As they poled the boat toward the dock, a dark figure emerged from the deeper shadows. The flickering light from the torches set along the dock limned his figure, the shadows elongating as he moved toward the end of the dock until he seemed like a giant as he planted his feet slightly apart and waited. Despite the wide legged stance, she might have thought he was completely relaxed except for the fact that his hands were balled into tight fists.
The side of the boat butted against one of the poles holding the dock up. It jolted Erin out of her abstraction.
The man on the dock didn’t speak until she’d been lifted out of the boat and deposited on the dock in front of him. He crouched before her, studying her face in the flickering light for several moments. He lifted a hand, flicking a finger over the place along her neck where there was a tiny, whitened scar. “I knew, eventually, the mark would bring you back to me, chère.”
A wave of shock swept over Erin as his voice filtered into her mind. “Jesse?”
He wrapped his hands around her waist, lifting her to her feet as he stood, thrusting his shoulder into her belly and hauling her over the hard ridge like a sack of potatoes. It knocked the breath out of her, focusing her attention on struggling to drag air into her lungs.
“She was alone?”
“Oui. No others. She went back ta de place, like you said she would. She was callin’ for you so we come ta bring her ta you. Run like hell when she seen us, though. You watch her, mon ami. I guarantee she be gone you done mind out. She fast, move like greased lightnin’ when de mood move her.”
“Many thanks--for everything, mes ami,” Jesse responded.
“You shore you doan need help wid dat one?” one of the men asked with a laugh.
Jesse swatted her ass smartly with the palm of his hand. “But, oui, mon ami. Dis woman an’ me, we go way back, don’ we chère? We been good friends, very good friends.”
The swat jolted Erin out of her shocked stupor. She sucked in a painful bite of air and let out a huff of anger. Rearing up abruptly, she wiggled her legs, trying to free herself from his grip. He placed a palm in the middle of her shoulders and shoved her down again.
The two men in the boat began to laugh. Waving, they pushed the boat away from the pier and disappeared into the gloom as Jesse turned and strode purposefully along the dock, the heels of his boots beating out a threatening tattoo that made Erin’s belly quiver with dread.
The darkness closed in around them as Jesse stepped off of the dock and onto soft, mossy grass. He continued without any noticeable difficultly in negotiating the pitch darkness. His feet struck wood again a few moments layer as he climbed a shallow set of steps and crossed a wooden porch.
A door creaked open on rusted hinges. Erin’s head spun as he turned to close it again, bolting it. She caught a glimpse of a surprisingly comfortable living room and then he crossed the room and opened another door.
She let out a gasp of fright as he shifted her from his shoulder and she felt herself falling. She bit her tongue when she hit the mattress and bounced. Before she could recover from the fall, he grabbed her bound wrists and yanked her arms over her head. She tried to jerk free, twisting at the waist at the same time to kick him. He released his grip on her hands long enough to shove her flat and straddle her, then pushed her arms above her head again and secured them to the headboard.
Even in the dimness of the room the look he bent upon her was enough to freeze the blood in her veins.
She was too mindless with fear to consider giving up without a fight though. The minute he climbed off of her, she launched another attack, drawing her knees up and kicking out at him. He sprawled across her, pinning her to the bed as he grabbed one leg, straightened it in spite of all she could do to prevent it and tied something around her ankle.
She winced as he jerked the knot tight.
He levered himself off of her then.
She swung her foot at his face as he reached to grab her other ankle. He caught it mid-air. Shoving her leg to the mattress, he looped something around her ankle and jerked that tight as well.
She stared at him, panting for breath as he got off the bed and moved around to the foot, checking the rope he’d used to secure her ankles.
Apparently satisfied, he moved away from the bed. Erin heard a scratching noise. The smell of sulfur wafted past her nose as a match sprang to life. Holding it to the wick of a lamp, he adjusted it, replaced the globe over the flame and moved back to the bed, setting the lamp down on a small table beside it.
Erin’s belly tightened spasmodically as he settled on the side of the bed and she saw his face clearly for the first time in the light of the lamp.
Her memories hadn’t done him justice. Or maybe she had simply never really looked at him before when she’d only thought of him as an animal?
Analyzed one by one, she supposed there was nothing particularly remarkable about his features or the lean plains of his cheeks and strong jaw and chin. There was a hint of a cleft in his chin and a slightly crescent shaped dimple in each cheek, faintly visible even when he wasn’t smiling. His nose was straight and well-shaped, his nostrils flaring in a way that left them just shy of a perpetual sneer. His lips were well defined, but thin and hard. His brows were nothing more than a thick, dark slash, without a hint of an arch.
His eyes of all his features, was the only one truly remarkable. Surrounded by thick, curling black lashes, they would’ve been beautiful if not for the fury glittering in them as he studied her.
Taken together as a whole, he was enough to knock any red blooded woman’s socks off, particularly with the long, glossy black hair that framed his purely male face.
“I thought you were dead,” she said finally.
His lips tightened. “Thought? Or hoped?”
She felt the color leave her face. “You think I wanted you dead?”
“Didn’t you? Isn’t that why you released me? It was you, wasn’t it, chère?”
She gaped at him in disbelief. “I was trying to help….”
“Me? Or yourself?” he growled menacingly.
Dragging his shirt off, he displayed his back for her and then his chest. Erin was so mesmerized by the play of hard, bulging muscles with his movements that it took her several moments to realize his back, chest and arms were marred with scars--round scars--at least a half a dozen, she thought, though it was very likely that some of the bullets had passed through him and made two holes.
She found it nearly impossible to accept that he’d been hit that many times and survived.
But then again … he wasn’t human.
Strange that she had to remind herself of that now when before she hadn’t thought of him as human at all.
Or maybe it wasn’t so strange. In the scheme of things, the revulsion she’d learned for her own species because of the things they were capable of made it a little harder to decide which species was more animalistic than the other. He, at least, had had ample reason to behave as he had. He’d been put through things that would have broken a human’s mind. The pursuit of knowledge wasn’t an excuse for what they’d done to him--and to her.
He leaned over her, bracing a fist on either side of her on the bed and she realized the question hadn’t been purely rhetorical. He wanted to know. The problem was … there was no simple answer. “If I’d wanted you dead, I didn’t have to do anything at all. They would’ve destroyed you when they were done. Don’t tell me you don’t know that!”
It wasn’t the answer he’d been looking for. She could see that in his expression. He pushed away from her abruptly, stood up. Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest when he pulled a long knife from a sheathe on his belt, testing the sharpness of the blade with the ball of his thumb.
His gaze moved from the thin cut on his thumb to her, snagging her gaze for a pregnant moment. “You should hold real still, chère.”
She stared at him blankly, unable to grasp what he meant until he leaned over her and grasped the leg of her trouse
rs. Hooking the knife under it, he drew it upward slowly. She jerked instinctively and felt a sting as the tip of the blade nicked her thigh. “What are you doing?” she gasped with a mixture of horror and outrage.
He didn’t even glance at her. His concentration was focused on slicing her clothing off. When he’d sliced the cloth through the waistband, he moved around the bed and repeated the process. Her panties didn’t take even half as long to remove.
“Jesse! Stop! Don’t do this! Whatever you think I’ve done, you’re wrong.”
He ignored that, too. Her blouse fared no better than her pants. She started struggling despite the warning when he grasped the straps of her bra. “You made your point! Stop it!”
Having cut the straps, he slipped the knife beneath the part of the bra that connected the cups and sliced it before his gaze met hers again. “I haven’t even begun ta make my point, chère,” he said in a low, menacing growl.
Erin licked her lips, jogging her mind for anything she might say to reason with him. “I did the only thing I could. I knew they would shoot at you, but at least it gave you a chance. There was no other chance. I couldn’t get out of the facility myself.”
His eyes narrowed as he studied her thoughtfully. “Me, I’m thinkin’ you didn’t care one way or the other, chère, so long as I was gone. I’m thinkin’ you figured that was the only way to make sure they didn’t put you in with me again, because you’d realized you was startin’ to like me fuckin’ you.”
Erin felt the blood rush from her face that he’d hit so near the mark. It flooded back with a vengeance until her cheeks were pulsing with color. “That had nothing to do with it!”
She might as well have saved her breath. She saw her reaction was enough to tell him a part of the truth she hadn’t been willing to acknowledge even to herself. The chances of explaining her chaotic emotions at that time to him were pretty much nil, though, because she hadn’t completely understood herself. She still didn’t. “What are you going to do?” she gasped, struggling to stave off hysteria.
“I made you a promise,” he said evenly.
Erin stared at him, trying to recall everything that had passed between them so long ago. It wasn’t easy given that she’d spent an entire year doing her utmost to submerge those memories. That particular memory surfaced without a great deal of prodding though.
“You killed the others?”
“Unfortunately for me, they were gone by the time I recovered enough to look for them. The trail was too cold to follow. That leaves you and the rat bastard that orchestrated my capture and torture. But I’m thinkin’ you can give me him.”
“You didn’t kill Freda Dallas. I don’t believe you’re a cold blooded killer.”
“Then you’d be wrong, chère. She was lucky. It happened real quick. Caught her by surprise when they lay down on me and got her too. I have to say I was very disappointed I didn’t get a chance to settle things between us, but then maybe it was just as well. Sick bitch would probly enjoyed it. I wonder if you will.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with what they were doing!” Erin cried out with a mixture of anger, fear, and desperation. “They brought me into the project later, after they’d captured you. I didn’t even know what they were doing until they sent me in there the first time.”
His lips curled, but there was no humor in his eyes. “Then this is gonna be a real surprise for you, ain’t it, chère?”
Erin started fighting the bindings uselessly. “Let me go! You have to let me go! I don’t know where Dr. Wagner is. I’ve been looking for him since I escaped. That’s why I came here. I thought they might have reopened the facility. It was the only lead I had.”
Something flickered in his eyes, but she could see that he didn’t believe anything she’d said.
“This is the way it works, chère. Over dere is the facilities. You get to use them once a day. Now I’m a soft hearted son-of-a-bitch so I’m gonna let you tell me when you need to go instead of takin’ you when I feel like it. You need ta think real hard before you ask, though, ‘cause that’s once a day, no matter what.
“It won’t be a real problem for you long, though, ‘cause you only get food and water once a day, too--if you’re good and I’m feelin’ charitable. If you piss me off, you don’t get any ‘privileges.’ You just get to look at the food and water and think about using the facilities.”
Horror filled Erin, not just because of what he was suggesting he was going to do to her, but because she realized he was telling her that that was what they’d done to him--for months. Even she had no idea how long they’d kept him chained in that cage, but she knew he had been captured long before she came to the facility, and she knew she had been a part of the experiment for over a month.
“I want to find him as much as you do. Let me go! I’ll help you.”
Frustration filled her as he left the room, closing the door behind him. She tugged at the bindings after he’d gone, twisting her head to look up at them. Her fingers were already numb. The rag the others had used to bind her wasn’t tight enough to completely cut off the circulation and she’d had her hands bound in front of her, which had allowed some circulation. With the binding Jesse had looped around her already bound wrists, and the position of her arms, it hadn’t taken long for the numbness to become more pronounced. Concentrating, she wiggled her fingers and arms as much as she could, not because she thought there was any real chance of getting loose, but to keep some of the circulation flowing through her arms and hands.
She was rewarded for her efforts with stinging pain. Gritting her teeth, she continued until her fingers didn’t feel so stiff and swollen.
If she could only pull herself up a little higher on the bed, she thought, maybe she could get enough slack to slip her bound hands from the loop?
She discovered very quickly that there wasn’t enough slack in the cords around her ankles to allow for it. Even when she’d stretched until it felt as if every joint from her groin down would separate, it wasn’t quite enough.
She subsided after a while, wondering if he did mean to kill her. Her throat closed at that thought.
* * * *
Jesse strode through the front room and out onto the porch, staring up at the night sky while he struggled to bring his heart rate and breathing back to normal. He felt more than vaguely nauseated. For several moments, he held his hands out, palm up, staring angrily at the tremor in them.
He hadn’t anticipated the things he’d felt from the moment he’d set eyes on her. He wondered if she’d been able to tell the effect she had on him, or if she’d been under too much duress herself to see his sorry state.
After a few minutes, he plopped his butt down on the edge of the porch and settled his feet on the lower step, struggling to summon the hatred that had consumed him for so long, that had carried him through the months it had taken him to recover from his wounds, that had kept him from totally losing his mind in the months after that when he had searched for her so frantically.
Of all the stupid things that he had done because of her, marking her was probably one of the stupidest. The link alone had tortured him. It hadn’t been strong enough to help him find her and yet it had been strong enough to taunt him.
Propping one elbow on his knee, he speared his fingers through his hair, propping his forehead on his palm while he tried to remember, and sort through, the things she’d said. Derisively, he realized he didn’t remember a hell of a lot. He’d been the next thing to mindless, roiling emotion even before he’d stripped her. From the moment he’d begun that, it had been far more torture to him than her because he hadn’t been able to get his mind off of his memories of stroking her soft skin, her taste, the way she’d felt when he had sunk himself deeply inside of her. The sounds of pleasure she’d made.
His mouth went dry.
With an effort, he pushed the memories aside. He hadn’t waited all this time to allow himself to be sucked in by her again.
The fury he’d b
een questing for rose inside of him at that thought. He hated all of them for what they’d done to him, but he hated her worst of all. Nothing they could do could touch him as she could. Nothing they could have thought of to do could have given him nearly as much pain.
He’d thought he loved her. All she’d had to do was be the one bright moment in that hell, the one person who offered him any kindness at all. He would’ve believed he was in love with her even if she hadn’t been so beautiful he’d been almost willing to gnaw his arms off to get to her.
He might have been more than tempted if he hadn’t seen that she was as afraid of him as she was fascinated by him.
It made him cringe inside to know that even after everything he’d learned about her, that was what had driven him to mark her, not the half formed lie he’d told himself--that it would make it easier to find her later. In his mind, she was already his mate. He had only had to seal it with his mark.
He dismissed those thoughts. He wasn’t in love with her. He never had been. That was only part of the mind fuck. He’d lusted for her. He didn’t even feel that much anymore.
Not much lust, anyway. Nothing he couldn’t handle.
All he wanted to do was to give her a taste of what they’d put him through, just enough to make it as impossible for her to ever forget as it was for him. Once he’d toyed with her a while, she’d be begging to tell him where that son of a bitch was and then she could go to hell for all he cared. Living with it would be more torture for her than a quick death.
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