It was like a lover’s embrace and one endless kiss—except more frustrating than pleasurable, Simon reflected, relieved beyond measure when he surfaced with Anna in the pool within the pod he shared with his lieutenants and closest friends. It took Anna several moments to realize they’d surfaced, unfortunately, and his relief was slightly premature. The moment he loosened his hold on her and broke contact, she began struggling to reattach herself. “There’s air here, Anna!” he said tightly, eluding her attempt to press her mouth to his again by turning his head, giving her a light shake to break through her panic.
She opened her eyes like someone waking from a nightmare and uncertain it was over, gasping, shivering all over.
“Let me help her out,” Caleb said, his voice roughened with sympathy that irritated the shit out of Simon.
For a moment, he tensed, but he forced himself to let go of her as Caleb pulled her toward the lip of the pool, caught her waist and hoisted her out.
It was a view that stopped him in his tracks. Her clothing was plastered to every inch of her skin and nearly transparent, hiding just enough to tease him. Either his reaction was of short duration, or it affected everyone else the same way. When he finally blinked in an instinctive effort to bring the view into focus, he came to himself enough to look around to see if the others had noticed and saw Caleb had just hoisted himself from the water.
Anna wrapped her arms around herself, shivering, her teeth clattering together hard enough he could hear it. He struggled with the sympathy that coiled in his belly, but he couldn’t shake it. He also couldn’t prevent the rise of resentment inside him when Caleb helped her up and supported her to the dryer.
“Why did you bring her here?” Ian muttered beside him. “I thought the plan was to take her to the Watch Center and interrogate her.”
Simon didn’t even glance at his friend. He was fully focused on watching Caleb wrestle with Anna for her clothes. Not surprisingly, Caleb won the battle and stripped her. He swallowed a little convulsively when the ‘veil’ was lifted, allowing him an unrestricted view of her.
“The governor told me to handle it,” he responded finally, a little absently. “He made it pretty clear that he didn’t want to know the details. We can’t take her there without everyone in the city knowing inside of a day, and if the governor hears, he’ll be forced to do something about it.” Moving to the side of the pool before Ian could question him further, he climbed out and strode to the dryer. Caleb had pulled a robe from the locker next to it and was dressing Anna as if she was a child.
She looked like a child, he thought, feeling his belly clench—all big, round, frightened eyes.
Well, unfortunately, not entirely like a child. As slender as she seemed, there was nothing at all childlike about her full breasts and rounded hips. That was all woman and his cock knew it, springing to attention before he even realized his body was working against him.
The robe swallowed her—no surprise since all the robes were of a size for them and she was at least a foot shorter than he was and probably half his weight.
He managed to get himself under control when he discovered that she was clutching at Caleb a little frantically, as if trying to shield herself with him.
“It’s alright, baby,” Caleb murmured. “No one is going to hurt you. I promise.”
Simon rolled his eyes. He didn’t like it that she was scared anymore than any of the others, but the hard truth was that her fear of them was all they had to work with.
They couldn’t hurt her. He wouldn’t have even if he wasn’t constrained by law to protect her.
Glaring a warning at Caleb, he caught her arm, dragged her loose from Caleb in spite of her efforts to cling to him and marched down the main corridor until he reached his room. “Wait inside,” he said curtly, stealing himself against the wide-eyed look of terror she turned on him before she scurried inside.
Closing the door behind her, he jerked his head at the men in a silent order to head into the living area. He could see all of them were thoroughly pissed off—with him. He supposed he should’ve expected it, all things considered. There were virtually no women in all of New Atlantis. The government had glibly promised brides to the first colonists to accept the ‘change’ and establish the new American frontier. Like everything the bastards promised, though, it never really materialized.
They’d legalized prostitution just to get any women at all and even the money wasn’t enough to draw droves of them. Those who came could not only name their price, but the men were eager to take them as brides and carry them away if they could convince them. That practice eventually led to bride bartering on the bride mart. The poor and desperate sold their daughters to the colonists, but even the most dutiful daughters apparently refused to support the family in that way more often than not, because there remained a tremendous shortage of women even after generations.
It was the main reason the people in the upper forty considered them wild and barbaric—their wedding practices—because beyond the fact that women were scarce, they were damned expensive to acquire. Few of the colonists, no matter how hard they worked, could afford to buy a bride without help, let alone protect their investment from the men who were doing without, which had led to claim sharing.
It was a marriage—of sorts, but it was so ‘outlandish’ to the traditionalists in the continental U.S., who weren’t faced with the problems they were, that it was seen as proof of their barbarism. No one in the territory was particularly happy about it, if it came to that, but ‘owning’ a fourth or even an eighth of a bride beat the hell out of having no woman at all!
So he could see their point. Women were precious. They were to be pampered and cared for because they were so scarce and fragile.
“Let me remind you before anybody says a god damned word that that …
human in there is the spawn of the bastard that just killed a hell of a lot of friends of ours,” he growled, “and it’s very likely that she’s the only chance we have of getting our hands on the son-of-a-bitch.”
Some of the angry tension eased from them, but he could see he was going to have a battle on his hands. “I don’t believe she had anything to do with it,” Joshua said tightly. “I mean … look at her, Simon! She’s just a little bit! Any one of us could break her in half! I feel like a god damned bully and I don’t mind telling you I don’t like it worth a shit!”
“You bought that dumb act?” Simon growled with disgust. “She admitted she was a scientist—although we knew that already! She graduated at the top of her class.
She has enough brains to more than make up for her lack of sparing abilities! If you can’t keep your head on straight around her, keep your distance! She’ll play mind games with you and fuck you over forwards and backwards!”
“Jesus, Simon!” Caleb snapped. “There wasn’t a damned thing in anything we uncovered about her to suggest she’s like that! Or even that she had any connection at all with her father!”
“And yet she’s written and published a half a dozen papers condemning genetic manipulation of the human species!” Simon shot back at him. “Whether she is or was connected in any way to the attack, she is clearly a chip off the block—of a like mind with her father who considers the only good ‘mutant’ is a dead one! You need to keep that in mind when you’re dealing with her! You probably make her skin crawl.”
Caleb looked angry and a little sick. “She … clung to me.”
“Because she’s scared,” Ian said coolly. “It was probably instinct because she was more afraid of Simon right then than you—or because you offered sympathy. Don’t let her get in your head, Caleb. I hate to agree with Simon on this. I think she’s as pretty a little thing as I’ve ever seen and there are a lot of things I’d love to do to her besides interrogate her, but there’s the danger. She doesn’t need strength to beat us. She just needs to weaken us—turn us against one another.”
Caleb glanced down the hall, but he subsided. “So … we’re going to keep her here and interrogate her. I don’t see what that will gain us. Say what you like, but she convinced me she didn’t know anything useful.”
“She’s been inside his home,” Simon pointedly. “She attended a party—I still say a celebration of their victory. If that was the case, then she saw a lot. She knows what Miles Cavendish looks like—and we don’t. She knows what a lot of his people look like—because she saw them. She also knows what his home looks like. It’s a long shot.
He could’ve moved it anywhere up and down this coast or he could be heading for Europe—in fact anywhere. But it’s still something and we don’t have anything without her.”
“You don’t think we could use her as bait?”
Simon stared at Ian a long moment and finally moved to a vacant chair, settling in it heavily. “I don’t know,” he said finally, reluctant even to consider it. “If it’s true she didn’t even know the man before she met him last week … doubtful. Anybody as cold-blooded as Miles Cavendish probably doesn’t have any real attachments to anyone—let alone a young woman he doesn’t even know.”
“So … we keep her here, under wraps, until we’ve gotten what we can out of her, and then what? She’ll know our names and our faces. The minute we let her go we’re facing federal kidnapping charges. She’ll make a dash to the nearest police station and spill her guts.”
Simon shrugged. “We’re territorial lawmen. The most we have to worry about is operating outside our jurisdiction—fines and a slap on the wrist. She has terrorist connections. All we have to do is produce the evidence and the charges vanish.”
“Then why hold her here at all?” Joshua demanded. “Wouldn’t it be better to hold her at the Watch Center? This could easily be interpreted as false imprisonment—keeping her here.”
“Except the bomb made the Center unstable,” Simon pointed out and held up his hand before any of the others could comment. “There is a chance Cavendish will try to get her back—a slim one, granted, but a chance that he’ll discover his only child is being held by the people he despises. As long as there’s any chance, at all, that she could help us stop the bastard, I’m keeping her here. Like I said, if we jail her, the governor will be informed and if the feds demand her back—which they would—then we have to turn her over.”
“This is a little deep into the gray area,” Ian said.
“I don’t like it either,” Simon said grimly. “But I also don’t like the idea of waiting for the next bomb to go off.”
Caleb blew out a heavy breath. “Alright. How are we going to handle this?”
“The same way we would if we’d caught the bastard that blew up the desalinization plant. We interrogate her, keep her off-kilter until she cracks and we know we’re getting the truth out of her. If any of you just don’t think you have the stomach for it, speak now.”
* * * *
The bone deep chill that had been rattling her teeth finally eased off and some of the tension with it, but Anna was still in such a state of shock that it almost seemed that she was moving through a nightmare. She kept trying to reconcile the smiling, personable man she’d met with a cold-blooded killer and discovered she just couldn’t. A monster capable of killing so many people should
look like a monster. He shouldn’t be able to project so much charisma, kindness, joviality. He shouldn’t be handsome and rich and polished.
Was it possible, at all, that they were mistaken?
They didn’t seem to think so, and she still couldn’t accept it. She hadn’t been able to accept his claims of being her father—and her patron!
Bitterness washed through her at that. She’d felt like she was making her own way, felt like her mother would’ve been proud of her if she’d been alive to see it! She’d felt that winning a grant right out of school justified her existence, underlined her importance to society.
And it hadn’t been anything but … an ego-trip for a man who hadn’t even been around for her birth? So that
he could take pride in his off-spring?
She felt betrayed in every sense of the word, belittled by what he’d done.
She realized abruptly that she did believe every awful thing they’d said about Miles Cavendish, as hard as it was to accept. It was accepting that his blood ran through her veins that she was having trouble with.
She hadn’t believed him when he’d spun her the tale about her mother. She hadn’t
wanted
to believe it and therefore she’d tried to keep an open mind. Deep down, she’d felt the entire time that he was a liar. She didn’t know him, but she knew her mother. There was just the two of them. They’d been close enough that she felt like she knew her mother better than anyone. The very fact that her mother had never said one word about him seemed proof positive that he was a liar. She didn’t believe her mother would’ve stayed on the run throughout her life without a reason.
And that reason had to be that she was terrified of the man she’d married. If it had been a ‘misunderstanding’ as he claimed, she might or might not have reconciled with him, but it seemed probable that she would’ve vented about it—at least at some point.
She’d never understood why her mother kept them on the move. There’d been many times when she’d resented it, become angry and argued with her mother and just generally been a pain in the ass. She had a hard time making friends. She didn’t fit in easily and it had made her miserable every time she made a friend and then had to give them up until she’d finally ceased even trying to connect. She’d nursed a lot of resentment toward her mother because of it.
And to think all that time her mother was just trying to protect her!
She was so sorry she’d doubted her mother, angered that her mother hadn’t trusted her enough to explain it.
She must have found out what he was doing, Anna thought abruptly. She must have discovered he was a terrorist!