by Jeanne Adams
“Oh!” Carrie said, and he saw her eyes light up again. “I thought we’d have to”—she broke off, blushing—“well, you know.”
“Yes, I do. Please, go ahead, I’ll just be over here.” He walked to the farthest end of the cell. It was impossible to ignore the process, but he focused on the carvings instead to give her at least the illusion of privacy. The one he was examining showed the god she’d called Kukulcan stacking up bones, then carrying them away. He moved down the wall to see more, but Carrie interrupted his art appreciation.
“Okay, your turn,” she said. “When you’re done, we should go through everything we have, figure out what’s useful and what isn’t. If there’s any chance at all that we can get out of here, we need to be ready.”
“Now you sound like Gates,” he said, trading places with her and taking care of his immediate needs. Hunger rumbled his stomach, but he didn’t mention it. It must have been on her mind, however.
“I was thinking I sounded more like you,” she said, smiling. She deepened her voice and added the slightest hint of his accent as she mimicked his words, “We must save everything.”
“I don’t sound like that,” he demurred, embarrassed at the portrayal.
“No, you sound much better than I do.” She bent to straighten out his coat, smoothing the fabric they’d layered under them to keep the ground’s chill from making sleeping any more difficult that it already was.
“I have some protein bars in my purse, if you’re hungry,” she said, sitting down again.
“I think we should save those for later,” Dav cautioned. “You never know what might happen. If they brought us dinner, scant as it was, they may bring breakfast too.”
As if the words had summoned them, they heard their captors’ voices approaching.
“Turn your faces to the wall,” the smooth, amused voice called out. “If I see your faces, I shoot you.”
Dav whispered an additional order. “Put your hands in front of you, like you’re still tied. We don’t want them to know we have any skills or weapons.”
He saw her comply as he turned to face the wall. Dav fought down the urge to reach for Carrie’s hand. Much as he wanted to reassure her, he didn’t want anyone to see just how important she was to him. Doing that might put her in yet more danger.
Dav focused on the carvings as the rattle-clang of the lock and grate echoed in the small space. There were grunting sounds and the slap of metal and fabric as something was lowered down.
“We’ll be back for you in two days,” smooth-voice said.
“Or not,” another voice said. Coarse laughter greeted this statement. “Adios for now, rich man.”
The voices receded and both he and Carrie turned to see what had been left for them. Four canteens of water, some fruit, what he presumed were hard-boiled eggs, more sandwiches, crackers, a bunch of bananas, an out-of-place plastic baggie full of bacon, and to his great surprise, ajar of Nutella.
Carrie looked from the provisions to him and back again. “That’s a strange breakfast. Strange provisions.” A flash of fear crossed her face, but she showed no other sign of concern as she said, “Why do you think they’re leaving?”
He considered it as they advanced on the cache of food. “Perhaps to get Niko. Perhaps to contact someone regarding ransom.” He looked around the cell, strange as it was, and then up at the locked, metal grate. There would be no escape for them, not from this hole. “Either way, these aren’t regular kidnappers. They’re not prepared for us to be here for a long time, nor are they thinking too far ahead.” He didn’t want to go into the ramifications of that, so he asked, “Do you still have your watch? They took mine at some point.”
“Well, it was a Rolex,” she said, smiling at him. “Easily hocked.”
“Yes, too tempting, I guess.” He hesitated. Should he tell her the watch had held a locator?
“Look at it this way,” she added. “One quick way for Gates to find you, if it turns up in a pawnshop in the States.”
“Good thought, since it does have a location device built into it,” Dav said, making his decision. He wanted to hit something, knowing it had been taken. How could anyone have known it had the fail-safe locator in it?
This was a problem. As cunning and snakelike as Niko was, he wasn’t into tech. He’d either hired that kind of smarts or... or what, he didn’t know. Either way, it made a grim situation even more desperate. Gates would have no way to know anything about where they were or even what direction they’d gone. “However,” he said, softly, “without it we’re a needle in a...” He paused, searching for the phrase he wanted. “A worldwide haystack.”
“I know,” she said, glancing away. “But maybe it will lead him to something. Some conclusion that will help. If he finds it.”
“Oh, he will.” Of that, Dav was sure. Gates would be on the locator like a stooping hawk. Hopefully it would yield something that would direct him their way.
“It’s nine A.M., Pacific time,” she said, bringing him back to the original question as she handed him an egg. “And I’m an optimist. We’ll hope, right?”
“Right.”
They pulled the odd assortment of food closer to their sitting area and began peeling the eggs. “Hang on a second,” Carrie said, digging into her purse. “I was just wishing I could wash my hands, and I remembered this.” With a “ta-da” she pulled a small bottle of waterless hand soap from her purse. “It won’t last us long in this situation, but hey, we can pretend we’re somewhat civilized.”
Laughing, he used the gel sparingly, then went back to peeling the eggs. “I don’t know much about food,” he admitted, scanning the pile before them. “I’m thinking we should eat anything that would spoil, first. I guess the bacon would be okay for a day or so.”
“If the sandwiches have mayonnaise on them, we’ll need to eat them. Mustard would keep okay, I think, but the bread will be stale pretty quick.”
“Crackers too,” he said. “I could never keep crackers fresh, back in my starving student stage,” he said idly, turning the box to look for an expiration date. He slipped a finger under the cardboard and opened it to find the interior waxed bag with crackers still sealed.
“I can’t picture you as a starving student, somehow,” Carrie said, glancing his way. “You’ve always seemed so polished, so urbane. So,” she hesitated, then added, “rich.”
“Urbane?” That was an English word he’d not come on before. “Does that mean something good or something bad?”
She laughed and it made her blue eyes twinkle. “You make it so easy to forget that you weren’t born here. It means something good.”
“Eh-la, well, thank you, then. I’m afraid I was very much the starving student. I wanted to go to university in America, my father was against it. He wanted me closer to home. I wanted to get away from him and from my brother and from all the watching eyes. And frankly, from all the women.”
He said it without thinking, because it had been true. Then he winced for it must have sounded pompous, macho and arrogant. Carrie’s response told him he was right.
“Oh, really?” Carrie drawled. “That sounds chauvinistic.”
“Hmmm, it is,” he muttered, struggling to figure out how to explain without sounding even worse. Only this woman could disconcert him so. Perhaps that was why he had always been so intrigued with her. “In the suburb outside Athens where my father kept his estate, he had many families who worked for him. My brother had run through one generation of the daughters, and when one of the young women got pregnant, my father gave her money.
“Unfortunately young women and even young men, everywhere, when they need a job, will do many things they might not otherwise do to secure their future. There were also the daughters, and sometimes the wives, of my father’s associates, who would follow me around or seek to come into my room.” He felt the heat rise in his face at some of the memories associated with that time. “My father made sure everyone knew that he had pitted my brother and m
e against one another to prove our worth. What is the old saying? To the victor go the spoils? That was to be the deal.”
“Oh, my gosh, that’s terrible.” Carrie looked shocked, appalled.
Dav nodded. “It was. You never knew who was helping you because they liked you, or thought you would be the winner in the game, or who was helping to actually hurt you.” And some had truly, truly hurt him, in those games. Dav tried to make his tone lighter, more upbeat as he finished his story. “He made only one rule. We could not kill one another, for if either of us died, he would give it all away, he said. Neither Niko nor I would inherit if we were rash enough to cause an inconvenient accident.” Dav sighed, thinking back to what had started the question. “He also made it known that if we managed to kill one another, he had no compunction about naming a bastard grandson as his heir.”
“Which attracted even more women, looking for a chance for a child.” She quickly picked up on the ramifications of his father’s pronouncements. “What a dangerous, cruel game your father played with you both,” she said, and he saw pain in her eyes.
Pain for him. His appreciation for her deepened, something he’d thought impossible.
“True,” he said lightly, feeling her caring soothe the old ache of his father’s callousness. He leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. “Thank you for caring about that. At the time, I thought little of it because I had grown up with such treatment. It seemed ...” he hesitated to say it, but they had already revealed much. He wanted to share more, and if his plans ever came to fruition, she must know the truth anyway. He would not have a wife who did not know the darker side of him, so he must be willing to speak. “It seemed normal.”
She nodded. “People can get used to a lot of cruelty, can’t they?” He agreed and they both pondered in silence as they ate. Trying, evidently, to change the somber mood the revelations brought, she asked, “So what happened when you came to America?”
“He cut me off,” Dav said, shrugging, as if it hadn’t hurt, hadn’t devastated the young man he had been. “I managed a scholarship, and he deigned to pay for my books; he did that much, but anything else was on me.”
Carrie cocked her head to one side, a ghost of a smile playing about her rosy lips. It made him realize he’d never seen her without makeup or lipstick, without her feminine armor.
“I guess he did you a favor, didn’t he? You didn’t ever count on him, so when the time came to count on yourself, later, you knew you could do it.”
That perspective had never occurred to him. “True, very true.” Another thought occurred right on the heels of the paradigm shift though. A dark thought to balance the lighter one. “That one decision may be why we’re here, however,” he added with a snap of anger for Niko’s continued treachery. “My brother hated me for leaving, putting myself not only out of his reach, but out of Father’s reach as well. For four years, I didn’t go home. Not for holidays or for summer. I took jobs in construction, in manufacturing, in management as I got to be older. You can get those jobs with a student visa, though once I took internships in management positions, I began to think about applying for citizenship.”
“Bet that pissed your dad off,” she said as she wrapped the sandwiches more tightly in their wax paper.
“Yes. It did.” An understatement if there ever was one. Dav winced at the memory of the rage that had sizzled through the transatlantic call forbidding him to apply for American citizenship. The fact that his father had been so against it made it all the sweeter when he received it.
Carrie watched him, speculation in her eyes. She was about to ask more, he could sense it, but he decided it was time to talk about something else. Those memories were raw, and dangerous. The anger at his family, never far from the surface, threatened to overwhelm him given their present situation.
“Here, let’s figure out what to keep for later,” he said, brushing her fingers as he reached for the bundle of eggs. “These will keep, as will the crackers and this.” He hefted the Nutella. “The sandwiches”—he pointed at the bundles she’d made of the sandwiches—“we should eat today.”
“Good idea. What about—”
“Shhh,” Dav said suddenly, catching her arm, straining to hear a repeat of the sound that had caught his attention. “They’re leaving. I was not sure they were serious about that.”
Fear leaped into her eyes. “Oh, God. Do you think they’ll come back?”
“I don’t know.” He said it as calmly as he could. “Carrie-mou, we’re in a terrible position,” he admitted, using the endearment because he felt he could, because he knew that they were in so very much danger it didn’t matter. Besides, had he not already decided that this woman was who and what he wanted?
He sat still as stone, straining to hear any movement, any sound. The bird noises resumed as did the hum of insects buzzing in the warming sun above them. Underground, shaded, it was still fairly cool, but still warmer than most April mornings in San Francisco. “I have no idea if they’ll come back.”
He stood, stretched again, trying to ignore the way she was watching him, the way her gaze roamed over his chest. It made him feel primitive, powerful. It made him want to...
He caught the thought before it hatched, stuffing it into the back of his mind. Women always complained that men thought with their libido. Unfortunately, they were far too often right. Time for a change of subject.
What had Gates told him about being held captive? Keep moving. Stay limber. Be ready to run if you get a chance.
Looking around the cell, Dav realized the outlook was bleak and getting bleaker, but he couldn’t tell Carrie that. Nor could he think it himself. He had to act as if there were something they could do, some way to effect an escape or to ensure rescue.
“We need to explore this place,” he said briskly, assessing the space with a renewed sense of purpose. He forced all the dark thoughts away; he would not let Carrie see his fear. “We should see if we can reach the lock up there. Perhaps, if you stand on my shoulders?”
“On your shoulders?” Carrie echoed, standing now, and looking upward as well.
“Yes, we need to figure out what we’re going to do if they don’t come back,” Dav said, injecting a firm note into his tone. “We must do what we can to help ourselves.”
“God helps those who help themselves,” she muttered, walking to the center of the cell and staring at the grate. “So,” she said, with patently false brightness, “which is worse, if they do come back or if they don’t?”
“We have no way to know,” Dav admitted, coming to her side. “Come now, Carrie-mou,” he soothed, reaching out to smooth down the fabric of her sweater, knowing it was a futile gesture in some ways, since there was nothing he could offer in the way of truly meaningful action. “The most important thing is to keep thinking for ourselves, to keep thinking and looking for options.”
“I know, I know. Think positive.”
He smiled, running a hand up and down her back, feeling the faint tremble in her body. He moved behind her, slipping his arms around her. For a moment she stiffened.
“Come,” he coaxed softly. “Let me hold you. It won’t get us out of here, but we’ll both feel better for it.”
She relaxed in his arms and for a long time they stood that way. He closed his eyes and let his cheek rest on her hair. He was fascinated by the silk of it, regretted that the heavy growth of his beard caught its fine strands.
“What was it you said earlier? While there’s life, there’s hope, eh? If we’re taken out of this hole, we may have chances. We must stay active while they are gone so we can be ready to run, or fight. We need to plan.” He was already doing that in his own mind. “But for now,” he added, “I like standing here, holding you. I like it very much.”
He felt the hum of her agreement through her back. Slowly, she turned to face him, letting her hands slide round him, one pressing his back; the other, at his belt, clutched the leather as if a lifeline. He stroked her back again, let his
fingers rest at her waist where the material rode up. He let the heat of her skin warm his hands.
It was irresistible to let the fingers of his other hand slide into her hair, remembering the kisses she’d pressed on his face when she was intoxicated with the drug.
As he stroked, she relaxed, melting into him with a pliancy that made his heart beat faster, made his body fire and respond. Here, finally, was Carrie, in his arms. They were alone at last, together, but there was no magic carpet, no fantastic meal or wine with which to ply her, no theater tickets or stunning gems with which to shower her.
Just the two of them. Alone. There was no past, no future. Nothing but the moment.
Carpe diem. Seize the day. The ancient adage floated into his mind.
Pulling away a bit, he let the hand he had in her hair slip round to caress her jaw, tilt her face toward his. Her natural compliance encouraged him and he gazed into her gorgeous blue eyes, seeing the desire kindling there.
“Carrie.” He whispered her name, saw her lips curve upward in acquiescence. Kissing her was like sipping hot coffee on a cold morning, like the finest brandy at the end of a delicious meal. It made him want. It satisfied him, then drove him higher, fed his hunger in the most fundamental way.
She shifted slightly, changing the angle of the kiss, drawing him in, drawing him deeper to her. Her hands were active now, digging into the heavy muscles of his back, sliding lower to cup his backside and pull him forward. He felt more than heard her reaction to the pounding erection she inspired.
“Mmmmm,” she moaned, pulling him away from the light, toward the wall. He followed as best he could, never breaking the connection of their mouths, the impassioned race of his hands. “Come here, please,” she implored, turning him to brace his back on the wall. “No one can look in, or see us here. The angles,” she explained obliquely. He took her word for it, so distracted by her luscious kisses that he really didn’t care if anyone saw them. He found her full breasts with his hands, caressed them, then hesitated, wanting to see her reaction.