Kept

by Jami Alden

  “Do I even want to know why you’re hanging out at the servants’ entrance looking like you’re about to stick your thumb out?”

  “I didn’t want to have to deal with the crowd on my way out. And now my driver got into an accident, so it looks like I’m stranded for a while.”

  He was silent for several moments, and though his eyes were shadowed she could feel him studying her.

  Ask me.

  “Can I give you a ride home?” He almost looked shocked that he’d asked.

  She didn’t let that stop her. “Sure,” she said without hesitation.

  A slight frown creased his forehead, but he gave her a curt nod and left without another word to get his car.

  As she waited she shifted on her sky-high heels, restless, alive with anticipation. After so many months on her best behavior, a reckless urge was pulsing through her. Uncontrollable, unstoppable. She needed to forget the consequences and do something outrageous.

  But this time it wouldn’t be for attention, publicity, or her father’s censure. This time it would be all for herself. She’d been so good, watching her every move for so long. Surely she deserved a little treat?

  A silver Audi rumbled up to the driveway, and Alyssa wasted no time sliding into the passenger seat. The leather was cool against her bare thighs, and the interior of the car was full of his cedar and soap scent.

  He backed out of the driveway and turned the corner, passing the snarl of limos and guests crowding the circular driveway of the Bancrofts’ estate.

  “Where to?”

  Nerves warring with desire, Alyssa rummaged in her bag and dug out her lip gloss, slicking on a coat to give herself something to do.

  Derek stopped at a stop sign. “Where are we going?”

  She swallowed hard, her throat suddenly bone dry. What she was about to do was crazy. Stupid.

  Necessary.

  “You know, it’s so early,” she said and turned to face him. She kept her eyes locked with his and placed her hand deliberately on his thigh. “And I’m not quite ready to go home.”

  He stared at her hard for what felt like an eternity. His thick, dark brows drew together in a harsh scowl.

  Her stomach bottomed out as she realized he was about to turn her down.

  “You want to get a drink somewhere?”

  The moment of truth. She slid her hand farther up his thigh, delighting in the swells and ripples of rock-hard muscle hidden beneath wool gabardine. “I’m not much for crowds. Why don’t you just take me back to your place?”

  Outside Mbuji-Mayi, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  Martin Fish checked his watch again and peered around the corner of the abandoned shack. Fifteen minutes. Marie Laure was fifteen minutes late. Martin dug a bandanna from the pocket of his cargo shorts and wiped the sweat already beading his brow. Though it wasn’t even seven AM, the equatorial sun was already brutally hot, shimmering on the tin roofs that sent rusty streaks down the brightly colored shacks they sheltered.

  The smell of cooking fires and jungle rot permeated the air, mingling with the stench of human waste. Nausea boiled in his stomach, mingling with tension as he nervously fingered the silver oxide batteries in his pocket. He was down to the last two disks, and Marie Laure was supposed to meet him here at six thirty to take them in exchange for a one-pound bag of lentils Martin had stolen from the nearby Population Services United mess hall.

  Another bead of sweat trickled down his cheek, itching its way through his scruffy beard growth. He wondered if this was the day Mekembe had turned his wrath on Marie Laure.

  And God help them both if Mekembe found the hidden camera and microphone. Mekembe would torture her until she gave him Fish’s name, and then he’d kill Fish and whomever was unlucky enough to be in the vicinity.

  The sound of footsteps and low conversation approached, and he shrank farther back into the shadows. In this part of the world, it wasn’t safe for anyone, much less a white man, to be off on his own, skulking around the makeshift living quarters surrounding an unsanctioned diamond mine.

  Mekembe and his men were savages, less civilized than the animals that ruled the jungle around them. Hopped up on palm wine and cocaine, they’d hack him to death with rusty machetes for the pure fun of it.

  The shanty village surrounding the mine was just coming awake, workers scraping together a meager breakfast to fuel another day of backbreaking labor. Sipping from their canteens, they looked uneasily over their shoulders as soldiers for the People’s Freedom Movement—some of them no more than twelve years old—emerged from their shacks, brandishing Kalashnikov machine guns as casually as they would a coffee cup.

  If she didn’t show up soon, he’d have to bail. He needed to get back to the relative safety of the PSU before anyone got a bead on him.

  Fuck. He needed to pass off the batteries and retrieve the latest footage from Marie Laure. In the past three weeks since he’d set her up with a pinhole camera hidden in an unremarkable bead pendant, she’d provided him with some amazing footage of life in the diamond mine controlled by Mekembe.

  But it still wasn’t enough to make people care about the horrors of life in this godforsaken part of the world. Not enough to make people care about Martin Fish and what he was doing hiding out in the civil-war-torn DRC, disguised as a caseworker with Population Services United, an NGO with operations all throughout the DRC. He was aiming to be the next Bob Woodward, and he wasn’t going to get that from a few hours of footage showing men slaving in horrific working conditions and women and girls being abused by their captors.

  Heartbreaking though it was, these days it didn’t rate more than a single column buried in the back of the world news section.

  Meanwhile, Bernstein, AKA Charlie Farris, had long since sold out. When he and Martin had met in journalism school a hundred years ago, they were going to revolutionize the media. Bring it back to real news; show the world the truth about what was happening in the world.

  Unfortunately all the world cared about was bimbos like Alyssa Miles and whether they were going to flash a beaver shot as they exited a cab. Charlie had accepted that years ago and left Martin and their self-run hard-news Web site in the dust.

  Now Charlie lived in a house in the Hollywood hills, thanks to an awesome money shot he’d scored three years ago. It was of Alyssa Miles at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, IV in her arm and a tube down her throat as the doctors struggled to save her life after she’d done one too many lines and gone into cardiac arrest. Charlie had had the only pictures of her in the hospital, and every fucking news outlet in the country had wanted them. With one picture, good old Charlie was set for life.

  At the time, Martin had been in Afghanistan, trying to avoid land mines as he sent daily dispatches buried three layers down on Newsweek’s Web site.

  Over the years, Charlie had kept prodding him to give up the hard news, take the easy way out, but Martin knew he wasn’t cut out for that. Charlie could still turn on the charm, make nice with the brainless contingent that populated the entertainment elite. But after years observing and chronicling the most godforsaken people and places on earth, that kind of life had sunk into Martin’s pores, never releasing its clutches on his consciousness even when he got back to the first world. When he was in some third world hellhole, he couldn’t wait to get back to working sewers, running water, and good whiskey that wouldn’t ruin your guts like the local brew. But when he was home, he couldn’t squelch the disgust he felt with people, their bloated white, ignorant faces. Sitting on their fat Wal-Mart–clad asses watching Alyssa Miles make a fool of herself on TV, with no fucking clue what was really going on in the world.

  They’d have a clue soon enough. Alyssa Miles was about to make his career, just as she’d once made Charlie’s.

  Martin knew that to make his name he had to tie this operation to something—or someone—big. Van Weldt Jeweler was definitely big. And so was Louis Abbassi. While the press went crazy talking about that famous-for-nothing
Alyssa Miles and her latest campaign for Van Weldt, they ignored the fact that Van Weldt had entered a supply agreement with Abbassi, a man who had made his fortune in the late nineties and two years ago had purchased a diamond-cutting operation headquartered in South Africa.

  But no one seemed to care where Abbassi’s diamonds came from, including Oscar Van Weldt. Martin had interviewed the CEO of Van Weldt right before he’d left for the DRC, under the guise of doing a fluff piece about marketing fine jewelry to the youth market. When Martin had probed Oscar about the deal with Louis and suggested some of his rocks were sourced from unsanctioned mines, Van Weldt had clammed up quick, threatening Fish with a libel suit if he so much as hinted that Van Weldt diamonds were dirty.

  Martin hadn’t expected anything different, but it made it that much more entertaining to expose Van Weldt’s dirty secret. His lip curled when he thought of the ad campaign featuring Alyssa Miles draped in nothing but sparkling stones. He wondered what she’d do when she found out she might as well have been covered in blood.

  Alyssa Miles at the center of a blood diamond scandal. And Martin Fish would be front-page news for breaking the story.

  But first he needed Marie Laure’s help to get him the footage he needed to give the story that heartbreaking dose of reality.

  “Monsieur Fish?”

  He sighed in relief when he heard Marie Laure’s soft greeting. She shot a furtive glance over her shoulder before emerging from the shadow. Her eyes were huge and dark in her thin face. Spindly arms poked from the sleeves of her dress, her legs covered by a colorful ankle-length skirt. She shuffled forward on bare feet. “I am sorry to be late,” she said in her lilting English. “My husband was slower to go out this morning.”

  Husband. Now, that was a euphemism if he’d ever heard one. Mekembe had stolen Marie Laure during a raid on their village nearly a year ago. In the course of the raid, her parents and younger sister had been killed, her younger brother taken captive and impressed into service for the People’s Freedom Movement.

  Marie Laure, an uncommonly pretty sixteen-year-old with smooth, coffee-colored skin and fine sculpted features, had been chosen by Mekembe to be his “wife.”

  Which Martin knew was code for sex slave. But it meant she had only one rapist to endure.

  And uncommon access to Mekembe and those who helped him move the diamonds over the border.

  “Give me the necklace,” he said, reaching for it even as she slipped it over her head, careful not to dislodge the blue and white scarf wrapped around her head. “It’s late. I’ll be lucky to make it back to the camp without anyone seeing me.”

  He ignored the stab of guilt in his chest as she lowered her gaze and hunched her shoulders and quickly replaced the battery in the pendant.

  She slipped it back over her head and reached for the bag of lentils.

  “Uh-uh,” Martin said, holding it just out of reach. “Before I give you this, you need to promise you’ll get me footage of the next shipment.”

  Her full lips tightened. “Monsieur, I do what I can, but he sends me out when they are meeting—”

  “Peek in the window, hide under the bed, for all I care. But if you want to get you and your baby out, you’ll get me the access I need.”

  Her thin, long-fingered hand curved protectively over the small bulge of her belly pushing insistently against the worn cotton of her dress. “I heard him talking to someone on his handphone. Someone important, someone they call the Français, is coming in next week.”

  Martin barely kept his jaw from falling open. He couldn’t possibly be this lucky. “The Français? You’re sure of that?” He tried not to get too excited. No doubt a lot of shady characters of the mixed French persuasion did business in this part of the world. How likely was it that he would come here in person? Still, his insides churned with anticipation. “You get me footage of him, and I promise I’ll get you out on the next transport to Kinshasa.”

  “And my brother, too,” she said, losing her timidity.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said, knowing her brother was a lost cause. Finagling a pregnant teenage girl a spot on the helicopter was difficult enough, if not impossible. He still wasn’t sure he could live up to that promise.

  But he shoved aside his guilt as he handed over the bag of lentils and watched Marie Laure disappear around the corner, her bare feet silent in the red dirt. Even if he couldn’t save one pregnant girl, if he broke the story the way he wanted, it would bring the plight of thousands like Marie Laure and her brother to the world’s attention. If she had to be sacrificed to save thousands, so be it.

  Martin sipped at a mug of malafu as he reclined on his canvas cot. He took another slug, wincing at the taste of the bitter local brew, but he’d learned the best way to consume palm wine was to power through the first couple glasses. Then you barely tasted the rest of the bottle.

  He fumbled under his cot for a refill, nearly upsetting the notebook computer on his lap as his fingers twisted in the netting surrounding his bed. As accommodations went, a canvas tent in the PRC encampment wasn’t much, but at least he had a net to keep the bugs out, a modicum of privacy to do his work, and access to a generator to keep his batteries charged. Add his satellite modem into the mix for easy Internet access, and, really, what more did he need?

  Sweat trickled down his neck, but he barely felt the itch as the malafu flowed thick and warm through his blood. He posted his latest article onto his news site, FishBait.org, and checked the traffic stats. Fuck. Only a thousand goddamn people had bothered to read his news in the last month. Might as well have been zero.

  Why do you waste your time? The voice in his head started out as his own and then morphed as it echoed around his head, becoming his ex-wife’s, his daughter’s, his parents—All the people he’d disappointed in the past two decades, angry at him for not being there because he was too busy chasing a story. Pissed that he wouldn’t give it up and settle for some desk job writing business news for some bullshit paper in podunk USA.

  Then another, smug voice. Why do you waste your time? Charlie’s. Arrogant fucker. Martin surfed over to Charlie’s site, creatively titled Celebzone. The glow from his screen cast an eerie light against the dark canvas walls of his tent. Outside he heard scuffing footsteps in the dirt, snippets of muffled conversation as aid workers made their way to their tents after a long day of trying to save a part of the world beyond saving.

  Little of it registered as Martin stared, transfixed at the images on the screen. Headlining Charlie’s site was a non-story about Alyssa Miles attending a charity event up near San Francisco. The story itself was nothing—a single paragraph on what Alyssa wore and something about tension between her and her stepmother.

  What mesmerized him were the pictures that ran alongside. Alyssa, long hair spilling down a back left bare by her flame-colored silk dress, the hard glitter of diamonds at her wrists and fingers.

  Below that was a picture from the latest “Diamonds for All” campaign, featuring a nearly naked Alyssa with cold, hard stones trailing down the curve of her spine. Martin swallowed hard. Resentful as he was at Alyssa and the dumbed-down culture she represented, even he had to admit there was something about her. An appeal, an allure, a natural charisma that went beyond beauty to draw people’s attention, even though she’d never done a single useful thing to deserve it.

  He stared at the photo, her pale gold skin giving off a glow, her eyelashes a thick fringe as she kept her eyes downcast, fixed on a point to the right of her shoulder. Most people thought the glow of her skin was a trick of airbrushing, but Martin had seen her in person and knew for a fact it wasn’t. She really was that pretty, that flawless.

  A perfect, empty shell.

  He traced his finger over the screen as if he could feel her skin. Feel the cold bite of the diamonds trailing down her back. Marie Laure’s face popped into his brain, her dark eyes bottomless pits of despair as she hunched her body around the bump of her baby. He gulped down another cup o
f palm wine to wash the image away.

  It did nothing to dampen his resentment for Alyssa, so busy posing in ad campaigns and pimping jewelry at fund-raisers, with no clue in her walnut-sized brain of the kind of suffering those sparkly little stones represented.

  He saved the photo of Alyssa’s ad to his desktop and reopened it in a graphic design program. In a different window, he opened another photo, a still from the video footage Marie Laure had captured just a week ago, after one of the miners had tried to smuggle a stone out of the camp. First Mekembe had hacked off the man’s hands with a machete. Then Mekembe had gone to the man’s tent and dragged his wife and ten-year-old daughter out into the road.

  As the man watched, his wife and daughter were gang-raped by Mekembe’s men before having their hands hacked off with a machete blade. In this frame the man sat dazed in shock next to the crumpled forms of his wife and daughter. Blood pooled around them, darkening the already red earth to a near black crimson.

  Marie Laure told him the daughter had died several hours later.

  Lips curling, Martin clicked on the sea of thick red, transferring the color to the photo of Alyssa. As he clicked his way down her back, the diamonds became drops of blood, oozing down her skin like scarlet tears.

  CHAPTER 2

  HE WAS BATSHIT. That was the only word that explained Derek’s behavior.

  Why else would he be unlocking his door to usher in a woman he’d just met—some random society brat, no less—into his house?

  Okay, not merely batshit. Completely nuts. He had been from the moment he’d taken her hand, felt the sensual warmth of her skin. And when she’d leaned over in the car, laid that hot hand on his thigh, burning him through the fabric of his pants, his cock had gone titanium hard.

  Every drop of blood had rushed down to pulse and throb between his legs, causing temporary insanity. Because there was no way in hell Derek would be doing this otherwise.

  That said, he was mesmerized by the swing of her ass, the subtle flex of muscle under the smooth skin of her thighs as she preceded him up the stairs leading from the garage to the kitchen. He wanted to lean forward, bury his face against the curve of her butt, take a nip out of a firm cheek. Push her forward, lift her skirt, and shove his cock into her from behind.