Runner: The Fringe, Book 3

by Anitra Lynn McLeod

  “270Mil would change any man’s mind.” To his own ears, he sounded like a total jerk. “I’ll never have to work another day in my life. I get to retire with the biggest and baddest rep in the universe to boot.”

  “All of this was about money?” She clutched the bars so hard, her fists went white.

  “Naw. Money wasn’t the only reason.” He gave her a slow glance from her sock-covered toes to her gleaming honey-blonde hair. Hitching his thumbs to the belt loops of his jeans, he let his hands draw attention to the bulge in his pants. “There were other benefits to holding you back.” Not a woman in the Void would miss the glaring implications of what he said by what he did.

  Blanching white, she gulped and softly asked, “You played me?” She looked at him with baffled eyes. “You toyed with me for money and sex?”

  “Sure. Why not? You made it easy. And fun. Corrupting the IWOG lady right out of you. Even told you to your face I wanted to. You not only let me, you encouraged me. I told you I was a very bad man who would hurt you. You just wouldn’t believe me.”

  “You’re lying to me. Why are you doing this?”

  He wanted to stop right now, pull her into his arms, kiss her desperately and take everything back. Resolute, he stood his ground.

  “I’m doing this because I’m a ruthless bastard. I told you that, too. Patted your lovely butt the first time I said it. Remember? When you were over my shoulder crying in that ratty motel room?” He laughed as the memory flashed in her eyes. “Later, when you were trying to get into my pants, you said a ruthless bastard would be flattered by your interest and take advantage of it.” He winked. “You were right.”

  Shaking her head side to side, she fought back a burbling cry of anguish. “Stop it.”

  “Naw. That works for the computer game. Or the sex game. Doesn’t work for real life, I’m afraid.” He approached her cage. “You wanted to talk. You wanted the truth. Well, here you go. Happy?”

  “Sex game?”

  “That’s what it was, wasn’t it? You told me to stop thinking so much and just play with you. Holy shit! You actually bought my shy guy routine.” He flashed her a cutting smirk. “And the way you worked to talk me into it. I tell you, I’ve never had a woman so willing to be taken advantage of.”

  Humiliation flared in her eyes, causing her to look away. He wanted to take out his gun and blow his own head off when tears gathered, obscuring her gaze. Instead, he pushed forward, determined to make her hate him.

  “I swore when I ordered you to ride me, it was all over.” His dark laughter drew her attention to his face. “Nope. You took me up on it and did a damn fine job of obeying all my orders. Like a good little slut, you did whatever the hell I told you to.”

  Her jaw dropped, and for the longest time, she just looked at him, horrified and hurt. Negating his words with a subtle shake of her head, she let go of the bars and took a step back. “Don’t you dare try to make that ugly when it wasn’t.”

  “Ugly? Hell no. Nasty is what it was. Down and dirty and decadently lewd. I called you a slut, and you certainly lived up to it. I enjoyed every second of our master-and-servant game.”

  Her violet eyes, blurred with tears, cleared, pinning him to the spot. For the first time ever, he was afraid of Jynx Brennan. Suddenly, it felt like there was a bag of sand on his head, and someone poured water on it. His head hurt, and he clutched it with both his hands. Terror sharpened his mind when he realized Jynx tried to read him by projecting into him. She hadn’t lied about how bad it hurt. Vise grips closed along his skull as magma erupted in his brain. He locked his mind down to the only thing he could think of.

  Damn You.

  He said the phrase over and over and over, for at least a full five minutes, until the weight finally abated. Shaken by exhaustion, he looked up to find that Jynx shook so badly she had to sit down on her prison bunk.

  Bursting into tears, she covered her face with her hands.

  “I’m sorry, I was angry. I won’t do it again, I just—”

  “Wanted to find out if I was lying.” Taking a deep breath, sucking down a burst of fear, he let anger fill him. “I’m not. You try to get in my head like that again and I’ll drug you.”

  Raw fear filled her eyes as she touched her belly. “No.”

  “Right. Drugs might hurt the brat, so don’t do it again. Got it?”

  “Yes.” She sat there dazed, shaking her head softly as tears rolled down her cheeks. One quivered on the edge of her lip, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. “I won’t cause you any trouble, Mr. Nash.” Her voice fell flat, toneless and devoid of passion. Wrung out like a dishrag, she gave up as quickly as she had the first time.

  Cursing himself a thousand times over in his head, he left the cell room without another word and without looking at her. Making his way to the bridge, he settled at his chair and pounded furiously at the main console.

  Not long now. One more day and they’d be in orbit around Juno. He’d hand her over to Roberts and go on his way.

  Shocked by her aggression, Jynx sat shaken on her bunk. She couldn’t believe she’d deliberately used her gift to give back the pain he inflicted on her. On the heels of that thought came another, that she should have used her skill much sooner.

  “I hurt him knowing I would hurt him because he was hurting me and I wanted to know why.” Slapping her hand over her mouth, Jynx darted her gaze around the cell room. Foster could be listening to her, watching her. Before, she didn’t think he was, but now, she wasn’t so sure.

  He’d just been playing her. Heaven help her, she let him. Helped him! She felt like an idiot. Falling in love with him, trusting him, and to make matters worse, telling him! She rolled her eyes at the folly of sharing her body and soul with a man who turned out to be utterly false. Foster was a compelling façade that lured her into an empty room.

  A rush of anxiety swept from her toes to her fingertips. She couldn’t trust anything she knew or thought she knew about Foster, and the realization made her heart pound as her breath became ragged.

  “Stop it,” she whispered to herself. “It doesn’t matter what he said, it doesn’t matter what he did or why. What matters is surviving. He won’t kill me, because Roberts wants to do it. I’m getting off the Damn You alive, so I need to keep my focus on Roberts.”

  Taking a deep breath, telling herself to relax over and over, she got her heart to stop pounding. If Foster watched her, let him, he’d see no different than he already had. He admitting to playing her, but she hadn’t played him, and she wasn’t going to start now.

  Keeping her focus to her goal, she thought about what she knew and didn’t know. How much time did she have? She realized they could be hanging in orbit around Juno just waiting for clearance from Roberts to land. She may have only hours left, and she had to get ready now. At the moment, she wore a flannel plaid robe and Foster’s ugly mustard T-shirt. It fell slightly below the edge of her bottom, but the robe fell to her mid calves.

  Casually, she tidied her cell. She set the books on the table and made her bunk. Where the hell were her panties? At one point, Foster had returned her laundered dress but not her panties or her bra, and she needed them.

  “Looking for these?”

  She spun around. Foster entered the cell room with her white lace bra and panties dangling from his finger. Wagging them back and forth with a suggestive smirk, he walked right up to the door of her cage.

  “If you want them, come and get them.”

  His low voice mocked her by vibrating her body from her nipples to her suddenly throbbing clit. Drawing his robe protectively about her, tying the belt securely, not knowing his true game, she refused to play his overtly sexual one.

  “Yes. I was looking for those. I need to wash them. I’ll want to wear them when you triumphantly take me into Roberts’s custody.” She stepped forward and tugged her garments from his hand.

  He crooked his finger and tried to draw her to the bars.

  Frighten
ed, she let go and stood well back.

  “Don’t want to play that game anymore?” His eyes were almost feverishly bright. Quickly assessing him, she looked for signs of drugs or alcohol. Truly, he was not himself in some way she couldn’t put her finger on. Who was she kidding? For all she really knew about him, he could be a very clever push addict.

  “The sex game?” She tossed her head with cool disdain. “If that’s what you want to call it, and even if that’s what you think it was, I didn’t then and I don’t now. I don’t play games like that, Mr. Nash. I had sex with you because I wanted to.”

  He smirked and offered her dangling lace underclothes again.

  “If you’re trying to make me regret my actions, think them ugly or feel ashamed, you are wasting your time.” Placing her hands on her hips, she looked right into his eyes. “If you’re looking for a repeat, you’re also wasting your time. Either give me my underclothes or take them and do whatever you want to with them.”

  He wagged them back and forth again, trying to lure her to the cell door.

  “What is wrong with you?” She stepped farther back into her cell. “I’m not coming anywhere near you, Mr. Nash. Especially when you’re behaving like a lunatic.”

  “I like that word. Lunatic.” He said it again and rolled his mouth around it. “Rolls off the tongue in a harsh way. Hardly anyone uses it anymore. Well, except for a lady like you, that is. IWOG lady too civilized to use the dirty words. Those juicy words. Like prick. And bastard. I’m behaving like a fucking asshole. Why don’t you just say so?”

  After a glance to her soiled panties and bra hanging from his finger, she met his gaze. “I don’t know what you want. I don’t know why you’re doing this. I really don’t even care. Just go away.”

  “So now you don’t want these panties?” Foster lifted them up. “They smell like you.”

  She felt her face rush hot with a startled shock of desire. Wide-eyed, she watched as he considered the scrap of lace hanging from his finger. No doubt they smelled like her, since the last time she’d been wearing them was right before she plastered herself against him in his leather pilot chair.

  “Why don’t you just keep them as a souvenir, then?”

  “Thanks.” He tucked them into his front pocket. Right next to a straining bulge he rearranged while she watched. “I’d much rather get back to the source, though.”

  “What?”

  “You’re slipping. You didn’t say pardon.” He grinned. “I wanna get back to the source. You know, that part of you that made your panties smell so fucking good.”

  Simultaneously, her jaw dropped and her eyes went round, not only at what he said but how her body reacted. He was trying to humiliate her, or frighten her, yet instead his rumbling voice, penetrating gaze and pointed words excited her.

  “You’re insane if you think I want anything to do with you now.” Trembling hands tightened the belt around her waist. Underneath the flannel, she wore only a battered T-shirt.

  “What’s a matter? Wasn’t it fun before? I didn’t hurt you then, and I wouldn’t hurt you now. I’m a fairly benevolent master, right, my lovely servant? In fact, if I were a betting man, and I am, I’ll bet you’re wet.”

  Heaven help her, she was. Very. For all the wrong reasons. Fear and shock, but still, below it all, she flat-out wanted him. And he knew it. Desperately seeking a clever and distancing rejoinder, she found herself rendered speechless.

  “Maybe I should come in and see for myself.”

  She shook her head and backed farther away.

  “How about a deal. You let me check and see, or rather feel,” he said with a wink, “and I let you have your bra. Sound like a fair trade?”

  In a rush, she understood. He knew she wanted her bra. That meant he had already removed what she wanted from it. He was only playing the sex game with her to torment her and extract information.

  “Keep it with my compliments.”

  “Yeah. Kinda figured you’d say that. ’Cause you don’t want this.” He tossed the bra to her feet then plucked two small metal cylinders from his back pocket and held them up. “You want these.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  After making a few other hasty arrangements, Foster had been working off his nervous energy by cleaning up the bridge. He found his jeans, his silk boxers, his blue T-shirt, Jynx’s bra and panties. They’d been abandoned for four days. When he bent over to retrieve them, her scent enveloped him, making him remember the feeling of her in the dark as music rolled around them. The alluring scent made him so instantly hard, he had to stand or injure himself.

  From where he stood, he smelled the worn leather of his chair and felt the hide molded to his body. That chair was as familiar as his own hand. To, for only once, ever, in his whole life, take a woman from that seat of power filled him with a masterful rush.

  “Ride me.”

  His eyes rolled back as he thought about that moment. How many times had he sat in that chair, on his bridge, and pleasured himself, thinking of what it would be like to have a woman on his lap?

  “Lovely IWOG lady.”

  To have it be Jynx, to have her be so excited and eager, was just icing on the cake. “Jynx Brennan.” He’d hated that name, then loved it; now it swung to a painful regret. He could have refused the contract, but greed made him ignore that little voice in his heart. Longing and lust further blunted the niggling doubt that said something was wrong. Jynx Brennan was not what Roberts said, wasn’t what anyone said. Jynx was herself. Not perfect, not good or bad, but honest and direct, passionate and proud. If Foster took nothing else away from her, he would always remember her pride. She acknowledged her foibles and mistakes but still kept her dignity.

  He looked down at the scrap of lace and tossed the panties in with the rest of the laundry. Her bra looked a bit torn on the cups where he’d forced the edge low with his teeth and chin.

  “Crap.” He dumped himself in his chair. “Aw, Jynx, I’m going to hurt you so badly and I don’t want to but you just don’t know how to lie. If I can see right through you, so can Roberts.”

  Foster had enough to worry about trying to keep his true intentions from Roberts. No way could Jynx. Foster was a master at putting on a nasty face and spewing cutting words that denigrated his target. He didn’t get his reputation by accident.

  “Gonna have to pull off the biggest act ever to win this.”

  Clenching his fist, he stopped when he felt something stab at his hand. He examined Jynx’s bra. The sides seemed too thick and rigid. Shit. He’d cut out the underwires but hadn’t even bothered to check the sides.

  “Hell, doesn’t matter, she wouldn’t know what to do with them if she had them.”

  Scooting forward, he plucked his knife from his belt and cut a nick into the side of the bra. He extracted a slim, flattened, finely fashioned metal cylinder.

  “What the hell?” He checked the other side and found another one. They didn’t look like any underwire he’d ever seen.

  Ordering the bridge to full light, he held one of the small metal tubes up and discovered a tiny latch at the top. “With what inside?”

  He set both items on the main console, then linked to the Tasher and channeled until he found out they were expensive and rare containers that wouldn’t set off most scanners. They would have set off his if he’d bothered to scan her body with more than his hands or his gaze.

  Carefully, he held them up to his ear and rattled them. One of them sounded like it had liquid in it and the other had two or three loose items within. Looking at the channel info, he found out how to open them and almost did until he remembered that Jynx had worked on the Tyaa plague.

  “Shit.” He set the little metal cylinders on the main console and backed away. Composing himself, he realized even if she carried something deadly, it wouldn’t open by accident. “Not if she wore them around in her bra.” Sudden or even violent movement wouldn’t open them. They had to be deliberately opened.

  “But wha
t the hell is in there?” He shook his head. “Has she really been playing me? Getting cozy so I keep her alive long enough for her to get me and Roberts in the same room and then she lets us both have it? A big old dose of the plague? I deliver her to Roberts, who kills her, but ha ha ha, we’re gonna die too?”

  Shaking his head, Foster couldn’t even imagine Jynx doing that. Not in a million years. She’d been horrified she’d hurt him while trying to read his mind, and clearly ashamed that her anger got the better of her. He couldn’t blame her for trying. He’d been a right bastard, egging her on and practically daring her to. In an effort to protect herself and her child, she fought back with the last power she had. What she’d done scared the crap out of him and her.

  He had to find out what was in those things. Putting them in his back pocket, he left the bridge, carrying her underclothes.

  “Gonna get the truth from you one way or another. Know just how to do it, too.”

  Jynx reached for the cylinders, and he grabbed her wrist. He tugged her to the bars with a slow, persistent strength.

  “Let go.” She tried to free herself, but his fist wrapped around her wrist like iron.

  Shoving the cylinders into his pocket, he lifted his hand to capture her face. “Are you afraid of me?”

  “Yes.” Her answer came automatic and honest.

  “Smart. You should be.” Cupping her chin, he lowered his hand until it rested against her throat.

  He had to feel the pounding of her pulse in his palm as it pressed right against her jugular vein.

  “Fear excites you, doesn’t it?” he asked.

  Beads of sweat popped up on her upper lip, and she wanted to lift her hand to wipe them away. But if she moved…

  Foster lowered his face and brushed his mouth to her lips, licking away her sweat. Lifting his mouth to her ear, he whispered, “I can taste your fear, Sweets, along with your need.”

  Frozen, she didn’t know what to say or do as her mind and body warred between lust and loathing.