“Next time you pull a stunt like this one tonight, I’ll take it for an invitation.” His lips curved in a twisted parody of a smile. “You’re lucky I don’t go ahead now. I’d kind of like to make it with you. I go for broads with big tits.”
And with that he straightened suddenly to stand looking down at her again, his arms folded over that hairy chest and some indecipherable gleam in his eyes. Before Lora could even begin to assimilate the fact that he apparently wasn’t going to rape her after all, he stepped away from the bed for an instant and returned with the blanket that he had discarded earlier by the trapdoor. Lora’s head whirled as he dropped it over her, covering her nakedness. She thought she might faint with relief . . . He was not going to rape her. . . .
Lora knew her eyes must have betrayed her feelings. She felt limp all over at the unexpected reprieve. He stood looking down at her a moment longer, his eyes on her face now that the rest of her was decently covered, then grinned maliciously. Moving away, he rescued the plates of food from where Lora had left them by the door. He set one on the bedside table near her head, so that the appetizing aroma wafted across her dilating nostrils. He held the other in his hand, scooping up a mouthful of beans and forking it into his mouth while he chewed with obvious enjoyment.
“Mmmmm, this is great.” He looked down at her again as he forked in another heaping mouthful. “Hungry?”
Eagerly, Lora nodded. He wasn’t so bad after all. He hadn’t raped her, despite scaring her half out of her wits, and he was going to feed her. . . .
“Isn’t it too bad that I had to tie you up? You won’t be able to eat,” he said with apparent regret, wolfing another forkful. Lora’s eyes widened with outrage as she realized what he was doing: teaching her a lesson. First, he had frightened her worse than she’d ever been frightened in her life, and now he was eating his meal—and hers, too!—right in front of her starving eyes as a lesson in obedience. The filthy swine! He had not raped her, no, but he had terrorized and humiliated her and now he was starving her while he stuffed himself.
Lora glared at him furiously. He grinned at her, finishing the food with a loud, aggravating and probably purposeful burp. He then patted his stomach and set the empty plates aside and took a healthy swig of whatever drink was contained in the bottle. Lora’s mouth was already painfully dry from the gag, and she longed for the liquid in the bottle almost more than she longed for food. Glaring at him ferociously as he drank again, Lora mentally called him every filthy name she had ever heard.
Finally, he set the bottle down, yawned widely, and leaned over to blow out the light. Then the blankets beneath her were dragged free, not without some effort, leaving her lying on a cool, rough woven sheet. He spread another blanket on top of the one that already covered her. Then Lora heard him move to the other side of the bed, felt the mattress sink beneath his weight, rolling her slightly toward him.
The blankets moved. Lora felt the hard, hot length of a hairy leg brush her, then a shoulder settled just millimeters from her upstretched arm. She could feel him next to her, smell him, hear him breathing. He shifted, and the bed shifted with him. If she had not been tied, she would have rolled against him. His weight made a considerable valley on his side of the bed. As it was, her hands and ankles pulled painfully as they held her body in place. He moved again, and she could hear the faint thump of a pillow being shoved into place.
“Pleasant dreams,” he murmured just inches from her ear.
Lora jerked, and she could have sworn she heard him chuckle. She lay there, seething with anger and something else she refused to acknowledge as his body heat wafted all around her. Tied as she was, she could not escape the occasional brush of shoulder or arm or leg as he shifted position. His skin was so hot . . . With every pore of her skin she was maddeningly conscious of his body next to hers—and her own nakedness. She hated him, feared him—but she could not for the life of her get the image of him as he had looked earlier, clad only in his underpants, out of her head.
He shifted again and his hair-roughened thigh brushed her hip. Lora gritted her teeth, feeling as though hundreds of centipedes with fiery hot feet were swarming out all over her body from that central spot. It was no use, she might as well admit it to herself. He was getting to her. She could not forget the way the lamplight had emphasized the muscles that rippled and played beneath tanned satiny skin; the dark hair that formed a wedge on his chest to trail past his navel and then disappear into the snug white briefs; the linebacker’s shoulders tapering to a narrow waist and hips; the hard, strong arms and thighs that had crushed her beneath him, the calloused hands. . . .
Lora swallowed. She must be going out of her mind. He was a sadistic animal who had enjoyed scaring her to tears earlier, who had reveled in denying her food and was probably even now delighting in the knowledge that she was suffering miserable discomfort from the way he had her tied. He was a criminal guilty of God knew how many vicious acts, he had threatened her with rape and he was quite likely to murder her before this nightmare was over. How could she let herself be excited by his body? It was insane. Nothing like it had ever happened to her before. Not even for Brian had she felt this aching physical awareness—and Brian had always been a perfectly satisfactory lover. It was not as if she was sexually frustrated or anything. She enjoyed making love with Brian. This man had scared the hell out of her, humiliated her, caused her physical discomfort, as her stretched taut arms and legs that were already falling asleep reminded her. How could he possibly excite her? Sheer physical chemistry, perhaps? She had read about the irresistable pull of one particular set of glands for another in romance novels, but she had never really believed it could happen. At least, not to her. Not to sensible, level-headed Lora Harding. But something was happening. Was she the only one to feel it? Was he experiencing this unwelcome attraction as well?
A faint but unmistakable snore put an end to Lora’s speculations. She stiffened. The no good son of a gun was asleep! So much for mutual chemistry, she fumed, squirming angrily in an effort to find a comfortable enough position so that she could imitate his nonchalance and fall asleep herself. Temporary insanity was more like it. And she meant to fight it for everything she was worth!
VI
Stockholm Syndrome. That was the answer. Lora awoke from a miserably uncomfortable sleep with the words flashing like a neon sign in her brain. She had read about it, of course. A psychologist had documented cases where hostages had begun to identify and even fall in love with their captors. It was some sort of defense mechanism designed to reduce the stress of an otherwise unbearable situation. Anyway, it perfectly explained her otherwise incomprehensible reaction to the brute who still snored blithely beside her. She was not attracted to him at all; her mind was merely playing tricks on her in an effort to keep her from fully experiencing the horror of being kidnapped by a violent stranger.
Despite the dryness of her mouth—she was sure her tongue must be swollen to three times its normal size—and the lack of feeling in her arms and legs, which had gone numb hours ago, she felt much better. It boosted her morale considerably to know that what ailed her body was a recognized psychological condition that even had a name. Now, if she had only paid more attention to the article, perhaps she could remember the cure . . . But probably just knowing what was happening to her would be enough. Certainly she was no longer in any danger of succumbing to his dubious charms. . . .
“Sleep well?”
Her nemesis was awake. She turned her head to glare at him. By the faint glow of sunlight filtering in through the roof, she saw that he was very close. . . . He looked very male, very sexy with his black hair ruffled all around his head and what must have been a week’s growth of bristly black beard roughening that tough jaw. He also looked very well rested. She eyed him resentfully, her resentment increased by the inescapable fact that the bandido’s mustache became him very well. It made him look rakish and wicked, like a modern-day buccaneer. She wondered if it was soft or prickly to the t
ouch, then caught herself up sharply. Stockholm Syndrome, she reminded herself, and to drive the point home shifted her toes and fingers so that red-hot needles seemed to sear through her limbs. After that, she managed a truly ferocious glare.
“Cat got your tongue?” He was grinning as he reached around behind her head to fumble at the knot he had tied in her bra. Lora shrank from his touch—but not very far. She couldn’t. Then he was lifting the bra away from her mouth and the towel, too, and suddenly Lora was no longer thinking of him. Her mouth hurt! Her jaw ached and her tongue was dry and swollen, and her lips were probably swollen too. Just closing her mouth was agonizingly painful. She passed her tongue over her lips instinctively, wincing at the feel of the two dry tissues coming together. She would never be able to talk again. . . .
“Drink this.” He had rooted around the floor by the bed and come up with the bottle he had been drinking from the night before. Sitting up, the blankets falling to his waist so that his bronzed, hairy chest was bared, he slid one hand behind her head to lift it and held the bottle to her lips. With a single glare at him Lora complied. The way she was feeling, she would have accepted water from the devil himself, which he was not far from being. Only it wasn’t water. She choked as the unidentifiable liquor burned across her lips and tongue and down her raw throat. He kept pouring, and she spluttered, turning her head so that the liquid ran down the side of her face and onto the bed. His hand tightened on the back of her head.
“Drink some more. You need it.” He put the bottle to her lips again, and she had to drink. When he judged that she had had enough, he took the bottle away and turned to set it on the floor.
Lora experimentally tried running her tongue over her lips again. Her whole mouth tingled from the nasty tasting liquor, but she had to admit that it felt somewhat better, no longer so painfully dry.
He got out of bed. Lora was further annoyed to find that, Stockholm Syndrome or not, she still thought he looked good in his underpants. His limp was more noticeable this morning, as he walked around to the foot of the bed to pick up his jeans, feeling them to see if they were dry. Lora wondered if his knee had stiffened during the night—she hoped it had, and she especially hoped that something she did was the reason. Apparently, the jeans were dry, because he stepped into them, pulling up the zipper and fastening the button at the top of the fly without regard for her interested if resentful stare. Then he reached down to pull at the blankets so that her feet were exposed to the air. It took him more than a few minutes to untie them; apparently, her twisting movements during the night had tightened the knots in the cheap nylon material of his shirt. When at last they were free, he moved up to the head of the bed while Lora gingerly bent her knees, drawing them up toward her chest, and flexed her ankles. Pain shot along her nerve endings; she moaned. When at last her hands, too, were free, Lora lowered them slowly, wincing as she rubbed her chafed wrists.
“You bastard,” she said venomously as she sat up, her tortured arms and legs screaming for vengeance as blood began to circulate through them. She rarely swore, but on this occasion, for this man, she was willing to make an exception. Under the circumstances, the epithet so exactly expressed her feelings that she could not regret it. Unless, of course, he chose to take some violent reprisal.
“My, my, you’re going to hurt my feelings if you’re not careful.”
He shrugged into his badly wrinkled shirt as he spoke, buttoning the front of it and stuffing the ends into the worn jeans. Lora glared at him, hating him so much that it was all she could do not to throw the nearest object at him. As that object happened to be a flat pillow, it would have done little but possibly relieve her feelings, so she allowed good judgment to win out over spleen and refrained. Her arms and legs ached miserably, her tongue still felt about twice its normal size, and her head hurt, either from hunger or from the position she had been forced to lie in all night, or possibly a combination of both. While he—he looked positively blooming—and had the nerve to mock her. If looks could kill, the one she threw at him would have felled him on the spot.
To her surprise, he sat down on the end of the bed and reached for one of her slim bare feet. Lora tried to jerk her foot away, but she was hampered by the necessity of maintaining her grip on the pile of covers that were clamped under her armpits and held across her bosom. He held onto the prize easily, crossing one muscular thigh over the other and positioning her bare calf across his lap as he began to rub the traumatized muscles of her foot and leg. Lora scowled at him, but those hard warm fingers on her skin felt so good that she quit tugging at her foot and surrendered to his ministrations. When at last he put one foot aside and reached for the other, she eyed him warily but made no resistance. His brows knit in concentrated effort as he kneaded and probed the tendons and ligaments he had abused, finally flexing her foot several times before looking up at her.
“Better?” he asked with a slight, quizzing grin.
Lora, all too conscious of that large, brown hand wrapped around her own pale foot—a foot that was by no means dainty, although the blatant masculinity of that large hand made it appear so—recovered herself enough to jerk her foot out of his lap.
“No.” This was said with a bite. He grinned, a real grin this time, as if he were genuinely amused.
“Bitch,” he said without heat. “You’re lucky you’re still in one piece after what you tried to pull last night. I told you before, I’m on the run for my life. If it comes to a choice between you and me—well, there’s no choice, so I’d keep that in mind, if I were you. I won’t hurt you unless you make me, but I’ll do whatever I have to do to get out of this damned country in one piece. Now, get your ass out of bed and get dressed. We’ve got a long way to go today.”
Lora glowered at him from the depths of the bed, still clutching the blankets under her arms. He was a brute, and a bully, and . . .
He reached down, grabbed the covers, and yanked them off her. Lora gasped, covering herself with her arms as she scrambled to put something, a pillow, anything, between her body and his eyes.
“I said get up. I’ve already seen everything you’ve got, so there’s no point in worrying about modesty. On the other hand, if you’re not into your clothes and ready to go in three minutes flat, I will give you something to worry about. So move!”
He grabbed her arm, hauling her out of the bed and then, when her feet were on the floor, throwing her clothes at her. Lora caught the dress but missed the bra and panties. Turning her back after a single furious glare at the man who stood watching her with gleaming attention, she dressed. When she had trouble getting the zipper all the way up, having to stretch her arms into pretzel-like contortions as she fought with the tiny metal tab, he came over to help her. Lora felt his hands on her spine and shivered. Jerking away, she glared at him over her shoulder and finished the job herself. He shrugged, and sat down on the edge of the bed to pull on his mud-caked sneakers. Lora’s sandals were in no better shape, and she regarded them with revulsion before forcing the warped leather straps on her feet.
“Here.” He was standing now, and as she looked at him he tossed her purse to her. She caught it instinctively with both hands as it thudded against her stomach. “You look like something the cat dragged home on a bad night. Brush your hair, put on some lipstick, do whatever it is women do to make themselves look human. But do it fast. There’s some water in the washstand over there.” He pointed to the far side of the room.
Nestled underneath the eaves was a small wooden table with a pitcher and bowl on top. Last night, with only the lantern for light, it must have been hidden in the deep shadows which had shrouded the corners of the room. Now Lora was glad to see it, primitive as it was. Crossing to it with a single scathing glance at her captor, she opened her purse and extracted her small makeup case. Besides her few cosmetics, it contained a travel-sized toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, and a bottle of sunscreen. There was a small mirror on the washstand too; Lora took one look at herself in it and had to repress
a shudder.
At the best of times she was no beauty, but at least she was reasonably attractive and certainly neat. Today, with her lips chapped and swollen from that repulsive gag, red marks creasing her cheeks from where her bra had cut into them during the night, her eyelids heavy and dark circles under the eyes themselves from lack of sleep, she looked dreadful. Added to that, her face was sunburned from exposure during the hottest part of the day yesterday—the sunscreen had to be diligently reapplied to he effective—and her hair, usually a smooth, shining cap that curved gently under just at her jaw, was a tumble of riotous curls. The rain, of course. Her hair was naturally wavy, and to achieve her usual dignified style she needed a blow dryer and a round brush. To add insult to injury, the blue dress was stiff with dirt and terribly wrinkled. Lora grimaced, then almost had to smile as she remembered having suspected her captor of lusting after her the night before. No man in his right mind would lust after her looking like this! She tore her eyes away from the awful sight in the mirror and went to work with a will, washing her face and as much of her body as she decently could with him watching her. That done, she applied sunscreen in place of the moisturizer she usually used, and looked at herself in the mirror critically. The sun had tinted her forehead and chin and particularly her nose a rosy pink, while somehow missing her cheeks. The result was that the center of her face was bright with color, while the sides looked unnaturally white in comparison. Pride compelled her to do something about it. She could not go about the world looking like this!
Digging through her small cosmetics case, she unearthed a sample-sized pot of blush in a brilliant shade of strawberry pink. Lora remembered that Janice had gotten it as part of a bonus makeup kit offered by a department store in Wichita, along with a matching lipstick and a tiny powder compact. Lora had never worn the blush or lipstick before, and had never expected to. She had only brought them with her because they were travel-sized and fit well in her cosmetics case. But now the neon pink seemed just what she needed to balance out the already glowing center of her face. She dabbed a little blush on her cheeks, rubbed it in, and, emboldened by the results—it was not nearly as garish on her skin as it had appeared in the pot—added a little more. That done, she smoothed the matching creamy lipstick over her sore lips—surprising how soothing lipstick could feel—and stood back to survey the results. Not half bad, she thought, surprised. She was now rosy pink from her forehead to her chin and from ear to ear, but the color was surprisingly becoming. Her denim blue eyes seemed much livelier, brighter, and her tousled, mousy colored hair looked almost a true blond. Lora blinked at herself, mildly amazed. She would never have believed how much a little added color could do for her face. Interesting. . . .
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