by Kylie Scott
Whether she wanted him or not.
The side windows were boarded up, the door locked and barricaded. He started a fire in the pot-belly stove to warm the place up.
What the hell could she be doing?
He drifted by the bathroom door again, about-turned and hovered, antsy. His knuckles rubbed at the palm of his hand and his foot tapped. Like every other part of the place, he’d stocked the bathroom with the sort of shit girls liked. Bottles and tubes. Creams and lotions. But seriously … how long did it take? It wasn’t like she’d give a fuck what he thought of her appearance.
The beauty of the eco-chalet was it had been good to go despite the meltdown. Composting toilet and plenty of water in the tanks located beside each of the buildings. Spare tanks of gas for the stove sat waiting in the shed. They could be happy here for a long time. Or at least, content. Stupidly, he’d hoped she’d appreciate all the effort he’d put into making a home for them. That had been the idea. The reality was a little different. A shitload more difficult.
He scowled at the door and his temple gave an agonizing throb. Maybe he had a mild concussion. It wouldn’t have surprised him. This beat the worst of his hangovers, easily. And after everything went to shit, he and some of his buddies had spent days loaded. Weeks. With all the booze at their disposal and plenty of pills to be popped, why not? But those days were gone.
Nothing would distract him from protecting and providing for Roslyn.
Nick gave in and knocked lightly on the bathroom door. “Ah, Ros? You alright? Need anything?”
From within came the sounds of water splashing and the shuffling of feet over wooden floorboards. There was also the occasional jingle of the chain running beneath the door, connecting her to the bed. At the expected signs of life something loosened inside of him, unwound. He breathed easier.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” she said, her voice sounding off. Flat.
Yeah, well. Who could blame her for being mad about the chain? Or the ball gag? Some sucking up was required.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
The bathroom door opened. Her unhappy face appeared, eyes rimmed red. Damn it.
“Maybe,” she said.
“You’ve been crying?”
“No,” she snapped.
He blinked.
Her puffy face emerged further from the shadows, the evidence obvious. Bloody hell.
Maybe this wouldn’t work after all. The world was so messed up and he’d been so sure. Given a chance, she might see the benefits of the situation. But what if she never did?
Fuck that.
No. She would. He could be charming. Numerous exes had said so. Still, his throat constricted, fingers clenching and releasing at his sides. He’d spent months on his own, trying to get his shit together and figure out what came next. Because after a while, surviving day-to-day didn’t cut it. In fact, it became fucking meaningless. Just going through the motions: breathing and eating and pissing and shitting for the sake of it. Living long past when he should have been dead with the rest of them.
He’d spied a few other groups of people during his months on his own. But only Roslyn had tempted him into giving people another go. To set his shithouse attitude aside and try being social.
Checking out the group at the school for safety’s sake, he’d seen her grinning at something some old guy said. Something inside him had woken up. For the first time, he’d actually felt lonely. But he’d felt something else, too. Hope.
Then he’d spied her a time or two through the school library windows and hope had turned to need. He had always had this librarian fetish—embarrassing but true. And he had one Miss O’Connell with her sensible shoes and tight sweaters to thank for that. It had been an epiphany to his preteen mind each and every time she went up on tippy toes to retrieve a book off the top shelf. Good God, the woman had been stacked. When Roslyn had done the same, reaching high with reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, he’d been converted to the cause instantly. The cause being to seduce her as soon as bloody possible … that, and keep her safe.
“There’s a fire?” she asked, eyeing up the pot-belly stove.
“Yeah.” He sucked in a deep breath. “Look, I know this is unusual. But I’m really not going to hurt you. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“I’m not. Despite the chain.” She shook her leg, jiggling the metal links. It sounded almost merry.
“You’re not?”
“No. I nearly brained you with a bottle of Pinot. If you were going to hurt me, you already would have.” She sniffed. “Which doesn’t mean that I trust you. Or that keeping me like a household pet is acceptable. You’re still very much on my shit list. Holding someone hostage doesn’t exactly endear you to them, Nick. You’re wrong to do this. And if you’re waiting for Stockholm syndrome to kick in, then you’re going to be waiting a hell of a long time.”
“Right.” He pinched his lips with his thumb and forefinger, thought it over. She was right, in a way. But admitting it wouldn’t get him anywhere. It would be best to sidetrack her for now. “I’m sorry I made you cry.”
“It’s not that,” she sighed, held out her hand. A busted pair of reading glasses lay in her palm, one lens cracked in the corner, the frame badly bent. “They were in my pocket during my great escape.”
“Let me see …”
Another shrug and a snuffle, but she let him take them. “You said something about food?”
“Just a sec.” One of the arms had broken off, but the bend in the central part of the frame could be dealt with easily enough. “Mind if I hold onto these?”
A third shrug as she wandered closer to the fire. He bet it had been bloody cold up in the old school.
He took a deep breath. “We need to come to some sort of agreement.”
“Regarding?”
Nick sat on the edge of the bed, watching her. How best to come at it? She was smart. She’d gotten the drop on him. But still. All of the screaming had been her reacting without a single thought. That sort of behavior could get her killed. “Think you could climb a tree if you had to?”
“What?” Roslyn squinted at him over her shoulder. She looked better. Her blue eyes were clearer and some color had returned to her cheeks. The pretty mouth, however, remained an unhappy bow.
“You don’t look like you’ve got a lot of upper body strength to me. If you had to climb a tree or a building to get yourself out of trouble, do you think you could?”
She held her hands out to the flames to warm them. “Oh, I see. We’re back to talking me out of my ability to survive on my own.”
He didn’t bother to answer.
“You’re army, aren’t you?” Her voice was thick with distaste.
“Yeah, I was. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“So was my father.” She gave him a contemplative nod. “I’d manage alright, Nick. Trust me.”
“Would you? How fast do you think you could move if you had to? How far could you run before you had to stop?”
“Infected aren’t exactly swift.”
“True. But if there’s enough of them it doesn’t matter.” Nick set his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands together. “So, running and climbing are limited. You know how to hot-wire a car?”
“Must have missed that day of school,” she mumbled. “I’d find one with the keys still in it. There’re enough sitting around abandoned.”
“And they’ve been sitting there for six months now,” he said. “Not good for an engine to be idle so long. What are you going to do if it doesn’t start? Do you know how to do anything past checking for oil and water?”
“I’ll ride a bike if I have to. Hell, I’ll skateboard.”
He ignored her devil-may-care grin. “If you actually manage to kill me next time you attack me then you run the chance of dying here, Ros. Either in here, chained up, or out there from the infected.”
“I’m really sure concern for my wellbeing will keep you awak
e at night.”
“You have no idea.”
Roslyn studied the skirt of her gray school uniform, her bruised knuckles. She was tough, but not tough enough. Not to go out there alone. Not even just to get back to the school.
“This isn’t going to work, Nick,” she said. “You’re not going to convince me of a damn thing.”
The woman made no sense. After everything she’d seen, the blinkers were still firmly in place.
“You really want to go back to that place and those people?” he asked. “After what they did to you?”
Her top lip curled in distaste. “After what you forced them to do to me.”
“I didn’t force them to do jack-shit. They chose to screw you over with their own free will.”
“They’re not all like that,” she bit out.
He grunted, frustrated but trying to hide it. Probably unsuccessfully. “You like them enough to spend the rest of your life with them? Not that you’ll live long with bastards like them at your back. Especially once you have to start going on raids into town for supplies. How do you think that’ll work out, Ros?”
The line between her brow deepened and her shoulders squared. “I don’t know, Nick. But it sure would be nice if the choice of how and where I spend the rest of my life were mine to make.”
“Those days are gone. No one’s got choices any longer. No one’s where they want to be.”
She flicked out her hand in obvious dismissal of the subject. “Food, Nick. I want food. Or are we bargaining for that too?”
He sighed long and loud, but only inside the confines of his own head, in private. To her he gave the most charming grin in his arsenal. The one that almost always got him what he wanted with women in the past.
Her eyes made like slits. “Well?”
“No, Ros. Of course not. Let me fix you some dinner.”
* * *
Nick was sprawled out on the king-size mattress, eyes shut and body lax. Forget sleeping on the couch. She hadn’t been happy. Not even after he’d sworn he’d keep his hands and every other part to himself. Roslyn lay as far from him as she could manage without falling off the bed. But give it time. She was awful close to the edge.
There were infected outside moaning and groaning. Her earlier carry-on had definitely been heard. Who knew how many had gathered? After six months there should have been less of them. They should have been dying off from starvation by now. But they weren’t, or at least, not in any great numbers. The virus somehow kept them going. Maybe they were eating each other or cornering the local wild life. Who knew.
Roslyn lay dead still, her breathing soft and slow. Not asleep, though. Not even a little. He could feel the tension radiating off her.
Fuck. Tiredness owned him. But all he could do was lie there and wait for her to attempt whatever it was she had her heart set on attempting.
Waiting.
Maybe leaving the cuffs off her hadn’t been the best move. Unlikely he’d get any sleep tonight, either way. His head remained in agony. Lucky he wasn’t particularly vain, given the scar he’d have.
There was a rustling noise, the muted clinking of links of metal chain as she gradually lowered her foot to the floor. Beneath him, the mattress shifted as her weight carefully, sneakily moved. He lifted an eyelid and watched her shadowy form rise off the bed in slow motion.
“Going somewhere?” he asked.
A startled squeak escaped her.
Nick leaned over the edge of the bed and flicked on the battery-powered camp light he’d left on the floor. He held it high. His jaw ached from ongoing tension. It didn’t compare to the misery of his forehead, but soon, his teeth would be ground down to nothing. “Well?”
She blinked rapid fire and raised a hand to shield her eyes from the light. “What?”
He snorted. “Like you weren’t going for something to attack me with. Again. After you promised …”
“Nick.”
“How can I trust you?”
“You kidnapped me!”
“You made a promise!”
“Would you just—”
“Die?” He kept his voice low, calm. Or he tried to. “I doubt you’re the killing kind, darling. I don’t think you’ve got it in you. But forgive me if I don’t give you a shot at it just the same.”
“You’d be surprised at what I could do,” she seethed. “But, you idiot, I wasn’t going to attack you.”
“Yeah, right.” He thrust the lamp forward like it was a weapon. “Then what were you going to do? Huh?”
The moaning outside rose in volume, no doubt spurred on by their shouting. She gave the door a pained glance and her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “I wasn’t going to attack you.”
“You thought you could get the chain off without waking me? Seriously?”
“I wasn’t doing that either,” she said. “I don’t know how to do things like pick locks and hot-wire cars, remember? I don’t have MacGyver skills like you do.”
“Then what were you doing?”
She crossed her arms over her chest, pumping up the perfect swell of her breasts. He tried not to let it distract him. The school uniform looked tatty and faded in the glare of the camp light. Outside the groaning went on and on.
She took her sweet time in answering. His molars would be a distant ground-down memory by the time they were done. Never in his life had a woman yanked his chain with such ease. Which would have been funny in another time and place, given the chain on her ankle. Or not. Humor required him to be more then semi-conscious and not suffering from a head wound.
When she wavered in and out of his vision he got a little concerned. He rested his head back on the pillow. Bloody hell, falling on his face wouldn’t strengthen his position.
Her gaze settled on some point behind him. “I was going to sleep underneath the bed.”
“What?”
The woman just looked at him, mouth a bitter line. Dark smudges sat beneath her eyes. He wasn’t the only one in need of sleep.
“Roslyn. Why would you do that?”
She flung out her hands. “Why do you think?”
“You’re safe here.”
“Nowhere is safe,” she said. “Sleeping on that bed, out in the open … it feels too exposed. The storeroom I used to sleep in was very small. And locked.”
“We’re inside a locked building.”
She just looked at him.
Nick sighed and slowly sat up, pushed off his blankets and scooted across the bed. When he swung his legs over the side of the mattress she danced back a step or two, almost tripping on the chain. Not like he wasn’t dressed. He’d changed into a T-shirt and some sweatpants to sleep in. The odds were good if he’d left anything hanging out she would have tried to cut it off.
He set the light on the bedside table and gave her a small, tight smile as his head spun queasily. “Easy. We’re just talking.”
The nasty glance she gave him seemed pretty fucking unnecessary, really. Not like he wasn’t proving himself willing to discuss things. Also, not like he could do much, what with the condition he was in. Though she didn’t know that.
He cleared his throat, took a deep breath. “Do you really think I would bring you here without making sure you’d be safe?”
Her face lifted in a mocking grin. “Oh, I’m sorry. Is my fear of dying a horrible, bloody death bruising your ego?”
“Ros, be reasonable …”
“I’m so glad this is all about you.”
“Wait, okay? Let’s just stop and think this through,” he proposed, leaning his elbows on his knees. Propping his chin in his fingers stopped the world from sliding south. “You are very valuable to me.”
The sides of her lips turned down in disgust. “Yeah, a van’s worth of valuable. I saw.”
He ignored her baiting, still hopeful they could get some sleep tonight. Please God, let them get some sleep tonight. “Be logical, Ros. You like logical, don’t you? I will not let anything happen to you. I went to too m
uch trouble to lose you now.”
“Aah, the power of the pussy.”
“Exactly,” he agreed with a smirk. Which was a mistake. If the woman hit him now, he really might be down for the count. “Calm down. It’s the truth. You have it. I want it.”
“I hate you so much.”
“Because I’m honest?” He sighed. “No, Roslyn. This should comfort you. You’re pretty much worth more to me than my own life. You and your pretty pussy.”
Shouldn’t have said it. Couldn’t help himself. Wasn’t like she didn’t hate him already.
It was a little surprising when she actually hissed at him, though. “I mightn’t even be any good in bed. Have you thought of that?”
“I’m willing to take the risk.” He grinned. “I’m also willing to teach you. I’m actually quite a good instructor when I put my mind to it. You’d be surprised.”
Her jaw shifted restlessly like maybe he wasn’t the only one wearing away teeth. “I desperately need you to go fuck yourself.”
“Roslyn,” he tutted, and the fury in her eyes exploded. She was a lot of fun all stirred up. Pity about the reason. Still, it pleased him to know he could get to her as much as she got to him.
A long, low growl came from outside and her shoulders jerked. He hated seeing her afraid, for reasons even greater than his ego. There’d been enough fear and death. By locking this bird in a golden cage, he’d save her from experiencing more. Perverted, but true.
“You’re safe,” he said in a softer tone.
“I’m here. I’m clearly not going anywhere. We don’t need to be discussing this any longer. Why do you even care?”
“I don’t want you sleeping beneath the bed.”
Blue eyes stared back at him, unhappy.
He smothered a yawn, searched for something to put her at ease. With his brain pounding, he couldn’t have set himself a harder task. He’d promised not to jump her no matter how much he wanted. The place was locked down. The evidence on that front was obvious. His headache left little room for thought. Didn’t put off his dick, but then his dick had no sense. It had gotten him into trouble for most of his adult life.