Bebe (17 page)

Trying not to look as repulsed as she felt, she tentatively slipped her hand under the hem of the curtain and pressed her palm to the cool glass that separated hers from his. The breadth and length of his hand dwarfed her own, and yet it seemed so small compared to what she was used to.

His mouth moved, but she could hear no sounds. He mouthed again, slower this time, and a jolt of half-remembered past came flooding back to her. Bebe cocked her head, staring at his lips, half hidden by his snow-dotted beard. She moved her lips in sync with his, puzzling through the words—both familiar and yet strangely not—until they became clear.

‘Are you okay?’

It wasn’t big-people speak. These were words Bebe hadn’t heard in quite some time, not since her mother had spoke them, back when Bebe lived in a plain slat-board stall with straw on the floor. Back before she had been collared and sent to live with First Ma’am. The first change that had ever rocked her life.

Bebe recoiled, instantly uncomfortable. Snatching her hand from the cold glass, she let the curtain fall and shut the male from her sight.

She looked over her shoulder at Tral, still snoring. Terribly unsure of herself, she tapped her fingers worriedly. She didn’t want to, but after a good full minute of nervous indecision, she reached for the curtain again.

The furry man remained as he had been, standing in the swirl of new-falling white flakes, his hand still flat against the window pane. Even more hesitantly than before, she reached for him. The glass didn’t feel quite as cold as before; his palm, strangely small and square-ish and yet so much larger than hers, was heating it.

Her lips trembled as Bebe struggled to remember her mother’s words. ‘Go...go a-away,’ she finally mouthed back, then snatched her hand from his and dropped the curtain again.

She limped several steps away from the sink, waiting for what felt like hours. She never did hear his footsteps crunching away into the night, however. And sure enough, when she finally did summon enough courage to check outside, there he was, still with his open palm steaming the icy window. The only move he made was the curling of his bearded mouth as he smiled at her.

He waited expectantly, then beckoned with his head, his warm brown eyes dancing until her fingers unfurled and reluctantly reached for his. Her stomach was a tight jumble of knots. She was very, very uncomfortable and her hand was trembling, but she still touched her palm to his through the glass.

‘No,’ he mouthed and his breath fogged the air when he grinned.

Bebe frowned. She was half-tempted to let the curtain fall and this time leave it that way, but he recaptured her attention and grudging curiosity when he beckoned with his head, two slight jerks to the right. It was a come-hither and follow-me motion that she traced through the room until her gaze came to rest squarely on the window he had been trying to break through earlier that night. Bebe frowned, but when he did finally take his hand from the glass and vanish into the snowy night, she reluctantly limped after him, following the wall to the next corner and then over to the window tucked behind Tral’s work station. When she peeled back that curtain, there the human male was, smiling widely and waiting for her.

Again, he beckoned with his shaggy, furry head, gesturing her on now towards the door. Bebe shied a half-step back, but she did not let go of the curtain. She shook her head.

‘Open,’ he mouthed.

She shook her head harder, but her eyes drifted over his shoulder to the rapid-falling flakes of white snow. There were drifts knee-high against the porch’s support beams. It was probably very cold out there.

As if he could read her mind, he hugged himself and gave a slight shiver, but his eyes were still dancing as his mouth silently begged, ‘Please open.’

Bebe felt herself giving in long before she actually did. Knowing this would probably rank quite highly among all the other stupid things she’d yet done in her life, she touched two fingers to her lips and glared at him to be quiet.

The male accepted that command with a nod, crossing one finger across his heart and then holding up three more with his other hand in a very strange sort of salute.

Her brows beetled. She wasn’t at all sure she should trust him, and she was almost positive that she really shouldn’t open the door. But there were fat flakes of snow in his hair and sticking to the fur on his face, and all she could think about was how cold she had been yesterday when she’d been lost in the snow. It hadn’t been snowing then; not like it was now.

Frowning, she let the curtain fall closed. She glared at the back of it for a long time, knowing she shouldn’t and yet, in the end, she limped around the table toward the front door anyway. She cast a quick glance at Tral, the skin of her bottom tingling in dreadful warning, but already she could hear quiet crunching steps following her across the porch. She wrestled with her conscience first and then with the security latch.

One quick burst of cold invaded the heat of the station house along with the large human male. True to his word, he very quickly and quietly pushed his way inside. Holding up a finger to stay his approaching companions—she startled when she saw them, melting like shadows out of the snowy night to climb the fire-lit front porch—he shut the door. Glancing back over his shoulder at Tral, his eyes darkened into something that made her nervousness intensify. Then he turned back to her. That dark expression left him as his staring eyes roved her, staying locked well below her face for so long that Bebe timidly looked down, following the direction of his eyes and studying herself in an attempt to figure out what was wrong. She couldn’t see anything. Just herself, the curves and vales of her body locked in the flickering shadows of the dying fire in the hearth.

His face flushed. Finally, he managed to drag his gaze back up to her face. He tried to smile, but it was every bit as shaky as the finger he brought to his silently moving lips. “Shhh.”

She already regretted letting him in; she wasn’t about to make a sound. Not even when he reached behind her to grab Tral’s heavy coat from the wall. She resisted, trying to hang it back up while he tried every bit as insistently to wrap the overlarge and very heavy clothing around her shoulders.

Tral snorted, halting the silent argument when it froze them both. The human snapped his head around to stare at the slumbering giant, one hand dropping quickly to the knife at his belt. Bebe’s eyes widened. Really regretting having let him inside now, she grabbed the knife too, fully prepared to fight over that as well. The human male didn’t look at her and he didn’t move, he simply watched and waited, but Tral didn’t waken. Instead, drawing a deep breath, he shoved the gun off his chest and threw that arm over his eyes before settling back into his dreams.

Slowly, the human began to relax. He turned to look at her again, and then looked down at her hands, wrapped around his and the knife. He pulled gently, but Bebe didn’t let go until she realized he was angling to tuck it back into his belt.

She shrank from him, trembling. She never should have opened that door. Snapping one arm out, she pointed for him to leave, but the furry male had turned away from her again. He began to rummage quietly through the room, stepping over and around the clutter to feel his way across shelves higher than his head and search the cupboards and cabinets. Finding a length of rope at last, he crept back to her.

“Shhh,” he said again, tucking one finger to his lips before pulling his knife to slice the rope into two segments. She watched, shifting restlessly until he put the knife away again. Then, cupping her shoulders in his large hands, he maneuvered her to stand well back from the door and didn’t let go until she was pressed firmly against the wall.

It was a relief to see him reach for the latch. Finally, he was leaving, even if he was stealing Tral’s rope as he went.

She bristled, frowning at the vandalized rope, but she wasn’t sure it was worth what might occur if her protests woke Tral.

‘Go,’ she mouthed, shooing at the bad—Tral had been right; he was absolutely bad—human with both hands for good measure.

How Tral slept through the cold gust of air that accompanied the opening of the front door, Bebe had no idea. What he didn’t sleep through, however, was suddenly being jumped on by four human men, all of them every bit as furry as their leader and each aggressively scrambling to secure their grips on either his wrists or ankles as they pressed him flat to the mattress.

Bebe screamed when Tral bellowed, fully awake and now frantically struggling to get out from under the bottom of the living pile. Hands trapped in the sleeves of his overlarge coat, she slapped them over her mouth, frantically keeping the bevy of subsequent shrieks locked in the back of her throat. It wasn’t helping the situation, and she only seemed to be distracting Tral, enabling the humans to get one cut length of rope wrapped tightly around his ankles, which were then tied to the foot of the bedframe.

“Carve the fucker up,” one man growled. A grizzled older man with more white in his hair than rapidly melting snowflakes could account for, the effort of securing Tral to the bed was already leaving him panting.

“No,” the big male quickly countered. “We won’t last three days if we start killing them.”

With Tral’s wrists firmly tied together, he scrambled up to practically stand on Tral’s chest as he wrapped the free end around the leg of the headboard and then heaved on the rope with all his strength. Both he and Tral roared with the effort it took, but under so many humans, Tral lost the fight. His straining arms were dragged up the mattress until they were pinned to the corner of the headboard, where it took the combined efforts of all four men to fasten the ropes securely. And through it all, Bebe stood like a rock against the wall, her hands clasped over her mouth, gasping in shock through her fingers and the overlapping sleeves. She had to do something! But what? What could she possibly do to stop this?

Growling curses, his arms now bound every bit as tightly as his ankles, Tral indulged in one last fury of bucking and thrashing before it was over. The fight was lost; Tral was now tied to his bed, arms and legs fastened together at opposite ends, leaving him to lie somewhat diagonally across the mattress.

This was all her fault. Bebe blinked rapidly to prevent the flood of forming tears from spilling from her eyes. She shrank along the wall until she bumped into the corner by the door. Just as soon as the bad humans were gone, she was going to put herself into it. She deserved to stand there all night long, for what she’d just done.

“We’ve got what we came for,” the leader of them said, as he checked the last knot. He gave Tral two quick pats on the cheek and then climbed off both him and the bed. Finding Bebe in her corner, he grinned at her. “Grab as much as you can carry and let’s get the hell out of here.”

The men scrambled to obey and in very short order, the small station house was thoroughly ransacked.

Bebe jumped as tins and bottles in every cupboard and shelf were searched through and either gathered up or summarily discarded. The humans weren’t gentle. More often than not, discarded items ended up on the floor where containers spilled open and more than one thing broke. She was horrified. Tral simply lay where he was, frowning blackly up at the ceiling and muttering to himself. Every now and then, he jerked at his bonds but they held fast.

“It’s okay,” the big male said, coming back to her. He grinned as he began to fasten the ties of Tral’s coat around her. She slapped at his hands, shoving them away, but this was one tug-of-war that she did not win. Despite her protests, the human got the overlarge coat wrapped around her and fastened shut. He touched her face then, a gentle, almost calming caress that she was too panicked to recognize right away. “You’re all right. I’m going to carry you. You just hang onto my back; we’re going to get you out of here.”

They were going to take her with them? Appalled, Bebe fell backwards into the corner, but the bad humans paid no attention to her objections. When the leader turned around, the older man grabbed her arm with one hand and planted the other under her buttocks and between her legs. She was promptly tossed up onto the leader’s back. Sheer reflex had her latching onto his shoulders as he hooked his arms around her thighs, securing his piggy-back grip.

“Let’s go,” he said, casting Tral a victorious glare. “Close the door behind you, Matt. Wouldn’t want the fucker to freeze to death.”

Bebe screamed, but she was carried out into the icy wind-swept night anyway. Cold engulfed her; the wind howled. Some of the men began to laugh, and in a matter of only a few jarring steps, the lights of the house completely disappeared behind a fury of fast-falling snow.

She had just been kidnapped.

* * * * *

“Crap,” Tral muttered, thoroughly disgusted with himself. He wasn’t all that happy with Bebe right now, either. He indulged in a furious but useless struggle against the ropes, but they held fast. Sooner or later, one way or another, he was going to get free, and when he did, he was going to hunt that disobedient little female down, turn her across his knee and paddle her backside raw.

And he was going to get his coat back. That was company issued equipment, and he’d have to account for it come the morning when he was fired for gross incompetence.

That paddling was definitely going to come first, though. And probably even be repeated, oh, at least half a dozen times during the long hike back to town. Carrying everything he owned in a sack across his back.

Thank goodness he’d called his uncle, or heaven only knew how long he’d lie here, waiting either for rescue or a slow death of starvation or dehydration. He frowned, considering the matter. Once the fire finally waned and died, he supposed exposure was even possible.

He shook his head again, banishing that macabre thought and turned his irate attention to trying to come up with a suitable explanation to validate being caught like this. This made twice in as many days that she’d got the best of him. He twisted his wrists uselessly in his bonds, even knowing it was futile, and then gave up with a growling sigh. It was almost enough to cure a guy from sleeping altogether.