by Susan Grant
“Thank you,” Bree told her. The woman’s curious gaze hesitated on her before she hurried off, as if she didn’t know how to react to such open acknowledgment.
As quickly as they came, the servers vanished.
Kyber chuckled.
“What?” Bree asked.
“You thanked her.”
“For the food. Was that wrong?”
“Under the circumstances, not at all.” Kyber smiled at her, his gaze warm. “You see, she asked if I desired company tonight. Female company.”
Ah, so that’s what that little round of nonverbal communication was all about. “So, you turned her down and I thanked her.” Bree’s face warmed, and then she laughed. “Oh, well. I didn’t know you had a harem.”
“Not a harem, no. Nothing that formal.”
“But you have women...at your disposal.”
“Why, yes.”
Bree’s head filled with images of Kyber in bed, making love with several women. She couldn’t tell if she was embarrassed, offended, or a little bit jealous. “Did she mean now or later, by the way? The female company.”
Kyber acted affronted. “Later, of course. I would not have considered that she...” Curious, he searched Bree’s face. “But, if that is what you desire—”
She held up her hands. “No, thanks. I’ll stick to the food. Anyway, I prefer men. And one at a time. But don’t let me stop you. Do whatever you want.”
“I already did,” he said, quieter. “I declined.”
She shook her head at him. He knew too well how to walk the fine line between sexual flirtation and coming on too strong. And yet, she sensed he was trying hard to be on his best behavior, wanting more to impress her than to bed her.
Kyber filled two tiny glasses with a clear liquid and gave one to Bree. “Vodka. I offered you proof earlier but did not deliver it. One hundred proof.”
She touched her glass to his. “To proof, then.”
“To proof,” he returned. His gaze held that odd hunger again, the awe and fascination, and all because she was from the past. It made her a relic, something valuable. Coveted.
She had nothing in this world. No family, no career, nothing. And, apparently, nowhere to go. Not only had the UCE turned away from its American roots, she was a throwback to a time they seemed to want to forget. But if she stayed here, she’d be more than a mere addition to Kyber’s eclectic collection of servants, mistresses, bodyguards, physicians, politicians, and advisers. He’d treat her with the utmost care, as befitting a valuable and hard-won addition to the palace, like a fragile antique vase or a priceless ancient brooch. Maybe others saw her that way, too. It hit her that her “value” might serve as a bargaining chip, one she might have to use if she ever needed to barter for anything, including her life.
“Another?” Kyber asked tentatively.
“Why the heck not?”
Kyber refilled her glass, and his own. When he touched his glass to hers, he asked, “What were you pondering so hard?”
She laughed softly. “My new life as a kept woman.”
“‘Kept’ woman? Is that what you think you are?” His gaze hovered somewhere between wicked and hopeful.
“Being coddled, pampered—I’m not used to it.” She downed her drink. Her eyes watered less this time. She shook her head. “What would Cam say to that? Banzai Maguire, kept woman. I can almost hear her laughing.
She pictured Cam’s bright smile, and her throat constricted.
“Cam Tucker. Your wingman.”
“And my best friend,” Bree whispered. She poured vodka into her glass and drank it down before she realized what she’d done. “Wow.” She shook her head. “Strong.” She offered Kyber the bottle. “Give me your glass.”
The prince shook his head, his gray eyes unusually soft. “No, but you go ahead, Banzai.”
And she did. A little sloppily. Beads of vodka shimmered on the carpet. She ran her finger through them. They reminded her too much of tears.
Kyber speared a piece of meat with his fork and offered it to her. He was sober, she thought; she was getting drunk. “Being pampered, coddled—this doesn’t appeal to you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s like.”
“Try it,” he murmured, touching the morsel to her lips.
She took the meat off the fork with her teeth. Kyber’s eyes darkened, his gaze fixed on her mouth. His sexual attraction to her was obvious. The temperature inside the room went up a few degrees, and Bree suspected it wasn’t due to a computer problem with the air-conditioning. She washed down the meat with some more vodka.
Kyber offered her a second bite. “I could get used to this,” Bree confessed, her speech slightly slurred.
“And you will. I will see to it.”
Her words flowed almost as freely as the vodka. “All my wishes granted. Anything I desire. As long as I live here on display, like something in a freak show.” She beckoned to an imaginary audience. She could hear the jeers and applause. “Come, see the woman from the past. Come one, come all. I don’t know, Kyber. I don’t know if this is for me.”
She refilled her little glass. She was beginning to feel a little light-headed, but her mood had turned so dark that she didn’t care.
Kyber appeared to tamp down his temper. “I will always protect you,” he said in a controlled voice. Or maybe it was his gritted teeth that made him sound in control. “I rescued you. Now, I offer you sanctuary.”
“From what? From the world? From everything that’s out there?”
“All that’s worth having, Banzai, is here.”
He made the statement with such conviction that even if she hadn’t spent hours on the Interweb she’d have found it hard to argue. “Including me?” she asked, frowning at her glass.
“Ask the trespassing UCE pig who tried to steal you.”
“The man who almost kidnapped me is from the UCE?” Suddenly, she was fascinated. However tenuous, there was a connection between the United States and what the country had become. “Why did he want me?”
Frowning this time, Kyber filled both of their glasses with vodka. He swallowed the contents of his glass before he answered her question. “He claims you belong to the UCE. And now, so it seems, the UCE does as well. They have already filed a formal request to have you brought back.”
“That was fast.”
“Word travels.”
Bree felt like the rope in a tug-of-war game. “Did he come here specifically to find me? Was he part of a search team?” All she could think of was Cam, and the chance that this man from the UCE might know her whereabouts. Hope, absent since Kyber told her that his men had searched the cave from top to bottom, flooded back, filling the void inside her. “Did you ask him if he knew of anyone else in the cave? Maybe he saw my wingman’s pod.”
Or, Bree thought, he’d found Cam’s pod empty. It had been almost two centuries. What if, during that time, years ago, someone had found her and freed her? Maybe Cam had searched high and low for Bree, but couldn’t find her. Finally, she’d had to give up, and went on to have a full and happy life. Bree liked that scenario better than the one of Cam’s body decomposing under leagues of cold seawater. “He might know, Kyber. He might be able to help us.” Us. Just like that, she’d aligned herself with the leader of the Asian Empire.
“Banzai,” he tried, gently. “He’s a tomb robber. A treasure hunter. He’s rich and bored, the playboy son of the highest-ranking military officer in the UCE.”
“So, what was he going to do with me if he found me first? Sell me?”
“It does not matter! You are here. You are safe.”
Bree remembered that streak of ruthlessness she’d seen in Kyber earlier when they’d discussed the clones, and contrasted that with the statement he’d made in the hospital room: “Perhaps, I will keep the bastard alive—if only because he brought me to you.”
“And you’ve got him locked up.”
“Yes.”
“The son of the UCE’s
top military man...”
“Yes.”
She leaned forward. “Isn’t that causing a wee little bit of international tension?”
Kyber downed his drink. “Gloriously so,” he said on a gust of air. “And I’m enjoying every minute of it.”
“Are you going to give him back?”
“Eventually, yes.”
And when he left, Bree would lose the only other person she knew who might have information about Cam.
She pushed aside her glass. She could hold her own in any bar, but she had no intention of falling more under the influence than she already was, not now, not with Cam’s life possibly at stake. “I want to see him, to talk to him. About Cam.”
“Beware of putting all your hopes into finding your friend. You set yourself up for more disappointment.”
She squared her shoulders. If in command, I will never surrender my men while they still have the means to resist. “I’ll take that chance.”
Kyber stared at his empty glass and brooded. He seemed to be vacillating between wanting to temper her rising hopes without crushing them, and wanting to appease and please her without sacrificing his principles. After a long while, he spoke. “I am an open-minded man. I will prove it to you, Banzai. I will invite the trespasser to dinner. Give me a few days, and I will arrange it.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Kyber narrowed his eyes at her. “Five minutes in the man’s company and you will understand everything I have told you about the UCE.”
Chapter Ten
Bree spent the hours not engaged in physical therapy in front of a computer embedded in a desk made from a foot-thick slab of glass. In her quest to find information leading to Cam Tucker, she’d learned more about her new world. The people of 2176 had settled Antarctica, and lived on the bottom of the sea. They’d built space stations as big as cities, traveled to Mars and Saturn, and put a few colonies on the moon, too. But nowhere did Bree find anything about an audacious blond bombshell of a southern belle who’d walked out of a cave dressed in a flight suit.
Elbows propped on the desktop, Bree dropped her chin into her hands and watched a digest of the day’s news stories. “‘We have no new information’ state those close to Supreme UCE Commander Aaron Armstrong, whose efforts to free his son of all charges stemming from illegal entry into the Kingdom of Asia have so far met with failure. Negotiations will continue, sources say, though at the time of this report, they have broken down.”
The image cut to a severe-looking man dressed in a crisp black trench coat and a high-crowned, General Patton-type hat trimmed in patent leather. He had sharp cheekbones and a hard mouth. The general strode to a sleek waiting car with a woman clinging to his arm. She wore a black scarf wrapped around her neck and pulled over her mouth and nose. Dark sunglasses kept the rest of her face hidden as security people ushered the couple into their vehicle.
The general looked as impossible and arrogant as Kyber said he was. Kyber said he had designs on the UCE presidency, now a government-elected, not a people-elected position, and that he wanted to see a military dictatorship in its place—with him in charge, of course. Now his son was biding time in Kyber’s comfortable dungeon, waiting for the posturing to cease so he could go home. But maybe, before he went home, Armstrong’s son would be able to tell her about Cam. All her other efforts thus far had failed. She was beginning to see Tyler Armstrong as her only hope, her only link to Cam, and the cave in which they were hidden all these years. But would the younger Armstrong help her? With a father at the military helm of the greatest imperial power the earth had ever known, why would he bother?
Somehow, she had to make him want to bother.
But how?
Joo-Eun, one of the subservient Park “sisters,” entered Bree’s hospital room, her arms laden with flowers and a beribboned box. Bree turned in her chair. “Wow. What’s all this?”
“Gifts. From Prince Kyber.” Joo-Eun’s smile was sweet and shy.
Clone. No matter how hard Bree tried to block it, the word intruded when she saw Joo-Eun. The girl didn’t have a father or mother; someone had created her in a lab. But, though the girl was a little slow on the uptake, and Bree took special pains not to speak to her as if she were a child when in reality she was seventeen, Bree had made a vow not to treat her differently than anyone who’d started life in the traditional egg-and-sperm way.
She sensed that Joo-Eun had noticed, and that in return, the girl had given Bree her loyalty. Bree hoped so. Friends were valuable when you didn’t know who your enemies were.
The bouquet was a fragrant cluster of three dozen long-stemmed aquamarine roses. Another marvelous, bioen-gineered feat, she thought. Tucked within the flowers was a note in Kyber’s handwriting. Tyler Armstrong will join us for dinner at 8:00 p.m., it said simply.
Bree’s heart skipped a beat. Tyler Armstrong. To her, he was no longer the blue-eyed diver-thief; he was the man who would tell her how to find Cam.
Joo-Eun gave Bree the package next. “It would please the prince if you wore the dress to dinner.”
Bree tore off the ribbon and lifted a bundle of rustling fabric from the box. Shaking out the dress, she held it at arm’s length. “Whoa. It’ll please me, too.”
The gown was a floor-length gorgeous lavender confection made of diaphanous silk and pale amethyst gem-stones. Despite the knots in her stomach and her lingering numbness, something melted inside her as she contemplated wearing the gown. Kyber had made no secret of his romantic interest in her, but so far, she’d pretended not to notice and he hadn’t pushed it further. Did the gifts foretell a turning point? Choosing Kyber would be as good as consigning herself to staying here, and that’s what she couldn’t do. As long as hope existed for finding Cam, she wanted no promises holding her back.
But letting go for one night didn’t mean surrendering all her nights to come, did it? Bree clutched the dress in her hands and touched the shimmering fabric to her face. What plans Kyber had made after dinner, she didn’t know, but he sure was doing everything right.
* * *
Guards appeared outside Ty’s cell just after the heat peaked for the day. He’d been dozing with his back propped against the wall—more specifically on the scrawled letters that spelled out Freedom! He didn’t consider himself a superstitious man, but he figured it couldn’t hurt, sleeping next to the upbeat graffiti.
Stiff and sore, Ty got up warily and waited for them to unlock the gate. The guard who opened the cell was a moose of a man whose ancestry appeared to be the same as some of the pirates Ty had fought in the Raft Cities.
Many of them were of Indonesian, Malaysian, or Maldivian ancestry who hadn’t thought to—or wanted to—resettle on the mainland after the ocean took their island homes. Ty empathized with their plight, if not the piracy.
“UCE. You, shower,” the big man grunted, as if speaking to Ty was too far beneath his level of contempt to bother using full sentences.
Ty lifted his brows. “A shower? No kidding.” He rubbed his T-shirt. It clung damply to his skin. Sweat had long since erased the bloodstains. “What’s the occasion?” If he was getting out, good. But if he had to leave Banzai here, not so good.
The guard didn’t answer, instead stood back to let him pass by, wrinkling his nose at Ty’s stink. Ty scratched his beard. “Will your disinfectant kill lice?” He pinched something in his fingers and studied it. “These look like lice. Or fleas.” He thrust his fingers at the guard. “What do you think?”
The guard arched out of his way. “Go,” he growled, pointing farther down the dank passageway between the cells. Ty suppressed a smile, squared his shoulders, and strode on ahead.
Two other moose-like men waited for him with ion-rifles in their hands. They fell in step with him, and did not meet his eyes. Ty studied their faces, however, analyzing their level of tension, their size and strength. He shifted to study the doors and exits, and the location of additional men. No, not yet, advised his SEAL’S intuition. This wa
s not the right time to make a run for freedom. And he might not have to take that chance; if they were giving him a shower, things were looking up.
Or, down. Kyber might like to clean up his prisoners before he put them out for public execution.
Ty walked with the guards to a shower room that looked as if no one had used it in a century. A guard commanded the water on. As it swirled down a drain in the middle of the stone floor, it took with it decades’ worth of grit and God knew what else.
Barefoot, Ty stepped under the spray. Lifting his face to the stream, he closed his eyes. Little else had ever felt this good, he decided.
“Clothes off!”
Ty opened one eye at the guard. “If only the women I meet would say that.”
“Off!” The guard jerked his rifle butt menacingly.
No humor, Ty thought. He stripped off his T-shirt and baggy, tattered prison pants. Taking his time—he’d waited long enough for this—he soaped his body, scrubbing the sterilizer into his skin, stopping shy of abrasion. Then he did the same to his hair and scalp. By the time he stepped out of the shower, he felt ready to face whatever they had planned for him.
The guard threw him a towel, which he tied around his hips. They climbed a staircase made of stone that ended near a magtrack with pristine silver coils that indicated infrequent use. Here, the air wasn’t thick with rot. Ty thought he smelled pine trees. Somewhere, a window or door was open to the outside.
Another hundred paces brought them to a room similar to the ones Ty had sat in during interrogations. Yet here, a young woman waited for him with a pair of sharp scissors in one hand and a razor in the other. She pointed to a stool. “Sit there, UCE.”
He gave her a salute and took a seat. Silently and efficiently, she cut his hair and shaved his beard. Brown clumps of matted hair spilled onto the floor and his bare feet. Within minutes, his hair was trimmed, not quite to military specs, but shorter than it was.
“Nice job,” he remarked, rubbing his smooth chin and cheeks. “What’s next? An oil massage? A sports rub-down?”