Charming Charly (English Edition) (Lords of Arr'Carthian 3) (8 page)

***

“I don’t know what I should do,” Amano complained. “I’ve held back, given her time. I’ve even moved out of my quarters, but she simply does not want to open up to me.”

“Perhaps it’s the wrong tactic after all,” thought his uncle. “Perhaps she needs to be forced to trust you. If you remain distant she might never make the move towards you.”

“But I can’t hurt her!” Amano snorted with indignation. “After everything she’s been through it would just traumatize her.”

“Of course I don’t mean that you should hurt her,” said the king. “Just force her to listen to you, to tolerate you, to allow you to touch her. Let me explain it to you this way: if you had a wild pergamo mare that pulled away from your hand, what would you do with her? Would you forever creep around her and hope that she would one day come to you of her own accord?”

“Of course not,” replied Amano. “I would tie her to a post and get her used to my voice and my proximity – then my touch and finally to bearing my weight.”

“You see!” said his uncle.

“But I can’t tie Charly to a post like a mare!”

“Of course not!” replied the king, irritably. “But can’t you take any lesson from this? Think, boy!”

“You mean I should tie her to my bed?”

“Not the whole time of course. But for her lessons.”

“I understand. I’m just afraid that it could unsettle her too much. What’s more, she would scream the whole palace down and her friends would rush to her aid.”

“The time has come for you to move to your estate. Take her with you.”

Amano nodded pensively. Perhaps his uncle was right. He would probably never get Charly to come to him of her own will. She was insecure, distrustful. Perhaps he really did need to force her to trust him.
 

“OK. We’ll leave early tomorrow morning,” he said finally. “Thank you for the advice.”

The king simply nodded and leant back in his armchair. A smile spread across his face.

“What are you thinking of right now?” asked Amano.

“I was just thinking of your aunt. Back then, the way I …” he chuckled. “Oh, she was a wild thing. She didn’t want me near her, either. Not because she was afraid, of course, but my problem was similar to yours.”

“Don’t tell me that you tied aunt Moreena to your bed,” asked Amano, grinning.

The king smiled mischievously.

“And it helped?”

“Of course. How else do you think I got my sons?”

Amano stood up. He hoped that he would have just as much success as his uncle. There was a difference, of course, between taming a frightened mare that had been handled badly and taming an animal that had been caught in the wild.
 
But he was now more confident than before the chat.
 

***

“What’s that supposed to mean? – We’re leaving?” asked Charly, horrified.

“I’ve already been away from home too long. I urgently need to see to the estate,” Amano explained calmly.
 

Charly’s heart was pounding madly. He could not be serious. For her it was completely unthinkable that she should go with him. Here she felt safe, but once she was alone with him, then … It did not bear thinking about what he might do with her.

“That I understand,” she said. “But
I
don’t need to go there with you.”

“Charly,” he said, sighing quietly. “I can’t leave you here. You can come with me of your own free will or I’ll need to force you. We’ve been here before, haven’t we? So, will you come with me without me needing to force you?”

Charly turned away and walked up and down the room, agitated. Why did he have to do this now? Precisely now, when she was gradually beginning to trust him? She was not yet ready to be alone with him anywhere. Here in the palace there were so many people and she had her friends and the queen.
 

“For how long?” she asked, stopping in front of the window.
 

“I don’t know. Perhaps for a week, but maybe longer. It depends on how long I need.”

“Need for what?”

“I have … things to sort out.”

“Things,” she said quietly. “Very informative.”

“Listen, Charly. If you’re concerned that we’d be alone … I have a whole house full of servants. It’s a large house and we have a beautiful garden there and …”

“OK!”
 

She interrupted him crossly, turning round. “I’ll come with you. But only because you would force me to anyway!”

The flight in the glider passed without conversation. Charly looked out of the window, silent. She had to admit that Karrx7 was an absolutely beautiful planet: a huge amount of forest with mountains in between and villages dotted about in the valleys. She was approaching the coming days with mixed feelings. On the one hand she liked Amano’s company, and his charm was certainly having an effect on her. On the other hand she was scared – especially when she thought about the fact that, sooner or later, he would want more from her. He had so far given her no cause to believe that he was capable of doing her any harm, but she simply could not change her mind-set.
 

“We’re almost there,” Amano interrupted the silence.

“OK,” replied Charly stiffly. She hated this tense situation. For the first time since he had rescued her, she wondered how it might have been between them if she had not been raped. She knew that Amano was charming and he was good-natured. He had a great body and she was sure that he would be a good lover. But, unfortunately, all of his obvious talents were lost on her.
 

 
She was not the sort of woman who was able of appreciating this. She sighed.
 

“Are you OK?” he asked with concern.

“Yes,” she replied. “I’m just … tired, that’s all.”

“You can rest straight away.”

A large house came into view. It reminded her a little of those old southern state houses with round pillars and a veranda that seemed to go round the whole house.
 

“Is this it?” she asked.

“Yes, this is our house,” he said, with evident pride in his voice.

“
Our?
”
 

Their eyes met.

“You’re my mate. It’s now your home,” he explained.

Charly did not respond. She swallowed down the cutting remark that was on the tip of her tongue and Amano looked ahead again. He set up the landing and she could see a few people, clearly his servants, approaching the landing area. They waited at a safe distance until the glider had landed on the ground and the motor had come to a stop.
 

Chapter 6

When she woke up she realized immediately that something was not right. Her arms were above her head – a position that she definitely would never sleep in. An attempt to move her arms confirmed her awful supposition.

“Shh,” sounded Amano’s gentle voice next to her. “Don’t panic. Nothing is going to happen to you. I won’t hurt you, OK?”

She threw her head round and glared at him wildly. She felt panic rise within her. She felt sick and her heart was racing as if it was going to burst. She looked at him accusingly. She had trusted him. Well, at least to a certain extent.

“If you’re not going to do anything to me, why am I tied up then?” she asked with a hint of hysteria in her voice.
 

“Because otherwise you’re going to carry on pushing me away,” he explained calmly. “You’re my mate, but you can’t bring yourself to let me to get close to you. By that, I don’t only mean that I am not to touch you. You won’t speak to me about what you’ve been through. You won’t let me console you when you’re not feeling good. You don’t trust me, although I’ve …”

“And you believe, in all seriousness, that you can gain my trust
by doing this
?” she asked, shaking her head. “What are you planning to do now? Force yourself on me?”

“Nothing is further from my mind,” he said gently. “No. I won’t even touch you, at least not today. You won’t tell me what you’ve been through, so I’m going to tell you what I’ve been through.”

Charly stared at him incredulously.

“What?”

“I’ll going to tell you my story, OK? Just listen. Can you do that?”

Charly looked at his serious face. She was confused. What did he want of her? What was he hoping to achieve by doing this?

“Will you listen to me?”

“What choice do I have?” she asked ironically. “So, what do you want to tell me? How you were raped by a woman?”
 

She snorted. What might this giant of a man have to tell her? Nothing could be as bad as what she had suffered. He was a man. And what was more, a warrior – strong and probably without scruples, too.

“I’m going to tell you about my childhood,” he began.

“Oh, right!” she said sarcastically. “What happened? Did you fall off your pony?” she laughed.

He smiled, but it was a sad smile and her laughter ceased. He sat up a little straighter and folded his arms across his broad chest.

“I was eleven when it happened,” he said at last. “I was with my father and my uncle on Mananao7. That’s where the seat of the High Counsel of the United Galactic Federation is. Those were unsettled times. War was raging between many races. A group of rebels was storming the building that the ambassadors of the Federation had been accommodated in. Some of the ambassadors were killed. My father injured. My uncle and I fell into the hands of the rebels. They carried us off to Sixtus6, a planet in the Black Quadrant.”

He paused, rubbing his chin. Charly was looking at him intently. She had a feeling that the story that he was telling her was going to become at least as horrible as her own.
 

“I was put into a cell. Alone. My uncle was put somewhere else. I spent two days without food or drink. Without no contact with anyone. No one came to me. The part of the building that I was being held captive in was empty. I did not even know whether they had locked me in the cell to die. There was only me and the uncertainty. But on the third day they came. They took me into a room. My uncle was sitting there, tied to a chair. He tried to free himself when I was brought in, but it was pointless. They wanted him to betray information that was of use to them, but that would have cost the lives of thousands of innocent people. Under no circumstances could he give them this information. So they tried to force him to speak.” He shuddered slightly as he recalled this, rubbing his chin again.

Charly did not dare consider what was coming next, but she thought she knew.

“They tied me up,” he continued. “I tried to be brave and not to scream. I knew how important it was for my uncle not to betray anything.”

He paused again. A heavy silence filled the room and Charly was forced to think about the boy that he had been. Who could be so inhumane as to tie up a child? But of course she knew that such things as this happened on earth as well. War always brought out the worst in people and it appeared to be this way everywhere.
 

He took a deep breath before continuing to speak.

“I came to the point where being brave was not enough on its own. I … I screamed. I begged and I screamed. And my uncle … he gave in. He could not bear the fact that they had tied me up. He told them some things, but he did not know everything. I was taken back into my cell. I was more dead than alive. But someone tended to my wounds and from then on brought me food and drink daily. I didn’t know what they had done with my uncle – whether he was still alive. My … my father was able to make contact, once he had recovered from his injuries, and he offered an exchange – his life in return for my freedom. I was again taken into the room in which I had been tied up before. This time my father was sitting there, bound to a chair. He had not known that Federation warriors had followed him in order to capture the rebels, but the rebels did realize this and held my father responsible for it. And they had one more prisoner – a female prisoner, to be precise. They had taken her from our house soon after my father had left to exchange his life for mine.”

Charly was looking at him. A tear ran down his cheek and she would have reached out to him if she had not been tied up.

“Your mother?” she asked, her heart pounding.

He nodded, leaning his head back against the bedstead that he was sitting in front of. With his eyes closed, he continued to tell her what had happened back then.

“They brought her in. My father was beside himself. He roared and acted like a wild thing. They confronted him directly with the fact that he had betrayed them and that the Federation was on its way. He denied even knowing about any of this, let alone having anything to do with it, but they didn’t believe him.”

Now tears were running down Charly’s face. She was crying for the little boy that had experienced such horrible things. She did not want to hear what happened after that, but she felt that it was important for Amano to speak about it, so she listened in silence as he continued.

“They killed her. But not before raping and torturing her for a long time. They kept my father tied up once they had finished with her, and me … they tied me to the table that my mother was lying on. The blood … Her blood dripped down onto me. By the time the Federation found us, my father had already gone insane. He tore the sword from the very first warrior and killed himself.”