Overlord: The Fringe, Book 2 (23 page)

“Help yourself.” She opened her legs a bit wider, daring him, a part of her wanting him to take her up on her bold offer.

“I don’t think so.” He shook his head. “Maybe I’ll make you beg me. That should make me different from all the others.”

Obviously, he’d not only heard the tales but also believed them. She was profoundly disappointed.

“The only thing I’m likely to beg you for is a gun to put me out of my misery.” It took her a moment to realize she was still stroking him, no force needed.

“Suicide?” He grinned. “You are a coward.”

“Murder.” She smirked. “I’m not a coward.”

“So, now you want to kill me.” His eyebrows shot up.

“The thought has crossed my mind.” She yanked her hand away from the pleasure of touching him.

“I wasn’t holding your hand there. You were.”

“Yeah, well,” she said, fighting down a blush, “maybe I want to drive you insane before I kill you.”

“Maybe you want me.”

His confidence annoyed her. “Maybe I’m just a tease.”

“Granted.” With a wink and a grin, he adjusted the prominent bulge in his black leather pants. “Teasing can be a two-way street.”

“I thought information could be too.” She felt he’d stripped her of many layers that protected her heart and soul. There wasn’t a person in the Void who knew more about her than Commander did, and she didn’t even know his real name.

“Information. Do you want to chat more?” He plopped down right next to her on the bed and took her face in his hands. “What do you want to know?”

“Your name.” It came out like a prayer, breathless and soft.

One edge of his mouth lifted as he cocked a brow. “So you can scream it out? I’d like that.” His hand settled on her knee. “I’d love to hear you screaming my name in the throes of passion.”

She gripped his wrist to keep him from sliding his hand up her skirt. “I want your name so I can damn you to hell.”

“Really?” Using his other hand, he traced her ear, her neck and then cupped her chin. His simple touch shook her body more profoundly than what he’d done earlier between her greedy thighs. “You have to get better at compelling me.” His breath tickled her face. “Why would I tell you my name just so you could damn me to hell?”

She sat up and forced her voice to come out steady. “Because you don’t believe in hell. What harm could there be in telling me your name?”

Chapter Twenty-One

I could lose everything in one breath of truth.

The thought hit him like a blow to the face. Michael pulled back from Mary and climbed off her bed. “You’d only abuse my name.”

Confusion swept her face. “You don’t like it much when I call you Co-man-dur, do you?” She shook her head. “I don’t like it much when people call me Remarkably Average Mary.”

“I called you that. Once.” If he could, he’d snatch back that one time, knowing now how much the nickname hurt her.

“In your office, when you had me fully bound.” Her gaze locked on his. “You unshackled me, then forced me to yield.”

“Not true.” No way would he let her slip out of this. “I offered a fight, which you accepted. Despite cheating, you lost. I forced you to yield because you wanted to fight for control.”

“Control?” She laughed. “No. You offered a fight for information or freedom.”

“You didn’t have to accept.”

“What else could I do?” She shot him a look of pure fury. “Had I not accepted, I’d be branded a coward. Had I accepted formally, I’d be deemed an idiot.” She shook her head dismissively. “Either way, I come off as a total ass when I had no choice but to try to secure you as a hostage by cheating.”

He realized the truth of her statement. In her battered boots, he would have made the same choice.

“In the dojo, you made it abundantly clear that to fight you physically would be a total waste of my time.” Her voice had a hurt and bitter edge. “You didn’t have to grind the truth in my face. I already knew.”

He settled himself at the foot of her bed and took a moment to gather his thoughts. He drew a deep breath but stopped when the scent of the room—peaches and hyacinth—mixed with the lovely aroma of her still lingering orgasm, made him so hard he had to stand back up. Pacing, he tried to expel the energy coiled in the pit of his belly. Her gaze followed him.

“I’ll level with you, Mary. Had you focused, your sudden attack in my office could have killed me. Had the heel of your hand actually hit my solar plexus, I wouldn’t have been able to breathe, let alone move, but you missed. By a damn inch, you missed. Your exhaustion allowed me to escape unscathed from underestimating you.”

“I never aimed to kill you. I just wanted to get away.”

“You would have killed me to get away.” He remembered the scent of determination she exuded in his office. “Don’t lie.”

“Yes.” Her face tightened with resolve. “I would have killed everyone in that room to get away.”

“You’d kill me now.”

“Yes.” She didn’t even hesitate, but dropped her gaze. “I don’t want to kill you, but if I had to, I would.”

He didn’t say anything until she glanced up.

“That is why I won’t remove the bracelet.” He felt a brief flash of guilt that he allowed her to continue to think the plastimetal was full of Baka when he’d filled it with Vergessen, a strong sedative. Then he remembered Duster’s admonition not to underestimate her again.

She looked at her wrist, as if for the first time, and her eyes startled. Fear ran her floral scent dark. “You haven’t underestimated me, but I’m beginning to think I may have underestimated you.”

It was as if she’d read his thoughts and spoken them aloud. “I don’t think you have.”

“Funny.”

“What?” He moved away, unable to bear her luscious scent anymore. He wanted everything out in the open, but he also wanted to leap on the bed and lose himself in her. When they touched, nothing else mattered.

“You said you smelled fear and desire on me.” She tilted her chin. “I’m not a reader, but I find the same from you.”

He suspected she was a reader, an intuitive. “I won’t argue with the desire, but there is no fear in me.”

“I may not smell fear, like you do, but I can feel fear.” She dropped her gaze to his lap. With an arched brow, she smiled up at him. “In the bedroom you are a god, and you know it. Accolades or, rather, dresses from hundreds of women have been tossed at your feet.” She nodded to the overflowing closets. “Seducing me brings you nothing you haven’t had. Keeping me prisoner is nothing but a way to torment me. You could do anything to me, and we both know it, but something holds you back. I think it’s fear.”

Her sharp analysis convinced him Mary was an intuitive. As he read her scent, she read the very feel of him.

Having sensed his weak spot, she dug further. “You fear me, yet I don’t know why. Why don’t you tell me why?”

Fear did run through him for reasons he wouldn’t admit at gunpoint. Love frightened the hell out of him. People in love did crazy things. Kraft had killed herself for love. Michael feared loving Mary would force him to give up part of himself and trust someone who could hurt him. And the pain of not knowing if she felt the same immobilized him. He could read her scent, but all he found was the same heady mix of fear and desire, not love.

He did his best to toss off with a casual air, “You’re so good at this game, why don’t you tell me?”

“I would if I could, but I can’t. So where does that leave us?”

His wrist com gave three short beeps.

“Saved by the bell.” She settled herself against her pillows, probably unaware of how distracting he found her sprawled position. When she gave him a pointed wink, he realized she knew
exactly
how he felt.

He opened up the channel with a tense, “What?”

“Is Mary with you?” Duster asked.

“Yes.”

“Jones figured out how she sabotaged the bracelet.”

“How?” Michael watched her eyes widen as she cast a guilty glance toward the vanity across the room.

“She covered the plastimetal with plastimirror.”

“What? How could something so simple, so common—” He glanced at the vanity, then back to Mary. A self-satisfied smirk graced her lovely face. “Tell Jones to fix this mess. And
do not
let this information go beyond R and D.” Michael cut communication, walked over and began checking everything on the vanity for plastimirror.

“You won’t find any more there.” Her voice held a lilting challenge. “I already got it all.”

Michael whirled around. “How did you know it would work?”

“I didn’t.” She shrugged. “Good guess, though, huh?”

“You—you—”

“I believe the phrase you’re searching for is wily bandit.” With a cocky smile, she breathed on her nails, then rubbed them briskly across her chest.

“No. The phrase I’m looking for is lockdown.” He strode over, plucked her off the bed and tossed her over his shoulder despite her protests.

“What are you doing? Put me down!” She started swinging her fists and feet, bellowing a creative blast of multilingual expletives. He counted a combination of thirteen languages as he strode from her bedroom. With one strong arm, he pressed her legs against his chest so she couldn’t get any leverage. Instead, she paddled his back and ass with her fists, cursing with every step he took. In a strange way, her pounding fists felt good, like a deep massage.

He carried her from the main part of House, past his office, to the detention cells. The two guards on duty snapped to attention and scrambled to open one of the prison doors. He plunked her on the bed and backed out of the cell.

“Detain her.”

Nodding, the two guards closed the door on her screaming protests. Pressed against the soundproof glass, she immediately became a red-faced mute. Her pounding fists didn’t even shake the six-inch-thick walls, but she stopped when she further hurt her injured hands.

Michael stood, arms crossed, and waited until she stopped shrieking. It took a full five minutes for her to run herself dry of verbal insults. Glaring, she hobbled over to the narrow cot and threw herself down.

He hit the com button. “You are going to stay—”

“You bastard! When I get out of—”

He cut the com off.

Soundless, she hurled insults, but all he could hear was the trip-hammering of his own heart. She finally realized he couldn’t hear her and stopped.

He tried again. “You are going to stay—”

“F’idiot! I swear, when I get out of—”

He cut the com off. Realizing the futility of trying to talk to her right now, he turned to the guards. “If she asks for anything, you ask me first.”

They nodded in unison. “Yes, Commander.”

“Don’t give her anything, and I mean anything, even if she asks for a kitten.”

After a pause, one of the guards asked, “What could she do with a kitten?”

“I don’t even want to speculate.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Believe me, that woman is the most dangerous criminal I’ve ever encountered in my life.” He strode off, issuing commands into his wrist com.

Mary looked around her glass prison. It had a cot, toilet, and nothing else. The air reeked of antiseptic. If she thought getting out of House was difficult, getting out of lockdown seemed impossible.

She should have listened to what Commander had to say but just couldn’t get her mouth to obey her brain. Once he left, the two guards cast fearful, perplexed glances her way. What in the Void had Commander told them to make them look at her like that?

“What’s your name?” She knew they couldn’t hear her, but she hoped they might turn on the com. They only looked at her with a bizarre mix of fear, curiosity and disbelief. She glared at them until they shuffled away.

“Crap. What am I gonna do now?”

She searched the edges of her see-through glass prison. Even with a jackhammer, she couldn’t dig her way through the durosteel floor or the thick walls. She looked up.

“Holy…” She whistled appreciatively. A glass ceiling with vents for air, wires for the com and, after another twenty feet of glass-encased space above her, a plate of durosteel loomed.

With the right explosives, she could blow a hole in the structure, but only if she wanted to die in the process. Before she could annihilate herself, she’d have to render the two guards blind, since they could observe everything she did.

“If I thought I was screwed before, I didn’t get nothing yet.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Michael had House stripped of plastimirror.

After dismissing his men, he retrieved Mary from lockdown. He carried her into the main room and placed her on the burgundy fainting couch.

“Finished punishing me?” She settled herself on the velvet cushions.

“I wasn’t punishing you. If you would have held your tongue, I would have told you that.”

“Then why did you toss me into lockdown?”

“I had House stripped of plastimirror.” Ever-too-clever Mary stumbled on, then exploited, a major weakness in his security by using a common household item in a unique and dangerous way. As angry as he was, he also had to admire her devious criminal mind.

“Aw, too bad.”

“Don’t be smug. I found your stashes.”

“Think you found all of them?” Her eyes glowed with challenge. “Big place, this prison you’ve got me in. Hard to search everywhere.”

“You’ve only had access to five rooms.” He tried to make his voice sound more assured than he felt. What if he had missed something?

“Five gigantic rooms. And the hallways.” She had that playful malice in her eyes again, like the look she had while trying to figure out his name in the shuttle. It shocked him to realize how much he enjoyed that expression on her face, along with the bubble gum and whisky scent she exuded.

Refusing to underestimate her, he vowed that before he went to bed, he’d have his men examine the footage House routinely filed and search again. He would also post extra guards at the exit doors. Michael studied her too-smug face and a new thought gripped him.

“There’s only one place I haven’t searched.” He stepped forward and dropped to his knees in front of her.

She leaned back into the fainting couch. “What do you think you’re doing?”