by Linda Turner
The other man didn’t so much as grunt in response. Only a fool would have missed the flash of resentment in his black eyes, however, and Ace was no fool. So the bastard spoke English. It was always nice to know what kind of garbage you were dealing with. Giving Maddy’s cold fingers a reassuring squeeze, he continued to taunt their captor, though this time in Spanish. “Since you so graciously insisted on showing us the way, don’t you think you ought to take us to the big man himself? I’m sure he’s expecting us, and I’ve got a feeling he’s the type who doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
“You will shut your mouth and do as you’re told,” the man he’d dubbed Bubba replied coldly. “The big man, as you put it, doesn’t waste his time on the likes of trespassers.”
“Well, that’s just too damn bad because we’ve got business with him, and he’s going to want to hear what we’ve got to say. Get him.”
It was a bold move, throwing orders at a hired gun who could shoot both him and Maddy in the back any damn time he felt like it. But pushing the perimeters told him a hell of a lot about a man and his position of authority. If Bubba was just a heavyweight who kept the guards in line, he wouldn’t do anything without getting the okay from somebody higher up.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” Ace snapped when the man hesitated. “Go get him.”
For a split second, he actually thought Bubba was going to fold like a deck of cards and take them to Barrera. Then his jaw hardened, his eyes narrowed with fury and he brought the butt of his rifle down on Ace’s temple with a savage curse.
Caught off guard, Ace didn’t have time to dodge the blow. Pain exploded in his head. Staggering, he felt his knees start to buckle and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about it. Blackness crowded in, swamping him. The last thing he heard before he hit the ground and the lights blinked out was Maddy’s scream. It seemed to go on and on and on.
The basement was humid and damp and filled with looming, threatening shadows. Grunge covered the walls and floors, and somewhere in a dark corner, water dripped in a constant cadence that was guaranteed to drive even the sanest mind over the edge. If she’d been thrown in there all by herself, Maddy would have been pounding on the door within seconds, begging for release. Ace was with her, though, and the terror that gripped her by the throat had nothing to do with whatever unseen monsters lurked in the dungeon’s shadows. Ace had been out for ten minutes and showed no sign of regaining consciousness.
His poor head cradled in her lap, she leaned over him, rocking as tears welled in her eyes and spilled unchecked down her cheeks. “Please don’t die,” she whispered brokenly. With trembling fingers, she wiped frantically at the trickle of blood that oozed from the wound at his temple, but the blood kept coming and coming. Sick with fear, she tore a strip of material from the tail of her shirt and quickly pressed a makeshift bandage to the jaggedly torn cut. And all the while she prayed, she pleaded with him. “Do you hear me? You can’t die. I won’t let you. Dammit, Ace, open your eyes!”
She knew he didn’t like it when she swore—why he thought he could and she couldn’t she had yet to figure out!—but any hope that that would jar him back to awareness died a quick death. His breathing slow and shallow, his face colorless, he didn’t move by so much as a flicker of an eyelash. Maddy had never felt so helpless in her life.
Despair weighting her heart, she sniffed back tears and told herself she couldn’t just sit there and cry. She had to do something! Now! Carefully easing his head onto the moss-covered floor, she hurried up the steps to the bucket of water that had been left for them just inside the door by their jailers. Too worried about Ace to even spare it a glance until now, she peered into it suspiciously. It could, for all she knew, be laced with drugs or, worse yet, unfit for human consumption. But it was the only water they had, and Ace’s wound needed to be cleaned. After his insistence on cleaning the scrapes on her ribs, she hadn’t forgotten his lecture on the danger of letting wounds go untreated in the jungle.
Quickly carrying it down to where he lay sprawled on his back at the bottom of the steps where the guards had dumped him, she would have traded a ride back to the States for the antiseptic and ointments he had used to tend her injuries. But they’d been left behind at the camp. Choking on a sob, she dropped to her knees beside him and ripped the edge of her shirt with her teeth again, tearing off a ten-inch strip to use as a washcloth. Bending over him, she went to work.
She came to him in the dream, just as she did every night. Soft and warm and eager, she touched him with that same hesitancy that always knocked his legs right out from under him. His heart pounding, he bit back a groan, afraid to move, to make so much as a sound and risk scaring her back into the dark shadows that engulfed him. She was so new to this, so shy, so damn unsure of herself that it completely destroyed him.
Not for the first time, he told himself that her innocence shouldn’t have mattered. This was the nineties and a woman had every right to seek her pleasure where she would without fear of judgment. And he didn’t have a problem with that. In today’s world, a man was a hell of a lot safer with a woman who knew the score and how to take care of herself.
But Maddy was…different. Sweet and wholesome and totally outside the realm of his experience. And every time he touched her, kissed her, the sensuousness that lay just beneath the surface of her virginal exterior hit him like a punch in the gut, robbing him of breath, of reason, until all he could think of was seducing her, loving her, charming her into falling in love with him so that she’d never think twice about another man, even her precious Ace MacKenzie.
God, he was out of his mind.
But even as the thought swam up through the unnatural darkness that clouded his subconscious, he felt her touch and started to reach for her. Pain exploded in his head like a flashbulb. Wincing, he groaned. What the devil was wrong with him?
“Ace? Oh, thank God! I was so scared. No, don’t move!” she said quickly when he started to lift a hand to his pounding temple. “That Bubba idiot hit you in the head with the butt of his rifle.”
“Son of a bitch! I didn’t think he had it in him.” Ignoring her efforts to hold him down, he ruthlessly pushed himself upright and paid the price as the grungy stone floor he sat on seemed to tilt under him and jackhammers went to work in his head. “Oh, damn, that hurts! Where the hell are we?”
“The basement.”
From what Ace could see from the chains on the wall, it looked more like a dungeon or a torture chamber out of a house of horrors than a basement, but he had no intention of mentioning that to Maddy—she was already scared enough as it was, and with good reason. They were in a hell of a mess. He shot her a sharp look and even in the gloom couldn’t miss the tears streaking her face and her unsteady fingers as she sat back on her heels and brushed the hair from her eyes. “Did he touch you? Did any of them touch you? By God, if they so much as laid a finger on you—”
“What?” Suddenly understanding what he was implying, she gasped, “Oh, no. No!” Launching herself at him, she buried her face against his chest and hugged him fiercely. “You were the one that Bubba character was furious with. He didn’t even glance at me except to tell me we’d never get out of here alive. Then he had the other men drag you down here and he locked us in together. I—I thought they’d killed you.”
The shaky admission was said so quietly against his shoulder that he almost missed it. Surprised and stupidly pleased by the notion of her crying for him, he grinned crookedly. “No kidding? And here I didn’t think you cared. You should have told me, sweetheart. I would have been happy to do something about it.”
“Oh, you…you…” At a loss for words, she wanted to hit him…and kiss the roguish laughter off his sensuous mouth. But she didn’t have the heart to do the former when he had to still be woozy from the blow he’d taken or the guts to do the latter. Punching him in the shoulder, she couldn’t help but laugh. “How can you joke at a time like this? Look at you! You’re weak as a ba
by!”
He could have told her that all it took was one kiss from her and she’d see just how weak he was, but that was something he had no intention of admitting anytime soon. “It’ll take more than a whack on the head to knock me out of the game, worrywart. C’mon, help me up. We’ve got to find a way to get out of here.”
Drawing back, she looked at him as if he was crazy. “How? This place is like a bank vault. The only way out is through that door—” she nodded toward the three-inch-thick reinforced door at the top of the stairs “—and it’s locked. They could leave us down here to rot if they wanted to, and there’s not a heck of a lot we could do about it.”
“What’s outside that door? Did you notice the layout of the place? How many guards did you see standing around? And what about surveillance cameras? How many were there? And where?”
Struggling to his feet with her help, he threw questions at her as he moved to examine their holding cell, hardly giving her time to answer one before he was tossing another at her. “I don’t know.” Her fingers pressed to her temples, she closed her eyes and tried to remember, but she’d been so worried about him, there could have been a civil war going on around them and she didn’t think she would have noticed.
“After that…” Struggling for an appropriate adjective, she blurted out, “…jackass hit you, everything happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to see much. They took us down a narrow hall—it was to the left of the entrance hall where we came in, I think—and brought us down a back stairway to the basement.”
“What about guards? And cameras?”
“There were several guards outside in the compound, but I only noticed one inside the main hall, and he was more like a butler than anything else. If there were any cameras, I didn’t see them.”
“With the state-of-the-art equipment Barrera’s bound to have installed in this place, you probably wouldn’t. That doesn’t mean they’re not here.” Climbing the short flight of stairs, he examined the door that was their only way out, but it was sturdy as an oak and locked tight. Nothing short of a bazooka was going to get them out of there without the key.
Watching him probe every inch of their holding tank, Maddy knew as well as he did that they were effectively trapped and the chances of escape were slim to none. But the panic that should have been twisting in her gut like a snake by now just wasn’t there. Ace wasn’t going to take this lying down. If there was a way out, he’d find it.
He moved to the wall across from the stairs and stared up at the small window ten feet above their heads. Glancing over at Maddy, he arched a brow at her. “If you stood on my shoulders, you might be able to see out that window—if you didn’t fall and break your neck. You game?”
Caught off guard by the grin curving his mouth and the glint in his eye, Maddy could only stare at him. He was enjoying himself, she thought with a shock of surprise. He’d just taken a blow to the head that would have put most men in the hospital, but he only shook it off and got right back into the hunt. How did he do it?
Shaking her head in wonder, she joined him beneath the window and looked up—way up. “I can’t believe I’m even considering this.”
“You’ve got more guts than you think you do. C’mon, up you go.”
He held out his hand to her and braced his leg with his knee halfbent, offering her a step up. Too late, Maddy realized she had to climb up his body to get to his shoulders. Startled, her eyes flew to his.
Grinning wickedly, he taunted, “Don’t chicken out on me now, scaredy-cat. We’re just getting to the good part.”
It was the needling nickname that did it. He’d done nothing but tease her since they’d left New York, and it was high time she paid him back. Her eyes locking with his, she closed the space between them with a single step and placed her hand in his. His grin never wavered, but for just a second, she could have sworn she felt him stiffen. Encouraged, she gave him a grin of her own. “Ready?”
“For anything you can dish out, babe. Go for it.”
If she hadn’t been so worried about falling, it would have been the most intimate experience of her life. She touched him, pressed herself against him, clung to him with a daring that set her heart slamming against her ribs. And all the time, he kept murmuring words of encouragement. “That’s it, honey, you’re doing fine. Easy, take your time. Don’t worry about hurting me. You don’t weigh more than a feather.”
She knew that was an out-and-out lie, but by that time, she had reached his shoulders and had to focus all her attention on the barred window above her head. Holding her breath, she balanced herself on his shoulders and inched her hands up the wall until she could reach the bars. Latching on to them like a lifeline, she let out a huge sigh of relief and grinned down at him. “Now what was that crack about being a scaredy-cat?”
“I take it all back.” He chuckled, wrapping his fingers around her ankles to steady her. “Every word. Can you see anything?”
Easing up on her toes, she sneaked a peak and gasped. “Feet,” she whispered, quickly ducking out of sight. “There’s a guard standing right in front of the window.”
Ace swore. “Damn. I was afraid of that.”
“He’s facing the compound—I don’t think he saw me.” Inching back up, she pushed her nose just over the edge of the windowsill and carefully peered around the khakicovered legs blocking half her view. “There’s another one at the corner of the parapet. I think he’s asleep. He’s half-sprawled in a chair—”
Whatever she might have said next was drowned out by the scrape of a key in the lock to the basement door. Horrified, she looked helplessly down at Ace. “Somebody’s coming!”
“Hang on,” he whispered, and before she could guess his intentions, he stepped out from under her, leaving her hanging from the bars. “Okay, drop. I’ll catch you.”
She didn’t think—-she didn’t have time. Willing her clenched fingers to unlock their fierce hold on the bars, she drew in a bracing breath and let go. A heartbeat later, she fell into his arms.
“Cry!” he muttered through clenched teeth, forcing her face against his throat as he wound his arms against her and sank to the floor. “Come on, sweetheart, give me some tears!”
Maddy had never been any good at pretending—she couldn’t even tell a little white lie without looking as guilty as a thief caught in the act. But fear, she discovered, was a powerful motivator. By the time the door at the top of the stairs opened, she was crying real tears against Ace’s hard, muscular chest.
His arms closing protectively around her, Ace held her close against him and glared at the man who stood on the landing staring down at them with contempt in his black eyes. Bubba. Great. “Come back for some more head bashing?” he taunted in Spanish so there could be no possible misunderstanding. “You’d better enjoy it while you can, big guy. My time’s coming.”
The other man’s eyes narrowed slightly, but he only said, “Rooms have been prepared for you. Come. You will clean up and dress for dinner.”
It was an order, not a request, but Ace had no intention of taking exception to anything that would get them out of the hellhole of a basement. “D’you hear that, Maddy, my girl?” he asked with a jaunty grin as he helped her to her feet. “We’ve been invited to dinner. Let’s not keep the man waiting.”
The chamber they were shown to was large and airy and surprisingly modern looking considering they were literally hundreds of miles from civilization. Suddenly conscious of just how filthy she was, Maddy stepped into the room first and glanced around, wondering if she would have time for a bath before Bubba came back for them. Behind her, she didn’t see the stern-faced guard bring his rifle down in front of Ace, blocking his entrance into the room when he tried to follow her.
“This is the señorita’s room,” he said coldly. “Yours is farther down the hall.”
Alarmed, Maddy spun back around. “What do you mean, down the hall? Why can’t he stay here?”
“The decision isn’t mine to make,” he ret
orted, and started to shut the door in her face.
“Then talk to Barrera!” she cried. Suddenly terrified at the thought of being separated from Ace, she clutched at the door. “Please, you can’t do this—”
Ace swore and tried to muscle past Bubba, but the guard turned his gun on him, and all he could do was shoot him a murderous look and assure Maddy, “It’s just for a short while, sweetheart. Trust me. There’s no way you’re going to be left in this mausoleum by yourself for long. I’ll be back for you, and then we’re getting the hell out of here.”
The door shut in her face then, closing him out, locking her in. Her heart thundering, she pressed her ear against the door to see if she could figure out which room Bubba took him to, but the walls were a foot thick and apparently soundproof.
It was then that she became aware of the silence, the absolute quiet that seemed to push in on her from all sides and was broken only by the murmured whisperings of panic in her ear. Turning, she surveyed the large chamber and should have been reassured by its very ordinariness. There were no whips or chains, no drugs of choice on the bedside table to show that she was being held captive by one of the world’s most notorious drug lords. Totally private, with its own bath, it appeared perfectly safe.
The walls could have eyes and ears, though. Her gaze zeroing in on the simple cotton blouse and skirt that had been laid out for her on the bed, she felt her stomach turn over at the thought of some perverted stranger watching her on a television monitor in some small dark room while she changed. Deep inside she started to tremble. No, she thought, shaken, hugging herself. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t put on some stranger’s clothes or sit down to eat with a man who was responsible for who knew how much death and tragedy and pretend to be civil to him. He was a monster, a devil, and just the thought of being at his mercy terrified her. For all she knew, he could have had Ace returned to the basement and even now could be torturing him to death. And locked away in this soundproof room, she’d never hear a thing. God, she had to get out of here! Go to him…
