Angel Face (20 page)

A cool breath of air brought his head up instantly. “What are you doing?”

He thought she’d blown on his lips, but it was her fingers. She was exploring his mouth with her fingertips. She’d barely touched him and yet she’d drawn sparks. It was the shower of gold when a blowtorch touched metal. Every damn thing she did drew sparks.

Jordan had a flash of her rising above him and dangling one of her luscious breasts over his face, dipping down just enough that he could suckle a moment before she pulled up. Once again, heat surged into his groin. Heat and wild desire. If she didn’t drive him mad, his own fantasies would.

“Get me out of these ropes—”

“I can’t, not yet. There’s something I need.”

Something she needed. Sweet Jesus. There was only one thing he needed.

Her fingers fell away, and her lips replaced them. She kissed him with breathless ardor, but this time, he didn’t respond. Despite the fact that her mouth was as sweetly agitated as his gut, he wouldn’t allow himself to feel any part of it. He held back. He held on. He had to.

“You can stop now,” he told her with a low groan. “I said I’d help.”

“Yes, but you didn’t really mean it.”

“I did—”

She cut off his protest with another kiss, and he was helpless to stop her. He couldn’t stop himself. His responses zinged back like rubber bands, stronger for having been stretched taut.

“I meant it,” he told her.

“No, you didn’t,” she whispered through the chaos ringing in his ears, “but you will.”

It was all starting to blur. He couldn’t separate the feelings, they were so intense, and yet he knew exactly what was happening the instant she began to touch him. He was going over the side. He was headed for a wipeout.

Her first touch raised the hair all over his body. Her second sent him sighing and tumbling. It didn’t matter where she touched him, just that she did. Her fingers were plumes, the velvet of rose petals. It was impossible to describe the softness, but they were all over him and yet barely made contact. They feathered and flurried and sprinkled the sharpest kind of ecstasy. His body loved every breath and caress.

Yes, God, yes, that was nice.
He let out a moan, flinching as she tickled his belly. She fluttered her fingers down his torso, and his muscles knotted. It was unbearable, but he wanted more. Contact. Intimate contact.

Touch me everywhere, even there. Yes, there!

The breath surged out of him, and electricity rocketed through his groin. God, how he wanted her to relieve the pressure. He was going to blow out like a tire.

“What the hell do you want from me?” he demanded harshly.

“I want you on my side, but there’s something I have to know first.”

“What is it? Ask me.
Anything.”

“I have to know that you won’t ever betray me.”

She rose above him with an urgency that took him by
surprise. Her dark eyes bored into his, spiraling into depths he hadn’t known were there. What in God’s name? She was deadly serious about this. He half expected her to produce a stingray spine and a ceremonial bowl.

“I won’t.” He would have promised anything, and she knew it.

“That isn’t enough, Jordan. I have to be sure, and there’s only one way I can do that.”

Her voice raised goose bumps on the back of his neck. Her mouth was moving, but the eerie proclamation seemed to come from somewhere else, from above him, behind him, whispering and echoing, like the jungle. She was every one of its libidinal urges personified, and he couldn’t resist her, even if it meant this was the last thing he ever did.

“What do you need?
Tell me what you need.”

She arched over him so precariously he thought she was going to tumble into him and knock them both over. She was surreal, unreal, hovering like a dream, and her breasts dangled just above his face.
God, let this be a hallucination,
he prayed.
Let me wake up from this agonizing dream.

“Your soul, Jordan . . . your mortal soul, as naked and trembling as the day you were conceived . . .”

It was a dream. It had to be. Who said things like that?

Her voice was everywhere, surrounding him again. Her breasts brushed his face, and each caress made him throbbingly harder. Her voice, her breasts, her nakedness, they all whispered of a journey unlike anything he’d ever taken. His mouth watered. His throat ached.

Somewhere an animal cried out, squealing a warning, and something inside Jordan echoed the haunting sound. The soul was a man’s last refuge, but she already had everything else, why not that? And yet if he believed it was the life source and the only link to a higher power,
then without it he would cease to exist. Was that too high a price to pay for the nirvana she promised?

He was completely caught up in her spell. Completely. He didn’t know dream from reality, real from surreal. He didn’t know himself. Once he had doubted whether this woman could hurt someone. Now he knew she could do anything. The jaguar had been safe compared to her.

“This is insane,” he got out, but she was at him again.

His jaw clenched against the riot of sensation she elicited. Her lips and fingers were exquisite and deadly. They brushed his body like charged air, sizzling with static electricity. Pleasure wasn’t meant to be this strong. He was already a netted animal, a circus beast, but she wanted him cooperative at any cost.

She was part seductress, part waif, part avenging angel, and by the time she was done with him, she’d brought him to a throbbing pitch. He looked down only once—the instant she stopped—and saw his own bursting need. He was hot and swollen, hungry for conquest. He was engorged and glistening from excitement he couldn’t control. She saw it, too. Gazing up at him, she spread his own moisture all over him with her fingers, as if preparing him for what was to come.

Her mouth was slack and beautiful. Her lips were wet from her tongue, and her head rocked forward. He watched in awe as her eyelids quivered. She was in a trance, too, he realized. This ritual had completely taken over her body. Her throat convulsed, and he saw the future. She was going to deliver him with her mouth.

He recoiled as she bent toward him, but her ministrations were so gentle, he couldn’t hold out. She caressed the length of his shaft with her cheek and showered it with little kisses. At the first stroke of her tongue, he felt the truth of what she could do to him. Her lips slid over him, and he let out a groan as their sweet, terrible heat closed on his shaft. She sucked and drew on him with
such exquisite care he cried out her name, the name of his captor, his tormentor.

“Give me what I want,” she whispered.

He was close to releasing, and he knew that was her goal. She wanted power over everything, including his bodily responses, but he wouldn’t give her that. To the extent that he could control anything, he would control that. If he were to give in to this excruciating pleasure, then she
would
own his soul.

“Give me what I want!” she cried.

“Is this how you do it?” he snarled at her. “You humiliate your victims and rip away their control, then kill them? This is your
sick
ritual, isn’t it?”

Her head reared up. Her body was slick with perspiration and white as the moon. While Jordan watched, she rose without a word and went over to the cane basket where the knife was stuck. She pulled it free, and when she turned around, there was no doubt in Jordan’s mind that she intended to use it.

He braced himself. He had only one option left. One weapon. His mind.

F
ROM
the vantage point of his glass-enclosed loft office, Peter Brandt overlooked the entire Cognitive Studies lab. He could keep watch over the various operations that way without anyone knowing he was on the premises. There were surveillance cameras, of course, but he preferred the global view. Maybe it made him feel a little like a field general surveying his troops.

Normally, he found that relaxing.

Tonight, however, nothing could have relaxed him.

A softly measured voice whispered directly into his ear, “It’s too late, Peter.”

Peter instinctively modulated his own tone as he spoke into the headset he wore, but he would never master his partner’s ability to sound sinister, especially over the phone.

“I’ll find her,” Peter argued with urgency. “Give me some more time.”

“You had your chance.”

“What? A couple days?”

“It’s out of our hands now, Peter. We have to let them handle it.”

“Christ, you know what this means, Ron. You know what they’ll do.”

“They’ll do what we
can’t
do. They’ll find her. She isn’t coming back voluntarily this time, Peter. You know that. In your heart you know that. It’s out of our hands.”

Peter picked up a spherical crystal paperweight that was etched like a globe of the earth. Angela had given it to him last Christmas. Normally they didn’t exchange gifts, but she’d found it somewhere, and she’d known about his penchant for such things. She was thoughtful that way.

It was an exquisite piece, this globe. The etching made him think of snowflakes and their crystalline perfection. But every time he touched it, he had a sudden and terrible fear of dropping it. His fingerpads dug into the facets, but he was convinced it was going to pop out of his hands, no matter what he did. It was going to get away from him and be destroyed.

“What happens now?” he asked.

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Neither should you. Would you rather she brought down the company and everyone in it? This isn’t about you and her anymore. You can’t keep indulging your adolescent fantasies.”

The bastard would have to bring that up. Ron had never understood that this wasn’t about some ridiculous old fart trying to recapture his youth with a young chick. This was about unlimited human potential. Peter was one of the few people who knew what Angela Lowe could do. The other was Ron Laird, and that’s what confounded Peter. How could his partner let her be sacrificed?

Peter’s chest hurt. Dead center was the thud of a blacksmith’s hammer, and it was the only thing he could feel. The rest of his body was hollow. Something had to be done, but arguing with Ron would serve no purpose. There would not be a fight tonight, Peter had decided. He’d already decided several things.

He set the globe down carefully. There was only one flat surface the size of a nickel, and if you missed, it would almost certainly roll off the edge of desk and shatter on the limestone floor of his office.

“Peter, if she talks, it’s all over. You know that. She’s a threat to too many people.”

“What makes you think she’ll talk? What makes you think she remembers?”

“She ran, didn’t she? The shrink you sent her to said she was about to break. What do you need, newspaper headlines?”

For all of about three seconds, Peter wondered how his partner knew what Dr. Fremont had said. The phones were tapped, of course. Everything was tapped around here, even brains.

“She’s one of our people, Ron. We should be allowed to handle this.” It was a futile attempt, but Peter had to make it. “Listen, we don’t know how much she remembers, if anything. Nobody knows. I’d like to bring her back and find out.”

“She stopped being one of our people when she became a threat to national security.”

Don’t argue. You can’t change his mind. You can’t change anyone’s.

“So what do we do?” Peter’s voice was as hollow as his body.

“Nothing, that’s the beauty of it. We do nothing. It will all be taken care of . . . like she never existed.”

The globe sparkled so brightly it was painful to look at. In his mind, Peter could see it rolling across the desk. He could hear it drop to the floor, and that’s when he had to shut the image out.

He was about to hang up when Ron spoke up again. “You haven’t been answering your pages,” he said. “That’s not a good thing to do, unless you want me to make all the decisions myself.”

A dial tone told Peter he was free of the patronizing SOB. He’d come to despise his partner over the years, and not just for his condescending manner. Ron was trying to make it look as if the situation with Angela was all Peter’s fault, when that was anything but the case. One day, judgment day, blame would be assigned, and everyone would know the truth.

Meanwhile, Peter had made some decisions of his own. He’d cooperated long enough and probably for the wrong reasons. Now it had to be his way. He had not saved Angela Lowe for nothing.

He walked to the glass that looked down on the lab. It was late, after midnight, but the lights were on in some areas, and a few stragglers were still working. The lab rats, he called them, smiling ruefully. Most of them worked around the clock on their experiments and left the lab only to shower, eat, and sleep. Their life was whatever hypothesis they were working on at the moment. Peter understood what drove them. He was one of them not so many years ago. In many cases, his most dedicated workers were avoiding a world they didn’t understand in order to observe one they might have a chance of explaining.

Lab rats were a strange, brainy breed who preferred the abstract to the real. They liked mysteries they could solve, and the human condition was much more manageable when you divided it into experimental chunks that could be analyzed on the computer monitor. Some people weren’t good at life with all its confusing emotional and social demands, so they retreated to analyze it from a distance.

Angela was one of them, for so many reasons, and it grieved him deeply that she would never have a place to heal, to fit in, even if it was with a group of misfits. She would have been safe here. That was his plan, to isolate and protect her. But it couldn’t be done, and maybe he should have known that. She was his most ambitious
experiment, and to understand her might have helped unravel the mysteries of extreme abuse. Why some children survive and thrive despite it, and sadly, why most don’t.

Perhaps the experiment was always doomed to fail, but if that was the case, only he could end it. If she had to be stopped, he would stop her. No fucking government agency was going to wipe her from the record books as if she didn’t exist. No, she was going out in a blaze of glory.

He was about to turn away when he noticed the most brilliant of the lab rats, Sammy Tran. Sammy was peering at his computer screen with the intensity of a teenager caught up in a video game. It wasn’t unusual for him to be here this late. Peter had found him asleep at his desk at all hours, but something about the man’s body language caught his attention. The lab was freezing, but Sammy had just mopped his forehead with his sleeve, as if he were sweating.

Peter’s gut told him something was wrong, but he was already on overload and didn’t need to borrow trouble. It was stress. Not Sammy’s, his own. He was overreacting. Sammy was fine. Peter was reading his own reactions into his employee. Sammy had always been the calm before, during, and after the storm. There were plenty of people at SmartTech capable of cracking under pressure, but not him. The sky would fall before he would. Sammy was fine.

With that he turned from the window to go. Swallowing was painful, mere breathing was painful, but pain had never been a reliable state from which to judge anything. The scientist in him was trained to be dispassionate and to discard theories that weren’t valid. You could not cling to the patently false, no matter how much you wanted it to be true. Dreams and illusions were the antithesis of scientific progress. He had learned that in his lab rat days, and it had served him well. He did not like going outside
the law, but better he than the government. Better he than Ron Laird or some other Philistine, who had no concept of the exquisite perfection of soul he was dealing with.

How terribly, terribly sad,
he thought,
to waste such a gift.

“
G
ET
rid of the knife!”

Jordan surged to his knees and roared at Angela with such force her legs buckled. Dizziness rocked her, but she had enough presence of mind to know that his behavior didn’t make any sense. Nothing about it felt real. It was as strange and stark and fuzzy at the edges as a dream. A sick-stomach dream, she used to call them when she was a kid because she would wake up from them dizzy and nauseous, with the smell of fear in her nostrils.

“Get
rid
of it, goddamit!!”

The knife slipped from her hand and fell to the floor. She tried to pick it up and stumbled. Her legs didn’t want to stay underneath her. It felt like she was on a moving sidewalk and couldn’t get off. One thing after another shocked her senses: the white rage in his face, the strangely gyrating room, her own nakedness. Her thighs and belly and even the dark triangle between her legs were totally exposed. A startled sound slipped from her lips.

How? How?

Dizziness made her drop to the floor, and an anchor took her down, spiraling down.

Why was he shouting at her? She had only meant to cut him loose. She had tortured him enough.

His voice was distant and muted now. She couldn’t make out what he was saying, and there were other voices shouting at her, too. Someone was being slapped. She heard it, the sharp crack of a hand against tender flesh. Her face stung like fire. What had she done? Why was he
shaking her?
Peter, don’t hit me! No, don’t say that! I couldn’t have hurt Adam. I loved him.

Now her hands and feet were bleeding. She was crawling over a floor of broken dolls. Hundreds of dolls. They were in jagged pieces, as if someone had thrown them down and smashed them. There was blood everywhere.

People were crying out for help, but she couldn’t get to them.

“Do as you’re told, and no one will get hurt.”

The jaguar roared at her, and she roared back.

“Fooled you, fooled you,” a bird shrieked.

Why did he keep shouting at her? Her father was having a heart attack. He was already dead, and yet he kept shouting.
“It’s not working! More voltage, more pressure on the paddles, turn it higher!”

She did as she was told! Did as she was told!

Who killed Adam? She did. Oh, God, she did.

“When I say rain, rain, go away, you won’t remember anything. It will all be gone.”

“Wake up, Angela. It’s all over. Everything’s gone. You’re safe. Safe!”

But Angela couldn’t wake up this time. Her yawning and spiraling mind took her to depths she wasn’t supposed to go. The void had always been her place of refuge. Its darkness had protected her, but now everything was exposed, all the hidden corners and crevices, all the devastating secrets. Her mind plunged her into the miasma of her past and forced her to relive what she’d done. And what they’d done to her.

S
HE
was lying on a rattan couch. Her hands were behind her, bound at the wrist. Her feet were tied, too. She tried to move them and felt the ropes. She also felt naked skin, her own, against the back of her hands, and that was all the feedback she needed. She knew immediately where
she was and what had happened. There was no more screaming, no voices, no fever. Her head was clear and her body cool.

Opening her eyes confirmed everything. She was now the hostage. He hadn’t tied her well, but she wasn’t going far without clothes. At least he’d covered her with a sheet.

She didn’t see him at first. The hurricane lamps had burned down, and in the deep golden haze, she could just make out a figure standing by the screen that separated the rooms. He was still bare-chested and wearing shorts, but he looked more like a beach partygoer than the roaring beast she’d been dealing with. He’d obviously showered or taken a swim, and he had a bottle of something in his hand. It appeared to be a beer.

“Sleeping beauty awakens,” he said.