Armageddon (10 page)

Truly bizarre dreams haunted Lena’s sleep. Some of them were distinctly unpleasant dreams about Morris, or a man that looked like Morris but wasn’t. Some of the dreams were scary, because she kept trying to climb this thing that seemed to go on forever and she knew if she fell she would just keep right on falling.

She dreamed even scarier dreams than that, though, where she was running from something in the dark, something she knew was evil, terrible, even though she didn’t really know what it was, but she couldn’t run because suddenly something was holding her down. Sometimes the things that scared her hardly even seemed like a dream at all, because there was nothingness and then a man would leap out at her from darkness, just burst into her mind like a jack-in-the-box popping out of a box.

Pleasant dreams mingled with the unpleasant, though. She would feel a man’s weight, hear his harsh breath as he drove into her body, feel heat and need surging through her blood--and then everything would stop, leaving feeling horribly let down and disappointed.

A woman kept appearing in the dreams, too, a complete stranger who always bullied her, dragging her up from her bed and sending her to relieve herself, or making her eat or drink and then stabbing her with something sharp and smiling at her and talking to her as if she was a child. “Good girl!”

Lena wasn’t certain what had wakened her, but she awoke with a clearness of mind that seemed almost as strange as the dreams that began to dissipate from her mind as soon as she opened her eyes. Oddly enough, even though she felt completely alert, nothing looked the least bit familiar to her as she stared up at the ceiling for several moments and finally rolled over to look around at the room she found herself in. Maybe she wasn’t as awake as she thought she was?

A faint sound caught her attention and she went still, closing her eyes.

When she opened them again, she discovered that she was looking straight at a naked man that was looking straight at her. She’d surprised him. He’d frozen in the act of drying the water off that was running in tiny rivulets down his chest and legs.

He didn’t look the least bit perturbed to discover she was watching him, just surprised to find her awake.

She frowned faintly. “Where am I?”

He studied her intently for a moment. Finally, frowning, he focused on drying himself. “You don’t remember?”

She might remember if he wasn’t distracting her with that damned towel, she thought a little irritably. When she managed to drag her gaze from his thoroughly--she was certain--dried genitalia, it was to discover that he’d slanted a glance at her through half closed eyes, his brows drawn together over the bridge of his nose. She blinked as recognition hit her almost as forcefully as a physical blow. “I know you. I remember.”

The frown vanished. His dark brows rose upward, but something flickered in his eyes that looked more like concern than irritation or relief. “Somehow, the way you say

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it doesn’t comfort me. What do you remember?”

Lena sat up abruptly. “I met you at Morris’. You came there one time.”

He studied her, still with that puzzled, concerned look, slowly balling the towel he held into a tight ball and then tossing it carelessly across the room. “You don’t remember anything after that?”

Lena blinked at him, stunned by the question. “Of course I do!” She thought it over, wondering why he had asked such a strange question. Abruptly, she realized she had been so surprised by the sudden memory that she hadn’t been very clear about what she remembered. “When I was a little girl.”

When he said nothing, she studied him carefully, wondering if she’d been wrong after all. “You’ve changed. Your hair was longer then, lighter than it is now. You seemed so tall.”

“You remember all that?”

She nodded.

“Just like that? I come out of the shower naked and suddenly your memory is jogged?”

She frowned at the sarcasm, watching him as he crossed the cabin and opened a panel in one wall. Pulling a uniform from it, he stepped into the legs, tugged the suit up his hips. He left the upper half of the uniform dangling from his hips, but Lena found him slightly less unnerving half dressed than completely naked. When he turned again, he was adjusting his package.

Lena looked down at her hands, discovering in the process that she was as naked as he had been a moment before. Grasping the sheet, she pulled it up self-consciously and tucked the edges beneath her arms, blushing when she caught his wry glance.

Why was she naked? In his bed? And why did she not remember getting there?

If they’d done what she thought they might have done, she was going to be really pissed off. Because she didn’t remember a damned thing!

Without a word, he stepped to the bunk, picked up a jumpsuit similar to the one he was wearing off the foot and dropped it in her lap. Lena stared at it a moment and finally shrugged mentally because there hardly seemed any point to worrying about her nakedness when it was obvious she’d been sleeping naked in his bed since she’d come onboard. Moving to the edge, she pushed a foot into first one and then the other of the legs of the jumpsuit, working the snugly clinging fabric upwards.

“It was the way you looked at me,” she said, struggling to sort through the flash of memories that began to flood into her mind.

“Then? Or just now?” he murmured, his gaze moving over her as she stood up to tug the jumpsuit over her hips and then thrust her arms into the sleeves.

When she glanced up at the question, she saw he’d moved to a small basin supported by a pedestal and filled one palm with a foaming substance from one of the taps.

Fascinated, she watched as he covered the lower half of his face with the foam, wiped the excess from his hands, and reached for a hair removal appliance. Working with both hands to hold his skin taut, he began raking the remover slowly over his face.

Thoroughly mesmerized by the process, Lena’s mind just seemed to shut down.

It wasn’t until she caught his gaze on her from his reflection in the mirror that she realized she’d completely lost the thread of the conversation.

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She couldn’t pick it up again either, couldn’t remember what she’d been talking about before.

Frowning, she looked down at the suit she’d pulled on and studied the closure that went all the way from the neck to her groin absently, trying to figure out how to work it.

She didn’t realize he’d moved toward her until he pushed her hands from the closure and pulled the edges together himself.

An electric current seemed to sizzle through her at the light brush of his hands as he worked his way up the closure. Her belly spasmed.

She looked up at his face, wondering if he’d noticed the effect he was having on her. “You’re Morris’ son, aren’t you?” she said, suddenly remembering when they’d come onboard the ship the soldiers had called him Captain Morris and wondering why it hadn’t occurred to her before when she could see now the strong resemblance between father and son.

Instead of answering, he uttered a nonspecific grunt. A distressingly uncomfortable sensation washed over her. She’d been fantasizing about Dax since the first time she’d set eyes on him--or at least the first time she remembered seeing him.

Before that--the very first time, when she’d been nothing but a kid, she’d thought he was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. She could still remember how awestruck she’d been. Had he been thinking of her all that time as a younger sister? “I guess … that sort of means you’re my brother?”

His head came up abruptly. Gripping her upper arms, he yanked her up on her tiptoes and covered her surprised mouth with his own. Lena’s heart slammed against her chest wall so hard she almost blacked out from the painful concussion. Heat scoured her as he thrust his tongue into her mouth and explored the exquisitely sensitive inner surfaces of her mouth and tongue with a thoroughness that made it impossible for her even to remember to try to breathe. His taste and scent mingled with her own like a potent liquor, flooding through her veins like liquid fire and draining away every ounce of strength and willpower until she was intoxicated, dizzy, lethargic and her entire body began to tremble with weakness and need.

He released her almost as abruptly as he’d seized her and she wilted weakly to the bed. “Not even sort of.”

Too stunned even to gather her wits about her, Lena merely stared at him as he moved to the wall and punched it almost viciously. The door of another locker popped open. Pulling a pair of boots from it, he crossed the room, plopped down on the chair behind a desk and shoved his feet into them.

When he stood up again, he caught the upper half of his uniform and dragged it upward, shoving his arms into the sleeves. “Just a suggestion,” he murmured when he paused at the door. “Find another place to sleep. The next time I find you in my bed, naked or otherwise, I may do something we’ll both regret.”

A shudder went through her when the door closed behind him, breaking the spell at last--sort of. She still felt rather as if she’d been blindsided. Lifting a hand, she touched her swollen lips gingerly with the tips of her fingers, tasting him as she licked the dry surface. It was enough to send another wave of need through her. Swallowing convulsively, she dropped her hand to her lap again.

Was he laboring under some strange misconception that she wouldn’t welcome anything he wanted to do to her, she wondered?

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That thought brought her crashing back to reality.

What was she thinking?
She didn’t know anything about him--except that the man was dangerous. Images flashed in her mind of the fight in the cell when the guard had thrown her in with him and the other men. The one the guard had called Black Stew was a mountain of a man, taller and broader even than Dax, and
Dax
was a monster--every bit of six foot three or four and as solidly muscular as a tank--and Dax had beat the man into the floor as if he’d been no more than a ninety pound weakling
after
Black Stew had mopped the floor with the others.

Men didn’t just naturally know how to fight like that. It took practice. If that wasn’t evidence enough, Dax’s body was a road map of violence. There were scars on his legs and arms, his back, his chest, even several small scars on his face; a long thin one on one cheek and two tiny, barely noticeable one on his upper lip and chin.

Unbidden, the memory of Dax heaving and thrusting over her washed through her mind. Another shudder went through her, but she didn’t even try to lie to herself.

Maybe, if she hadn’t been too drugged up to hardly know where she was, that incident would have scared her out of her wits, disgusted her. She wasn’t certain of it, though, because the moment she had finally realized it was Dax the entire complexion of the situation had changed, radically. Some part of her had relished it. Some part of her had felt nothing but frustration that the circumstances prevented him from doing more than he had.

Her belly clenched almost painfully at the memory of his flesh gliding along her cleft, her body instantly recalling the pleasure that had heated her core.

Covering her face with her hands as if she could block out the memory, she got up abruptly.

Morris hadn’t wanted her anywhere around his son--hadn’t wanted Dax near her.

She remembered that from that time, so long ago she didn’t know why or how she still remembered it--except maybe because she had been terribly confused, disappointed, and scared. Dax couldn’t have been much more than a kid himself then, but to her eyes he was a man, and she’d never seen anything quite like him. He’d seemed almost god-like to her, a warrior god, a wondrously beautiful creature that was almost as scary as he was fascinating.

But then he and Morris had had a terrible fight. She couldn’t remember anything specific about the argument, only that Morris had told Dax he wasn’t welcome, that he wasn’t to come anymore and Dax--Dax had been hurt, and furious because he was hurt.

She remembered that, remembered seeing it in his eyes and wanting to cry for him.

He’d changed, and it wasn’t just that he was older, brawnier. There was no longer any sign at all of that vulnerability that had been in his eyes then.

He was a rebel. There was no longer any doubt about that, and he’d brought her into the middle of the conflict.

She didn’t want to be here. She wasn’t a rebel. She didn’t want to be one. She wanted the life back that she’d had before, but there was no way in hell she was ever going to get it back now.

Maybe there never had been. Most likely there never had been, because she’d seen something she should never have seen, the proof that the rumors weren’t just rumors. That didn’t mean she was ready to throw in her lot with the rebels, though. She didn’t want any part of fighting a war that there was no hope of winning.

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Dax had made it pretty clear he was going to consider her lingering in his cabin as an open invitation. She took that to mean that she was free to leave, and she still felt really uneasy when she left the cabin. After standing just outside in the corridor for several minutes, looking around, she followed the corridor. The first door to her right opened into a large room with bunks stacked two tiers high and with little more than two feet between them on either side or at the foot where the narrow space formed a walkway.