Paradise County (45 page)

Then he reached down, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her hand out of his pants.

“My turn,” he said, his voice thick.

Aquiver with desire, Alex lay back on the couch and watched as he unbuttoned her pants, pulled down her zipper, and delved inside. His palm was warm and big, and his fingertips were faintly rough as his hand slid over her taut stomach to find and caress the triangle of ash-brown curls between her thighs. She was wearing tiny silk bikini panties in a delicious leopard print, and the top part of them was just visible in the V of the open zipper. Watching his hand disappear inside them was the most erotic thing she had ever seen in her life. Then he was pushing his fingers on down between her legs, touching her where she wanted to be touched, pressing, caressing, sliding inside—and watching her all the while.

“Oh, God, Joe,” she breathed, writhing convulsively under the ministrations of his knowing hand, her fingers digging into the soft couch cushions beneath her, her body on fire. “Make love to me. Now. Please.”

“You got it, Princess.” His voice was so hoarse that the words were almost a growl.

He sat up abruptly, his face flushed, his jaw clenched. Alex whimpered as his hand was withdrawn, but then he was scooping her onto his lap and standing up with her. Her arms looped around his neck, and clung. She looked up and met his eyes, which were bright and hard with
desire for her, as he carried her out of the lighted living room into the shadowy hall, then turned from that into a darkened bedroom, where, reaching behind him, he closed and locked the door.

“Your father …” she whispered.

“Wouldn’t hear an express train plow through the living room.”

The curtains were open, allowing moonlight to pour into the room. There was a bed, Alex saw, a double bed with a dark nubby-textured bedspread. He yanked the bedspread back, and the top sheet, then put her down on the mattress with her head resting on one of the two pillows. The sheet was smooth and cool and faintly stiff, some kind of floral pattern. The pillow with its matching case was of too-firm foam rubber. The bed smelled clean, but the room had the air of one that had not been used in a long time.

Joe pulled his sweatshirt and T-shirt off in a single fluid movement. Alex caught just a glimpse of broad bare shoulders that gleamed bronze in the moonlight and a wide chest covered by a thick wedge of dark hair. His unzipped jeans sagged below his hipbones, revealing plain white jockey shorts beneath. He was gorgeous… .

Then he was bending over her, tugging at her pants, pulling them down.

“My boots.” Alex struggled to sit up. “I have to take them off first.”

He let go of her pants and moved down to her feet. Picking one up, he gave her high-heeled boot a peremptory tug. It didn’t budge.

“Remind me to buy you some tennis shoes,” he muttered, tugging harder.

“They unzip,” she said, and did it herself, pulling off both boots then dropping them onto the floor, and shedding her blazer, which hit the floor, too. He tugged her sweater over her head, and then reached down and grabbed her pants, pulling them off. Alex was left wearing only her tiny bikini panties and matching push-up bra.

“If you got that at Victoria’s Secret, Jenny’s going to buy her underwear there over my dead body,” he said, his eyes moving over her as, supported by her elbows, she lay waiting for him to join her on the bed. “That’s the sexiest getup I ever saw in my life.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed. Alex sat up and pressed her silk-covered breasts against his bare back, her hands sliding over his shoulders, measuring their breadth. They were so wide, and strong… .

“They have plain white cotton, too,” she promised huskily as he struggled with his own boots. The first one hit the floor with a clunk. He was working on the second. She put her arms around him, running her hands over the hard contours of his chest. His chest hair was crisp, and curled around her fingers. His nipples were hard… .

“All right, that’s it.”

The second boot hit the floor, and then he turned suddenly, grabbing her upper arms and twisting at the waist so that he could kiss her. Gasping at his sudden fierceness, she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. Turning with her in his arms, he lowered her to the mattress and rolled on top of her, pushing her bra up out of his way, yanking her panties down her legs and throwing them aside, pulling himself free.

He pushed his jeans and shorts down his legs with a series of quick, impatient shoves. Then his knees slid between her legs, his hands grasped her hipbones and he plunged deep inside her. He was huge, burning hot, and just what, she thought, she had always wanted. She cried out, arching up to meet him, her heels pushing up off the mattress, gasping at the intense pleasure of it. He kissed her mouth, her throat, her breasts, suckling them like a babe. His mouth and tongue were as scaldingly hot as the rest of him. Alex loved him back with a wild passion, her nails scoring his back, her legs wrapping around his waist. He thrust inside her with an urgency that made her writhe and buck and strain—and beg for more. His hand slid down between their bodies to touch her where they joined, and stayed to tease and caress. Alex buried her face in the hollow of his neck to muffle sharp little cries of ecstasy, while her body quivered and burned and finally convulsed.

“Joe! Oh my God,
Joe!”
Her release, when it came, was shattering. She was trembling, shaking, dying with the sheer bliss of it.

But he didn’t stop, didn’t even give her time to catch her breath. He
kept going until she was begging him not to stop, until she came again, until finally he took pity on her and found his own release, groaning his pleasure into her throat as he ground himself deep inside her shaking body.

In the aftermath, Alex lay on her back on the bed feeling vaguely like she had been run over by a semitrailer truck. She was too spent, too tired, too achy and shaky to move. Joe lay on top of her, and he weighed a ton. He was hot, sweaty, and his breath was stertorous in her ear. They were both naked. She could feel the rasp of his chest hairs against her breasts, and the solid strength of his thigh as it lay between hers. She moved a little, experimentally, and his mouth nuzzled her ear. His hand, which had been resting on her upper arm, slid down to fondle her breast. Then it slid lower, smoothing over her rib cage, sliding across her abdomen… .

“Joe,” she protested, curling her fingers around his wrist to stop his hand and noting as she did so that his wrist was way too big for her fingers to come anywhere near to encircling.

“Had enough?” He lifted his head and looked at her, his eyes gleaming bright in the spill of moonlight.

“What I was going to say is …” She smiled up into his eyes, then wriggled on top of him so that she was lying full-length against him, breasts to chest, stomach to stomach, thigh to thigh, her toes curling against the hair-roughened hardness of his calves.

“My turn.”

Then she wriggled up his body until she could kiss his mouth.

Forty-three

N
eely.” It was a whisper, just the teeniest breath of sound. The voice was familiar, achingly familiar… .

“Daddy?” she whispered, opening her eyes. It was so dark that she couldn’t be sure whether it was day or night. So dark she could not see as far as the end of her nose. Dark as the inside of a grave. And cold and clammy as one, too. The air smelled of damp, of the earth after a rain. She was lying on something soft—a mattress? A bed? She could hear—what? A steady drip, as if from a leaky faucet. And a moan… .

“I’m here with you, Neely.”

“Daddy?” She heard the voice, she knew she did, she was not just imagining it. She struggled to move. Her hands were tingling, asleep. She’d been lying on them. They were beneath her body. She shifted, stretching her aching arms. At least, she tried to stretch her arms. With a metallic rattle they moved—and then she could move them no farther.

There were metal bands around her wrists with something linking them together. Her arms were pinned behind her back.

Neely explored frantically. Moving out from the metal bands on her wrists, her fingers found smooth, cold metal links—a chain.

Her wrists were chained together behind her back.

She fought the chain, struggling madly, twisting, kicking—
her ankles were chained, too.

My God, my God, what was this? She was chained hand and foot, lying on a mattress in a cold, damp place that was darker than the inside of a cave.

“Daddy,” she whimpered, even though she remembered now that he was dead. Is that how she had heard his voice? Was she dead too? No, there wouldn’t be chains, not even in hell.

There’d been a man at the top of the stairs—he’d grabbed her.

That was all she could remember.

She squirmed over onto her stomach, trying to twist free, to kick free, to get free any way she could, realizing as she did so that she was still dressed in her jeans and turtleneck. But she’d been wearing her jean jacket, too, and a pair of cowboy boots. She wiggled her toes: only her thin trouser socks covered her feet. Someone had taken off some of her clothes.

The thought made Neely’s skin crawl.

“Neely?” Her dad’s voice again.

“Where are you?” she sobbed, her head thrashing wildly from side to side as she fought to see through the darkness.

She could see nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was as dark as if she were blind. But she knew she wasn’t.

She fought the chains. They clanked and rattled and held fast no matter what she did. She took a deep breath, opening her mouth to scream… .

“Be quiet,” her dad’s voice warned. And then she saw something: two dots, two small glowing dots, luminous green, just a few feet away. Like eyes in the night… .

Footsteps. She heard footsteps. Footsteps that grew louder as they approached where she lay.

This was not good. Neely didn’t know how she knew it, but she did.

“Pretend to sleep.” The voice was fading away. The dots of green light were gone. She was in the dark again, alone and terrified. She wanted to call him back, scream
Daddy
at the top of her lungs, but she was too scared, too conscious of the approach of something …

Evil. She didn’t know how she knew that, either, but know it she did.

Instinct took over. Trying to get her breathing under control, Neely wriggled onto her back and assumed the approximate position in which she had awakened: supine, arms beneath her body, legs stretched out straight… .

There was light. It was coming toward her like the headlight of a train. A small headlight, without the accompanying rattle and roar—it was a flashlight, of course. Someone was walking toward her carrying a flashlight.

Just before she squeezed her eyes shut, Neely saw that she was lying on the bare mattress of a twin-size bed. It had been pushed lengthwise against the far wall of a small, cell-like room with rough stone walls and jail-like iron bars forming an entire fourth wall. The chamber she was in looked like the set from a horror movie. Vampires would feel right at home.

At the thought, Neely felt the hair rise on the back of her neck.

She heard a rattle as if of keys, and squeezed her eyes shut while the flashlight was still a couple of feet away from the iron bars. Then she forced herself to relax her face… .

“Hello, Cornelia,” a male voice crooned. It was a pleasant voice, not too deep, unmistakably Southern in origin.

It made her skin crawl.

“Are you awake yet?”

There was the sound of metal on metal, a faint click, and then the cell door swung inward and he was inside the cell with her, moving toward the bed.

Neely’s heart raced. Instinctively she stiffened, then had to remind her terrified body to relax, go limp, feign sleep… .

“Still asleep?” He sounded disappointed as he played the flashlight over her body. “Well, that’s all right. I’ve got plenty of time. All night, in fact.”

He laughed, although it was more like a giggle, a weird little high-pitched giggle that made Neely want to scream. Only she knew she could not, knew she had to remain perfectly still, perfectly limp, as he set the flashlight down somewhere near the bed and touched her, rolling her onto her side… .

“Your hair is so pretty.” He fingered one of the long, curly strands. “You dye it, don’t you? Or are you blond all over? We’ll see… .”

He was talking to himself as much as her, Neely realized. She realized, too, just what she was in for. Rape
—oh, God, oh, God—
after which he was probably going to kill her.

Stay limp. Keep your limbs heavy. Remember to breathe.
She could almost hear the words as they scrolled through her mind.

“Let’s make you more comfortable, shall we?” He rolled her onto her side so that her back was to him, and his fingers brushed her skin as he fumbled with the shackles on her wrists. Unlocking them, she realized, as first one hand and then the other was set free. To her surprise, he chafed her wrists, a kind gesture that was somehow almost scarier than violence would have been. “I’m sorry I had to leave you like this for so long, but there was something I had to do. You just missed the most amazing bonfire. It was in your honor, actually. Your predecessor just moved out.”