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By
Maren Smith
Excerpt:
He noticed her silence and it was enough to distract him from the news. “I sense you are unhappy.”
“You think?” Brinley asked caustically. “What could I possibly have to be unhappy ab—oh, wait.” She held up her bound wrists in emphasis. “Among many other reasons, this might have something to do with why.”
“That is a temporary security measure and one that will eventually be discarded.” He turned back to his news.
“When?”
“Just as soon as I can trust you. Five… perhaps ten years from now.”
Five or ten years? Her temper spiked again. “Maybe if I knew I was going to be treated fairly in a place that isn’t another prison, I’d be more willing to be trustworthy.”
He stared at her for so long she began checking the open stretch of rail ahead of them.
“Do you want me to drive?” she offered.
“No.”
“Then would you? One fiery crash per lifetime is enough for anybody.” She settled back in her seat, fidgeting with the cuffs, twisting her wrists until it felt as if the rough plastic edges were cutting into them. “Watch the road.”
“We aren’t going to crash, fiery or otherwise,” Rowth soothed again. “It’s all perfectly automated, and I’m not taking you to another prison. I’m taking you to my home.”
“Can I leave?” she demanded.
“No.”
“Then it’s a prison. Watch the road.”
“I don’t need to ‘watch the road’,” Rowth said, not quite rolling his eyes. “The shuttle can handle itself.”
“If that were true, it wouldn’t come with controls. If you can’t trust your own car, what hope do I have?”
“Why do I feel you are trying to start an argument with me?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Brinley said, too busy clutching the handle to notice the warning in his frown. “Maybe because you drugged me, you’re holding me prisoner, and now you’re trying to scare the shit out of—watch the damn road! Oh my God, slow down!” Was it her imagination or did she really just feel the car come off the rails on that last corner? “You’re trying to kill me, you sadistic—”
“Watch your tone.” Releasing the controls, Rowth sat back in his seat far enough to face her fully. “You are fine. You are safe. But you might not be if you speak to me like that again. Let me explain something you seem not to have realized. I am the only person responsible for your current and future wellbeing, and there are consequences associated with trying to upset me for no good reason.”
“No good reason?” Letting go of the handle, Brinley shook her bound wrists at him. “Think about it carefully. No good reason?”
“Nobody upsets me,” Rowth replied. “Think about that carefully. Nobody. Not one person on the whole of this planet.”
She gave him a toothy, unamused smile. “Not anymore.”
“Do you want me to take you to the cellar first thing when we get home?” He said it as if it were a threat. “Because if you do, I have an old barrel that you may well find yourself stretched over before the night is out.”
Her smile vanished even as her eyebrows rose. “What, like stretched on a rack? What comes next, flogging? Waterboarding? Are you going to stick an anal pear up my ass and see how wide you can open it before I scream?”
His expression underwent the most subtle change, drifting from unreadable to damned unreadable, but with a touch of approval. “So, your people have a precedent.”
“Only if you’re Torquemada.” When he only blinked at her, she grudgingly supplied, “He was a Grand Inquisitor several hundred years ago.”
“Inquisitor?”
“A religious torturer during the Spanish Inquisition.”
Shifting in his chair, Rowth put his hands back on the vehicle’s control stick. “My translator is having difficulties with much of what you say, but I am not your Torquemada. However, magistrates do often make inquiries, so I suppose that does make me an inquisitor of a sort.” He studied the rail ahead of them. “And I am rather grand.” She stared at him, silent in her incredulity, until he added, “You’d do well to keep that in mind, too, before you go deliberately seeking ways to prick my temper.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she deadpanned.
He shrugged. “You’re an alien, a female, and incredibly young. For a short time, at least, I am willing to be both patient and stern while you learn how best to mold yourself to our ways and become a productive member of society.”
Binding Brinley
The only member of the SS Reconnaissance not to reach the shuttle in time, Brinley Lawson never thought she’d survive the crash. Nobody expected her to survive the healing process either, but now, in the home of the same magistrate who tried and found her guilty of crimes against Pra’kir, Brinley knows only that she can’t stay any more than she can leave. However, if he thinks she’ll blindly obey any command he makes, then he can think again. His punishments might leave her body aching, both with pain and sensual arousal, but Brinley has never been a woman to blindly submit to anyone, much less an alien lawyer.
Everyone is guilty of something. That is the motto dominant Rowth Lashat lives by and he doesn’t consider the diminutive human female lying battered and broken in her hospital bed to be any different. Not until she issues that first irresistible challenge and suddenly he finds his authority being pricked at every turn. Still, it’s not her constant defiance that forces him to bend the rules, bringing her into his home, into his care… and even into his bed. It’s something much more important. Though winning her submission calls to him, it’s Brinley’s cooperation that Rowth needs. Hopefully, before it’s too late.
She survived the crash.
He’ll make her wish she hadn’t.
Captives of Pra’kir.
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