“He sounds like Mimi. She’s not a laid-back type either. But look, if you are, and he isn’t, what drew you to him?”
“It was his kiss,” Anna said, her eyes dreamy. “I knew right from the moment his lips touched mine. Nobody else would ever be able to kiss me like that.”
“Right. So, um, anyway, do you fancy a quick game of Guitar Hero?”
Mimi cleared her throat but when she spoke her voice was still rusty from disuse. “You can kiss,” she said as unemotionally as she could.
“Thank you. So can you. With passion, unlike your friend, who just stands there and expects me to do all the work.”
“Oh, don’t slag Anna off. She doesn’t deserve it.”
“No. You’re right.”
“And that’s not just a kiss, is it? There’s something else to it. You do it for a reason. There’s some kind of power in it.”
John’s eyes, the only part of him she could clearly see in the darkness, were bright and hard with suspicion.
“Not enough power, obviously,” he remarked drily, then he leaned back into her. “Let’s try again.”
“No, don’t!” Mimi rasped into his approaching mouth. “It doesn’t work on me the same way it did on Anna. That much ought to be clear.”
“Shut up.” He pressed his lips firmly to hers again, putting every ounce of otherworldly force behind the embrace, not stopping until her chest heaved and she was gasping into his lungs, giving him every last breath.
“John,” she panted. “John, listen to me.”
“I don’t want to listen to you. I want you to listen to me. And then I want you to act on what you learn. That’s the only way this can work, Mimi. If you can’t do that, we’re as good as doomed.”
“Hold on.” Mimi strained against the bonds, urgent in her need to speak to him. She knew he would have no scruple in killing her if she didn’t meet his requirements—especially now that she knew a little about him and his background. “I can’t help it if I’m not like Anna. I don’t know why your kissing trick hasn’t worked on me in the same way.”
“It has had a limited effect,” John sniffed, his pride wounded. “You do want me. At least.”
“Yes, yes,” Mimi said, humouring him, seeing that his ego was his Achilles’ heel, storing up that information for later use. “I want you. God, you’re hot. But I’m not in thrall in the way Anna is. I don’t know why. I’m sorry. Perhaps this would all be easier if you had control of my mind. But look! I’m prepared to listen to you. I’m prepared to maybe even help you. Just tell me what it is you need from me. If I can do it with a clear conscience, I will.”
He wavered. “I should just kill you.”
“Kill me when you have to. Right now, you don’t have to. Let me help you, John. Let me in.”
“I don’t trust you,” he said at length.
“But you can read my mind. You will know if I’m scheming. You have the ultimate weapon of power over me. Let me out of this contraption and we can talk about how I can help you.”
Mimi listened to the rhythm of pacing footsteps for what seemed like a very long time. Then a light snapped on and she cried out, screwing her eyes shut in pain. When she opened them again, she could see John, surrounded by a corona of fluorescent light that died away as her eyesight accustomed itself to the glare. He was directly in front of her, unsmiling, slouching with his hands in his trouser pockets. Looking around, Mimi saw that the room was like a laboratory, or a factory floor. Strange machines, jars and test tubes were dotted around while a central computer took up much of the basement’s space. She began trying to map them out in her head, but John knew what she was doing, and he distracted her immediately.
“Don’t think about that,” he snapped. “It won’t help you. Let me have a good look at you, Miranda.”
“I hate being called Miranda. Mimi, please.”
“Oh, I like Miranda. Miraculous. As well you might be.”
He stepped forward, then plunged down until he was leaning his forearms on the arms of the prison-chair, next to hers, bent right over her, his face searching hers as if looking for clues.
Mimi breathed him in. He was so like a man. How was anyone supposed to realise that he wasn’t?
“I like your smell. You’re substantial. Not floaty and ephemeral like Anna. I like your brain. You don’t accept things at face value. You are sceptical. It might be an inconvenience for me, but it’s a quality I admire all the same. You are confident. You can act. You are a convincing liar. You are an opportunist. You are capable of being manipulative. But you are unselfish. You are, at heart, altruistic, yet you are also a pragmatist. You use humour to defuse tension. You are not an anxious person and you are emotionally and psychologically stable. You enjoy the pleasures of life—eating, drinking, sex, friendship.”
Mimi blinked into his eyes. “Bravo. Now do Scorpio.”
“There. Humour defusing the tension. Tell me I’m wrong, on any of those points.”
“You aren’t. You’re right. Can I do you?”
John chuckled. “I don’t think I want to hear it. Besides, I know what you think of me. High-functioning sociopath about covers it.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I missed sexy. How could I miss sexy? You fancy me, of course.”
“Well, who wouldn’t fancy an alien with a penchant for bondage?”
His mouth, so close to hers, broadened into a delighted, teeth-baring grin.
“I was right about you. What the hell am I going to do about Anna, though?”
“Be kind to her. If you can’t use her, then let her go.”
“She is bonded to me. She can’t leave me. And I can’t let her go with my child anyway. The child is important.”
“I will not collude in anything that hurts my friend.”
“Yes. I missed loyal from my list. You are loyal. I am not.”
“Tell me why you’re doing this. What do you believe in? Why did you come here? Do you have any values?”
“Values? Beliefs? We are differently made, where I come from. We don’t think in those terms. Besides, being this close to you is driving all that philosophical stuff right out of my head.”
His lips bobbed dangerously close to Mimi’s neck, but instead of kissing it, he drew in a long inhalation. “Ah, something about you makes me feel drunk,” he whispered. “Which is strange, because I can’t get drunk. I’ve observed the phenomenon often enough in the watering holes of the City though. It must feel…like this…”
Survival, thought Mimi, and at the same time, kiss me.
“Right priorities.” Then he planted a kiss on her neck that made the tender flesh sizzle and burn into an imprint of his mouth. “If I free you from these restraints,” he said into her ear, a warm scirocco that drove most of her capacity to understand and interpret his words scattering on its breeze, “if I let you out, you must never leave my sight. That’s the first condition. Shall I tell you the others?”
“Yes.” Mimi’s breath was hitching and catching all over the place. Her lungs had never worked harder.
“The second condition is that you do as I tell you. Always. Regardless of what it is.”
“Not if it means hurting my friends. Not if it means hurting anyone.”
“I won’t ask you to do that. I can do the hurting.”
“Okay.” Mimi nodded as best she could. “Can you undo this now? My hands have gone numb.”
“You haven’t heard my third condition.” John took Mimi’s deadened fingers and squeezed them. “I want you for my brood partner.”
“You have…Anna for that,” she said, wishing her voice was stronger, trying to remember what shock and revulsion felt like. However hard she strove to feel them, though, they wouldn’t come. Only rampant desire.
“I’ve told you. Anna doesn’t cut it. You do. Oh, what I could do to you, Miranda. How I could make you feel. Aren’t you curious? No human can give you the intense pleasure I can. Once you’ve experienced me, you’ll never be able
to go back.”
“I can’t…” Panic was beginning to stir and send Mimi into a flap. Her breath was shorter than ever, and yet her body seemed to be in flames. He would only have to touch her…he would only have to touch me, fuck, I shouldn’t think it, too late…
He touched her.
“Yes,” she wailed. “Yes, I agree.”
“Sensible girl,” he breathed. He pressed a button at the side of the chair and the wrist and ankle restraints flew open, shortly followed by the collar. Mimi could barely lift her arms to flex the wrists, let alone move her legs, but John solved the problem for her, sliding an arm behind her back and lifting her up to stand shakily against his chest.
Her cheek rubbed his shirt, the top of her head resting in the crook of his neck. He settled a hand into her hair at the back, his fingers crawling through its mass, pulling tiny sparks from her scalp.
“I can’t feel a heartbeat.”
“I don’t have one. It’s okay. Relax.” He was whispering for some reason. He held her closer. “I can feel yours.”
“What made you like this? What happened to you?”
“Never mind.” His lips were under the flap of her earlobe. She felt unaccountably safe, even as she faced terrible danger and uncertainty. “I’ll move you into the house. I can say that I want you to be around for Anna, a bit of female company. I can spend more time in here then. But I don’t want to share a bed with Anna anymore. How can we organise that?”
“You’ll break her heart.”
“I don’t want her. I want you. And you want me.”
“I want Anna to be happy. And I hate you. Don’t think that wanting you has changed that, Stone.”
“I like your hatred for me. It gives you that extra fire I enjoy so much.”
John paused to show Mimi once more exactly how fully and inextricably he was now linked into her physical desires, kissing her until she had to grind her pelvis mindlessly against his. “You see,” he gloated. “Fire. Desire. Want. Need.”
“You are cruel.”
“I know. I can’t help it though. We’ll think of something to do with Anna. Don’t worry, I won’t hurt her. I need that child.”
Mimi was only half listening, locked inside her body, trapped by its treacherous current of lust for John Stone. She wanted nothing more than to wrap a leg around his hip and impale herself upon him. His touch was like every euphoria-inducing drug in the world magnified by thousands. She was already addicted.
God help me, she thought, and for a moment she couldn’t work out why John was laughing so long and so loud.
“He won’t. Nobody can help you now, Miranda.”
Chapter Nine
Liam had wanted to move his arm for a good half hour. It was both numb and painful, a state of affairs he had thought medically impossible until tonight. But if he moved it, he would dislodge Anna’s sleepy head, and he didn’t want to do that either. Poor girl was exhausted, it was plain to see. Growing a person inside your stomach must take it out of a girl.
All the same, it would be nice to be able to reach the remote control and switch over from Hallmark True Movies. He was missing the Grand Prix highlights. And where the hell was Mimi? By now he should have been happily ensconced between her thighs, giving John Stone’s guest bed a proper workout.
His eyelids began to slide downwards, tragic violin music building to a crescendo on the television and sending him into a half-world where grief and sexual frustration were somehow bound together, floating with him into a dream.
Footsteps. Somebody was coming. His head jolted back upright.
“Mimi,” he croaked, looking over towards the door.
Oh.
Shit.
Not Mimi.
John Stone strolled over, his face a mask of vengeful loathing, picked up the remote control and snapped the television off. Standing before it, he folded his arms and glowered at Liam, who hadn’t felt every nerve on alert like this since the Year Eight rugby team trials.
“Who are you, and what are you doing in my house?”
“I-I was at your wedding,” Liam stammered. “Liam McGlynn. Friend of Anna’s.”
“Clearly.”
Liam sprang to his feet, dislodging Anna, who began to regain consciousness at a slow and bleary pace.
“No, fucking hell, no, you’ve got the wrong idea!”
“Oh have I?”
“John!” Anna’s eyes were open now and she tried to lever herself off the couch, ineffectually at first. “You’re home!”
The joyful wonder in her voice, made Liam stretch out his arms as if vindicated.
“See! She’s really pleased to see you. She’s missed you so much. I just came round to see Mimi but she wasn’t here and then Anna fell asleep and I didn’t know what to do.”
“I’ll tell you what to do, shall I? Get out of my house. Get away from my wife. Do it all in the next ten seconds or you’ll be getting better acquainted with the hereafter.”
Liam fled, not even stopping to bid goodbye to Anna.
Anna stared after his disappearing figure, then turned to John, puzzlement in her sleep-bleary eyes.
“John? You didn’t think…?”
She stepped towards him but he held up a hand.
“What do you expect me to think?”
“John, no! Please. Don’t ever think that of me. You know I love you, more than anything.”
“I know you say so. But is it me, Anna? Or is it the money? Is it the security? Is it the lifestyle?”
“John!” The words couldn’t get past her shock. He couldn’t really think such things of her, surely?
“He’s younger than me. Better-looking. I don’t suppose he’s better in bed, though. Is he? Does he do it the way you like it, Anna? Does he hold you down at the wrists and kiss your moaning mouth when you come?”
“John, stop it, stop it!” Anna put her hands over her ears and let tears overwhelm her.
“Oh, I’ll stop it all right. It stops right here. I’ll sleep in one of the guest rooms tonight. Get to bed and get some rest. I won’t have our child suffer because of your hysteria.”
“Please don’t do this.” Anna wept, prostrate now on the sofa. How could something so good go so wrong for no apparent reason? “Please don’t, it isn’t true, I’ve never even kissed Liam, never wanted to kiss anyone but you, please don’t leave me, please.”
“Control yourself,” said John with calm coldness. He bent to take her wrists in a strong grip and lifted her to her feet. “Come on.”
He led her, sobbing and pleading all the way, to their bedroom and lifted her onto the bed. As she lay there, begging him to stay, to get in beside her, to do anything he wanted with her, he went into the en suite bathroom and took some sedatives from a cabinet, then filled her tooth glass with water.
“Take these,” he commanded, holding them out.
“Can I?” she asked, hesitating. “With…you know…the baby?”
“They’re fine.”
Meekly, she took them, then drank down the water he offered.
“S-stay,” she hiccuped, reaching out for him. “I need you.”
“I know you do,” he replied, standing beside the bed, looking down at her with a dispassion that froze her blood. “I’m not leaving you. I’m not leaving our child. But I can’t sleep with you anymore. I think you should understand that. Good night, Anna. Sweet dreams.”
When he left the room, he locked the door behind him.
After unlocking the guest room on the floor below, John stopped in the doorway for a moment to take in the sight of Mimi, stripped to her underwear, tethered to the bed with a selection of his best silk ties.
“You didn’t have to truss me up,” she grumbled. “I’m not so stupid as to try and escape from you.”
“No, I’m sure you’re not.” John’s smile, so boyish and yet so sinister, took over his whole face. He pushed the door shut with a heel and leaned back against it. His smile slowly dropped, his eyes blackening wit
h lust. He licked his lips, loosened his collar. “Just wanted to look at you, all bound and spread for me. Besides, I think you like it a bit kinky, don’t you? Hmm?”
He sat down on the edge of the bed and put a hand on Mimi’s bare stomach, which shuddered beneath his touch.
“Not like Anna. Strictly a missionary girl. Eyes shut, lights off. Boring.”
“Don’t…be mean…” But Mimi was struggling to speak, struggling to think, struggling to struggle. Every resolve that didn’t include shagging the living daylights out of John Stone flew from her head the moment his skin met hers.
“Now you, Miranda,” he said, rolling playfully onto his side and looming over her, “like all sorts of exciting things, don’t you?” His hand moved slowly, torturingly, over her stomach, up as far as her bra, down as far as the waistline of her knickers. She yanked at the ties, writhing, arching her back for more. “Variety,” he murmured, lowering his lips to her navel and licking a circle around it. “Spice.”
“Oh fuck, please.” Mimi hardly recognised her own voice. “Please.”
“So much pleading today. Anna, you. I may dispense mercy…” The tip of a finger flicked lightly against the silk covering Mimi’s hard nipples. “Or I may not.”
“Hng.” Mimi tried to lift her bottom, to spread her legs wider, to invite him to touch the soaked fabric plastered to her pussy lips. One coherent thought popped into her mind, a moment of clarity. I’ve sold my soul to the devil.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Actually, I can only tease you for so long. My kind have strong urges, Miranda. Very strong. I need sex, lots of sex, as much as I can get. I find it…empowering. Very. So you’ll get yours, don’t worry, my love. But I do enjoy a little bit of torment first. Indulge me. I can’t help it. It’s my nature. You’re big on nature, here on Earth, aren’t you? Red in tooth and claw.”
Mimi let him ramble on. He could have been speaking Hindi for all she understood of it. She was aware of nothing but the furious need of her sex, clenching and spasming, all but screaming for him.
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