Dark Paradise

by Tami Hoag

  A sharp howl that ended in a sharper yelp flipped a switch inside her, and her eyes flew open. She was still in the cabin, tied to the bed. It was still daytime—or it was daytime again. She had no idea how long she had been out. All the same pains were throbbing in her body and in the base of her skull. Her hands, lashed to the headboard, had gone numb. The smell of urine and the dampness of the sheets beneath her told her her bladder had given up while she had been unconscious.

  She could hear indistinct voices outside and she tried to call out, but the gag was like a cork in her mouth and there was no way to dislodge it. Hope surged like a geyser inside her. Maybe the voices belonged to hikers and they would come in and rescue her. Or hunters—with the dogs. But it wasn't hunting season.

  Hope receded with the thought that the voice might belong to her captor.

  A door opened somewhere behind her. She couldn't crane her neck around far enough to see. No one spoke. The minutes stretched on, stretching her nerves into brittle, hair-thin strands. Her head pounded. She wondered dimly if she had hallucinated the door opening, the sound of boots on the wood floor. How could she hear anything at all with this pounding in her brain? How could any of this be real? Who would want to kidnap her? She wasn't worth anything.

  The boots sounded again against the wood floor. Closer. Closer. Right behind her. She struggled to twist her head around, but couldn't see the owner of the boots, and the pain from the movement was excruciating.

  Then she felt a warm breath on the top of her head, and a pair of gloved hands slid between the bars of the headboard, one on either side of her, and she jolted hard against her bonds out of fright. The hands cupped her face, thumbs caressing her cheekbones and along the corners of her mouth, down over her jaw to her throat. The black leather was cool and fragrant, the touch bold and strangely sensual.

  “How's my little Indian princess?” The low voice was almost masculine, sharp with sarcasm and secret amusement.

  Sharon.

  A shudder went through Samantha. A nameless fear that sank deep into her bones. She had no idea what this woman was capable of doing. Naive as she was, she had sensed from the first that Sharon had seen things, experienced things Samantha had never even imagined. Dark things. Squinting at the pain, she tipped her head back, wanting to see her tormentor. Sharon pressed her face against the thin iron rods of the headboard and smiled.

  “It's just us girls, princess. No men to fight over.” She settled her thumbs in the hollow at the base of Samantha's throat and pressed experimentally, choking her briefly, then sliding her hands down over her breasts. “Just us girls,” she muttered.

  Slowly she rose and came around the side of the bed, her boots thumping dully against the worn wood floor. She wore a skintight black catsuit with a dark brown hunting jacket over it. Her hair was slicked back against her head as tight as the body suit, her thin, wide mouth was a slash of bloodred lipstick. From a deep pocket on the coat she extracted a slim, deadly looking knife. A dagger that gleamed as she turned it from side to side and admired the blade.

  Samantha's eyes went wide and sweat filmed her body in a fine mist.

  Sharon's mouth curved in amusement. “Oh, yes, little princess, this is for you.” She seated herself on the edge of the bed and rolled the handle of the knife between her palms, twisting the blade around and around. “I can't have you turning Bryce's head. I was willing to share, but I won't let you take him away from me. I wouldn't let Lucy have him. I won't let you have him. He has always been mine. I won't let his obsession with you change that.”

  With one hand she grabbed the bottom of the T-shirt Samantha wore and with the other brought the knife down swiftly. She laughed as Samantha strained against her bonds and tried to scream behind the gag.

  “Not yet.” She let the tip of the blade nip into the silk and sliced the fabric open from the neck down. Her eyes locked on Samantha's as cold and elliptical as a snake's. “I haven't had my fun yet,” she whispered as she peeled back the halves of the shirt to reveal Samantha's breasts. They were small and pretty. Soft-looking with dusky brown centers. A young girl's breasts. Natural and unembellished. She thought about slicing them off.

  “I wanted Bryce to share you, but he wouldn't. He thought you were too pure. Untainted,” she sneered, her mouth twisting in disgust. “His little virgin. You won't be untainted when I finish with you. You won't die untainted.”

  Setting the knife aside, she rose from the bed and undressed.

  Tears leaked from Samantha's eyes as Bryce's cousin fondled her. She tried not to cry, because the gag choked her and because it only made her head pound harder, but she couldn't seem to stop herself. She was caught in a nightmare that was her own fault. If she hadn't fallen in with Bryce's crowd . . . if she had remembered her place . . . Think what you're doing, Samantha! You're not like them. . . .

  She had thought she could pretend for a while, be a part of the good life, live as if she were somebody special. But she wasn't Cinderella and life wasn't a fairy tale. She didn't even want a fairy tale, she thought, her heart breaking at the realization. All she had ever wanted was Will and a home and a family. She cried as much for those small lost dreams as she did for the degradation Sharon Russell put her through. The violation of her body seemed incidental to the breaking of her spirit, the shattering of hope.

  She would never have Will. She would never have a family. She would die out here at the hands of a mad-woman in payment for the sin of her own stupidity. Those were the things she cried for, not the hands that touched her or the mouth that plundered or any of the vile acts Bryce's cousin committed with twisted hedonistic joy.

  “You're tainted now, little virgin,” Sharon said, straddling Samantha's hips. Her shoulders were as wide and angular as a man's. Her breasts thrust out from her chest, twin cones of plastic encased in flesh. There was no fat beneath her skin, only muscle and sinew. She reached for the knife on the stand beside the bed. “You're tainted, and you'll be ugly too.”

  She brought the dagger up and pressed the tip of it just beneath Samantha's right eye, pressing, pressing ever so slightly. Samantha bit down hard on the gag and tried in vain to stop her body from shaking. She could see Sharon's hand on the hilt of the knife. She could see most of the blade as she angled it up and down, playing, toying with her. The point bit into the tender flesh, and Samantha strained to push herself down into the mattress. Terror clawed through her, raw and primal. Sweat streamed down the sides of her face. She could smell her own fear, sour and strong above the ammonia stink of urine and the sickeningly sweet scent of arousal that radiated from Sharon.

  Her tormentor laughed deep in her throat. “You'd be ugly if I cut your eyes out, wouldn't you? Bryce wouldn't want you then. He wants only beautiful things. Beautiful, like you, with your long, silky black hair.”

  Abruptly, she lifted the knife and grabbed hold of Samantha's braid. Her face twisting into a grotesque masque of hatred, she pulled the braid up hard, winding it around her fist. Samantha squeezed her eyes shut against the pain of having her head jerked to the side. It felt as if Sharon would pull her hair off her head, scalp and all, but she hacked at it with the knife instead, sheering it off raggedly at the base of her skull.

  It was a relief when the last strand gave way against the blade and pressure went with it. She tried not to think of how her hair had been one of her few sources of pride, or how Will used to love to play with it when they were in bed, rubbing it between his fingers, stroking it over her skin and his skin. She tried not to think of Will at all. She tried not to think. Maybe if she could stop thinking, she could simply cease to be. She could become invisible, and Bryce's cousin with the insane gleam in her eye would lose interest and go away.

  She prayed desperately for that to happen. She prayed for deliverance from the nightmare. She prayed for a miracle.

  No one answered.

  Sharon leaned down and whispered in her ear. “No more pretty hair, little princess. No more pretty face,” she w
hispered as she laid the blade of the knife against Samantha's right cheekbone.

  Orvis Slokum sat in the cab of his ramshackle '79 Chevy pickup, enduring what was for him a rare experience: a crisis of conscience.

  Most everything that had ever happened in his life he could blame on somebody else. He flunked out of high school because the teachers had it in for him on account of he was a Slokum and his brother Clete had gone ahead of him, laying a trail of trouble. He had never been able to hang on to a decent job because every last boss he'd ever had was a son of a bitch who expected too much and paid too little and had no understanding of a man's need for latitude. So he was late to work once in a while. That wasn't his fault. It was the fault of his alarm clock, his mother, a woman, his truck, the weather, the clerk at the Gas N' Go. Nor was it his fault he had landed in prison. That was the fault of his partner, the cops, the public defender, the judge, the prosecutor—all of whom had no respect for him on account of he was a Slokum—which wasn't his fault either.

  He regretted many things—not the least of which was being born a Slokum—but one of the few regrets he had regarding jobs he had landed and lost was that things had not worked out for him on the Stars and Bars. The Raffertys were good people. Will knew how to have a good time and was always friendly—had never looked down on him 'cause he was a Slokum. J.D. was a tough bastard, but he was fair and he was the kind of man other men could admire. He'd been three grades ahead of Orvis in school, and Orvis had watched him with a kind of awe. J.D. had always had an aura about him, as if he were stronger and wiser and more clear-minded than the average man. He always seemed to just know what was right, which was a true mystery to Orvis, who always seemed to do what was wrong regardless of his intentions.

  Yes, sir, he regretted that J.D. had worked him too hard and then fired him for screwing up the irrigation dams—which was not his fault. He hadn't cared so much about losing that job when Mr. Bryce had hired him fresh out of the penitentiary. Mr. Bryce paid real good and there wasn't that much work to be done on his place, which allowed a man that all-important latitude. Orvis had thought himself pretty smart at the time. Just out of the can and getting hired on at the biggest spread for miles around to do hardly anything for twice what he would have earned elsewhere. That had to make him pretty darn smart, didn't it?

  But things were turning sour on him. Bryce's people treated him like he was dog shit on a stick. The ranchers and hands around New Eden all hated Evan Bryce and extended that dislike freely to the people who worked for him. And there were jobs here he didn't much like doing. Jobs that made him feel a little sick at his stomach sometimes.

  The hunting dogs were part of his job—feeding them, keeping them fit, seeing to them on the hunt. Seemed simple enough, but he'd found out quick that Bryce and his snooty friends weren't sportsmen and the animals they hunted were never in season in Montana. Lions and leopards and all kinds of exotic creatures he'd never seen anywhere but on “Wild Kingdom.”

  Bryce bought them from some shady middleman who bought them as excess zoo stock. They were trucked in onto Bryce's land by back roads in the dead of night and were sometimes kept for days in cages not much bigger than they were. The animals were never given much of a chance in the hunt. Oftentimes they were drugged and could barely make it out of the cage before the dogs were on them or one of Bryce's guests shot them in order to have them stuffed and stuck in their dens, where they could lie to their friends about the dangerous safari they went on and how they risked their lives and all in order to kill this tiger or panther or whatever.

  Orvis told himself it didn't matter, that the animals were no different from livestock and a man had the right to do as he pleased with his livestock. But he couldn't seem to make that excuse sit very well in his belly when he watched those people laugh and smile after they'd shot some poor drugged animal or when they made him do the dressing out.

  More and more he caught himself thinking about what J.D. had said to him that day at the Stars and Bars. There's more important things in this world than money, Orvis.

  Sad to see you come to this, Orvis. He was feeling a little sad himself.

  He didn't like Bryce's people. He especially didn't like Mr. Bryce's cousin, who looked like a female impersonator. Because he occasionally liked to steal a peek through windows, he'd seen her do some things that just plain turned his stomach. Sex with other women. Sex with two or three men at once. Unnatural things. It had made him ashamed to see it.

  She had done some twisted things with Kendall Morton too. He knew, 'cause Morton had told him, snickering the whole time. Orvis couldn't imagine any woman with Morton. The smell alone should have driven them off. But he didn't doubt that it was true. Miz Russell had come asking for Morton to do this job, but he had gone to the Hell and Gone last night and had yet to return. And so Miz Russell had told Orvis to truck a pair of dogs up to a hunting shack northwest of the Five-Mile creek and leave them, and she'd paid him a hundred dollars cash money to keep his mouth shut about it. He was supposed to get lost and come back in the morning and never say boo to anybody—especially Bryce. She'd see he was fired if he screwed up, and if he didn't have a job, he'd lose his parole. She told him she had arranged a little hunt for herself and she didn't want anybody horning in.

  Orvis had followed orders. What was it to him if Sharon Russell wanted to go hunting on her own? If they were all lucky, maybe she would be eaten by a grizzly. But he had a feeling she wasn't alone. Just to remind himself why he didn't like her, he parked the truck out of sight on the old logging trail and looped back around through the trees to take a quick gander in the back window of the cabin.

  The dogs, a pair of big African something-or-others, barked at him, but they were chained to a tree and they never quit barking anyway, so it was hardly an alarm. Orvis was unconcerned with getting caught as he sidled up to the window.

  Sure enough, she was with a woman. He had a bad angle on the bed, and the window was so dirty, it was like looking through a glass of milk, but he could tell a few things without any trouble—they were both stark naked and the other one was tied to the bed. Damned queer. Sick stuff, really, he thought, somehow managing to detach his conscience from his body as arousal stirred his pecker like a swizzle stick in his Wranglers. He could make out black hair and dark skin on the woman Sharon was doing things to. He couldn't see her face, but the only woman around Bryce's crowd lately who fit that description was Sam Rafferty, Will's wife.

  Now Orvis sat in his pickup, wondering what to do. He had a pretty good idea Will didn't know his wife had gone lesbo on him. But then, he couldn't quite accept that image himself. Sam was a nice girl. Orvis knew all the Neill kids, and aside from Ryder, who was mean and drunk much of the time, they were all real nice. He couldn't figure out what Sam was doing hanging around with Bryce's people to begin with. He sure couldn't picture her taking up with the dragon lady.

  The ropes bothered him, though he knew there were folks who went for that kind of thing. He rubbed his scrubby little chin and sucked on his crooked teeth. His ferret's face screwed up into a look of supreme concentration, and he bounced on the seat of the truck as though he had to pee. He didn't want to do the wrong thing. He didn't want to go to Will Rafferty and tell him his wife was getting naked with another woman and get himself punched in the mouth for no reason. On the other hand, if there was something kinky going on here . . .

  Sad to see you come to this, Orvis . . .

  The dilemma wrestled around inside him like a pair of wildcats in a cotton sack. He started the truck and put it in gear and let it start rolling down the grade.

  Sure wished he automatically knew the right thing to do, like J.D. always did.

  Damned sorry he usually did the wrong thing . . . not that it was his fault.

  CHAPTER

  29

  AND SO I said to Harry Rex, why would I want her? She's got so many wrinkles, she's gotta screw her hat on to go to church.” Tucker shook his head in disgust, leaned to th
e left in his saddle, and spit a stream of tobacco juice that sent a marmot scuttling for cover. “Well, Harry Rex, he just laughs like the big old jackass he is. I swear, he's about as useless as a dog barking at a knothole. If brains were ink, he couldn't dot an I.”

  J.D. let the old man ramble on, tuning himself out of the conversation. Tucker and Harry Rex Monroe of Monroe's Feed and Read had been buddies since God was a child. They bickered and goaded each other like a pair of old hens. He could remember when he was a kid, Tucker and Harry Rex and their ongoing competitions of thumb wrestling, wrist wrestling, arm wrestling, tobacco spitting, watermelon-seed spitting, cherry-pit spitting. They went from one challenge to the next, neither willing to let the other have the final victory or the final word. The prattle was familiar and unimportant. J.D.'s thoughts were elsewhere.

  Down the hill, to be precise. On Mary Lee. She had certainly told him what-for. Twice. At least. He felt like a bull that had to get knocked on the head over and over before he took the hint to quit pushing on the fence. For so long now his focus had been on the ranch. The ranch was everything. The ranch took everything—his energy, his money, his heart, his soul, his integrity. He didn't like thinking about what he had become in the guise of knighthood to the Stars and Bars. A martyr. A hypocrite. A mercenary. A liar. He had spent years creating the image of the noble rancher only to find out there was nothing behind it but fear. Fear of losing the ranch. Fear of letting anyone too close. Fear of losing himself. The irony was that there wasn't that much to lose; he'd given it all away . . . to the ranch.

  Christ, he hated irony.