by Katie Allen
“Me,” Cal grunted.
Rolling his eyes, Darwin amended, “Besides us.”
“Take away the secrecy.” Daphne flicked her fingers on her left hand, one at a time, against the tip of her thumb. It was an old habit that helped her think. “If everyone knows what they’re doing at the lab, the experimenting on humans—especially unwilling people—will have to stop.”
“That could go FUBAR in so many ways.” Cal shook his head with a scowl. “If everyone knows about us and the shit we can do, all the assholes will be coming out of the woodwork trying to get a fucking piece of us.”
“But if everyone knows, they can’t just lock you up in a lab again,” Daphne argued.
He snorted. “Bullshit. They’ll figure out a way—say we’re a danger to the public, that we’re fucking insane, whatever they need to do to get their motherfucking investments back in that shithole. They’ll put some kind of PR spin on it to pacify the sheep.”
“Sheep?”
“The public.”
“Oh.” Tapping her fingers against her thumb, she thought about this until Ari stood abruptly, startling her.
“We’re not going to solve this tonight.” Closing his fingers around Daphne’s upper arm, he urged her to her feet. “It’s been a long twenty-four hours, and I’m tired.”
“Yeah, kidnapping and hostage-keeping are exhausting,” Claire snarked.
Ari just sent her a dark look before turning to Benjy. “Coming?”
In answer, B stood and moved to Daphne’s other side. She called her goodnights to everyone remaining at the table. Ari grunted what could have been a farewell, and Benjy was silent, as usual.
They detoured to the storage room, where Ari tracked down some fleece-lined winter boots that weren’t too huge on her, although they were big enough that she caught her toes several times on their way to the exit. After she tripped for the third time and almost fell face-first onto the floor, both men caught her elbows and half-guided, half-carried her out the door.
On the path, Daphne looked back and forth between the two men looming on either side of her. The sky was clear, and the moon was about three-quarters full, so she could see the guys fairly clearly. “I’m not going to run off on the way back to the cabin, guys,” she said. “I don’t need an armed guard.”
Ari raised an eyebrow. “We’re not guarding you. We’re...escorting you.”
Mirroring his lifted eyebrow, Daphne just looked at him.
“Besides,” he continued when she didn’t respond, “we’re headed to the same place anyway. Might as well go along and protect you from bears.”
“Bears?” Her voice was a little higher than normal.
“And mountain lions.”
She just stared at him, eyes wide.
“Just thinking of your safety.” Despite his words, a tiny smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “Never know what’s out there in the dark, watching you.”
The repressed smile on his face made Daphne pretty sure he was messing with her. When she glanced at Benjy and saw his full-out grin, she was definitely sure he was messing with her.
“Quit tormenting the city girl,” she growled at Ari, making him laugh.
Despite knowing that he’d just mentioned wild animals to get a rise out of her, Daphne was still relieved when they arrived at their cabin. As Ari flicked on the lights, she toed off her too-large boots and studied a glowing lamp next to the couch.
“How do you guys have electricity? I didn’t see any power lines around here.” She hung her coat and hat on the hooks by the door, trying to ignore the fact that she was casually chatting with her captors. Seriously, she was the worst kidnap victim ever.
“Solar, mostly, plus a couple of backup generators,” Ari explained, bringing her attention back from where it had wandered.
She nodded. It made sense that they were off-grid while they were hiding. Her eyes skipped to the loft stairs, and a thought occurred to her.
“Where are you... I mean, we...” She swallowed and tried again. “As far as, um, sleeping arrangements go...?”
Ari shrugged casually, although his eyes were intense. “We managed earlier.”
“But...” Their nap seemed different, somehow, than actually planning on all sleeping together. She chewed on the inside of her lip as she tried to decide whether to fuss about it. Was it immature of her to be bothered, or would it make her a doormat if she just accepted it without argument?
Before she managed to sort things out in her head, Ari was already climbing the stairs to the loft. Benjy was still watching her closely. She shrugged and pulled a wry face, making him grin. He waited to climb the stairs until she’d preceded him. As she circled around the spiral, Daphne felt the lightest brush against her lower back. When she stopped and glanced behind her, Benjy was close, but his hands were clear of her—one at his side and one on the narrow railing. He raised his eyebrows, obviously waiting for her to move, and she started climbing the stairs again, dismissing the touch as her imagination.
When her head cleared the loft floor, she stopped again.
Facing away from the stairs, Ari pulled his shirt over his head. The broad expanse of his back took away Daphne’s breath. The curves and hard lines of his muscles shifted beneath his skin as he moved, drawing a picture that was both graceful and brutal. It distracted her from realizing that he was continuing to undress, until he shoved his jeans over his hips. One side of his black boxer briefs was tugged down along with the jeans, revealing the top of one perfectly sculpted ass cheek.
A sharp smack on her own butt made her jump and squeak in protest. She whipped her head away to glare at Benjy, who was smirking at her. Unable to hold back a sheepish smile, she turned again to hide her grin.
To her disappointment, Ari had straightened his boxer briefs to cover his ass. He was watching her as she climbed the final few steps, and the thought of how she’d stared at him undressing made her blush. Dropping her eyes, she made a beeline for the bathroom.
“Daph.”
When she turned—focusing her gaze on his chest, since she still couldn’t quite meet his eyes—he held up the T-shirt she’d worn for her nap. She held up her hands in preparation for catching the shirt, but he smirked and walked over to her, placing the shirt directly into her hands.
Daphne rolled her eyes. “You could’ve tossed it. I’m not that bad at catching.”
“Yes, you really are that bad.” Both Ari and B were grinning at her.
With a huff, since she couldn’t deny her absolute suck-itude at catching, she hurried into the bathroom. Her shoulders dropped when the door closed with a solid thud. It was a relief to have a moment of privacy, a tiny break from the two men who made her feel...she didn’t know what, but she did know that, whatever she felt, it wasn’t the right feeling to be having for her captors.
She shook her head, trying to clear her mind of the swarm of confusing emotions that had built a nest in there. Worrying about it wasn’t going to help the situation. She’d get through the night and then figure out a plan tomorrow. In the meantime, she was just grateful that her kidnapping hadn’t involved being chained up in a dark basement by a sadistic rapist. As kidnappings went, hers was more in the five-star category. Well, a four-star abduction, at least. She deducted a star for the times she’d been tossed over Ari’s shoulder and carried in that extremely uncomfortable fashion.
Muffling a snort of laughter at the thought, she started to change into her borrowed T-shirt.
Chapter Five
All of the feelings she’d pushed to the back of her brain in the bathroom popped back up as soon as she opened the door. Now, both men were in their boxer briefs, looking like a Calvin Klein underwear ad. Benjy lounged on the bed, while Ari stood, leaning against the footboard. They turned to watch her leave the bathroom, making her
self-conscious enough to want to run back into the safety of the smaller room. She jerked to a halt, coming to the instant decision that she would sleep in the tub. As uncomfortable as that would be, it at least would have to be less awkward than a Daphne sandwich in the king bed.
“I...” she started, trailing off when both men smirked at her, increasing the whole Calvin-Klein-ad-ness of the tableau by a billion-fold. She fought the need to drool and rub the tops of her thighs together, pasting on a defensive scowl instead. “What?”
“Just get in bed, Grace.”
She set her jaw and planted her fists on her hips. “I—”
That was all she was able to say before Ari moved toward her in a blur of speed. Before she could even flinch, she was sailing through the air, releasing an embarrassingly guttural grunt as she landed, belly-down, across the center of the quilt-covered mattress.
Once she was able to catch her breath, Daphne flipped over onto her back to glare at the two annoyingly amused faces looking down at her.
“Ass,” she muttered. “Throwing is not an acceptable form of transportation either, by the way.”
Ari snorted as he turned and headed toward the bathroom. “If we’d waited for you to get into bed,” he threw over his shoulder, “we’d have been here all fucking night.”
Daphne opened her mouth, but the bathroom door had already closed behind him. She shut her mouth with a click of back molars, annoyed but also relieved that he’d cut their argument short, since she hadn’t thought of a witty retort that would’ve verbally flattened Ari. She always came up with the best comebacks hours too late.
“Is he always this aggravating?” she asked Benjy, who was still sprawled across the mattress, apparently undisturbed by her flying missile of a body hitting the bed right next to him.
He lifted the corner of his mouth and one shoulder in unison, a half-shrug that told Daphne absolutely nothing. It could’ve been a “yes,” a “no,” an “I don’t know” or an “I don’t care.” She narrowed her eyes at him, some of her annoyance moving from Ari to B.
“Are you...” Her words trailed off into startled silence when his fingers brushed her cheek, moving a strand of hair off her face. Instead of withdrawing his hand then, he burrowed it into her hair, finger-combing the strands as he watched with apparent fascination.
Her heart beat thickly in her ears as she swallowed, not sure what to do. She thought she’d been in romantic situations before, when Brett had sent her flowers or surprised her with a picnic lunch. She’d always felt as though she was a bit of a failure as a female at those times, when thoughts crept in about how nasty lilies smelled when they wilted, or how annoying the ants and flies encroaching on their picnic were, or how uncomfortable it was to sit on the lumpy ground to eat.
Looking back, all of those so-called romantic gestures had just been part of Brett’s game, as if he’d been following the Dummy’s Guide for Dating Someone You Really Don’t Like in Order to Pretend to Look Like an Upstanding Guy to the Investors You Are Bilking Out of Their Money. She must’ve known, deep down in her gut, that those flowers and picnics and candlelit dinners hadn’t come from a place of true love—or even of true lust. None of those supposedly romantic moments made her feel even a fraction of the heart-ripping, breath-stealing intensity she felt when Benjy touched her hair.
“Your turn.”
Ari’s voice jerked her out of her trance. Without looking at the other man, B just finished his current track through her hair and leaned in to brush a barely-there kiss on her cheek. Before she could do more than suck in a startled breath, he heaved himself to his feet and headed for the bathroom. Daphne rolled onto her side to watch until the bathroom door blocked her view.
A slap on her butt made her jump and squeak. When she glared at A, he just gestured impatiently with one hand, tugging at the top of the covers with his other.
“Up,” he commanded. She scrambled toward the head of the bed, scooting under the top sheet and quilt as he pulled them down. She lay on her side, her back to Ari, in an attempt to hide how horribly awkward she felt, crawling into bed with an almost-stranger. An almost-stranger kidnapper, at that. Geez Louise, she hadn’t even slept with a boyfriend before.
He obviously felt none of the oddness of the situation, since he wrapped a heavy arm around her and pulled her in close. His body played the part of big spoon with a vengeance, curling around her until he was plastered against her back and side. It should’ve been hot and claustrophobic and uncomfortable, and it kind of was all of those things, but it was mostly...nice. Really, really nice.
Squeezing her eyes closed, she tried to relax, but she was playing her own role of little spoon too well in a different way than Ari was—she stayed hard and unbending. He didn’t seem to mind, tucking her closer and letting out a silent sigh that blew hot air across the side of her neck and beneath her ear, giving her goose bumps.
In an attempt to drown out the screeching of her touch-overloaded body, she tried to turn on the analytical side of her brain. A male body didn’t really feel how she’d expected it to feel. Her father was a college professor—actually, he was almost a caricature of a university instructor, thin and stiff and definitely not a hugger. Her mother was thinner, stiffer and even less touchy-feely than her spouse. At big events, like graduations, Daphne had received an awkward pat or two on her shoulder, but that was about it for physical parental affection.
Brett had given her a chaste kiss coming and going, but tongue contact was rare and full-body cuddling nonexistent. Looking back at their relationship, Daphne realized it had been a little like dating a brother—an older, rather condescending brother.
She really had no excuse for letting it go on as long as it did, especially getting engaged, but that rosy, vague future filled with happy babies and a comfortable, gentle husband had blinded her to the complete lack of passion. In fact, she didn’t really think she’d even liked Brett all that much. She’d just been lonely for so long that she snatched up the first possibility of a boyfriend when he’d started showing interest.
Ari’s arm tightened, bringing her impossibly closer to his body and jolting her out of her thoughts. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected from his full-frontal—and her full-back-al—contact, but it was warmer and harder and more...alive than she’d expected. She didn’t know why she’d thought a man would feel like an oversized Ken doll.
By the time Benjy turned off the light and climbed into bed, Daphne was closer to a nervous breakdown than she was to sleeping. Flushed and almost panting, she couldn’t hear anything except her heartbeat echoing in her head. She knew a deer in the headlights had nothing on her terrified expression, and her eyes grew even wider as Benjy reached toward her face.
With Ari’s mass directly behind her, there was no way to retreat. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to pull away from B’s touch, but it was oddly soothing not having a choice. If she couldn’t move, she couldn’t be held responsible for the mushy, warm feelings in her lower belly when Benjy’s fingertips brushed her mouth.
He traced her face with his fingers, following the line of her cheekbone to her temple, across her brow and down the slope of her nose. When his touch moved over her chin and along her throat, Daphne ducked her head in a ticklish dodge.
His hand dropped to her collarbone and his thumb slid lightly back and forth against the protruding ridge. Something about the action made her flush, whether it was because his fingers were in unnerving proximity to her breast or because her collarbone was just an oddly placed erogenous zone. Either way, she had to force her body not to shift and squirm. She squashed the urge to rub her thighs together.
When Ari’s fingers began to move, she bit back a groan. It was bad enough when he was just a silent hot wall behind her. Now, as he stroked her stomach, keeping her sandwiched between his caressing palm and his suspiciously lumpy crotch, need and fear and uncertainty
coalesced into full-out panic.
Blocked at the front and back by two large male bodies, she wiggled toward the top of the bed, freely using the sharp points of her elbows when Ari seemed reluctant to let her go. Once she was sitting, her back against the headboard, she glared through the near darkness at the two men’s dim shapes.
“I’ve been very accommodating,” she began, coughed to clear the rasp from her voice and then tried again. “Not many women would sleep in the same bed as two of their kidnappers without...well, without whining, at the very least. In order for me to continue to be accommodating...” She wished she could think of another word besides “accommodating.” It kind of sounded a bit whorish. “Um...if you want me to not whine and complain about this situation, the whole touching thing has to stop.” She waved her hands in the air when she said “touching,” as if to indicate her whole torso area.
Ari snorted and she knew, even without seeing it in the dark, that Benjy was smirking.
“Agreed?” she forged on, ignoring the skeptical sound she heard and the high probability that they were wearing identical mocking expressions.
“Lie down, Grace,” Ari non-answered, tugging on her leg under the blanket. She started sliding across the sheet, tipping back as she was towed toward the center of the bed.
She growled. “A! What did I just say about—” He gave a final sharp yank on her leg, and she ended up on her back in the middle of the bed, pretty much where she’d started. “Touching?” The last word ended on a defeated sigh.
Ari maneuvered her body onto her side until her back was plastered against his front once again. She felt like a life-sized teddy bear as he tugged and tucked her appendages until she was apparently where he wanted. With a deep, silent exhale she felt rather than heard, he wrapped his arms around her and lay still.
