She leaned close to smell the leather and canvas of him. Most people wore self-cleaning fabrics of strex or enotex, but Duster had said he hated the way they felt against his skin. Natural or nothing, he’d said with a grin that made her vote for nothing. And where most people slathered themselves in a chemical soup of personal products, Duster preferred simple soap and water. A deep breath of his scent refreshed a hundred erotic memories she’d worked desperately to submerge.
Succumbing to long-denied cravings, she put her lips against his, but his drug-slackened mouth didn’t come close to her fantasies. She pulled back.
“Seven years.”
He’d been both willing and eager to pay the hefty 1Mil-per-year fee to be stripped, but she’d put the job off time and again. Seven years was an eternity. Stripping a mind so deeply would cost her dearly, which was why she was alone with him in the ship. To do her work, she needed absolute privacy, not only so she could mentally and physically connect to her client but so that she could recover afterward. Seven years of memories would leave her drained for days. Tenacious, her mysterious client had jumped through hoops to sway her. After a year of negotiations, she’d accepted and signed the contract.
“I had no idea my desperate client was you.” Diane trailed her fingers through his dusty blond hair. Buzzed short, the strands tumbled through her fingers with barely a whisper. In the past, his hair had been long and shaggy, tangling up in her fingers, allowing her leverage to pull him ever closer in a frenzy of passion.
“I have a feeling you came to have meeting me removed from your mind.” Regret, sharp and shameful, caused tears to blur her gaze. When she wiped them away, she spied a platinum ring on his finger.
Moving back, she pressed her palm against her chest, feeling the chain-bound ring that hung between her breasts. With a trembling hand, she lifted his arm. After pulling the chain out from the folds of her diaphanous gown, she compared the two rings.
Mates.
She lowered his hand to the table.
Clutching her ring, she left the room, locking the heavy metal door from the outside. She strode to the bridge as fast as she could in her decorative high heels. The fashionable yet delicate gem-encrusted shoes would probably disintegrate under her if she stomped. She yanked the useless fluffs off after she threw herself into the pilot seat. Her fingers flew over the keypad as she activated every defense system on her ship.
Her hand hovered over the panic switch. If she flipped it, members of Network Thirteen would come out to the ship. Diane couldn’t turn Duster in. Maybe not just yet. Maybe not at all. She simply didn’t know enough about him to make that decision. Seven years ago, he’d been a slaver, but she had no idea what he was now.
Duster still had twelve hours before he came out of the anesthesia. Ironically this would have been her grand finale for Network Thirteen. She was determined to change her identity and start working as a stripper on her own, far away from the unrelenting press of their thumb. After seven years, she had the money to do what she’d always longed for, but now that Duster reentered her life, he threw all her plans out the window. Since he’d wanted seven years stripped, she figured she had three days to strip him with four days for each of them to recover. At best she had a week with Duster before her network would come looking, suspicious that she hadn’t returned him.
“A week to do what? Discover just how much he hates me?”
Diane touched the ring on the chain around her neck. She didn’t wear it on her hand like he did, because she couldn’t let the women of Network Thirteen see a wedding ring. But not a day had gone by in the last seven years where she didn’t touch her ring and think of the only man she’d ever loved. Duster Jennings. A slaver.
Just seeing the mate to her ring on his finger filled her with confused terror. He must have still care for her to wear it, or he had vowed to hunt her down and kill her. She didn’t know. She couldn’t read him, his memories, unless he allowed her to. She had to touch him to do her work, and he had to be in the proper situation for her healing touch to be effective.
As a stripper, she would put him into a hypnotic alpha state with drugs so his mind would open to her. Duster had been in such a state when he’d been loaded on her ship. Once she realized who her mysterious client was, she’d panicked and hit a button that automatically injected him to the point he rested in a chemically induced coma. Diane could safely induce such a state in him for only a few more hours, which would extend the twelve-hour lead time she had, but any longer than sixteen hours might cause irreversible brain damage.
What would she do with him after that? She couldn’t strip him. She couldn’t return him to Dahank, the planet she picked him up on. She couldn’t keep him. As pleasing as the prospect of keeping him her prisoner was, she couldn’t. He’d never let her do what she wanted to do with him. Given their history, he’d go out of his way to kill her, and she honestly couldn’t blame him.
Pressing her thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose, she squeezed hard as she considered her limited options. If she kept him in the stripping room and drugged him lightly, he wouldn’t be able to escape. And she could touch him all she wanted. But she couldn’t keep him there forever.
“We haven’t seen each other in seven years. You want seven years stripped. We once had seven days together. I have seven days to decide what to do with you.” Diane sighed. “Seven seems to be our number.”
She turned her mind back to when she’d been a slave and Duster had been her master. Within a week, she made Duster her slave. Encouraging him to mate with her turned him against everything and everyone he believed in. Linking them as mates made them strive toward a common goal—survival for themselves and their potential children. After using her feminine wiles to compel a commitment from him, she’d dumped him off in the Void without a breath of explanation. And she certainly didn’t want to give him one now.
“Eventually, I’ll have to release him. But where? And how?”
Diane studied Duster over the audvid. He hadn’t moved. Anticipation at seeing his mossy-green eyes open filled her with both longing and fear. She wanted to see lust in his gaze but dreaded seeing only burning hatred reflected back.
“How could he ever forgive me for betraying him?”
Duster opened his eyes to find a ceiling the color and texture of cheap sexdroid plastiflesh. Sickening-sweet strains of synthesized music filled the air.
Dear God, I woke up in hell.
“How do you feel?”
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It didn’t sound male or female. It didn’t even sound human.
Duster considered the question. He felt like a drunk coming off a three-week bender. Fearing for his safety, he bolted upright in panic.
Everything in the cramped room swirled around in his drug-hazed vision. Velvet and silk in various shades of pink and purple convinced him he was back at MacKay’s daughter’s wedding, trapped in a closet with the tacky bridesmaid dresses Shadra had begged for, and he’d bought for her, because he couldn’t bear to see the lovely girl cry. And Shadra had been so happy when he’d had the horrid dresses delivered to her thirteen bridesmaids. Those girls were not so happy, but they wore them because they loved Shadra too.
A lingering scent of vanilla-musk crawled up his nose, but then an oddly chemical whiff of flowers assaulted him. If plastic flowers had a smell, that stench would be it. Fighting down a simultaneous urge to throw up and kill someone, Duster took a deep breath to assess his situation. The disgusting odor of chemicals almost toppled him off the sinking-soft table.
“Where am I?” The neoflesh covering the ceiling, floor and table worked in concert with the fabric-covered walls to muffle the low throb of a ship. Duster couldn’t hear the engine so much as he felt it.
Not planetside. I’m on a ship. Going where?
“You are safe, Mr. Jennings.”
Strangely sexless, the voice sounded computer-enhanced as it wafted directionless, like the annoying vanilla-m
usk. The omni-directional voice aroused his fight-or-flight instincts. Hell, that voice flat-out aroused him. Something in that droning monotone stirred memories he’d paid handsomely to have stripped.
Without warning, Diane popped into his head as vivid as a hologram. Tall, with golden-copper hair, narrow, tawny eyes, pale white skin dusted with freckles and a wide, sensuous mouth that he couldn’t seem to stop kissing when they’d been young.
Foolish.
In love.
Through the years, he’d thought of her coral lips against his mouth, against his neck, pressed to his ear as they tumbled together, panting and pressing, seeking climax in the dark corners of the slaver ship called the Damn You.
Against the walls, on the floor—they didn’t care. Careful touches erupted to violent passion. Duster found a physical release with Diane that he could not envision with any other woman. Their lovemaking had ranged from sweet to savage. Her body was a guitar that he sometimes strummed as gently as a singing poet, yet other times he unleashed a fury on her like a metal-head in solo. Always with her panting eagerness, her wanton encouragement—her ultimate betrayal.
Speaking of betrayal…
“Why haven’t I been stripped?” Duster found tormenting Diane memories laced with everything from Shadra MacKay’s tacky bridesmaid dresses to how he’d named planet Windmere. For 7Mil, he should have no memory of any of it. Especially not a teasing memory of Diane as his tawny temptress, on her knees, her lips parted as he stood over her.
“A problem presented itself,” the absurdly compelling voice said.
“What problem?” He’d agreed to these ridiculous machinations and done everything the stripper insisted he do, even paying the fee up-front in script.
Aw, hell. I just got conned out of 7Mil.
Duster stood, swayed and crashed down hard on the neoflesh padded table. “How much more script do you want?” Not that he had any more.
“It’s not about the money, Mr. Jennings. It’s about the memories.”
He almost laughed when the words echoed in his mind with music, as if that line were from a song he barely remembered.
“What do my memories have to do with anything?” He gulped air in a desperate effort not to throw up. A plethora of pharmaceuticals were coursing through his veins, and he didn’t need any more up his nose. “We’ve been negotiating this contract for over a year. Seven years for 7Mil. That’s the deal.”
“Seven years is a long time. The event you wish to eradicate must be extremely traumatic.” The dispassionate tone of the voice continued to arouse him as much as it annoyed him. How the hell could a computer-enhanced voice stimulate him so much?
“Again, we’ve been over this. I’m not discussing it with anyone but the stripper.” Leaning back, he looked up at the lights embedded into the ceiling. He’d read something about how concentrating on light could prevent nausea. Or sneezing. His muddled mind couldn’t remember which one, but it didn’t matter when it had the desired effect. Despite the rolling of his gut, he didn’t blow chunks. Although, to be fair, hurling his last meal around would add a bit of interest to the all-purple-and-pink decor.
“I am the stripper, Mr. Jennings. You need to discuss the event with me.”
“Stop calling me that,” he snarled. “Everyone calls me Duster. And if you are the stripper I hired, then why aren’t you down here talking with me face-to-face? How come you’re modulating your voice into that sexless drone?”
A long pause filled his belly with a slow-creeping paranoia. What if the stripper had begun her work, found out about Michael and Windmere, realized Duster was the head of security and now plotted to sell him to the IWOG? Duster thought of the carefully worded contract but realized he couldn’t very well force the stripper to hold to their agreement if he were imprisoned by the Inner World Government.
He’d been a damn fool for even thinking he could protect Windmere or Michael from the IWOG. Darting his critical gaze around his girly prison, Duster looked for weakness. If there was a way into the room, there was a way out, and he would find it. He looked to his feet and saw his sharp-shined boots. Relief flooded him when he flexed his ankles and felt his narrow blades were ready.
“I apologize for not meeting with you face-to-face.” The sexless drone came from every soft edge of the room. “I worried you would become agitated by this change. Obviously, you are.”
“Agitated? No, I’m pissed.” He swayed even as he sat on the table. “I paid 7Mil for what has amounted to a ride in a whore ship. Den of Iniquity. Catchy name. If you’re not going to fulfill the contract between us, then I demand you set me free and return my money.”
After a long pause, the voice said, “You are in no position to demand anything, Mr. Jennings. If you would calm down, we could discuss a different mode of treatment.”
“I paid to be stripped, and that’s exactly what I want.” For a moment, he considered that Michael had a hand in this, since the argument rang reminiscent, but Duster dismissed the notion. Michael would get to the point, not dance around. Whoever this con artist was, he or she wanted more than money.
“If there was a way to reconcile your painful memories without stripping you of them, would you be interested?”
Despite the modulation, the voice had a desperate tone, almost as if the person behind the speaker were personally invested in his choice.
“I didn’t enter into this decision lightly.” Duster repeated the same words he’d said to Michael. “I’ve carefully considered it for the last three years.”
“And what triggered that event? Why did you begin contemplating a stripper three years ago?” The voice echoed deep compassion mixed with dispassion, and the conflicting sentiments exasperated him.
“Is this really pertinent?”
“Yes.”
He rolled his eyes, and it made him waver a bit, so he reclined onto the neoflesh table. “I met a woman.”
“And?”
“That’s it.” Duster refused to spill his guts to some nameless, faceless person. He hadn’t even told Michael all the particulars about Rena, and he told Michael everything. “You want to know the nitty-gritty details, you’re gonna have to come down here and face me.” Duster put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that for security reasons.”
“Gee, that’s too bad.” He crossed his ankles and settled himself more firmly into the soft table. Touching one of the pockets on his vest, he hoped for a handful of seeds to munch, but his pockets were empty. And then he remembered getting stripped would have relieved him of his crackleseed addiction, so he’d deliberately gotten rid of all the seeds he had. Crud. “I guess that means we’ve got nothing else to say to each other.”
Reasoning in that weird, sexless drone, with a direct and disturbingly composed tenor, the person behind the voice tried again and again to get him to speak. Arguments of logic gave way to accusations that he was behaving like a child. None of it moved him to respond.
Melting in his drug-induced haze, Duster dozed off.
He had nothing to say at the moment, and nothing the voice could say would change his mind. He wouldn’t open his mouth to speak until he had a real, live person standing in front of him.
And that was final.
Chapter Three
Arms crossed, reduced to childish arguments, Diane finally gave up and cut the com. From her place of safety on the bridge, she left the vid part of the audvid on, but if she had left the audio component on, Duster would have heard her grunting and groaning in frustration. Duster had not been like this seven years ago. Back then, he’d responded to reason and logic. How could he calmly fall asleep when she held his very life in the palm of her hand?
Not an idiot by any sane person’s estimation, Duster had to know trouble loomed. He’d paid a hefty price to be stripped, then willingly let himself be drugged and placed aboard a registered courtesan ship. He’d awoken to find he’d not been stripped, and his only contact w
ith the outside world was a carefully modulated voice. If she stood in his sharply shined black boots, she’d be terrified out of her mind. But Duster refused to beg, bargain or barter. He wanted to talk to someone face-to-face and wouldn’t be moved to respond otherwise.
“Bastard.”
Diane hadn’t considered this possibility when she’d laid her plans. She expected him to peacefully remain in the stripping room while she treated him via the audvid. It was the only way she thought she could help him while keeping herself safe. She never dreamed he’d refuse to participate without an in-the-flesh meeting. His obstinate stance defeated her plan.
She didn’t know what to do next. She couldn’t meet with him in person. He’d never let her treat him. Not only that, he’d likely attack her, commit extreme violence against her person and toss her out an airlock after wringing her neck.
Not that she could blame him.
After what she’d done to him seven years ago, she expected him to launch himself at her the moment he saw her. Not a chance in the Void he’d be pulling her into a long-lost lover’s embrace.
“He’s still wearing the ring.” She touched its mate on the chain around her neck. The ring nestled close to her heart, and she pressed it tight with a worried hand. “Is he wearing the ring out of love or hate?”
She turned her gaze to the audvid. Duster snoozed, his hands cupped behind his head, his shiny-boot-clad feet crossed at the ankles. Between, he wore canvas-and-leather pants, vest and shirt, all riddled with pockets, most now slack because he’d been forced to empty them before he’d been allowed to board her ship. His considerable amount of gear awaited him in a locker aft.
After setting the Den of Iniquity on autopilot, she ensured the autofire weapons were armed, then left the bridge for the cargo bay. Once there, she opened his locker. Empty. Puzzled, she clanged the door shut. A dark fear compelled her to open every locker. Her heart thudded when she found them all empty.
Stripper: The Fringe, Book 4 Page 2