Page 134 of At Her Pleasure
At the break in that last syllable, she came up behind him and put her palm on his shoulder.
Under his shirt he carried her marks, front and back. She knew what she was asking of him, and she was doing it without apology or shame, because she’d told him the truth. She thought of those babies every day. Even when she pretended she didn’t.
“Then think it through, and come up with a plan that works,” she said quietly. “One that does what needs to be done, and brings us back here, to have more canned cheese and stale chips.”
He turned and gave her a grimly humorous look. “Was it that bad?”
She shuddered. “They call me a sadist, and yet you made me eat that as a snack in bed last night.”
He snorted. “You were hungry, and you wouldn’t let me run out to get something I didn’t dig out of my pantry. By the way, you’d still love me, even if I had no cock.”
She sniffed. “Let’s not test the theory.”
He put a hand on the side of her throat, his thumb beneath her ear, stroking. The gesture was possessive and overly firm, fueled by frustration.
“Strangling a woman usually works better with two hands,” she advised.
“It’s why I’m touching you with only one. Too tempting otherwise.” He sighed. “I haven’t agreed to anything, but follow me.”
He led her back into the motorhome, pointing her to the couch behind the table. When she sat down and slid out of the way, he knelt and removed the aisle panel. Bracing her elbows and leaning forward, she saw the vehicle’s internal workings, a nest of wires and mechanical parts. Mick pointed to a circular disk no bigger than a quarter, nested among them. He put his thumb on it. A beep, and he’d lifted the whole slab of mechanics free, a false floor. There was another panel beneath it, with a code.
“Put in the wrong one twice, and it destroys everything inside,” he told her.
Making sure she was watching closely, he typed in the code. C, I, S, S, Y. Followed by a ten-digit alphanumeric combination she expected had no correlation to anything. The man held onto what mattered, at the same time detaching himself from it. He had her repeat it to him twice, to make sure she memorized it. But after she satisfied him on that, she had a more personal question.
“You weren’t taunting me that night. You do use Cissy as a safeword. Why?”
Mick rested his hand on top of hers on the table, a loosely entwined knot of fingers. “Before I left town, I visited her grave a lot.”
“Why?”
“You know why. It was why you left the necklace there, knowing I might find it. It was a way to connect to you. I also thought you might want someone to keep it cleaned up. Until I left.”
He sat down on the couch, at the other side of the table. His thumb stroked her wrist, back and forth over her pulse. “I swung back to the area a couple times. On the last visit, I discovered you’d moved her. I wouldn’t let myself dig out where. It was enough to know you’d found a better place to take her, which meant you were in a better place.”
He took his hand away, knelt over the safe again and showed her the contents. Guns and other weapons, money, passports, ID, files. He picked out a Walther, the same brand as her concealed carry, but this was a full-sized 9mm with an extended 15-bullet magazine. Mick handed it to her, with several clips and a holster.
“No serial number on it. Nothing you carry should be traceable to who you are.” He tossed a folder onto the table next to her. “That’s her identity. Memorize it, make it you. If you have to improvise and add to it, it can’t conflict with what’s already part of it. I’ll test you on it, extensively. You have to prove to me you can become her. You can’t break character, not once, so adapt it to your personality traits.” His serious lips quirked. “Fortunately, ballsy bitch fits the general MO.”
“What’s step two?”
“Asking yourself this question and giving yourself an honest answer. Do you think you could sit by and let your mother sell those babies now?”
“No. I’d…” She stopped. It was the same type of question she’d given him. Did he think he could have sex with an unwilling girl to maintain his cover, if it was demanded of him now?
His knowing look matched his uncompromising tone. “The person you have to be is the person who would sell those babies to the highest bidder and reward herself the same night with a steak dinner for the cut she’d earned.”
She knew she’d gone a little white-faced when he sat down on the couch across from her again, pushed the folder away and gripped her hands. “You don’t have to do this, Cyn,” he said fiercely. “You’ve paid for your sins. You were a child, raised by a monster, and you got out, long before most people would have had the strength or courage to do so.”
She pulled away and paced to the front, sitting down in the driver’s seat to put some distance between them. “You know she had at least one more after I left? Before the one that thankfully killed her?”
“It doesn’t matter. Cyn…”
She shook her head. “It does matter. I stopped by because I did sometimes. Not for her. I’d sit in Cissy’s old room and think I could still smell her. On one of those visits, I could tell she was pregnant again. I was no longer eight, and Cissy was no longer there. Nothing to blackmail me with. Maybe she saw what was going through my head on it. She told me she missed Cissy and me, that she might keep this one. She asked for my help.”
Her lip curled, self-loathing. “Because of that, I came around more often, for the next few months. I wasn’t an idiot. Or told myself I wasn’t. I could see she was hiding it from the neighbors, like she always did. I convinced myself if I stuck close enough, I could keep her from giving it away. That maybe I could save that one. I would take the baby from her if I had to, care for it. Then she had him, and for a couple weeks, it was like she was going to keep him.”
She paused, remembering the day her mother had gone into labor. At two in the morning. “I delivered that one.”