Abduction (7 page)

“I’ve no idea what you mean—I’m just here on a little errand. I’ve brought the silver cigarette case I promised you.”

His smile took on a tinge of sincerity.

“Would you like some breakfast?”

“Sure. Thanks.” She forced a calm tone.

“What would you like? An omelet? Cereal?”

“Cereal, please.” Quiet, Stiff. Polite.

“I always have cereal when I’m in the city. Somehow when I’m out here I always have to have an enormous greasy breakfast.”

He was making a conscious effort to talk, to put her and himself at ease.

He poured a bowl of cereal, doused it with milk, and brought it to Devan.

“I’ll grab you a spoon. Would you like some juice?”

“Sure. Thank you.”

Vaughn made himself an omelet while she ate her cereal. He took a chair across the table from her when his food was ready.

“The driver will be back for me in three weeks. If you can stand me for that long, we’ll just hike to the pickup point that morning, and you’ll be back in Seattle that afternoon.”

“Three weeks?” Fresh despair at the thought of being trapped there with him for so long. “People will think I’m dead.”

“You haven’t heard any search party activity?”

“No.”

She answered quietly, bowing her head. Of course no one would be searching for her this far down river. Or in this forest at all. Who knew where she was? Only one other person. She felt her hand trembling as she took a drink of juice.

“Are you cold?”

“A little.”

He went to the fireplace and got a fire going, then went into the kitchen. He came back with two big lovely peaches.

“Have one. They won’t stay fresh for long.”

“Thanks.”

The fruit was firm and fragrant. She took a bite, pleased by the sweet tartness.

“So, what do you do? Back in the real world, in Seattle?”

“I’m a student. I study literature at the university.”

“Ah, yes, Dostoyevsky.”

“That’s right, I’m in the Dostoyevsky department. All crime, punishment, epilepsy and tuberculosis, all the time.”

Sarcasm. Her usual defense mechanism. Like him she was struggling to be conversational, hoping to put him at ease. She was still very frightened of him, not trusting his congeniality this morning after his roughness the night before.

“Fascinating. I majored in Miller. All parasites, alcoholism, and STDs, all the time.”

“Well, they’re only offering that as a grad program now.” They were both smiling watered-down smiles.

As he looked at her he could not quite resolve the person she appeared to be with the person she had to be, to be there in his cabin. Maybe she was crazy. Really crazy. The others had been criminal, but they’d taken what they wanted like robbers. In, out. Maybe this one had a different plan. Would anyone be nuts enough to become obsessed with a stranger? Seek him out, thinking they could make him fall in love? Or worse? He started getting images from “Basic Instinct” and “Misery.” She felt him scrutinizing her, trying to solve her riddle, as he bit into the peach he had been holding distractedly as they talked. As he ate it, his teeth tearing the delicate 58

skin and sinking into the tender flesh, the golden juices wetting his lips, Devan was dismayed to feel herself flush. The image of him committing that terribly intimate act had forced itself into her mind. She could almost feel his mouth on her. She had the feeling that Vaughn was deliberately being suggestive as he devoured his morsel of fruit.

Flushed and nervous she got up from the table. He saw, but did not understand her sudden discomfort.

“I’ll wash up if you’re finished.”

She took his plate, then went to the sink with their dishes. When she had finished she returned to the table and picked up her book, anxious to return to the comforting isolation of the little bedroom.

Thirsty, he rose from his chair and followed her into the kitchen, and poured himself a second glass of juice. Standing there, leaning back against the counter, his gaze drifted to her, just a couple feet from him. He noticed a small hole in the shirt he had given her to wear, just over her right shoulder blade. Through it he could see a shaded inch or two of her pale skin. The torn fabric was curling and fraying, seemingly wanting to curl and curl until her whole back was bare, fray and fray until every last little crinkly thread had abandoned her, baring her back, her shoulders, her arms, and more.

Her hidden collarbones. Her breasts. Her belly. All her hot, soft flesh. Almost in a trance he moved in behind her, leaning past her to set his empty glass in the sink where she was rinsing the soap from their dishes. For a moment he forgot himself, absorbed by the sight of the wispy little hairs at the back of her neck that had escaped from the rubber bands holding the rest of her tresses prisoner in two neat pigtails, the way those 59

wayward wisps quivered in the soft breeze of his breath, the way that breath altered the smooth topography of her pale neck, raising delicate goose bumps.

He snapped out of it. Stepped back and walked off. He disappeared into his room and closed the door. And then he was careful to be perfectly quiet.

Under a tenuous truce they passed their day. If he caught her watching him he immediately suspected her of mentally recording his activities for illicit purposes—

private or public. When she noticed his maleficent eyes on her she felt a flood of fear rush her veins, feeling her vulnerability, trapped there with this moody stranger in the remote isolation of his cabin. In reality, both were doing their best to keep quietly to themselves, each watching the other only when they sensed they were being watched.

For her, that first long day, and for days after, every second in his presence felt like a moment of infinite peril. Each time she went into her little bedroom she feared she would hear his heavy tread behind her, feel him pushing her into the room. Each time she emerged she feared finding him there, in the hall, just outside her door, ready to take hold of her, push her against the hallway wall. Tear his clothes from her body, press himself to her, force her down onto the floor.

She tortured herself endlessly with thoughts of him taking hold of her somewhere, holding her against the wall by her throat, staring at her with a look of immense self-satisfaction in the knowledge of his absolute power over her, of her utter helplessness alone with him there in his cabin. Her look of fear, the trembling of her body, the panicked tempo of her breath would make him smile cruelly as he took the zipper of her sweatshirt between his thumb and forefinger. He would watch her face 60

contort with terrible fear as he began slowly pulling the zipper down. Then, still holding her by the throat with one hand, with the other he would slowly, calmly strip off first the sweatshirt, then, his huge fist clenched around the hem of the t-shirt he would pull it up, up, and over her head and it would give her up as he pulled it toward him and down, sliding it easily off her arms…

She could not even imagine fighting him. Every thought of defending herself led, involuntarily, painfully, to thoughts of his brutal retribution. Her pathetic efforts to hit him or push him away met with a rain of terrible, violent blows. If she thought of hiding a knife on her person, which she might use to fend off an attack, the image of him snatching it away from her, then using it on her, slashing her face and body, forced itself into her mind. If she pulled the gun on him, she was sure, he would turn the tables and terrorize her, holding the gun on her as he forced himself on her, made her touch him.

She suffered, choking in this atmosphere of unfamiliar vulnerability. Never in her life had she felt this way—weak, powerless, utterly hostage to the will and whims of another. But Conrad had made sure that she knew she could not fight him. That she could not defy him. And now that she was here, with this other man, she still felt defenseless.

There was something else tormenting her. Something she could not understand.

In spite of her anguished vulnerability, her fear of Vaughn was tinged with a different feeling. A peculiar longing—incomprehensible, yet undeniable.

This stranger in the woods was a curious package of contradictions. His powerful body incongruous with his calm and surprising grace of movement and his deep, resonant voice which, except for his moments of fury when they had first encountered 61

one another, was always low and soft. The sharp intensity of his eyes and the rigidity of his strong jaw and hard face went starkly against his tendency to quiet introspection through the days and evenings.

And never in her young life had she been so insistently and disruptively aware of a man’s physical presence. Of his body. As much as she dreaded his attention, his touch, whenever she was close enough to sense his heat she could not resist imagining pressing herself up against him. And in everything he did, his every movement, there was an alluring sensuality. When they were close she would watch his hands, with their long, graceful fingers, watching him turn the pages of a book, or kneading dough for a loaf of bread, or deftly maneuvering over his guitar, and without wanting to or meaning to she would imagine him touching her—an innocent caress of her arm, a delicate stroke as the back of softly curved fingers surfed the curl of her throat, less innocent touches elsewhere.

When she went to bed that night she lay awake, thinking about this strange man.

He was so different from that other, yet he aroused the same fear. And similar feelings that were…not fear. The memory of his strange eyes, always coldly flashing, sometimes like liquid pools of mercury, sometimes like metal disks rough and faceted with shards of graphite, seemed to prick her skin with countless tiny stingers, making her itch and burn. She had caught him looking at her, watching her, many times. Usually he did not even look away when she met his gaze. She could never fathom what he was thinking as he stared.

She thought of his body, so tall, and broad, and hard-looking. And his face. When he was calm, reading something or playing his guitar, he looked somehow…Homeric.

She laughed at herself, at the triteness of likening a man to a Greek god. But with his powerful form, his abundant dark hair, his rather prominent nose and angular jaw, he invited the comparison. Yet the similarity was even more apt in his embodiment of both a fierce physicality and a brooding calm. The thought of his size, his strength, made her stomach clench with a little ticklish spasm. She found herself powerfully aroused when she considered once again that, though he was being kind to her now, he could overpower her at any moment he liked, do anything to her.

She lay in bed, considering touching herself. The idea seemed strange to her.

Never before, except with
him
. She screened Conrad from her mind. Leaving her hands at rest, folded over her ribs, she squeezed her thighs together and released. A warm pulse of pleasure answered from between her legs. She raised her knees and parted them wide, considering the feeling of openness, of vulnerability it gave her, even alone in her room, under her covers. She stretched her arms back, over her head, arching her back, thinking about her breasts sticking forward, her bottom sticking back, the taut feeling of her stomach as she extended her torso. She flattened her back and brought her hands down to her stomach. It was warm, rhythmically rising and falling.

Trying to submerge herself in the still waters of the now, to drown out all thoughts of Conrad and what he had made her do, she lifted one hand and held it above her sex.

Very slowly she lowered it. With the lightest imaginable touch she let her fingers drift in random motions over the thin cotton fabric of Vaughn’s shorts, sensing with her fingers the delicate rising and falling landscape of her hip bones, the little hill of her mound, the shallow basin of her belly. Reaching further down she gently cupped her hand between 63

her legs, pressed her palm and fingers against herself, pulled slowly forward, pushed gently back.

It still amazed her, the intensity of the sensation she could arouse from her body.

Her very lightest caress, the one she could feel with her sex but not with her hand, stirred a delicious yearning ache. She was not yet open to herself there, her most delicate, sensitive places were still hidden from her wandering fingers as they teased her mound and lips through her shorts, gliding further and further back, down between her thighs, past her sex, sliding lightly down along the valley where the firm, plump spheres of her ass met, then back up, pressing a little more intensely, gently rubbing her still hidden clit between her fingers and her pubic bone.

She had not touched them, but she felt her nipples stiffening, tingling vaguely as if asking for her attention. She stilled her hand for a moment where it lay at her sex.

Laying still and quiet she focused her attention on her breasts, imagining how they looked at this moment as she lay on her back. Their roundness gently softened against her prone body, but her aureole still rising above, bearing her nipples up. With her two hands she took the hem of her t-shirt between thumbs and forefingers, and tugged down just a little, dragging the fabric against the tips of her breasts, feeling the subtle caress of the cotton. Just that was something. She slid her palms up her belly and gently cupped her breasts, feeling their soft warmth filling and overfilling her hands. With two index fingers, then, she traced circles around that raised, constricted flesh and felt that deliciously irritating little pulling sensation from her stiffening nipples down through her belly to her sex. She went on, gently teasing herself, letting her fingertips brush lightly against those sensitive protrusions, then, almost forgetting how strange it was to 64

be doing this, all alone in the dark under the covers, she pinched her nipples, feeling those tugging strings running through her body constrict suddenly, and with each little pulsing squeeze at her tits she felt her sex cry out in response.

She was throbbing, down there, between her legs. She wanted it, wanted to get herself off, spreading her legs and rubbing her aching secret flesh. She forgot her selfconsciousness. With her left hand she lifted the waistband of Vaughn’s boxers away from her tummy, and her right hand took the invitation. Her bare skin was hot and smooth and eager for her fingertips. Tracing delicate circles, spiraling out then in before gliding down to the very first hint of her slit, then back along that crevice to the little bit of moisture awaiting her, taking it up, opening herself, seeking that tiny place of enormous feeling. She was thinking of Vaughn.