Page 18 of Diamond in the Rough (The Diamond Trilogy 1)
That doesn’t mean I’m clueless now. “You want to kiss me?”
“I want to do much more than that. You’re a beautiful woman, even if you are sheltered and shy. Except I don’t particularly enjoy the quick sex. So now we probably won’t fuck in seven minutes. We’ll find some way to amuse ourselves, though.”
My throat tightens. “Will you hurt me?”
He makes a sound of shock. “No, it isn’t my pleasure to cause pain. I won’t do anything you don’t enjoy, ma petite. All you have to do is say no, and I’ll stop.”
“And if I say no, you put me back in this cell.”
“If you say no, your prisoner gets no water. Come now, I’m no monster. You considered taking me to your hotel on the plane, didn’t you? You can last seven minutes.”
CHAPTER FOUR
North
The dream comes to me before death.
I’ve seen it before. It comes to soldiers taking their last ragged breaths. They see their mothers kneeling over them in the middle of the godforsaken desert. They see a beloved wife holding their hand. I don’t have a mother or a wife. So it makes sense that the angel would come in the form of a stranger.
Except my angel begs me to let her go.
“I have money. And my family, they’ll pay a ransom.”
I walk through the conversation as if it’s a forest, touching the leaves and searching for animals beneath the foliage. She’s a puzzle, this angel, but she’s mine. I won’t give her up to die alone.
Adam comes downstairs. You can last seven minutes.
That’s when I know this is no strange dream. There is a woman in the cell with me. Christ. “Don’t listen to him,” I tell her, my voice low. The words echo off the damp stone walls. “Don’t fucking listen to a word he says.”
“You don’t want water?” Adam asks, taunting.
It’s painful how badly I need that goddamn water bottle he’s flaunting. But I have no illusions about my injuries. I’m going to die in this old French prison, and the part that pisses me off the most, the only thing that I really regret, is not taking Adam down with me. “He’s fucking with you.”
“I’ll do it,” the woman says, her voice brave and wavering at the same damn time.
I try to sit up, to stop her, to save her, but pain lashes my side. It blinds me. Ludicrous, the idea that I could save anyone in this state. “Don’t trust him. God, don’t let him—”
Don’t let him touch you.
If he kidnapped this woman, he’s going to do more than touch her.
There’s a squeak as the old metal protests its use.
Shuffling. Movement. The sounds filter through my haze of pain and hunger and the never-ending knife of thirst. They filter through with a bolt of goddamn outrage.
How dare he touch her? She’s my angel of death. Mine.
I shake my head against the cold concrete. No, that’s the blood loss speaking. She’s a real woman. Flesh and blood. And she’s going to get hurt.
“Let’s bring you into the light,” Adam says with his flawless, fake French accent.
It’s pitch-fucking-black down here, but somehow he finds a tiny shaft of light. The door is open a crack. Hope surges through me. No matter how unlikely escape, the human spirit won’t give up.
The woman cries out as she stumbles over something. Her back hits the bars with a clang. And then I can actually see her face in more than monochrome shadows. The delicate bridge of her nose, the eyes wide with fear. Blue. They’re blue. Her lips are a full, flawless pout, and my hope rips to shreds.
She’s beautiful. Incandescent, even in this hellhole. How will she ever survive?
“There we are,” Adam says, sounding very pleased with himself. He’s crowding her, one arm holding the bars, the other cupping her jaw. His perfectly tailored suit was made for this moment. It could be the picture of any man flirting with his date after dinner, stealing a kiss outside the restaurant.
Except he didn’t date her. He kidnapped her.
Rage gives me the strength to move from this cold slab of stone. I have to be careful, move softly. I have to use stealth, which is a problem because I’m starving and injured and half-dead. She touched me. She touched me, even though I’m just as bad as Adam—almost. She called for help. She’s letting Adam stroke her neck for a sip of water.
The unfairness of it lends me consciousness. I focus on Adam’s hands, the way they stroke that gentle curve again and again, each time falling lower—to the small dip at the base of her throat, to her collarbone. Soon he’ll touch the tops of her breasts.
She stands there, quivering, accepting like a martyr.
How far can he go in seven minutes? Pretty fucking far.
He does something I can’t see, some infinitesimal movement, some flick of his long, able fingers, and she whimpers. The sound slices through me—another knife wound. It’s almost enough to stagger me, except I’m intent on my goal. His neck. I want to wrap my fists around it.
