Blush

by Suzanne Forster

  He wasn't concerned about keeping an eye on her. She wasn't going anywhere this time of night, and he'd rigged the place to go off like a five-alarm fire if she did try to escape. It was purely curiosity that had him hooked, or maybe disbelief. He wondered what the media would think of her now, bent over her own filthy feet, muttering four-letter words as she gingerly dug slivers from her soles.

  The lantern that glowed next to the cot lit her up like a street urchin sitting by an alley campfire. Her dark hair was a rat's nest of tangles, and the grime that coated her face did nothing for her famous bone structure. Incandescent little blobs of hot-pink nail polish gleamed through the dirt that streaked her feet and ankles. No, the beautiful brat didn't look either beautiful or bratty tonight. She looked pathetic.

  "Shit," she whispered, grimacing as she twisted this way and that, trying to squeeze a stubborn splinter from the ball of her foot. Her eyes welled with tears. "Shit, shit, fuck— shit!"

  "You all right?" He was careful not to let any genuine concern soften the sardonic question.

  She didn't even bother to look up. "If I didn't hate you so much, I'd be fine."

  "You can hate me, just keep your clothes on while you're doing it."

  That brought her head up. Her dark eyes glittered dangerously, whether with tears or anger he couldn't tell.

  "What's your problem?" she asked. "Is it women in general, or is it merely the female body that bothers you?"

  "I have no problem with the female body, except when yours happens to be in my face. Naked."

  She shook back her hair. "Nakedness? That's what disturbs you? My nakedness? That could only mean a couple of things. Either you prefer men, which I sincerely doubt, or—"

  "You're right to doubt."

  "Then what... it's me? You don't find me attractive?" That seemed to astound her. She was a piece of work. "Apparently I'm the first?" he said.

  "Oh, never mind."

  She went back to her grimy surgery then, and Jack realized something. He was going to have to find a way to get through to this nutsball because she had what he needed. Information. Five years ago a priceless Van Gogh still life had been stolen from a vault within a secured government warehouse, and that theft was linked directly to the tragedy with his wife and child. The theft involved black-market art smuggling on an international scale, and he had reason to think her stepfamily, or someone connected with them, was involved.

  Gus Featherstone could help him with that. She might be the only one who could. There were things he needed to know about the logistics and security of the Featherstone mansion, which was where the family's art collection was housed. He didn't want to have to force the answers out of her at gunpoint. However, if that's what it took.

  "That idiot security guard is lucky I didn't kill him," he said softly.

  She was nearly bent over double now, working away, and she didn't seem to have heard him. He rather admired her agility and considered telling her there was a makeshift shower behind the curtain near her bed that she could use— if the well wasn't dry—but then he'd have to roust himself and pump the water. Tomorrow was soon enough, he decided. She wouldn't have gangrene by then.

  "Got it!" she exclaimed with real pride, holding up a nasty-looking shard. Her expression flashed from triumph to slow-dawning perplexity as she zoomed in on him. "What idiot security guard?"

  "How many idiot security guards do we know? The one who tried to stop me from taking you, of course. "

  "He was only doing his job."

  She was going to defend the idiot. Excellent. Jack rolled to his side and propped himself up with an elbow. "I don't think I've ever seen worse security. The guard shouldn't have let me through the gate without checking my story, and then he got suspicious and compounded his mistake by sneaking up behind me. "

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "I had a gun. He had plenty of time to see it before he committed himself. One whiff of my Magnum, and he should have been on the horn to the police. But no, he had to be a hero. "

  He loaded his heavy sigh with contempt. "Anybody could have pulled off that kidnapping, including Beavis and Butthead. "

  "Hardly. " She proceeded to enlighten the Philistine. "Maybe the guard was negligent, " she admitted, "but the security at the mansion is excellent, leading edge. The entire kidnapping is probably on video. "

  Yes, exactly why he'd stayed out of range of the camera at the guard gate, and why he'd put on a ski mask once he got through. "I didn't see any cameras at the pool. "

  "Of course you didn't. It's all done with fiber optics. They're in the pool lights. "

  Bingo. This was going to be easier than he thought. Her technical expertise was questionable, but the point was to keep her talking. "If it's fiber optics, then they must have run wires into the pool lights that feed information to the cameras. "

  "Well, yes, I suppose that's how it's done. But that's kid stuff compared to Lake's control room. There are banks of screens, and—" She went quiet suddenly, and alert. "Why do you want to know about the mansion's security?"

  He shrugged off the question. "AH I said was the guard was an idiot. You're the one who brought up the rest of it. "

  She went back to her grooming then, wadding the hem of the T-shirt and using it to dab at dirt smudges. Finally, as her efforts led up her thigh, revealing more and more skin, she hesitated and looked up at him. Her brows knit. "So, what is it you don't like about me? Specifically. My legs?"

  He looked her over. "I'm sure your legs are fine when they're not covered with scuzz. "

  "My breasts then?"

  "I'm sure they're fine, too. "

  "You saw them, " she reminded him.

  "I could hardly miss them. "

  "I've been told they're incredible. "

  He shrugged indifferently. "Are they real?"

  She sniffed at that and began to pull up her T-shirt as if another look would verify their authenticity. On the way she inadvertently gave him an eyeful that nearly took his breath away. A beaver shot, he marveled. That's what they would have called it in his horny high school days. Her legs were folded Indian-style, and her creamy white inner thighs made him fantasize how she must look on a runway. All legs, he imagined. Her inner thighs were just about the only part of her not smudged with something, except for the black satin delta that sat enticingly at their center. Christ! He'd done plenty of things outside the law, but this was his first kidnapping. It would also be his last, and she could take the credit for reforming him.

  His hand shot up to stop her from exposing anything else. "Once was sufficient, thanks. "

  "Aren't we polite?" she told him hotly. "You're not exactly Mr. January, you know. "

  She corkscrewed around and kicked his blue jeans off the bed, then pulled the trench coat over her and flopped down as if to go to sleep. There was a lot of twisting and sighing involved until she got herself settled, but she finally ended up on her stomach, her face smashed into the tattered mattress.

  Maybe she'll smother, he thought.

  The possibility had a certain macabre appeal, and much as it pained him to admit it, so did she. It wasn't just her physical appeal, it was her style. She wasn't a woman, she was an event. Like fireworks on New Year's Eve, she was more noise and flash than gunpowder, but she was incredibly shrewd under all the pyrotechnics. And cute, too, though he loathed that word. He didn't want to think about what sex with her would be like. No, he did not want to think about that.

  Staring up at the ceiling now, he was aware once again of the aching soreness in his shoulders and the gooseflesh on his naked skin. His body was humming with an inner expectancy, readying itself for some physical encounter. His hands had that restless, empty feeling he'd noticed while driving the car and the hot spark in his jeans was kindling into something hungry and dangerous. How long had it been since he'd been with a woman? How much longer had it been since he'd wanted to be with one?

  Don't contaminate the work with personal feelings, Culh
ane. You did that once before and everyone you loved got killed.

  The litany stormed his thoughts, warning him, reminding why he was here and what he'd been doing the last five years. It had kept him straight all that time, that and a rage for justice.

  Even so, he couldn't deny what was happening to his body tonight. Hunger? Shit, he had a need that hadn't been fed in years. If he was being truthful, he was ravenous, starved for a woman's touch. He rolled over on his side, facing away from her and felt the sharp ache in his shoulders as it flared lower, in the depths of his groin. The muscles were on fire, aching to be flexed, to be used. There would be damn little sleep tonight, he realized.

  Gus stirred several times during the night, and each time she opened her eyes she saw something more startling and dreamlike than the last. He was awake, or so it seemed, and doing things that didn't make sense. The first time she woke he was sitting in the rocker, cradling a can of beer in his hand. He wasn't drinking from it. The can wasn't even open. He was simply staring at it and rocking as if he were slowly dying of thirst and the beer was laced with poison.

  Odd, she thought, that he would bring beer he didn't intend to drink. Odd that he wouldn't even allow himself that.

  The second time she came awake, it was as if she'd never drifted off, as if she'd only been dozing fitfully. She saw him bathed in the green glow of a liquid crystal display. He was sitting at the table, caught in the eerie, electronic light of a computer screen as if it had cast a spell over him, and he couldn't break away. His fingers worked the keyboard without making a sound, and the intensity of his focus frightened her. There was something sinister about it, something she didn't understand, like his palpable obsession with the can of beer.

  When she woke the last time that night, she saw him as if through a drowsy, heavy-lidded golden mist. He was still sitting at the table, but this time there was a silver knife flashing in his hand.

  Whittling, she realized. He was whittling.

  Gradually the strange scene came into focus. The piece he was working on was a small and delicate yet very elaborate structure made up of tiny pieces of wood, some of them not much thicker than the sliver she had extracted from her foot. It looked like a fairy tale castle. Yes, he was building a castle in miniature, but what fascinated her as much as his creation was his machetelike knife. It was the same ferocious killing tool he'd strapped to his thigh when he'd gone out that day. The huge, gleaming thing glowed yellow in the firelight from the lanterns and made her think of the raw power of the outdoorsmen in Marlboro ads. He might have been one of those men himself except that there was a quality haunting his rugged profile she'd never seen in a cigarette ad. Traces of melancholy shadowed his concentration, turning him into a stoic, a man so inured to the pain he barely recognized it as his.

  She drifted off again with that thought in her mind... and still wondering if it could have been a dream.

  Somehow she had to escape. That was the sole thought occupying Gus's mind when she opened her eyes the next morning. She'd been pretending to be asleep for the last half hour, watching him as he pulled on his boots and tied the sheathed machete to his jeans. The purposefulness with which he'd done it and then headed out the door made her think he must be going off in search of food, and it had surprised her that he would leave her unguarded.

  One look out the window above the bed told her she wouldn't get far, even if she did attempt to escape. He was a half-mile away, but still within eyeshot. The lay of the land was such that he could have seemingly walked off the end of the earth before he would have lost sight of the shack.

  This wasn't going to be easy, she realized. If all else failed, the man had to sleep some time, which meant she would have to make it a point to be awake when he wasn't....

  Lizards skittered in every direction when she stepped out of bed a moment later. She was getting used to the little green gargoyles by now, but couldn't hold back a shiver as she crossed the creaking, sighing floor. A gritty substance prickled the soles of her feet and worked its way into the crevices between her toes. Shavings from his whittling, she realized. The wood dust and tailings were everywhere, coating the floor and the chair with feathery gray snow.

  The castle he'd made sat on the table, its graceful balustrades and spires aligned so delicately she could hardly believe it was real. On closer inspection, she saw that the only thing holding the pieces together were notches in the wood itself. How had he done it with a knife that size? The carving was fantastically intricate and detailed.

  The melancholy she'd seen in his profile stirred within her as she realized there was no way to preserve the piece. Its fragility made her think of her own daydreams of magical edifices, castles spun out of light and spiraling toward the misted sun. It would be a crime to destroy anything so pristine, she realized, but the desert had little regard for perfection. It was a hostile place with its charred, barren vistas and blood-boiling heat. Or was it he who was hostile?

  Her growling stomach reminded her she was starving.

  His duffel bag yielded two high-protein candy bars, and she grabbed both of them, scarfing one down as she continued to search the contents of the bag. Only supreme self-control kept her from devouring the other. She would save it instead, she told herself. There might be a time when she would need it more than right now.

  The bag also contained a shiny metal briefcase with a combination lock that she suspected must contain the computer she'd seen. Why a kidnapper would cart a computer around with him, she couldn't imagine, but if she hadn't dreamed the castle, she doubted that she'd dreamed the computer. Her search didn't yield any weapons, which told her that he'd hidden the Magnum somewhere else or taken it with him, but she did find a photograph hidden in a side pocket of the case. It was a tattered snapshot of a still life painting, and though she was not the art expert her stepbrother was, she recognized the style as reminiscent of Van Gogh's.

  Moments later as she looked around for something to wipe her grimy hands on, it hit her that her hands were the least of it. She was grimy everywhere, hopelessly filthy. A hysterical sound gurgled up. No one would believe this! If Rob could see her now— No, if Vogue's West Coast Bureau Chief could see her now! They would all boggle. She lifted her head and sniffed the air, wrinkling her nose. God, what was that smell? Lizard shit? No, it was her. And she was worse than anything lizards could have left. Gus Featherstone smelled like an unwashed jock strap.

  Choking back laughter, she began suddenly, inexplicably, to cry. "Oh, my God, " she whispered as tears blinded her for a moment. This wasn't like her at all. She never cried, ever, and the uncontrollable emotion propelled her to the sink, where she cranked on the tap. Red water was better than no water.

  As she scrubbed at her grimy face and arms, she told herself that the tears weren't for her. She was sad for Rob, who must be frantic wondering where she was. And for Bridget, whom she missed terribly. Emotion welled up into her throat as she thought about the towheaded moppet, who seemed to have inextricably tangled herself in Gus's heartstrings. If you dare worry about me, Bridge, even for a moment, I'll hide your toe shoes when I get home.

  The metal storage cabinet still made her uneasy, but it was time to brave the evil thing, she decided when she'd finished washing up. Sucking it in, she headed for it, but she wasn't halfway across the room when something astonishing happened. The entire place seemed to shift and shudder like an ocean-going ship.

  Being a native Californian, her first thought was of the Big One. She turned, scanning the walls, the ceiling, peering out the window before she realized it was the floor beneath her. It was giving way! She sprang back and realized she'd stepped into the trap instead of out of it.

  The rotting boards sagged under her weight, toppling her forward. Pain streaked through her injured knee as she landed on it, and a flurry of snapping and crackling dropped her down another half foot. The floor was about to collapse totally and there seemed to be nothing beneath it!

  "Help!" she cried, knowing
no one could hear her.

  Desperate, she clawed at the crumbling pine slats, breaking one fingernail after another as she struggled to get enough leverage to pull herself out. "The hell with this, " she. snarled as another nail snapped. Heaving furiously, she hoisted herself out with a superhuman effort.

  Once she was safe, she inspected her stinging knees and stanched the fresh-flowing blood with her T-shirt. The cut had been reopened, and she cursed the foul, rotting boards that did it. First slivers, now broken fingernails and mangled body parts. The goddamn floor was out to get her.

  But then again... maybe not.

  Studying the crater she'd made, she bent over the maw and peered through the broken boards. There was a pit beneath the shack's floor. A very deep pit. Another expletive fell out of her mouth, this time more awed than obscene. Rocking up to a kneeling position, she began to work frantically, putting a plan into action even before she'd had a chance to fully think it through. This might be her only opportunity, and he could return at any time. She had to work fast.

  She meshed the broken boards back together as best she could, securing them with some of the sharp little pieces of wood he'd discarded while whittling. As soon as she was done, she gathered up a handful of the sawdust and covered the broken boards with it to camouflage them. After that she dragged the rocker over to the corner by the cot. The last thing she did was put on the blue jeans he'd given her, knowing it would confuse him.

  From her vantage point in the chair, she watched the door and thought through her plan, fine-tuning it. It was important that he respond swiftly and without analyzing what he was doing. She was going to have to motivate him just right.

  When the door finally did swing open, the first thing she saw was the burlap sack he was carrying. He tossed it onto the table, where it landed with a soft, fleshy thunk, and then he strode in after it. The floor groaned plaintively under his heavy steps, and the smells of sage and sweat filled the room.