A Bride for the Taking

‘Everywhere! And now—now he’s got other men with him…’

Her words tumbled to a halt as Jake stared past her. She watched as his face changed. His eyes turned cold, his mouth narrowed—and she knew. Oh, God, she knew…

‘Get behind me,’ he said softly.

‘Jake. Jake—who is he?’

‘Dammit, woman, did you hear what I said? Get behind me. Now!’

She did, then stood trembling as she peered over his shoulder. There they were—the bearded man and his friends—looking as evil as death as they urged their horses slowly forward.

Jake said something. She couldn’t understand, but there was no mistaking the intent. His voice was harsh, angry—and protective. Instinctively, she reached out and put one shaky hand on his shoulder, and he reached up and covered her fingers with his.

One of the men pointed to them, threw his head back, and laughed.

‘Go to hell, you fat son of a bitch!’ Jake snarled.

The bearded man snapped out a word, and the laughter stopped. He moved forward, his horse dancing with almost obscene delicacy beneath his weight, and said something.

‘No,’ Jake said. ‘No, goddamn you!’ He added something in Barovnian.

The man with the beard reached slowly into his waistband. Dorian cried out as he drew out a black revolver. Jake reached back and drew her into the curve of his arm.

‘It’s going to be all right, kitten,’ he said softly.

But it wasn’t. She knew that as soon as one of the men moved off, trotting to the small herd of horses. He grasped the staked-down reins of a large black stallion, jerked them free, and led the animal back to them.

‘Itsai,’ he snapped.

Jake took the reins slowly. ‘I want you to do as I tell you, kitten.’

‘Jake, please—what do they want?’

The bearded man stabbed his heels into his horse’s flanks and moved quickly forward, snarling a command.

‘They want us to go with them.’

‘But where? Why? I don’t—’

‘We have no choice. They’re armed—and they have many, many friends. We wouldn’t stand a chance of a snowball in hell against them.’

Dorian began to tremble. ‘What do they want?’

‘Itsai!’

Jake snarled something in return, and then he leaped on to the back of the stallion and held his hand out to Dorian.

‘Come,’ he said softly.

She put her hand in his and scrambled up ahead of him. His arms closed around her as the other horsemen surrounded them, and the little party began moving out of Quarem.

‘Jake?’ Dorian swallowed hard. ‘Please, you have to tell me what they want.’

He took a deep breath. ‘Remember what I told you about the bridal market, kitten?’

‘I thought—I thought you were joking about that.’

‘No,’ he said grimly. ‘I was never more serious.’

‘Does he think you brought me to sell? Well, tell him you didn’t. Tell him—’

‘I did.’ His arms tightened around her. ‘But he doesn’t believe me. He’s taking us to his leader.’

‘But why? What does his leader have to do with anything?’

‘Itsai! Itsai!’

The man riding alongside reached out and slapped his hand on the stallion’s flank. The horses broke into a swift gallop, and Jake drew Dorian more closely into his arms.

‘Their leader is the Tagor,’ he said.

Hysterical laughter rose in her throat. There it was again, that ridiculous name. But Jake—Jake wasn’t smiling, she thought as she tilted her head back and looked at him. He was cold-eyed, narrow-lipped—he looked—he looked…

‘Jake?’ Dorian drew in her breath. ‘Why are they taking me to him?’

Jake’s arms tightened around her. ‘I won’t let anything happen to you,’ he said in a harsh whisper.

She felt very cold suddenly. ‘Please, tell me the truth. Why is the man with the beard taking me to the—the Tagor?’

He put his mouth to her ear before he spoke, so that his whisper seemed to travel into her very bones.

‘He wants to give you to him as a gift.’

Dorian waited. She waited for the punch-line to the joke, she waited for Jake to say he’d only been teasing; she waited for some terribly clever rejoinder to come dancing into her head.

But all that happened was that her heart began beating faster and faster, as if it were trying to keep time with the stallion’s thudding hoofbeats, and finally the only thing that seemed to make any sense at all was to bury her face in Jake’s neck and cling to him for her very life as they galloped wildly across the alien landscape.

CHAPTER TEN

DORIAN had once interviewed a young woman who’d been unfortunate enough to have been held hostage for more than twelve hours by a bank robber who’d locked her in a lavatory while he negotiated with the police.

‘You must have been terrified,’ Dorian had said.

The woman had nodded. ‘Oh, yes, I was. It was the worst experience of my life.’

‘But how did you get through it? What did you do to make the time pass?’ Dorian had asked, and the woman had got a defensive look on her face.

‘Well,’ she’d said after a pause, ‘once I realised there was nothing much I could do to change things, I slept.’

Dorian had been incredulous. The woman slept? Slept through those terrifying hours? No, she’d thought firmly, that was impossible.

Now, as they rode slowly towards the mountain encampment of the Tagor, she wondered if perhaps the woman had taken the only reasonable action.

Her mind was doing dreadful things, conjuring up scenarios that might take place once their captors turned them over to the Tagor. The imaginative scenes were vivid, frightening, and all shared an ending that was filled with violence and degradation.

Jake felt her move restlessly in his arms, and he drew her back against him.

‘We’ll be all right,’ he whispered, his breath stirring the damp tendrils of hair on her cheek.

For some reason she didn’t understand, the tender reassurances in his voice brought a lump to her throat. She wanted to fling her arms around his neck and beg him to hold her to his heart, not because of what might lie ahead, but because being close to him suddenly seemed all that mattered. All she could concentrate on now was the solace of Jake’s embrace, the steady beat of his heart beneath her ear, the coolness of his lips as he brushed them against her temple.

‘Close your eyes and get some rest,’ he said softly as the horses picked their way through a rock-strewn valley.

She protested that sleep was impossible. But little by little fear and fatigue worked against her, until finally her head fell back against his shoulder and her eyelids drooped shut.

‘That’s my girl,’ Jake whispered. She felt the soft press of his mouth against her hair. She thought of the woman hostage she’d interviewed, and then, mercifully, she drifted off into nothingness.

She came awake with dizzying swiftness, awakening not in a sweet, sensual haze as she had that morning, but to a formless terror, a sudden nightmare of such awful proportions that it made her gasp and jerk upright.

‘Jake?’ she said, and instantly his arms tightened around her.

‘Easy, kitten. I’m right here.’

A tremor went through her. ‘I—I was dreaming,’ she whispered. Images flashed through her mind and she buried her face in his shirt. ‘It was awful.’

‘Trust me, Dorian. Everything will be all right.’

She nodded and waited for her heartbeat to slow. Everything would be all right, Jake had said, but she wondered if that could possibly be true. Her dream had been ugly, but reality was little better.

She sat up and looked around. The horses were moving in a line through a rocky defile, with the black stallion in the centre of the little procession. It was late afternoon: the sun was low in the sky.

‘Jake? Will we be there soon?’

It was a child’s question, but Jake understood the despair behind it. He nodded as he drew her back against him.

‘Yes. I think so.’