Dark Solstice (5 page)

Seeing no hope for it, she continued her climb. Raathe stepped back when she reached the top, allowing her to climb onto the beam. She wrapped her arms around the column, hugging herself to it once she’d come completely upright. The man who’d climbed the ladder behind her set the bucket of rivets on the beam, studied her a moment and finally ascended to stand beside her.

“What are you doing here, Justice?”

Kyle flicked an assessing glance over Raathe, relaxing fractionally when he noted that, despite the hostility in his voice and his stance, Raathe was as firmly in control of himself as ever. “I was sent to pair off with you, Raathe.” He didn’t see any point in elaborating on the fact that he’d volunteered, particularly when it would only rouse Raathe’s suspicions more. No one volunteered to work with Raathe.

He suspected that was because, according to rumors, at least four men who’d been assigned to work with Raathe since he’d been imprisoned in Phobos had turned up dead—three prisoners and one guard.

Raathe studied him a moment longer and finally glanced at Rhea. “You’re gofer today.”

Rhea sent him a look of confusion. “Gofer?”

Tamping the urge to simply gape at her like an adolescent embroiled in his first crush, Kyle flicked a glance at her face. It was a pretty face, more striking than beautiful, but it was the fear and innocence in her wide eyes that made his gut clench every time he looked at her, that made his wits scatter—that made it really dangerous for him to look at her at all. “Yeah—gofer this, gofer that,” he responded with an effort at lightness, hoping it wasn’t as obvious to Raathe as it was to him that his voice didn’t even sound close to normal. “Whatever we need, you fetch.”

“Just mind what you’re doing,” Raathe added grimly. “If anybody yells ‘fire in the hole’ get the hell out of the way. It means something big and heavy is coming down fast.”

Turning, he strode down the beam as if he was walking on the ground. The other man lifted the bucket and followed him a little more carefully. Rhea cautiously crouched down and finally sat on the beam, straddling it while she tried to decide whether to climb down the ladder again or stay where she was until she was told to fetch something. Her stomach was performing calisthenics from the height. She didn’t particularly want to stay in the air. The question was, was she more afraid of the height? Or the men on the ground below?

There were guards, but she saw that they’d stationed themselves beyond the building perimeter. They’d activated an electronic field to cage the ‘animals’ in and sat down near the shuttles to entertain themselves. She supposed they must be using a different frequency to communicate. She could tell from looking at them that they were talking among themselves, but she couldn’t hear anything over the comm. unit.

It made her belly go weightless all over again to lift her gaze from the ground, but she ignored it, scanning the terrain around the construction site. The Martian terrain didn’t have a lot of variation that made identifying landmarks easy, but she remembered there’d been a construction site near where she’d discovered the fissure. If she was right and this was the site she’d spotted before, the entrance to the cave system wasn’t much more than ten miles away.

It might as well have been on the other side of the solar system. Even if she could somehow escape she doubted she could survive there.

The fleeting sense of hopefulness she’d felt when they’d landed so near what she believed was the place she’d found abandoned her. Raathe distracted her from the depression that settled over her by sending her to fetch one of the tools he or the other man had dropped while connecting the beams that were being hoisted up to them via a crane. During the course of the day, they worked their way back toward her, bolting the structure together. On the other side from where they were working, other men were dragging metal sheeting across the beams that had already been set and bolted. They worked slowly but steadily throughout the day, pacing themselves she discovered, because they were only allowed a few brief rest periods.

When darkness fell, they were allowed to climb down and herded into modules on the surface that did nothing more than protect them from the winds and the bitter cold that descended that could be felt even through the suits. Cots were stacked one on top of another almost to the ceiling and there still weren’t enough. She was wedged onto a cot barely wide enough for one with Raathe and they slept in their suits, and then they were roused out again to put in another full day’s work the following day.

Chapter Five

Neither exhaustion from two days of hard labor with little rest and almost no sleep nor familiarity had done a hell of a lot to curb the unaccustomed barrage of emotions that hit Kyle any time he came within Rhea’s vicinity, particularly if he met her gaze. His stomach still went weightless every time he looked into her eyes and his brain went on holiday—images flashing into his mind that had no damned business there.

The damned PEC should’ve helped tamp his wayward libido but didn’t. He couldn’t look at her without the image of her in the hanger flashing into his mind and even on the rare occasion when it didn’t, his gaze strayed to her mouth and heat flashed through him. His mouth watered for a taste of her until he thought he’d strangle on his own spit.

It was getting worse, not better, he realized with a mixture of disgust and alarm. The longer he was around her the more desperate he was to fulfill some of those images scrambling his brains and the harder it was to focus on anything else.

It was damned inconvenient given his priorities, but he saw he had no option but to try to work through it and hope he could manage it without getting himself killed.

He didn’t know whether to be relieved or furious that she didn’t seem to be as afraid of Raathe as he knew damned well she should be. She didn’t strike him as stupid. In fact, he knew she wasn’t. Her background clearly indicated that she was a woman of superior intelligence, but then women, he knew, could be brilliant and still stupid when it came to men, and he didn’t think he was imagining the innocence in her eyes. It wasn’t just a ploy. She’d been too sheltered to fully comprehend what she was dealing with now.

Or maybe she was just too scared to have her wits about her?

There was wariness in her eyes when she looked at Raathe, though, enough to indicate she wasn’t stupid with fear.

Or lust, like he was, he mentally added with disgust.

He should’ve just been relieved. It seemed patently obvious, both from her physical condition and her behavior, that Raathe hadn’t harmed her in any way, and he’d seen for himself that Raathe was possessive enough of her to make damned sure all the other prisoners steered clear of her, however lustful their gazes when they thought Raathe might not notice.

He didn’t find it particularly comforting, though. Not that he had any trouble understanding Raathe’s possessiveness of her. He was a man, however cold blooded, and Rhea was the sort of woman that could make a man think really stupid, dangerous thoughts.

He should know. He’d been thinking a lot of stupid, dangerous thoughts since he’d first set eyes on her.

There wasn’t going to be an easy solution to his dilemma.

Not that one damned thing had been easy since he’d arrived in Phobos!

There wasn’t a doubt in his mind, though, that he needed to remove her from Raathe—somehow. It was merely coincidental that his wants and necessity went hand in hand in this instance.

It would’ve made his life a hell of a lot easier if he could’ve just killed Raathe and taken her, but, unfortunately, he needed Raathe alive.

Then, too, he wasn’t nearly as convinced as he would’ve liked to have been that he
could
kill Raathe even if the necessity arose. It wasn’t something he was familiar with, wasn’t anything that had ever crossed his mind before—self doubt when it came to pitting himself against another man—
any
other man. He’d lived by his wits, his skills, and his resourcefulness for too many years for doubts to flicker across his mind very often.

But he’d seen Raathe in action. Before he’d actually met the bastard, he’d been willing to put his renowned prowess down as equal parts skill, cunning—and reputation, considered it was likely the legends surrounding him was enough to demoralize his enemies into failing regardless of his actual skills.

Raathe had dispelled that misconception the first time he’d watched him in the arena.

If he challenged Raathe outright for possession of Rhea, he couldn’t be sure of the outcome—not nearly as sure as he needed to be. The only alternative as far as he could see was to try to win her over and convince Raathe to trade her to him.

Which sure as hell wasn’t going to be easy. Despite his, admittedly, awkward attempts to break through to her, Rhea didn’t trust him any more than Raathe did.

It was a novel experience—stumbling upon a woman who seemed completely immune to the charms that had gotten him between the legs of pretty much any woman that had caught his interest since he’d attained manhood—actually since his teens, but the novelty of it sure as hell didn’t please him.

One
would
know that the first time in his life when it really counted, he would discover that his previously spotless record in seducing women would fail him completely. It sure as hell didn’t do a fucking thing for his ego that he couldn’t seem to summon any of the charm that had always come to him so easily before.

Nothing beat a try like a failure, though, he thought wryly, glancing at her in what he hoped was a friendly way and didn’t make it patently obvious that all he really wanted to do was rip that suit off her and fuck her senseless. “Who did you piss off to end up here?”

As dull as she was from weariness, Rhea glanced around at the question. Surprise flickered through her when she discovered Kyle Justice was looking directly her and realized he’d spoken to her. Wariness filtered through her. Beyond the fact that she had no desire to encourage friendliness with any of the inmates of Phobos the only way they could communicate was via the general comm. unit, which meant that anything any of them said could be heard by anyone on the ground, including the guards.

“What makes you ask that?” she asked finally.

He shrugged, favoring her with a slow grin she had no trouble imagining had been the downfall of more than one female. It made her belly flutter with mindless appreciation. He was a remarkably handsome man despite the fact that his natural swarthiness had faded with incarceration to a sallow hue that wasn’t particularly becoming, his lean, hard jaw and rugged features regular enough to place him above ‘average’.

Who was she kidding? He was gorgeous—no doubt deadly like Raathe—but handsome enough to make most any woman who looked at him too stupid to live.

She wasn’t nearly as immune to either his good looks or his boyish charm as she would’ve liked, but she was too wary to give in to the urge to yield to his efforts to charm her.

“Aside from the fact that you shouldn’t be here at all? Curiosity.”

“Curiosity in Phobos can be a dangerous thing,” Raathe growled, struggling with the unaccustomed sense of possessiveness that washed over him every time he caught Justice’s gaze on Rhea.

He had no trouble at all interpreting it, despite the fact that he could see Justice was struggling to tamp the hunger that glittered in his eyes every time he looked her way, and he didn’t make the mistake of thinking it was nothing more than a reflection of his own growing needs. Justice wanted her alright, and there was more to it, he sensed, than pure animal lust—which made him feel far more threatened than mere lust would have. There was certainly the vacant look of lust in his eyes, but it was tempered with the sappy look of the truly besotted.

The bastard had it bad.

It made him feel so sick with rage every time he noticed it that it was all he could do to refrain from pitching the bastard off the building.

The comment dragged Rhea’s unwilling attention from Justice to Raathe, who sat on the other side of her. They’d been allowed to ‘break’ briefly to eat. Not that that was necessary since the only nourishment available was the virtually tasteless liquefied nutrients they could suck through the tubes, but apparently the warden thought it necessary to rest his slave labor at least for brief periods to keep them from dropping dead from exhaustion. Raathe’s expression was impassive, but she had no trouble interpreting the fact that he simply didn’t want her chatting with the other inmates.

Or maybe he just didn’t like Justice?

She glanced at Justice again. “There are other women here.”

“Prostitutes. The warden has them hauled in to entertain his men. When they get tired of them, they turn them in to the general population and let the men fight over them … in the arena.”

A mixture of surprise, confusion, and horror filled Rhea. She knew there were still women who plied that trade. By and large pleasure bots and the open sexual practices brought about by the enlightenment of the masses that sexual congress was natural and healthy, both mentally and physically, had put them out of business. It had certainly narrowed the market. She supposed, though, that there were still enough men who preferred ‘real’ women to pleasure bots and had a propensity for sexual perversions not widely acceptable to ensure that the ‘oldest’ profession was still practiced. No doubt it was the lure of money when so few were willing to pay for sexual favors any longer that had brought the women into the warden’s clutches. It was staggering to think he had lured them in and enslaved them, however.

She doubted they were being paid for their services now and that made it very unlikely that they stayed willingly.

“What makes you think I’m not one?” she asked curiously.

Kyle stared at her blankly a moment, struggling with the urge to inform her that it was patently obvious that she wasn’t sexually experienced enough to have plied the trade. Aside from the fact that she didn’t have the hard, jaded look in her eyes of women with that kind of experience, there was no artifice to her body language, no overt sexuality in the way she talked or moved that was provocative. She was sexy as hell in his book, and he didn’t doubt just as appealing to nine out ten men, but it was a natural extension of who she was, not a conscious attempt to seduce. “You don’t have the look and you’re obviously well educated. Then, too, there hasn’t been a supply transport in months. There isn’t a colony close enough they could’ve plucked you from one of those. The only possibility is that you worked for the company and you landed in Phobos directly from the Mars project. So you pissed somebody off.”