Kept: An Erotic Anthology (43 page)

I stood up to leave, hoping that he’d finally end this stupid prank and let me go.

He rolled his eyes. “I’m no’ yanking your chain. If you’re going to force me to prove it, I will.”

In my frustration, I perched a hand on my hip and glared. “It’s only fair. You’ve been doing all the forcing till now.”

For a moment, he just stared at me. Then he broke character and smiled. “Cocky lass.” He rose from the couch with a sigh.

“My name is –”

“Maggie. Aye, I know. My ears work fine.” Without another word, he disappeared around the corner, in the back of the cellar.

It was too dark to see him and I thought about making a run for the stairs. Something kept me there though. Curiosity? A morbid fascination with seeing this through? It didn’t matter. He returned only a minute later.

His brows rose when he saw me. “You’re still here. Finished trying to run, eh?”

I wasn’t going to dignify that with an answer.

“Or was it your curiosity again? Come here.” He beckoned me with a wave of his hand.

I just stared.

“Come on, Maggie girl.” He grinned. “I won’t bite.”

Maggie girl? It was an improvement, I supposed. But I wasn’t quite sold on the not biting part. With a heavy sigh, I crossed the room and stood close enough to see what he was holding while still keeping my distance. “This should be interesting.”

“Try no’ to panic. I have no smelling salts if ye should faint.” He chuckled at his joke.

This close, I caught a small twinkle in his eye. When he wasn’t yelling at me or mocking me, he might’ve had a good personality. For a bear.

I gave my head a shake. Or maybe I was imaging it. “If I was the fainting type, it would’ve happened by now.” I braced myself anyway, not at all as confident as I tried to sound.

Baen opened his hand to reveal a long pen-like metal stick. I’d never seen anything like it but I wasn’t exactly the most worldly of girls. I’d only ever been as far as the coast and that was with my friend’s family back in high school. I feigned a look of disinterest. The key to being cool, I’d found, was to appear constantly unimpressed.

He fumbled with the gadget for a moment then grabbed my wrist and yanked me to him. I resisted, panicked, but he overpowered me easily.

“What are you doing?” I shouted.

Ignoring me, he tucked me under his arm, held out the fancy pen thing, and pressed a button. A tingly sensation swept over me then a blast of cold air.

Fuck.

The cellar faded away and I was thrown, violently, onto a patch of grass. The wind was knocked out of me and my whole body ached from the fall. When I caught my breath, I let out a groan and lifted my head.

Baen was smirking down at me. He put out his hand. “It takes some getting’ used to.”

I took his hand and he hauled me to my feet. A gust of wind whipped by, throwing my hair into my face. I swiped it away. Green hills surrounded us. Boulders dotted along them, creating small cliffs. A few trees stuck out from the ground. We were standing under one with wide branches that cast shade overhead. Not that we needed it. Above us, gray clouds hung in a depressing sky. We weren’t in Westburg, Maine anymore.

I started to hyperventilate. My mind whirled. We’d been transported by some technological device. Aliens were real. Were we even on earth anymore? Aliens were real. I had to say it a few times over before it sank in. They could come here. They could destroy us. And, fuck, I’d screwed up the shield! I’d fucking doomed the world!

“Oh god!” My chest ached as it became harder and harder to breathe.

A big hand grasped me around the back of the neck. Warm. Commanding. He squeezed then gave me a shake. “Breathe, lass.”

“I can’t!” I was going to pass out. Where the hell were smelling salts when you needed them?

I finally sucked in a deep breath. “Oh god. What do we do? We’re fucked. Damn my stupid curiosity!”

“Calm down, Maggie.”

I couldn’t. Maggie Turner was not a hero. I’d never done anything remarkable in all of my twenty four years. Now I was expected to fix an alien shield and save the world? Baen didn’t understand just how much I was the wrong person for the job.

My breath came out faster, shallower. The world spun. Then pain flared across my scalp. Baen had his hand in my hair again. He yanked my head back and looked me in the eye.

“Stop it,” he ordered.

Something about the pain and the firmness of his voice grounded me. My breathing slowed. Tears pricked my eyes.

“Don’t cry.”

Another order. Surprising myself, I blinked back the tears. Why did my body obey him? Worse than that, why were my girly bits getting all warm and tingly?

He shook me once. “You will stop this now, girl, or we will have a problem.”

Finally, I could breathe enough to speak. “You can’t order me to stop panicking.” But he just had. The pain kept me distracted from the fear. I tried to pull away then winced when he only held me tighter. “And we already have a problem.” The whole end of the world thing seemed pretty big to me.

“Aye, we do.” He let go and chuckled. “You need to get used to obeying me or this will no’ be pleasant.”

“I assure you it’s no picnic now,” I grumbled, rubbing my head. That was an understatement. And what did he mean by obeying? Was I going from being one man’s doormat to another? This was continuing a pattern I’d already vowed to end. “Listen. You might be in charge of that Clippy thing, but you are not in charge of me.”

“Clypeom.” He smirked then swept his gaze down my body. “We’ll get to that later. For now, you understand why you must help me, don’t you?”

I nodded numbly. This was too surreal.

“And you’ll come with me willingly to my people?”

Again, I nodded. Or maybe I hadn’t stopped. I let my mind haze over. Survival tactic, I supposed.

“And you’ll do anything it takes to fix the shield?”

Why was I nodding again? I put a hand on my forehead to stop my bobbling. Anything could mean…well, anything. And I already suspected there was something he was keeping from me.

“I have your word that you will cooperate?”

Was he really giving me a choice? It seemed not. “I’ll do my best,” I managed to choke out.

Maggie and her man-bear, out to save the world. This was shaping up to be a B-rated sci-fi movie gone horribly wrong.

He smiled and patted my head. “Good girl.”

Good girl? I ignored the urge to growl and bite him.

Chapter 2

“Why would you keep such an important thing where anyone could see it? And how did it turn off so easily? I pressed one button. Just one. These aliens can’t be very smart if –”

“I don’t know what happened. The brick must’ve come loose.”

“Shouldn’t it have a guard?”

He growled. “I
am
the guard.”

I didn’t think it’d be wise to mention he’d been slacking in his duty and should take some responsibility in this so I kept my mouth shut.

“The Clypeom is verra old. It’s possible it could have just malfunctioned. That’s what we’ll find out at the Order.”

“Okay.” More questions spun in my head but I couldn’t focus them. It still seemed too surreal. “Is there anything else I need to know? Other than the whole traveling to the mysterious Order and fixing an alien device?”

He rifled through his bag and didn’t answer for a moment, which convinced me he
was
hiding something. After a few moments, he turned to face me. His eyes were alight with…some emotion I couldn’t place. Though his lips were turned down in a frown, I could swear the rest of him was thrumming with anticipation. For what?

“One other thing. And you’re no’ goin’ to like it.”

Oh crap. I knew it. “Let me guess. We have to ride there in a spaceship?”

“No, lass.” A grin stretched across his cocky face. “You’ll be going as my slave.”

My stomach dropped. Slave? Like cleaning and serving meals kind of slave or… I looked in his lust-addled eyes and thought of another kind. Was it too late to break our agreement and run away? “No. Sorry. I don’t…do that sort of thing.” I didn’t whore myself to strangers. I wasn’t even that experienced when it came to sex.

“Women in my culture are either concubines or mothers. Usually both. Since you haven’t a bairn to bring with us, slave it is.” So he
did
mean sex slave.

I shook my head furiously. “No. We’ll have to find a different disguise.”

“Let me put it this way, lass. Either you go as mine, or you’re left for any male to claim. And I assure you, there are much meaner bastards than me.”

“Meaner than you?”

His forehead creased. “Aye. I’ve been downright angelic. And if I didn’t care about you, I’d drop you in Scotland and let the Order deal with you. Instead, I’m riskin’ becoming the laughing stock by taking you as my untrained slave. I must be daft but there’s something about you that makes me want to protect you.” To himself, he mumbled, “
Bluidy
soft heart.”

So many things wrong with what he’d said. First of all, that he considered himself angelic made me shudder to think what the rest of them were like. Was I about to walk into a barbarian society? And the Order dealing with me didn’t sound comforting. Would I be in trouble for this, even though I was trying to set it right? But it was the last part that struck me.

He wanted to protect me. It wasn’t flowers and poetry, but for a brute like Baen, it was kind of…sweet. Maybe there was a soft side to him somewhere, buried under all that muscle and fur.

Having romantic notions about the man making me his sex slave was disturbing. I cleared my affection-starved head and thought back on the more important thing he’d said. “Is the Order gonna…” Fear lodged in my throat. I hadn’t considered his culture probably didn’t play by the rules I was used to. “Are they going to…be mad? At me?”

After a long expressionless look, his face crumpled with strain. “Maggie. My culture is verra old. They didn’t evolve with the rest of the world. It’s male-dominated, but you’ll find we’re fair to our slaves. Most of us. Like your culture, there are good and bad and everything in between.”

I nodded, feeling somewhat comforted by his tender tone. He did seem willing to protect me. It was the only reason I wasn’t running for the hills right now. Not that I knew where to go from here.

“The Order might…have concerns…”

My gaze flew to his in fear. What the hell did that mean? I opened my mouth to ask but he put out a hand, stopping me.

“But I won’t let them harm you.” He gave me a side-long look. “Though you’ll have to learn some rules.”

Rules? I thought back on his patting my head earlier. He wanted a pet to learn some tricks. It left a bad taste in my mouth. And what if I forgot the rules? What if I slipped out of character by accident? That the Order had something to do with my future, what happened to me after this, made me seriously consider finding a way to escape. Could I call someone for help? Did I even get cell service out here?

“I should probably call Jared.” I pulled my phone from my coat pocket. “How long do you expect this to take? Will I be home by tomorrow morning?”

His brows descended, casting his eyes in a deep shadow. “Who’s Jared?”

“It’s complicated.” I stared down at the empty signal bars. Damn it.

“Explain,” he hissed through his teeth.

“It’s none of your business.”

“Do you have another male?”

“Another? You’re not…my male.” He was serious about this whole owning thing. But he needed to get one thing straight. This was pretend.

He flinched back and stared at me, wide-eyed for a moment, as if he was surprised with himself. “Right. No, of course no’.”

I exhaled a relieved breath. This was getting weird and escape seemed unlikely. But didn’t I owe it to the world to fix my mistake, no matter how uneasy I felt about it? I put my phone back in my pocket. “Is there better service at the Order?”

“I don’t know when you’ll be home, lass.” He gave me a regretful look. “And there’s no cell phone service out here. This is far from civilization.”

Taking a longer look around, I noted there were no roads. No towns or even a cabin anywhere in the distance. “We’re in Scotland, huh?”

He nodded.

“My family will be worried.” Would they? Truthfully, they probably wouldn’t even notice I was gone. Not until dinner didn’t arrive on the table. Then they might complain to each other that I worked late too often and should be there helping them. Bastards.

I sighed and stared at the ground. Whisked away to a foreign country and there was nobody home to miss me, to even fill out a missing person’s report. My life sucked.

“Never mind,” I said, chuckling humorlessly. “They won’t care.”

Baen raised his brows. “This man Jared won’t mind that you’re gone?”

“It’s my ex. Only he refuses to believe we’re broken up.” I shook my head. “Idiot.”

He frowned. “And the rest of your family?”

“My mom ran off a long time ago. My father raised me. Well, he let me live in his house at least. Now he and Jared are small-time drug dealers.” Shame filled me and I averted my gaze. Why was I telling him this? “It’s lame, I know. I’ve been trying to move out on my own but I don’t make a lot of money. I try not to get involved in the drug stuff though.” I stared at the ground. “Sometimes I do it just to shut them up.”

He didn’t say anything for a while and I figured he didn’t approve. Maybe he finally realized the loser he was stuck saving the world with.

“I’m truly sorry, Maggie,” he finally said. “That’s no way to live.”

I shrugged. It was my reality. I wasn’t the self-pitying type. “It’s temporary. I want to go to school to become a vet but…” I trailed off. I’d told him about the no money thing already. No need to be repetitive.

Again, he was quiet. I glanced up at him. Lips pursed, he nodded at me.
Way to make an awkward situation more awkward, Maggie.

“Anyway.” I inhaled a deep breath and brushed off my clothes. I could be brave. Maybe fixing this shield would prove I was worth more than everybody thought. “Let’s, uh, get down to this saving the world business. You said there were rules?”