Blush

by Suzanne Forster

  The sweat beading on his forehead had begun to trickle down his temples, but the parched air blowing in the windows dried the droplets before they reached his cheekbones. There wasn't even enough moisture in the air to send up the tangy odors of creosote bush and bur sage, but he could smell the gritty desert dust. He could even taste it.

  A plastic water bottle was clamped to the side of the console by his knee. He picked up the container and drank from it deeply and thirstily. When he was done, he wiped the mouth and handed it to her, all without easing up on the gas. She wrinkled her nose and continued staring pensively out the window.

  "I have a theory about people who drive at breakneck speeds, " she told him, not stopping to inquire about his interest in said theory. "I've always thought they were displacing aggression. Since they couldn't act on their primitive urges, they drove like bats out of hell instead. "

  Could damn well be, Jack thought. In his case, the primitive urge was to break a few things, starting with her fingernails.

  "Their primitive sexual urges, " she added.

  That made him look. What the hell could she possibly know about his primitive sexual urges? She refrained from returning his sidelong stare, but he detected a faintly superior air in her profile, as if she prided herself on having him all figured out, urges included. He doubted that. He seriously did. But she had him curious.

  "If you really want to know what somebody's like, get in a car with him, " she continued, apparently determined to share her cherished theory in its entirety. "People who won't use their turn signals are probably bad communicators, habitual lane changers have trouble with commitment, and slowpokes are secretly hostile. "

  "What does your theory say about men who lay rubber?"

  That made her look. "Excuse me?"

  He let up on the gas, hit the brakes, and pulled the van to the side of the road. He not only laid a little rubber, he raised plenty of dust. The powdery stuff flew as he brought the car to a shuddering stop. It swirled into the cab, catching in the sunlight, fine golden motes that sprinkled his hostage with a halo that made her look deceptively angelic.

  Fighting a different urge this time—the desire to stare at her lovely, startled mouth—he reminded himself that any resemblance she bore to the angels was strictly superficial. The woman was nine parts hellcat by all accounts.

  Now her much-photographed features were frozen between shock and suspicion as he produced a bandanna from the pocket of his jeans, pulled the material taut, and twirled it into a band.

  "What are you going to do with that?" she asked, her voice going faint.

  "Act on my primitive sexual urges?"

  "You're not going to blindfold me again?"

  "No, I'm going to gag you. Turn around. "

  "Gag me?" She flinched back, incredulous. "Why?"

  "Turn it around, " he repeated patiently. "Unless you want me to do that, too. "

  She made a sound of disgust and swung around, her shoulders heaving as he reached up to drop the bandanna over her head.

  "I can't believe you're doing this, " she snapped, looking over her shoulder at him. "Apparently I must have hit pretty close to the mark with my theory? Is that it? I threatened you?"

  "Yeah—" A snort of laughter escaped him. "I'm shaking in my boots. Now stay put. "

  She went silent, her shoulders continuing to heave as he slipped the bandanna between her soft, taut lips and secured it with a knot. Her dark hair caressed his hands like silk as he worked, and although the scent coming off her body carried hints of sweat and dust, it was a pungent female perfume—hot and angry, fervently excited.

  The tightness he'd noticed in his thighs was creeping upward, bringing the promise of deeper pleasures with it. There was a hot spark of life in his jeans, and he wanted like hell to indulge the sensation. But there was only one reason to do that and a million reasons not to. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was threatened. All he knew at the moment was that he wanted her petulant little mouth silent and her award-winning ass still. That way he would have the peace and quiet to plan his next move. That way he wouldn't have to hear her theories or her clicking fingernails.

  "I will pee my pants!" Gus threatened. "If you don't put me down immediately, I'll do it, I swear. "

  Her dire warning fell on deaf ears. Apparently Mr. Quiet-But-Deadly had no objection to the idea of a golden shower. He might even like it, she realized despairingly. He'd parked the van some time ago, lifted her into his arms, and now he was crushing her nearly breathless as he labored through the sand toward some destination he'd refused to disclose. In a bewildering move, he'd removed her gag, blindfolded her, and tied her wrists. If he'd done it to make sure she couldn't slow him up by struggling, it had worked. She was limited to stiffening her body like an indignant child and demanding to be released.

  She had no doubt that if some gossip reporter were lurking in the sagebrush, he'd say the beautiful brat was being difficult again, making unreasonable requests of her abductor, and generally harassing the poor devil. Her every move seemed to be catnip to the tabloid press, but she didn't understand why they persisted in seeing her as a holy terror simply because she knew what she wanted in life and went after it. How often did men get faulted for that sort of thing?

  "If I die out here from a burst bladder, " she informed him ominously, "you'll have a wet, smelly corpse on your hands and not a penny for your trouble. "

  He trudged on, his silence as frustrating as her bonds. He hadn't responded to a single word she'd said so far, and though she'd never been one to beat a dead horse, she hadn't been bluffing. If he didn't let her make a pit stop, she would soon be irrigating the desert.

  "Kidnapping is a capital crime in this state, " she said. "Did you know that? Punishable by death—the gas chamber, if I'm not mistaken—which is not a pleasant way to go. And speaking of bladders, I've heard you lose control of your bladder and your bowels when they pull that switch—"

  He hoisted her up in his arms, his teeth grinding savagely as he bit out the first words he'd spoken since they left the van. "Why the hell did I take off that gag?"

  Gus sighed for the unreasonableness of all mankind and for this man in particular. "If you'd stop being macho, put me down, and let me walk, I'd be quiet!"

  "You're barefoot, you idiot!"

  He had a point. She was still wearing his coat, but there was only one pair of shoes between them, and he was using them. It probably wasn't very smart to expose the most sensitive parts of her body to the griddle-hot sand anyway, though she wasn't sure which would be more hazardous, walking or whizzing.

  "Ouch," she thought aloud.

  Exhausted from the heat and the bickering, she heaved a great sigh and slumped against his chest. Why wasn't he exhausted? she wondered. He'd been hauling her and a duffel bag full of supplies around for what seemed like hours. With the desert sun pounding down on both of them like a sledgehammer, it was difficult even to breathe.

  "Aren't you getting tired?" she asked, knowing better than to expect an answer. Once she had made her heroic escape from this man—and she would—if the tabloid press should ask her to describe him, she would tell them that his most annoying trait was his refusal to communicate. "I sincerely doubt that he uses turn signals, and you know what that means, " she would tell them.

  She went quiet then, surrendering to the heat, the silence, his superior strength, the ultimate helplessness of her situation, the paternalistic society at large, and everything else that was oppressive in life. It wasn't her nature to do anything halfway, including surrendering, and to her great surprise, there was something oddly relaxing about it.

  His powerful, lunging gait made her body rock gently in his arms, and he was probably holding her that much tighter to compensate for the unsteadiness. She'd never been one of those give-me-a-gorilla-with-a-vocabulary women, and being carted around the Mojave was not her idea of a fun date. But she had to admit, it was rather sweet of him to carry her in one-hundred-plus degree heat. H
e must be dying, she thought, he really must.

  Given her profession, there'd been plenty of men in her life who'd wanted her in one way or another, but very few of them ever made her feel, well... Unaccountably, the word that came to mind was protected, though it was a strange way to characterize the situation with him. She was probably far too independent to allow that sort of relationship with a man, but this one hadn't really given her a choice, had he?

  She turned her head into his shoulders, seeking shelter. The rest of her body was covered by the overcoat, but the blindfold exposed the lower part of her face, and the sun was scorchingly direct. It did no good to wet her cracked lips, because they dried almost as soon as her tongue touched them.

  The heat was starting to get to her. Her body didn't feel quite right and neither did her head. She was light and heavy at the same time, and her thoughts were straying off to places she couldn't quite follow. She laughed softly for no particular reason, and then it flitted through her thoughts that she might be suffering from sunstroke. Weren't the symptoms weakness, lassitude, delirium?

  "I was just wondering what I should call you?" Pleasantly woozy, she mumbled against his damp cotton shirt. "Mr. Kidnapper, maybe?"

  He didn't answer, so she went on, amusing herself with the various possibilities. "Let's see... how about the Masked Avenger? I always liked that one. It's from a comic book, I think. How do you feel about Snidley Whiplash? Or maybe Jack? How does that strike you?"

  "Jack?"

  He sounded startled. Or maybe his voice had simply cracked with the heat. At least she'd got a response out of him. She could feel his heartbeat against her shoulder. "Yeah, Jack, as in Jack the Ripper. "

  Laughter, she thought. Was that what she'd heard? A rustle of laughter? "Okay, Jack it is, " she said, glad that was settled.

  "Why don't you call me what my mother used to call me," he suggested. "You had a mother?" She looked up at him, as if she could see him through the blindfold.

  "What'd she call you?"

  "Satan."

  Her throat burned with smothered laughter. "Your mom and I should talk. "

  Suddenly her forehead felt itchy and she rubbed it against his collar bone as languidly as a cat who was angling to be stroked. The stinging sensation she felt told her the sun had struck again. She was going to have little splotches of sunburn to go with her little blotches of nail polish.

  He made an odd sound, as if he were clearing his throat. She liked that sound, almost as much as she liked the hard, steady thump of his heart. She'd never been around a man who seemed so completely immune to her and preferred it that way. It intrigued her.

  "About how much longer?" she asked him conversationally. "Any chance there's an oasis on the way?" She had already decided to take his silence as an affirmation. Might as well think positive under the circumstances. It was possible he was nodding.

  As he forged onward, her thoughts began to stray again, creating fanciful associations with the situation. Being carried like a child drew her back to the early years of her life, the sordid years before her mother married Lake Featherstone, Sr. Oddly what she remembered most vividly were the soiled rugs—crawling across them as a toddler, playing with her dolls on them as a grade schooler. Threadbare and dirty, varying little from one fleabag apartment to another, those carpets had been one of the few constants of her young life.

  Her other strongest recollection was of abject loneliness. Her mother had worked nights in a restaurant, and she'd rarely come home until dawn. Too fearful to sleep, Gus had kept the lights on and the TV running all night, but it was the picture books an elderly woman in the next apartment had given her that had held back the darkness and kept the monsters at bay. Fairy tales had been Gus's salvation.

  Embarrassed as she would have been to admit it now, she'd lost herself in fantasies of Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella, identifying especially with the last one. She was Cinderella. She was every lonely, neglected young girl who had ever dreamed of being rescued by a dashing prince.

  Even after her mother's marriage, the fantasy of being rescued had sustained her through the troubled years with her stepsiblings. She'd eventually realized that no one rides to anyone's rescue unless there's something in it for them. Life had made her a hardheaded realist. But now, with the sun so hot and her thoughts so fuzzy, she could almost imagine herself being cradled in her rescuer's arms, being swept up and carried off to some glorious new existence, a fairy tale life, except that she was bound and blindfolded, and the man carrying her off was anything but a prince....

  "This is it, " he announced.

  The kidnapper's harsh words intruded on Gus's reveries. "This is what?" she asked.

  "The spa I told you about. We're here. "

  He tilted her until her feet made contact with a smooth, hard, hot surface, and then he began to untie her blindfold. Gus could feel him working at the knot. When the bandanna finally fell off, she blinked to clear her vision. If the sun hadn't been blinding her, she would have sworn she was staring at a mountain of rotted wood, rusted tailings, and chicken wire. "Where is it?" she asked.

  She stood on a piece of granite that apparently served as the front porch, but the heap didn't look any better up close.

  "Go on in," he said.

  "Does it have a door?"

  He kicked a column of wood that resembled window shutters. As the thing swung forward, Gus stared into the guts of what must have been a dilapidated mining shack from a much earlier era.

  "Oh, my God!" she screamed as she stepped inside. The kidnapper had crowded in behind her, and she slammed up against him in her effort to back out the door. "Lizards, look at them! Millions of them!"

  The tiny creatures scuttled in every direction.

  "They don't bite," he assured her mordantly.

  "No, but that thing does!" Gus plowed into him again, letting out a shriek loud enough to rock the shack. There was a rattler coiled not four feet away from her, and the glare of its horrible iridescent eyes pierced her courage like an icy shaft of steel.

  As the snake began to slowly unwind, Gus froze solid. She couldn't move. Her coat had fallen open, but she couldn't summon the strength to close it. All she could do was whimper. She was terrified of snakes as she was of nothing else in life. She had fought valiantly to get her childhood fears under control, but she had never been able to conquer the one she was staring at now.

  Riveted by the evil creature, she pressed up against her captor. "Let me out, " she whispered. "Please, please!"

  The snake flashed into the air, and Gus shrieked again.

  Its twitching tail sent up an obscenely familiar sound, the death rattle. The reptile swayed toward her with a searing hiss. Its forked tongue slithered repulsively.

  "You have a gun," she cried wildly, jerking at his chambray shirt "Shoot it! Kill it!"

  Gus closed her eyes and turned her face into his chest, steeling herself for the gun shot. When nothing happened, she reared back and looked up at him. Her fists had wadded his shirt into sodden clumps. "Shoot it, " she pleaded weakly. "Why don't you shoot it?"

  "If you'd stay cool," he said, "it might just slither away. "

  But she couldn't. Cool wasn't an option for Gus. She'd been terrorized by snakes, literally locked up in a pit with the vile creatures when she was a child, and she couldn't even think about one without shuddering in revulsion. Swaying in his arms, she felt the bile rise up in her throat. She was either going to be sick all over him or faint.

  The death rattle burst into her consciousness. She turned back just as the snake lunged at her, its fangs bared. Horrified she watched the whiplike blur of motion, but could do nothing to save herself. It was a silver spear of death flying straight for her bare leg!

  A silver spear of death with an exploding head!

  The kick from the gun rocked up the kidnapper's arm and reverberated through Gus's body. She wrenched away from him and turned to the wall, shutting out the gruesome scene. "What kind of man ar
e you?" she whimpered. "That thing could have killed me! If you'd missed, if you'd taken one second more to shoot, it would have been too late!"

  When he didn't answer, she glanced at him over her shoulder.

  He was staring at the floor in front of him with a look of barely suppressed irony. "Seems I was too late, " he said.

  There was a puddle in front of him, in exactly the place where she'd been standing. As she gazed at the wet spot and up at him, Gus realized she didn't have to go to the bathroom anymore.

  Chapter 5

  Huddled on the shack's only bed, a sagging metal cot propped up in the corner against the front wall, Gus picked at what hot-pink polish was left on her toenails and stared fixedly at a patch of dry rot on the diseased wooden floor. She was suffering post-traumatic shock. That was the only way to explain her unnatural interest in decomposing inorganic matter. It was easier to watch the floor disintegrate than her life. Stranger still, the blight appeared to be eating away a sizable portion of the wood planks even as she watched.

  Some spa, she thought. This was not in the brochure.

  Lizards haunted her peripheral vision, shimmying up and down the walls, their tails twitching like tiny green whips. Flies darted through the broken side window, madly buzzing the tiny spot where she'd ignominiously wet the floor and the larger one where the snake had lain before the kidnapper removed it.

  Absently Gus began to count flies as they performed their aerial acrobatics and made their precision landings.

  She reached a number in the high two digits before revulsion shuddered through her. Counting insects? She really was losing it. If Frances Brightly were here, she'd be swatting and stamping with a vengeance. Everyone was terrified of the housekeeper, which was why she'd become Gus's role model in the impressionable years after Gus's mother had disappeared. Even now, when Gus forgot how to be tough, she asked herself what Frances would have done.

  "Frances would have shot herself, " she mumbled, surveying the horrors of her one-room cell. The shack's interior and exterior were virtually indistinguishable. The whole place was crumbling, dust to dust as the Bible said, though that process had sounded poetic, and this was anything but. There was a grimy kitchen sink of sorts, a wood-stove, and a strangely decorative bistro table made of rusted wrought iron.