Night Child, page 3
There was no way she could stop him from doing whatever he intended, but she held herself rigid, raising her chin in helpless defiance, and stared hard at him, her black eyes crying her fear and hatred of him.
To her amazement, when she stilled he relaxed his grip on her mouth, and the minute he did she bit his hand so hard, she tasted the bitter metallic flavor of his blood.
"Bitch!"
She was so caught up in struggling to free herself from him that she didn't notice he had spoken in English, and that his perfect pronunciation of the insult was American. She lurched past him, stumbled down the stairs, limped the length of the hall and fell full force against Aslam.
"You see there is no escape, pretty American girl," Aslam said grimly, grabbing her by the throat.
She thought he knew of the stranger on the stairs. "Why don't you bullies just shoot me, and get it over with?" she whispered.
"That would be too quick. Too easy." He touched her cheek briefly once, almost gently. "You should not have danced for Prince Ali, pretty American girl. It was big mistake. I have never killed a woman before. I do not like to kill you. You are brave—for a woman. But foolish, as all women are." He threw her roughly toward her prison.
He did not want to kill her, he said, but he would.
In the darkness of her cell, after he was gone, she closed her eyes, and the blackness seemed to suck her deeper and deeper. There was a blinding white flash and a stabbing pain in the back of her head. Only this time there were even more images that made no sense to her.
She was a child running lightly toward a boy who had an Indian-dark face, green eyes and straight black hair. He was holding out his arms, and she was filled with an inexplicable joy. From behind her, without warning, she heard the sound of thunder, only it wasn't thunder. It was a man on a demon-horse, the pounding of its hooves shaking the earth as man and horse bore down on her. Frightened, she turned back to the boy with the green eyes, but he had disappeared. Just as she was fainting with terror beneath the flying hooves, a hand clamped around her waist, pulling her up, slinging her belly down across the saddle. The last thing she saw was the mad gallop of horse's hooves, the careening ground, flying rocks.
Slowly Dawn came back to the present, but her courage had melted before this vision. Every nerve-ending in her body was vibrating with fear. Was she losing her mind? Was it the perpetual darkness? Was that why she was having these terrifying white flashes? She'd never been able to stand the darkness.
She collapsed on her filthy pallet. Whether it was hours or minutes later, she would never know. Something heavy thudded against the wall outside, arousing her from her terrified lethargy. She sat up and strained to hear. Someone or something fell hard again. There was a muffled cry of pain as fist slammed into bone. A boot heel into gut. A desperate battle was going on out in the hall. She heard a single shriek of agony and recognized that it belonged to Aslam.
He had come back.
Why?
Was it time for her to die?
There was an ominous quiet, but she knew someone was outside the door.
Quickly she shoveled everything, her food, the lamp, her scanty belongings under the ragged quilt and ran to hide behind the door.
A key turned in the lock, and she shrank against the wall as the door opened a crack. In the gray-black light she made out the glint of a gun barrel. Then she saw the immense outline of a masculine body.
It was the menacing stranger from the hall.
He was death's angel, and in an instant flash, she knew she was not ready to die.
He stepped into the room and approached the bed, speaking softly, almost beguilingly. He had come to kill her. She knew it.
He pointed his gun at the lump and kicked it. When it remained motionless he snatched the quilt aside.
She bolted outside, only to stumble over a slumped figure in the doorway and fall flat on her face on the dirt floor. Behind her she heard the merciless clamor of footsteps as the giant tracked her. She struggled to get up, but she was weakened from her imprisonment. As she crawled along the floor, the man lunged and dragged her back by the hair, falling on top of her, rolling with her. When they were still, he pinioned both her wrists above her head, with one hand. Straddling her waist with his thighs, he held her down. All she could do was kick and flail the air helplessly with her legs. Still she fought him, twisting in his hold, her soft body like a sweet devouring flame wherever any part of him touched her.
In breathless English, he whispered, "Honey, don't make me hurt you."
Through the haze of her terror, his words made no impression. Aslam had spoken English, too. She kept struggling, so he tightened his grip. Her arms went numb.
She felt the warm grizzle of the man's unshaven cheek against her face. She heard his ragged whisper, "Julia, honey...it's Kirk. Don't fight me."
Names from the past.... They meant nothing.
Memories assailed her and were gone, vanishing into a mist of whiteness and terror. Kirk... Julia... What did they mean? Who did they belong to, these names? The flashes of light? They had to do with nightmares. Her head throbbed dully.
All she knew was that this monster who held her down was some living figment from a long-forgotten nightmare that had been more horrible than even her present terror. He had said he would come back, and he had.
She struggled more fiercely than before.
"Damn," he muttered. "I didn't want to do this."
He wrapped a cord around her hands and bound them behind her back. Then he stuffed a wad of clothing into her dry mouth and gagged her. Her eyes flared with new hatred as he yanked her unceremoniously to her feet and pushed her forward. When she stumbled on her bad foot, he leaned over, examined it and uttered a low curse. When she cringed from his rough probing, he slung her over his shoulders as if her weight was nothing and stalked down the hall.
As he bore her up the stairs to a fate too horrible to contemplate, her tortured mind went mercifully black.
* * *
Three
Fiery waves of pain, radiating from Dawn's ankle, brought her whimpering back to consciousness. Her mouth was dry and sore from some hideous cloth that seemed to work like a dirty sponge, soaking up what little moisture had remained in her parched tissues. Thin cords cut into her wrists like knives.
The narrow room was hotter than the cell where she'd been imprisoned before, and it stank with some gagging smell from a dark smoke sifting through a glassless window. But at least the brilliant moonlight cast her surroundings in a silver half light, and she was no longer in the dark.
Then she saw him, the cause of all these new miseries, the malevolent giant who'd accosted her on the stairs. He was dressed in his long black robes with a black kaffiyeh draped rakishly over his head, its folds concealing his face. He was leaning his great male body nonchalantly against a wall as he shoved a cartridge into a long-barreled gun. He set the gun down for a second and took a lengthy swig from a goatskin jug.
She could hear the liquid sloshing in the jug as he drank from it carelessly, and her dry tongue flailed against the wad of cotton stuffed in her mouth.
He set the jug down and licked his lips. Even in the dim light, she could see a pearly droplet glisten on his mouth before he smeared it away with the back of a long-fingered brown hand. The lip of the jug glimmered with the same wetness.
Her thirst was like a dry ache in her sore mouth. She could feel it burning in every parched crack of her lips.
The swilling, thoughtless pig! She shivered with hatred.
He gave not a thought to her comfort, not a thought to the possibility of her thirst. She could be dead for all he cared. Instead, he turned his attention to his weapon. She didn't know anything about guns, but as she watched his deft movements, his nimble expertise, she knew he must surely be a professional killer.
Dawn felt a premonitory quiver at the base of her spine as she considered what he'd probably do to her. Then she fought to stifle the chill of fear. Son of the Devil, he might be, but he hadn't shot her yet. He hadn't even touched her. And he had something to drink.
She writhed and twisted, straining against her bonds until she hurt all over in an effort to attract his attention.
He was totally absorbed with his gun, rubbing it lovingly, loading it. She watched those long tapered fingers move up and down his weapon as gently as though he were caressing a woman.
When he did look up it was never at her. He kept a sharp eye on what was going on outside the window. There was a predatory silence about him, the careful, patient waiting silence of the hunter, the silence of a man in total control of his body and his emotions.
She was going to have to scoot herself across the dirt floor to get his attention. Very slowly, because of her ankle and her bound hands, she inched toward him, moving her feet forward, placing her hands on the ground, and then lifting her hips, repeating this slow, painful process over and over again.
Suddenly, in reflex to the unexpected motion in the dark room, he whirled. His gun clicked, and she was staring down the shiny black length of it into the steel slits of his narrowed eyes.
She squeezed her lids shut and gulped a deep breath.
He lowered his gun. Carefully he set it down and swaggered toward her, bending down to her level.
"So you're awake at last, sleeping princess?" His voice was smooth and soft, faintly mocking and so sensually pleasant that it made her shiver. "It's about time."
She nodded, furious that she could find any part of him attractive, even his voice. Then she bounced her trussed body up and down on the ground. A torrent of abuse welled in her soul and blazed from her eyes.
He pushed the folds of his kaffiyeh aside, and a sliver of dazzling desert moonlight cut across his harshly chiseled features. She found herself staring into the most beautiful pair of green eyes she had ever seen. They were densely shadowed by the longest, straightest black lashes that no man, let alone this brute, deserved. Every dancer she knew would have gladly sold her soul for such exquisite eyes and lashes. Yet there was nothing feminine about their hot male appraisal as they swept insolently from her face downward, lingering on her small breasts budding against her scanty pink costume.
She had always hated men who stripped women with devouring glances. She especially hated this one. There was something about his eyes, something dreadfully familiar that she didn't dare dwell upon because if she did, it would stir that vague, unnameable terror that came with those blinding white flashes and headaches.
"You look like hell," he murmured, bringing her back to the present with a torrent of abusive gibes, "but at least you're still in one piece. When you've had a bath, you won't be half-bad—for a skinny, bosomless runt."
Bosomless! Runt! Normally she would have bristled from such insults, but she was hopeful that maybe his thinking her less than perfectly endowed was what had thus far kept him from physically attacking her.
This hope was instantly dashed when the bloodied hand she had bitten moved toward her forehead. He meant only to smooth the limp black snarls out of her eyes, but she cringed, afraid of what any gentleness from a man like him might mean.
He read her terror and snapped his hand back as if burned, his expression grim. "I'm not going to hurt you, princess," he growled. "And as for wanting you in that way—" His voice lowered to a sneer. "You're not my type."
He spoke English! This fact finally penetrated. He spoke English! With some sort of twangy Southern drawl! He was an American! A despicable, insulting one, but an American.
He wasn't one of them! But if he wasn't, who was he?
She lifted her trembling chin, and through lowered lashes, she studied him warily. What she saw rekindled all her chilling fears.
He seemed half-tamed and lethal, his large body coiled with a savage inner tension. Smooth, sun-bronzed flesh stretched tightly across his prominent cheekbones, giving him the ruthless aura of an Indian warrior. There were hollows beneath his eyes and grooves etched into his cheeks. His hawklike nose had been broken once and never set.
He was older than she, by at least ten years. She could see the fine lines beneath his eyes as well as the deeper ones bracketing his mouth. A jagged white scar winged from his left black brow and disappeared inside his kaffiyeh. Someone hadn't liked him any better than she did and had split that bitter, arrogant face open.
He had lived a hard life, and it showed in the implacable set of his square jaw, in the thin determined line of his mouth, in the world-weary cynicism of his eyes. Not a trace of boyish softness lingered in his harsh features. He was all man, virile, terrifyingly masculine to the core. Obviously, he was an uncooperative, domineering sort. He hadn't shaved in days, and the shadow of thick black bristles intensified his thoroughly disreputable look.
She had always liked elegant, sophisticated men, not he-men, brute male chauvinists without an ounce of culture like this gorilla.
Her eyes glittered with disdain. He read her mind. When she frowned in distaste, his magnificent knowing eyes sparked with the faintest trace of insolence before he deliberately obliterated it.
She forced herself to look away as though she had grown bored with him.
Awareness of his tightly-coiled, awesome maleness consumed every pulsating sense in her body.
"I guess I don't look any better to you than you do to me," he drawled dryly. "Like it or not, we're stuck with each other, and believe me, I don't like spending my time with some sissy-girl in toe shoes any better than you like being with me."
She struggled, fought against her bonds, chewed on her gag in rage.
"Hey, hey," he whispered, grabbing her arms and holding her still. "When you think you can control your urge to scream like a shrew or attack me like a spoiled brat—" Her eyes riveted guiltily to his bitten hand. "I'll let you go. You damn near chomped off my thumb back there."
She hesitated, glaring at him sulkily, hating having to strike any bargain with such an odious individual, especially one who was responsible for her helplessness and gloating over the power he held over her.
"Look, lady, I've come through hell to try to get you out of this jam you so stupidly got yourself into."
Stupidly! What did this Neanderthal know of charitable deeds, of the sacrifices civilized people and entertainers made to help those less fortunate? She'd come here as part of an international goodwill troupe. The proceeds of the ballets she had danced were to be given to feed hungry children in Africa.
"Princess, do you have any idea of the danger you've put us in? We're right smack in the center of Aslam Nouri's terrorist camp in a remote village he controls. Worse, we're slap-dab in the middle of one of the world's most inhospitable deserts. I just beat the hell out of the guy and took his prime hostage. He's the most vengeful revolutionary fanatic this hellish country possesses. He would love nothing better than to rip out our hearts with his dagger and cook them over one of those wretched camel-dung fires that's stinking up this luxury suite. The only thing keeping us alive right now is an avaricious peasant I bribed into lending us this stable until daylight. If we get out, I've promised to make him a rich man until he dies. I'm your only hope, honey. Do I make myself clear?"
She stared at him in wide-eyed horror.
"Now, if I take off your gag and you make the slightest suspicious sound, we're both dead. And believe me, honey, these people have vengeful natures. They know how to make the most of a woman, even a skinny one, before they kill her."
He traced a callused fingertip from her lips, down the length of her throat, to the crest of her breast, his sensuous male touch saying more than ten thousand words.
His finger had burned a blazing trail down her skin. She shuddered, aware of him in a way she had no desire to be.
And he knew it!
His hand lingered for an infinitesimal second, near her nipple, heating her flesh, making her tremble. Something hot and dark and possessive flashed in his eyes. At last he pulled his hand away.
"So if you think you can squelch those murderous urges you feel toward me and keep quiet, I'll untie you," he muttered grimly. "Otherwise, I'll leave you like you are. Nod your head if you plan to behave."
She twisted her head up and down urgently.
When he hesitated, obviously reluctant to untie her, she bobbed it back and forth even more frantically. His eyes were skeptical, but at last he leaned over her and very gently untied her hands, her feet. Then her mouth.
She ran a bone-dry tongue across her crusted lips. "I'll despise you forever for the way you treated me, you...you, macho-man Neanderthal," she whispered, her low, ragged voice filled with loathing.
"If I'm so lucky," came his sardonic snort.
"What do you mean?"
"I just hope I've got—a forever. Then suit yourself, your highness." He shot her a leering grin. "Hate me."
All he was interested in was saving his own despicable hide.
She tried again to lick her lips with her dry tongue. "I'm thirsty," she whispered.
Casually he handed her his jug. She took one drink, wrinkled her nose, and wrenched the jug away from her lips with a grimace. "What is this stuff? I want water. Not this hot, putrid..."
"It's camel's milk, my high and mighty princess," he said with a smirk. "I sprinkled in a tad of bourbon to improve its flavor."
"I hate bourbon."
"I hate camel's milk. Drink it. The water here is even worse."
He got up and went back to the window. Satisfied that there was nothing to be alarmed about outside, he rummaged in his pack, pulled out a can, carefully peeled back the top and handed it to her.
Vienna sausage!
After the nauseous alien stuff she'd been fed, the mere scent was heavenly. She pulled a sausage out and sank her teeth into it. She had eaten at the best restaurants in New York, but nothing had ever tasted as luscious as that first tender pink sausage dissolving between tongue and teeth. She stared up at him, her dislike lessening, a fierce gratitude shining in her enormous eyes as she licked her fingers. She ate the rest of the sausages greedily.
