How he yearned to take her in his arms. To kiss her hair and tell her how much he loved her. If he stood up now and took it all back, if he rescinded her right to leave, informed her she would remain here forever, bound to him as slave to Master until death did them part, would she accept it? And if she did, what would it mean?
Ironically, he had achieved the goal he’d set for himself when he’d first abducted her. She had come to accept her lot as his sexual property. But he knew better. She was like those hostages who became unnaturally attached to their captors. She might think she wanted to stay, but it was fear and conditioning, not love, that motivated her behavior.
It was time.
He pushed back from the table and stood. “Let’s go.”
Silently, Alana stood as well. For a moment it seemed she would speak, but she said nothing. It was still early, the sun just peeking up over the mountains as they stepped outside together.
Mark opened the door of his car and motioned for her to get in back. “I’m going to blindfold you so you aren’t tempted to remember the way back. You will lie down flat on the seat. If you try to get up, I’ll tie you down, understand?”
Mutely, she nodded. There were tears in her eyes.
Once she lay down on the back seat, he slipped a sleep mask over her face. She didn’t move or protest. Satisfied, he closed her door and slid into the driver’s seat.
They drove in silence for close to an hour. Alana remained as still and silent as death in the backseat. Mark held the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip. As he pulled at last into the bus station, his heart felt so heavy he thought it might crush him from the inside.
“Sit up,” he said, as he pulled into a parking space at the back of the empty lot. He turned off the ignition and climbed into the back seat next to Alana. He helped her to a sitting position as he removed the sleep mask.
As she blinked in the sunlight, he handed her an envelope. “There’s five hundred dollars in there. That should be plenty to get you back to the city or wherever you’re going.”
Alana looked at him, her large violet-blue eyes again pooling with tears. “What’s that?” She pointed to the numbers written neatly in the center of the envelope.
“It’s my cell. In case you needed to contact me. It will be a working number for the next twenty-four hours. After that you won’t be able to reach me. Ever.”
Heat rushed into his face. As if she would ever want to reach him for anything ever, except to lead the police to him. He climbed out of the car and gestured for her to get out. “Go on. Go, before I change my mind.”
~*~
Alana sat in the bus station, her purse in her lap. She’d bought a ticket for New York City, but she hadn’t called anyone yet. Not her parents, not her agent, not the police. She’d watched as Mark drove away, feeling strangely as if he were taking a part of her with him.
She stared down at the ticket. The bus would be arriving in forty minutes.
She should have been thinking about her future, about her freedom, but all she could think of was his face the last time he’d looked at her—the pain and sorrow in those green-gold eyes, and the way he’d kept clenching and unclenching his hands.
She shifted on the hard bench as her body recalled his touch. She could almost feel his large, hard cock sliding inside her, his hands on her throat, her breasts, her ass—possessing her completely, possessing her as no one ever had before.
What would sex be like now, without the overlay of dominance and forced submission? While he had truly frightened her, even terrorized her with his brutal behavior, she couldn’t deny he had also made her feel wildly alive. Pleasure and pain had been woven skillfully over and around her for so long, she no longer knew if she could experience one without the other.
Alana glanced up at the large clock on the wall. Soon she would be on her way. She would call her parents when she got back to the city.
What would life be like now? She would be thrust back into the limelight, bombarded by the media, surrounded by people who were intrigued with her fame and her supposed beauty, ghoulishly obsessed with what had happened to her during these bizarre months of forced captivity. None of them knew her at all. They never had.
No lover before Mark had ever tapped into her latent submissive sexuality or been able to release her fierce passion. Despite what he’d done to her, or perhaps partially because of it, she felt more alive in his arms than at any other time.