Page 60 of Hotter than Wildfire

She was puzzling over that when she heard quiet steps, much quieter than the thundering of her heart. The steps approached and she braced herself, but the steps walked past her, behind her. Hands at the back of her head, and the blindfold was pulled off.

At first she couldn’t see anything. There was a blinding light in her eyes. They hurt as they tried to accommodate.

There was the sound of something being scraped across the floor and a figure came slowly into focus. Black shoes, black pants, black sweater, dragging a chair. Everything about him was elegant, expensive. Another scrape and she saw a face.

Hard, dark, triangular. High cheekbones, the kind of beard that grew dark after five pm. Dark eyes, dark hair. A face she’d never seen before, a face she’d never forget.

But not Tom.

“Who—who are you?” she said, but the words were muffled by the gag.

The man flicked his forefinger and the man behind her untied the gag. Kerry dropped her head, coughed. Her mouth was completely dry.

The man had somehow understood. “Who am I?” He edged even closer and looked her straight in the eyes. “It doesn’t matter who I am. What’s important is what I want. I’m looking for the woman who sings under the name Eve. Her real name is Ellen Palmer but she’s not using that name.”

So. Kerry stared into the man’s blank black eyes. This was Irene’s Tom, worse than her own Tom. And apparently Irene wasn’t Irene. She wasn’t Eve either. She was Ellen.

Kerry looked into those eyes and flinched. No wonder Irene—Ellen—had been on the run. Those black eyes were utterly dead, like the eyes of a crocodile or a corpse. His eyes didn’t even reflect the light. They were like two dark pools of stagnant water.

Impossible as it seemed, there was something worse than Tom.

Tom was crazy, no question. But no matter that his emotions made no sense, he felt them, and keenly. All he wanted, he said, was for her to be his and to be perfect. Even when he was hitting her, there was emotion there. Rage, a perverted and twisted kind of love, a need to dominate. His eyes had glowed with what he was feeling, feelings almost visible on his skin.

This man felt nothing, nothing at all, which she now realized was scarier than rage.

Often she’d been able to talk Tom down, get him down from the ledge of crazy despair and wrong-headed love he’d felt. Reason with him, at least a little. Because somewhere in there was a man who was suffering, who couldn’t get a handle on his feelings. She’d stayed with him way too long, but part of it had been out of a misplaced sense of pity.

This man didn’t need pity. And he didn’t feel pity. He felt nothing.

It was there, in his eyes, in his face.

And at that moment, Kerry knew that she was dead. There was nothing in this man she could in any way appeal to. No common humanity, no mercy. There was none in him.

She needed her hands. They were duct taped together. She needed them now.

“Where’s Ellen?” The question was quiet, factual. But she knew it was the first salvo of a coming firestorm.

She said the only thing she could say. “I don’t know.”

Those dead eyes watched her, watched her face. Could he tell she was speaking the truth? Was she? She knew where Ellen had gone, but she had no idea if she was still there.

Something of her ambiguity trickled through.

“You know,” he said flatly. “You’re just not talking.”

He gave a short nod of his head and Kerry felt a large male hand land on her shoulder from behind. His hand moved and suddenly two fingers pinched a certain spot and pain exploded in her body. Hot, crackling pain, unlike anything she’d ever felt before. Pain so intense she couldn’t even pull in the breath to scream. Pain so intense she thought her heart would stop.

Only gurgling sounds were making it past her throat, then a strangled keening. The man in front of her nodded again, the hand was lifted and Kerry sagged against the duct tape, gasping and shaking.

The man sighed. “We can do this all day and all night, you know. Just this and you’ll be reduced to a screaming mass of protoplasm at the end. My friend here touched a special plexus of nerves which is extremely painful in humans. He exerted minimal effort. He’s very strong and tireless. He can do this forever.”

The chair scraped even closer and through her own sweat and terror, Kerry could smell him now. He actually smelled good—of clean linens and expensive leather and some costly male cologne. She knew that if she ever smelled that smell again she’d throw up.

The man behind her smelled of nothing at all. She hadn’t seen him yet but already he seemed larger than life, inhuman as an insect or an alien.

“Now the reason my friend here found that particular spot so very easily is that he’s an expert at extracting information.” The man in front of her was watching her carefully, gauging the effect of his words on her. He didn’t need to assess the effect though. He terrified her and she didn’t know how to hide that. “He knows exactly what he’s doing and he’s broken hundreds of men. Men who are very strong, highly trained to resist torture. And he broke them down into parts. He’d have them whimpering, begging for him to stop. He never stops until he gets what he wants. And he sure won’t stop with you because you’re a woman.”

She needed her hands!