a brief moment her body convulsed, but she fought it off in terror, backing away from it. He lifted his head to look at her, and in the darkness she could see the glitter in his dark eyes, the dampness on his mouth. He wiped it against his shoulder, staring at her. “You just keep fighting,” he murmured.

  “I always will. Now get off me, or finish it,” she said fiercely, the anger in her voice covering the tremor.

  He unzipped his jeans and pushed them down. She made herself look at him, to solidify her disgust. Even in the dark she could tell that he was tremendously aroused, bigger than anything she’d ever had to put up with. It would hurt even more, she thought with perverse satisfaction. She would hate it. And she would endure.

  She closed her eyes, clutching the sheet again, and waited. He pulled her legs around his body, levering forward so that she felt him against her, hot, hard, probing. She wanted to tighten against him, but her body was weary of fighting. He was braced over her, teasing her, and she wanted to scream at him, to tell him to hurry up.

  “You hate this, don’t you?” he murmured, his fingers in her tangled hair.

  “I hate this,” she said.

  “Brace yourself, sugar. I’m not finished with you yet.” And he filled her with a deep, swift shove that slid in fully, damply.

  She tried to catch her breath from the shock of his invasion. No pain. It wasn’t fair—there was no pain. Just a sense of stretching, fullness, of being taken over. She clutched the sheets so tightly her fingernails dug into her palms.

  She took a brief, shaking gulp of air. “Finish it,” she said in a furious hiss.

  He laughed, damn him. She could feel his amusement vibrate through his body and into hers. “Finish it?” he echoed. “I’ve only just begun.”

  Endure, she told herself as he pulled out of her, then slid back in, impossibly deeper. Her body was damp, lubricated, and she could only blame him. It wasn’t her fault, she didn’t want him, she was doing this because she had no choice.

  Oddly enough, she felt it first in her chest. A tightness that spiraled out to her breasts, an ache that teased and tormented her. Her stomach felt strange, gnawing, and she knew it had nothing to do with food and everything to do with hunger. He was moving, pushing deep inside her, then sliding out again, in a slow, lazy rhythm, as if he might keep doing it all night long. She tried to open her eyes, to focus on him, to focus on how much she hated him, but she couldn’t. He kissed her eyelids, thrusting deep, and she made a despairing little sound in the back of her throat.

  That strange, frightening ripple began to stir within her again, and she tried to stop it once more. But it was like the alien thing inside her, growing, taking over her body that she’d once thought she controlled perfectly.

  He shoved his hands under her butt, pulling her up tighter against him, pushing in deeper still. “I can keep this up all night long,” he whispered dream
ily. “If I come, I’ll just get hard again. You make me want to fuck, Rachel. I’ve been hard since the first time I saw you, and it’s going to take some time to take care of the problem. You won’t get anywhere by fighting it.”

  “I won’t stop fighting you.” She could barely recognize her voice.

  “I’m not talking about me. Fight me all you want. It’s your own body you’re so busy battling. And you’re going to lose.”

  “No.”

  “Hold on, sugar. This ride is going to change your life.”

  He pulled her legs around his waist, and she was shaking so hard she had no choice but to let go of the mattress beneath her, to put her arms around his sweat-sleek shoulders and hold on. It wasn’t cold, it was hot, steamy, churning, and she couldn’t stop trembling. She wanted to scream, or cry, she wanted to hurt him, and she did, digging her fingernails into his back, scratching him. She needed something with a desperation she couldn’t recognize, she needed to get away from him, she needed to hide …

  “Don’t fight it, Rachel,” he whispered again, and put his long fingers between them, touching her. “Give it to me, Rachel. Stop fighting. Now.”

  It hit her with the force of an explosion, and she screamed. He covered her mouth with his, drinking in her cries, but it wouldn’t stop, wave after wave of something that caught her body and shattered it. She felt him come, deep inside her, and it set off another series of hot, fierce clenching, lashing her body, and all the fight had been whipped from her. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, and she collapsed against the mattress, her entire body on fire.

  He pulled out of her, moving away from her in the darkness, and for a moment the place was like a tomb. Still and quiet and breathless.

  The lighter flared, illuminating his face as he lit a cigarette. She tried to focus on his expression, but her eyes weren’t working. Small wonder. Nothing in her body was working. She tried to lift a hand, to brush her hair out of her face, but it was trembling so badly she had to let it fall back to the mattress.

  She turned her head to look at him. He looked odd, distant, almost perplexed, as he stared at his cigarette as if it might have the answers to the questions of the universe.

  “Not bad,” he murmured reflectively. “If it’s that good the first time, imagine what it would be like when we’ve had a little practice.”

  She wanted to cover herself with something, but she couldn’t move. All she could do was lie there and shake.

  Luke moved then. Draping a sheet over her, tucking it around her shivering body with gentle hands. “It’s not cold in here,” he observed mildly.

  She couldn’t say anything, she was shivering too badly.

  He stubbed out the cigarette abruptly. He got on the bed with her and pulled her body into his arms, sheet and all, holding her tightly against him, so tightly that she suddenly felt safe.

  And she began to cry.

  16

  Arrogant asshole that he was, he’d told her she wouldn’t be sleeping. He hadn’t counted on any number of things, including the fact that once she started crying, she couldn’t stop until she’d wept herself into a state of exhaustion.

  She wasn’t very good at crying. Obviously something else she hadn’t had much practice at, something else she despised. She was noisy, choking and gasping as she wept, beating at him, beating at the bed, beating at herself. He ignored her struggles; he just wrapped himself around her and held her while she stormed and raged. She didn’t say anything intelligible, which didn’t surprise him. She was beyond words, lost in a high, lonely place of pain she’d been avoiding for too long.

  She fell asleep crying. He didn’t realize women could do that. Every now and then a stray sob would shake her body, and then she would sink back into boneless sleep. He tried to loosen his grip on her, but she cried out when he did, so he simply draped himself around her, one hand cradling her head, his thumb gently stroking her tear-damp face.

  He’d done exactly what he set out to do. He’d gotten her in bed and he’d made her come. He brought her down to his level, the most basic, human level, and in doing so he’d destroyed every defense she had.

  And all of sudden, he wasn’t so sure it had been that good an idea.

  For one thing, he was still horny. He’d gotten used to regulating his libido, and his access to willing, discreet women was limited in the New Mexico desert. He’d learned to wring the maximum of pleasure out of each coupling and have that suffice for months at a time.

  It hadn’t worked out that way. For one thing, he hadn’t been able to focus entirely on his own pleasure. She’d been too distracting. When he was in bed with a woman he was used to thinking with his cock, not his brain, but Rachel Connery had a bad habit of engaging both organs. It was a damned good thing he didn’t have a heart—she’d probably mess with that as well.

  And demoralizing her might not have been the smartest move on his part. She was a complicated woman, too smart for her own good, too vulnerable for his. He didn’t like women like her. He liked street-smart women, resilient, tough, sassy women who took what they wanted and left what they didn’t. He liked sweet women as well, innocent and helpless, in need of nurturing.

  Rachel was none of those things. And the more elaborate his plans to neutralize her, the more power she seemed to gain. Lying in his arms, exhausted from sex and tears, she had a tighter hold on him than she’d had before.

  It would be worth Stella’s money just to get her out of his life, out of his brain, out of his …

  She shuddered in her sleep, burrowing her head against his shoulder. Outside the storm was still raging—he’d almost forgotten they were in the midst of a hellacious thunderstorm. For a brief moment he shut his eyes, envisioning a tornado scooping up the house, the camper, and sending them to eternity. Or maybe, if they were lucky, the land of Oz.

  It wasn’t going to happen. Life didn’t come with easy solutions, and if they ended up in Oz Stella would be there as the wicked witch.

  Another gust of wind buffeted the camper, shaking the bed. Rachel was too far gone to notice, lost in a deep sleep that may or may not have been dreamless. Poor little Dorothy, unable to find her way home.

  As for him, he knew his own role perfectly well. Not the heartless Tin Man. He was the Wizard, the trickster, full of empty promises and gaudy lies. He wasn’t the answer to Rachel’s needs, he wasn’t the answer to anyone’s needs. And sooner or later he was going to disappear, unencumbered, to live off his ill-gotten gains.

  The rain was slowing, now a gentle tapping on the metal shell of the camper instead of the drenching downpour. It would be steamy, misty outside, and he needed to get away from her, from her clinging arms and her long legs, from her muffled, sleepy sobs and her needs. Most of all he needed to get away from his own need. Of her.

  This time when he pulled free she didn’t wake. She tried to hold on to him, but he extricated himself before she could realize what he was doing, and she fell back among the rumpled sheets with a sigh, her face against the mattress.

  He grabbed his pack of cigarettes, zipped up his jeans, and stepped out into the rain, shirtless, barefoot, not caring what swamp creatures he might run into. A hungry alligator would be less dangerous than Rachel Connery’s arms.

  The rain was fine, almost a mist. He was able to light a cigarette, cupping it with his hands, and then he started down the path, away from the camper that was half-hidden by the old house, away from the place he’d always hated.

  To a place that was even worse.

  The barn had collapsed more than a dozen years ago. He’d tried to knock it down himself, in a blind rage when he was thirteen and bleeding from the beating Jackson had given him. He hadn’t been strong enough then, but wind and weather and the swamp had taken care of it. It was just a pile of rotting boards and beams. His mother had hanged herself from one of those beams, and he’d been the one to find her. He was eight years old, and that was when he knew he would kill Jackson Bardell.

  That old
bitch Esther used to say his mama would haunt the place, haunt the old barn. That she would never rest because she’d committed such a great sin. Luke had never been able to shove the words down the old lady’s throat, and he no longer cared. Wherever his mother was, it wasn’t haunting a rotting ruin. She was someplace fine, he knew it. There had to be some peace, some justice, for someone in his life.

  He stared down at his cigarette in disgust, then tossed it on the pile of rotting wood. It sizzled, and went out. He’d lost the taste for cigarettes, which was just as well. He had a helluva time sneaking them in Santa Dolores.

  He lost track of the time he stood staring at the old ruins. The rain picked up again, heavier, a warm curtain of water soaking his jeans, his hair. He felt it running down his chest, his arms, and he wished that something, somewhere, could make him feel clean again.

  The rain muffled the sound of his return to the van. The door was open, and for a moment he was afraid she’d run away. And then he saw her.

  She didn’t know he was watching her. She stood in the rain, naked, her face tipped back, letting the water stream over her cheekbones, her eyes, her mouth. She lifted her arms to the stormy skies, and as if answering her supplication, the clouds opened up and drenched her, drenched him as he watched her.

  She turned then, and stared at him through the curtain of rain. There was knowledge and acceptance in her face. And need.

  He crossed the clearing, caught her in his arms, and pushed her up against the side of the van, kissing her with such rough abandon that he didn’t know if he hated her or loved her. She put her arms around his neck, and when he unfastened his jeans to free himself she was ready, wrapping her long legs around him as he pushed into her, impaling her on his rigid flesh, holding her against the cold wet siding of the van as the rain fell around them.

  She came immediately, tightening around him with a hoarse cry of wonder and despair. This time he was past thinking. He only knew he needed her, with a blind, driving lust that wiped his mind and soul clean until there was nothing left but his body and hers, pumping, deep, feeling her all around him, her rain-soaked breasts pressed against his chest, her mouth caught with his, her legs tight around his hips as he drove into her. He didn’t want it to end, ever. He didn’t want to think or talk, he wanted to fuck her from the back, he wanted to come in her mouth, he wanted to take her every way he could think of and then do it all over again.