“So,” he said, smirking, “because your previous captures didn’t have families who missed them, that makes them less human?”
Absence of loved ones was her own personal requirement when she went through the selection process, but that did not make them less at all.
His laugh greased the air. “The irony of your ethics is perverse.”
The irony of her life was perverse.
He relaxed into a sigh, his head dropping back against the seat. “We make an invincible team, Liv. Just do your thing until the mere presence of your pussy makes him vomit.”
With the previous captives, Van held the reins, driving the level and direction of the training. But the first requirement in this contract was sticky. To condition the slave to hate women, they’d agreed that she would be the brute force.
Her stomach wobbled. “Think you can stay out of the way while I handle this one?”
“Yep. Just call me in when your devout jock-bag is ready to suck my cock.”
Requirement Two. Slave will service Master sexually with exceptional skill, and his body will be prepared to make it easy for Master.
She and Van would play a depraved game designed to turn a straight, virgin boy into the embodiment of the client’s twelve requirements. Virgin boys were beyond her expertise. Joshua Carter—with his pious upbringing and family support—was a tangle in their operation, one that could endanger her arrangement. The unmistakable shiver of panic lurched through her.
He eased off the gas. “I think we’re here.”
Up ahead, a smudge of trees breached the flat horizon of rural Texas. She checked the signal on her phone. “We’re in the dead zone. This is it.”
He parked on the shoulder where the trees crept closest to the road and turned on the hazard lights. She stepped onto the gravel, the stir of dust settling around her sneakers. When she raised the hood of their car, he removed a fuse from the engine compartment and tucked it in his pocket. Then they waited.
Wheat fields reached around the woodland and stretched beyond the mantle of night. The lonely cry of a mockingbird pierced the dark hush.
The nearest resident lived two miles down. She knew them through the lens of her binoculars. Daniel and Emily Carter couldn’t leave their nightly chores to attend their son’s football game. She knew they expected him home soon.
A distant rumble drew her attention down the desolate road. Given the ease at which sound traveled over the vacant fields, she should see his headlights in about two or three minutes.
Van’s big body blocked her view, pressing in, violating her comfort zone. She raised her chin and searched the depths of his hood. Shadowed and vacant, his expression mirrored her presence of mind.
The back of his hand made a slow trace of her scar, brushing her hair from its path. When he reached her lips, he coiled several strands around his finger.
She grabbed his wrist, and the tendons in her grip turned to steel, immovable. She closed her eyes and braced.
He yanked, sparking a burn where the follicles gave way.
At the sound of his retreating footsteps, she opened her eyes and watched his broad back move toward the trees. “Someday, we’re going to talk about those fetishes of yours.”
Without acknowledgment, he continued in a slow, dispassionate stride until the shadows between the trees swallowed his silhouette.
The purr of the approaching vehicle grew louder, followed by the spit of gravel and bobbing headlights. She leaned against the fender and hummed to the tune of her bludgeoning heart.
Chapter Three
The truck slowed and stopped. Liv held up a hand, greeting the darkened interior and the boy who lingered within. Her mark.
When the door remained closed, she worried her lip. Were her assumptions about him wrong?
With each unanswered second, her nerves mounted. What if he had a passenger? She’d been so sure about this part of the plan.
Relief came with the creak of his door. It had been just her anxiety making it feel longer.
He hopped out, the interior light illuminating the empty cab. “Hey there. You need help?”
His voice reverberated through her chest for the first time. It exceeded all her imaginings, a deep underlying elixir, the perfect embodiment of his powerful, masculine frame.
“Hi.” She wiped imaginary grease on her jeans and gestured at the engine. “Started clanking on I-35. I pulled off, got turned around.” She spread out her arms to indicate the expanse of nothingness around them and quickened her rambling with a display of panic. “I’m lost, dang car crapped out, and I can’t get a signal on my phone.”
A chuckle vibrated in his chest, and there was something unnervingly soothing about it. “You definitely got turned around. You’re miles from the interstate. Want me to take a look?” He pointed at the engine and cocked his head, his luminescent eyes dancing in the headlights.
Several feet separated them, the closest they’d ever been in proximity. At almost a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier, he commanded the space he stood in, as well as hers. He could overpower her with sheer strength, which was why she had to lead him to chains by his own accord.
She regarded the ground and tapped the toe of her sneaker on the tire. “It’s the alternator. Last time this happened, the mechanic told me I needed a new one. It’s expensive, you know?” She peered at him through her lashes. “I’ll have to tow it.”
“There’s cell service about a mile up the road. I can give you a lift.”
Soon, he’d give her more than just a lift. Time to zip on the helpless-girl suit. She inched forward until the beam of light caught her left cheek.
His Adam’s apple jumped, and he seemed to wrestle with dragging his gaze from the scar to her eyes. Sympathy, or perhaps pity, softened his expression. She deserved the latter, especially after she used it against him.
“My dad…he…” She placed a palm over her cheek, cradling it, and trickled out an award-winning whimper.
“Hey.” Loose rock scraped beneath his tentative approach. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s just…Dad was so much harder on my little sister. She’s all alone, and she needs me.” She hunched her shoulders. There was no Dad, no sister, but a family boy like him needed something he could sympathize with. “I left Dallas as soon as she called, and now I can’t get to her.” With a shuddering breath, she gave him her back and wrapped her arms around her midsection. “This can’t be happening.” A whisper.
“Where’s your sister?”
“Temple.” She released a sniffle into the darkness.
His silence struggled around her. If she had chosen the right play, he would be working out all the dire possibilities that would justify driving two hours with a bad alternator. And if she’d chosen the right boy, he would offer a solution that delivered him into her hands.
“Is she in danger?”
If yes, he’d call the cops. She shook her bowed head, curled further into herself. “She’s unstable. I don’t think she’d hurt herself, but her mind’s in a bad place.” A deep breath for effect. “I’m the only person she has.”
The scuff of his feet moved in the direction of the truck. “Temple is only thirty minutes from here. I can take you, if you want?”
Touchdown. The victory pulled at her lips. She relaxed her mouth and pivoted slowly, facing him, her features arranged in a portrait of disbelief. “Really?”
He opened the passenger door and held it in invitation. “If you’re okay leaving your car for the tow service. No one will bother it.”
No one would bother it, because Van would replace the fuse and follow far enough behind to not be seen. She snagged her wallet and phone from the car and shuffled toward him with deliberate caution in her steps.
What would a normal girl in her position say? “You’re not going to kidnap me and rape me, are you?” The twisted callousness in that suggestion tightened her throat. She wanted to retract the words, despising what the end of the night would
bring for him.
“No, ma’am.” He shifted out of the way as she climbed in. “But there’s Mace in the glove box. Help yourself.” The corners of his full lips inched up. “Pretty as you are, you can’t be too trusting.”
A frigid clamp closed over her heart. Stupid, stupid boy.
Seated behind the wheel, he turned the truck around and drove toward town and I-35. When the bars appeared on her phone, he held up his. “I need to text my folks and let them know I’ll be late. Would you mind?”
As expected, his law-abiding refusal to text and drive put his phone in her hands. She accepted it and tapped on the call log. Last call was to his mom prior to the game. “Of course. Is it under—”
“Mom. Should be right—” He cut his eyes at her finger on the screen. “Yeah, that’s it. Just tell her I’m giving a friend a lift to Temple and I’ll be home by eleven-thirty.”
It was remarkable how unabashed he was about living with his parents. He didn’t know she knew the reasons. That they depended on him to work the struggling farm morning and night. That staying in his childhood bedroom saved them on-campus housing expenses despite some of the offset his scholarship awarded them.
He let her imagine whatever she wanted about a twenty-one-year-old checking in with Mom on a Friday night. His confidence wasn’t boy-like at all. It was admirably mature. And problematic. It would require breaking, likely through physical humiliation.
The pang from that thought hit her stomach, and she calmed it with the reminder that to succeed in an important aim, it was acceptable to do something bad. Or lots of somethings bad.
A discreet glance confirmed his eyes were on the road. As she typed out the text, she worked the cover off the back of the phone, let the battery drop between her legs—thank God it wasn’t an iPhone—and closed it up. The screen went black, the text unsent.
She placed it face down in the cup holder. “Sent.”
“Thanks. Do you need a number for a tow service?”
“I’ll call in the morning.”
His thumbs drummed on the steering wheel and stopped. “Name’s Josh. What’s yours?”
She always used her real name. No reason not to. “Liv.”
“Liv.” He pursed his lips. “L-I-V.”
“L-I-V.”
Shove it between DE and ERER, and she had a job title. Mr. E had a jolly cruel laugh about it when he promoted her to a deliverer by way of blackmail.
His face creased in a smile. “Do you believe in meaningful coincidence?”
Absolutely not. “Why?”
“I play football and my jersey number is fifty-four. Your name is L-I-V.”
What was his deal with the spelling? “And?”
He shrugged. “The Roman Numeral LIV is number fifty-four.”
Weird. Would she know these things if she’d had the freedom to earn her diploma or attend college? “I take it you believe coincidence is meaningful?”
“I think it’s plausible. There’s comfort in believing there are things in the universe that defy the odds, that something beyond common sense can pivot into place and fill an inner need.” He angled his head to glance at her, eyebrows bunching curiously, perhaps studying her face. He wouldn’t find anything meaningful there. He returned his attention to the road. “What do you think?”
The focus of conversation was expected for a boy pursuing a career in ministry. Still, she scrambled for an answer and settled on the truth. “Coincidence is nothing more than cause and effect. You jump. You fall.” He’d unwittingly jumped from his path and fallen onto someone else’s. What she had planned for him would challenge his notions of coincidence—and every other damned thing in his life.
Chapter Four
Josh sensed Liv’s huge brown eyes making furtive sweeps in his direction. Addictive eyes, the kind that tunneled through his outer shell and scrambled his mind until he forgot where he was going. There were moments in his life when he wanted to bypass the road chosen for him. He was staring at one now. The most attractive woman he’d ever seen. In his truck. Watching him.
The scar dividing her cheek flickered beneath a passing streetlight. It didn’t distract from her beauty, but it was a delicate emblem of her life, of whatever had happened to her. He burned with curiosity to know her story.
“Take 35 south. I’ll tell you where to go when we reach Temple.” She shifted her gaze to the speedometer. “Watch your speed.”
No please or thank you. Just a quiet authority that stroked his ears and urged him to test her limits. “How ’bout you just sit there, look pretty, and let me drive?”
“The cops are all over, shooting radar. I can’t afford more delays tonight.”
This girl seemed a lot less vulnerable than the one trembling on the road. Her voice was soft, musical even, but clipped at the edges as if repressing something beneath her scarred exterior, something beyond the hurt. Outside of her fleeting glances, there was a peculiar apathy in her stillness. Like a dormant animal, resting, waiting.
His discomfort swelled, feeding on all the unsaid things about her family. He merged onto the interstate. “Do you want to talk about your sister?”
“No.”
He scratched his stubble and grappled with her reserve. “It’s a good thing I came along when I did. I’m the only one who passes through there at this hour.”
The wind rustled against the windows as the truck gathered speed.
This was when a normal person would pick up the thread of friendly chitchat. Her silence challenged what he knew about girls and their self-involved monologues. He wasn’t usually a nervous talker, but seriously, her lack of conversation was growing more awkward and irritating by the second. “I live just down the road a piece from where I found you.”
She stared out the windshield, her fingers seemingly dead on her slender thighs. “Mm.”
Pity she didn’t want to talk. He had thirty minutes with this gorgeous girl, thirty minutes to speak openly, to be himself in the company of a stranger. “I’m majoring in religion at Baylor.”
A sigh whispered past her lips. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why the Jesus career?” Her lips rolled as if constraining judgment.
“I promise you, the reason is completely and wholeheartedly… absurd.”
She glanced at him. Not just a flick of her scrutinizing eyes. He’d won a full-on head turn. A tousle of chestnut curls clung to her face and spilled around her… Sweet Lord, he shouldn’t have been gawking, but her chest was very, very mature. He was certainly not immune to feminine attributes, but watching her mouth part, tipping up at the corners and stretching her scar, was hell on his focus. Confusion looked seductively X-rated on her.
A low-burning fire stirred in his groin, a sensation he’d never tried to sate with a girl. He could’ve blamed his abstinence on Christian principles and a demanding workload. Truth was, he derived pleasure from the exertion that hard work put on his mind and body. The girls hanging around his practices didn’t arouse him like the bruise of a tackle, the pains of farm labor, or the mental strain that accompanied religious stringency. He’d accepted his unconventional urges long ago and locked the darkest ones deep inside. If his parents knew the kind of thoughts he entertained, it would destroy them. His chest tightened.
He moved out of the passing lane and merged into an opening between two slower cars. He’d admitted to her the reason for his career choice was absurd. Might as well tell her why. “My folks tried to get pregnant for years. When they reached their mid-forties and found God, they prayed, made promises, and nine-months later…” He gave her a raised eyebrow.
“And you are…”
“Fulfilling their promise. They’d made a deal with God. If He gave them a child, they vowed to raise their miracle to be a servant of His church in Baptist ministry.”
She laughed, a sweet sound for such a glaring expression. “Absurd.”
“Told you.” And telling her seemed to dislodge it just a little from
his chest. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God. He just wasn’t fanatical like some of his classmates. Like his parents.
“So young to allow all your choices be dictated by a promise to God.”
“My promise is to Mom and Dad.”
“Whatever. It’s a promise that controls you. Doesn’t that make you angry?”
“It challenges me, makes me a better person. I’m good with that.”
A lull settled over her, and her gaze lost focus as she stared at him. She raised her hand, tentative at first, and reached for his face, fingertips resting on his cheekbone. When she traced his jawline, it was a caress so alluring he had to put all his concentration in keeping his eyes open and his hands on the wheel.
“Your life has always been predetermined, huh?” Her words were as perplexing as her touch.
“Mom and Dad gave me life, an honest one. In return, I accept the path they want for me.” He leaned ever so slightly against her fingers and murmured, “It’s just a job. You never know, it might lead to something extraordinary.”
She yanked her hand back, and her attention snapped to the road.
The absence of her touch left a cold shock. He rubbed his jaw on his shoulder. “Did I say something—”
“Take the next exit.”
Unease burrowed in him. What the hell happened? He exited, replaying the conversation in his head. Perhaps leaning into her touch had been too forward.
“Five miles up, turn right into the Two Trails Crossing subdivision.”
He passed Temple’s main drag, the emptiness of the streets seeping into the truck. His body knew she was sitting right beside him. Hell, it pulsed to close those few inches. But she seemed so very far away, lost in her thoughts.
Then she began to hum. It started with a tremor, out of the blue and shocking to his ears. Was she singing to avoid conversation or to slice through the quiet?
The fluttering harmonic built into a haunting rhythm. The tune was unfamiliar, yet the notes shifted through him as if breathed from the most secret part of his soul.