Ardor's Leveche (7 page)

“‘I love you’,” she mimicked him, thinking of the wild night they’d spent before she’d taken leave. “You love me, all right, you two-faced bastard!”

Entertaining thoughts of how she planned on breaking off relations with the Colonel made her head hurt even more. When the door to her cell slid back, the lights came up and a guard walked in carrying a tray of food, the smell made her sick to her stomach.

“I was told to tell you we’re thirty minutes from R-9,” the guard said, his upper lip twisted as he marched over to her bunk and bent over to place the food tray at the bottom of her bunk. The dishes rattled as he dropped the tray and turned to leave. He stopped, looking at her discarded bra and made a hateful sound with his lips.

Eyeing the unusual assortment of food on the tray, Ardor found herself asking the guard if such was the normal fare for prisoners.

The guard turned and his eyes raked over her. “Only for one of Major Breva’s whores,” he snapped and turned his back on her.

Despite the nausea lurking in her throat, Ardor cursed vehemently, trying to push aside the pain in her head. To be thought of as
any
man’s whore was an affront, and to be called one to her face angered her to the point of wanting to slit the guard’s throat.

The smells coming from the food were not only making her nausea worse, they were adding to the pain gathering in her temples. She rubbed at the discomfort, swallowed the bile pushing up her esophagus, and—holding her breath—got up from the bunk, picked up the food and carried it to the far corner of the cell where she placed it on the floor.

Straightening up, the pain seemed to get worse so she stumbled back to the bunk and laid down, drawing her knees up to lie there in a fetal position, the side of her face pressed into the soft pillow. She had not moved when Breva entered her cell.

37

Charlotte Boyett-Compo

The Storian major cast a look at the uneaten food and frowned. “It isn’t poisoned, wench,” he said.

“Did you mean what you said last night?” she muttered, recognizing his voice though she had not opened her eyes.

Breva flinched. Having no idea what his overlord had said, he simply stated that he never said anything he didn’t mean. “What particular thing are you referring to, wench?”

“That you will protect me from the Reaper. You won’t let him rape me.”

Scrunching his face up, Breva nodded. “Aye, I meant it.” He took a step closer to the bunk. “Did you, ah, enjoy last evening?”

“You are very good with your tongue, Major,” she replied.

Breva felt the heat wash up his face and had to bite the inside of his mouth to keep from groaning.

“I slept well, but now I hurt.”

Concern entered Breva’s eyes and he hurried to the bunk, squatting down beside it.

“He…” He cleared his throat and when he spoke, he sounded apologetic. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

Ardor forced her eyes open but the pain was so intense, she quickly closed them again. “It’s the implant,” she said. “I felt fine when I woke but as soon as I sat up, my head started hurting.”

Breva felt rather than heard movement behind him and looked around to see the Reaper standing in the doorway. “Her head is—”

“I know,” Lord Savidos cut him off. “I sent a guard to procure something to ease her pain until we can gain the caverns.”

“No drugs,” Ardor said with more force than had been prudent for she gagged, twisting over the side of the bunk as agony stabbed into her temples.

Breva jumped out of the way but when nothing but ungodly retching came from the woman’s throat, he knew she had nothing in her belly to bring up. He sat down beside her and held his hand against her forehead, bracing her as she continued to dry-heave.

“You are being foolish, wench,” the Reaper grumbled then spoke to Breva in the old language.

“No drugs!” Ardor repeated.

“Lord Savidos understands your concern but he doesn’t believe you will be able to make the trek to the caverns in your condition. Please let us—”

“No drugs,” she said, her voice weak, her throat strained from the gagging.

Breva looked up as his overlord bid him leave. “
Chanto
,” he said, “she is…”

The Reaper’s eyes glowed ruby red behind his mask and he jerked a gloved thumb behind him, ordering his 2-I-C from the cell.

38

Ardor’s Leveche

Removing his hand from Ardor’s forehead, Breva stood up and stalked to the door, a muscle working in his jaw. “
What are you about?
” he demanded in the old language as he passed.

“
She is in agony
,” his overlord replied in the same language. “
I will have her out before
we venture into the dust. Tell the techs to fill the room with olvido then arrange for a litter to
carry her to the base camp.
”

“No drugs,” Ardor said once more, somehow understanding that was what the conversation was about, though she could not make out the words.

Breva stared into the Reaper’s crimson eyes for a moment then nodded curtly.

“
You’d best clear out if you don’t want us carrying you to the caverns,
chanto!”

Ardor was aware of Breva leaving but even more aware of the man standing over her, staring down at her. She wedged one eye open long enough to take in the skeletal mask covering his face and the sweep of the black wool robe encasing his tall frame, then closed it.

“Go away,” she ordered.

Images of her lying naked in a field of daisies flitted unbidden through Ardor’s mind. She could feel warm air wafting over her flesh and smell the sweet scent of gardenia and honeysuckle.

“Stop it,” she said, knowing he was sending her the unwanted image.

He took a step closer to the bunk.

“If you rape me, I damned well might stroke out on you as bad as I hurt,” she warned him and was stunned when he laughed at her comment. Gritting her teeth she forced both eyes open and glared up at him. “I,” she said, punctuating each word as she spoke. “Am. Not. Afraid. Of. You.”

He snorted rudely then turned, his robe swirling behind him as exited the cell, the door closing quickly behind him.

Unaware she was casting the Reaper to the Abyss, Ardor began mumbling to herself. The pain in her head had dramatically decreased with his departure and in her rapidly advancing state of lassitude, she reasoned it had to have been his appearance that had brought about the pain in the first place.

Turning to her back, she drew her knees up and lay there with her hands folded together at her waist. She felt as though she was floating but it didn’t occur to her that she’d been drugged. Unbeknownst to her, she was inhaling the same narcotic that had put her to sleep the evening before.

“Damned ugly son of a bitch,” she called Lord Savidos then thought about what she’d said. His face might be as ugly as an overcooked egg but his voice had been sultry and mesmerizing as he had told her she was being foolish. That and when he had told Breva he had ordered something for her pain had been the first words she’d heard him speak in anything other than the grating, throaty whisper in a language she could not understand.

39

Charlotte Boyett-Compo

“I’d know that sexy voice anywhere,” she crooned as she watched spirals of multicolored lights dancing above her.

Gone entirely was the pain in her temples and try as hard as she could, she didn’t seem able to keep her eyes from closing. Her lips thrust out in a pout for the pretty lights were fascinating as they swirled across the ceiling. In some distant part of her brain she knew she’d been drugged against her will but, somehow, it just didn’t seem to matter.

Would he, she wondered as she lay there struggling to keep her eyes open and traced the spiraling lights with a limp hand, be as sensuous as his voice? Would his cock be long and slender, or longer yet with a circumference that would take her breath away? Did those skeletal gloves hide strong, powerful fingers with just the right amount of dark hair on the backs of his hand to pluck at after a long bout of sex?

“Beauty and the beast,” she whispered, remembering the old Terran fairy tale she’d read as a child. “That is what we are. Beauty and the beast.”

He was tall. That much she knew. She suspected he was slender beneath the billowing robe. If he’d been overweight with a potbelly, she’d have known, she reasoned. He couldn’t be so tall if his legs were bowed or he was knock-kneed.

“So what if he has a face like boiled mulch?” she asked, watching two spirals of colored light—pink and blue—converging on one another as though doing a mating dance along the ceiling. “He has his mask.”

But, she thought—and her lips thrust out in a sullen pout—how would he kiss her if he was nothing but charred and oozing flesh beneath that dreadful mask? What would his tongue feel like darting between her lips? Would she be able to stand having his rubbery lips and slippery, puckered flesh pressed against her breasts, his teeth nibbling at her nipples? Would he be as masterful as Raoul had been?

She thought about that for a moment then smiled happily.

“He has fingernails, I’m sure,” Ardor decided as she lay there. “Better to pluck with than teeth anyway.”

Lassitude had settled a warm blanket over her and her thoughts. She knew she was entertaining views she would not have had had she been totally aware.
Funny
, she thought,
how you always seemed to see things so clearly when you were in a semi-cognizant
state
.

Ardor laughed and sucked in her breath as the two colors collided, meshed, pulling against one another then became one shade of pale violet.

“We can do it once,” she finally decided. “If I don’t like it, we won’t do it again.”

And if he proved to be too much of a burden, there was always Raoul Breva.

One way or another, she determined, she’d escape the Storians. It was just a matter of which man she’d use to do it.

* * * * *

40

Ardor’s Leveche

Four guards carried the litter with the Riezell Guardian’s unconscious body tucked beneath a thick gauze canopy, which protected her from the whirlwinds of dust that could choke her. Trudging through the thick red sand, Lord Savidos and his men wore breathing masks to filter out the deadly dust spiraling around them in vortexes—some as wide as a mile across at the apex. Stinging shards of sand ripped at the troops but each wore a heavy robe to shield them. Only the sound of the grains hitting the padded wool garments and the howl of the ferocious winds could be heard.

From where the
Sangunar
had landed to the entrance of the hidden caverns deep within Riezell Nine where the Storian base camp was located was a good mile of steady uphill climbing in shifting sands that pulled at the men’s boots and threatened to bog them down. It was a tedious trek—tiring and dangerous—for the dunes had been known to completely cover a man in the blink of an eye, suffocating him beneath tons of red sand.

Beyond the unstable rim of the dune upon which the troops trod, sandblasted crags penciled up from the planet’s surface in torturously twisted spires. Streaking upward like serpents turned to stone, the jagged formations bristled with strangely shaped pinnacles and slender crags resembling needles, their tops thin and sharply pointed. A low escarpment fanned out along the foundation of the bizarre formations and in the exact center of its squat base, an arched slab into the sandstone façade was slowly opening, revealing the cave’s interior. The sooty depths of the entrance were obscured from time to time by the driving sand washing across it and spilling into the opening.

Scout ships streaked by overhead, but the sound of their engine throbs was obliterated by the fierce skirl of the winds. Those guard ships—their dull metallic hulls blending in with the sandstorm eddying up from the planet’s floor—were on the prowl above The Web, keeping safe the secret passageway that led to the Storian base camp, holding at bay any Command vessel of their enemies who might be lurking nearby.

Fully armed with particle beam cannons powerful enough to disintegrate even a battle cruiser, the ships patrolled R-9 airspace twenty-four/seven.

Drawing nearer to the dark entrance into the underground complex, Lord Savidos stopped, motioning the others to go on. He was scanning the surface of the sand-blown world, his psychic abilities roaming as far south as the medical research center where Ardor Kahn would perhaps need to be taken to rid her of the implant in her brain. His hands clenching and unclenching, the Reaper could feel his wrath building with every breath the Riezell Guardian took in her enforced slumber. He knew as soon as she woke, the debilitating pain from the retinal transponder would begin causing her pain.

Why he should feel such fury concerning the situation baffled him. He could not understand why her feelings and sensations should bother him so keenly.

He didn’t understand it and he didn’t like it.

Breva looked back before entering the cavern’s entrance. His overlord was at least five hundred feet back, turned away from him, facing the west where lightning forked viciously across the coppery sky. Violently, the wind was whipping the black robe around the Reaper’s long legs and billowing it away from his muscular body. Since the 41

Charlotte Boyett-Compo

hood of the robe was securely attached to the skeletal mask Lord Savidos wore on his face, not one feature of the man’s human appearance could be seen. At this distance, he appeared to be a statue—feet planted securely in the wavy sand—but Breva could feel the turmoil swirling inside his overlord’s head.

“Do you want me to wait for you?”

The Reaper turned and looked at Breva, intercepting the mental question sent his way. He lifted a hand, waving his 2-I-C inside.
“Make her comfortable
,
”
he ordered though his lips never moved.
“But do not wake her. Send word to see if there is any way one
of the Healers can come to her instead of us taking her to them.”

“And if they can’t?”

“Do not wake her
,
”
Lord Savidos repeated
. “Keep her under until the storm passes and
we can transfer her to the facility.”