I must have imagined it, she thought. Because I’m so desperate and I feel so helpless. There’s no way it can be real—no way I really heard his voice.
“Yes, you did—I am coming for you,” Roark’s voice spoke again in her head.
“But how—?” Sammi sent back tentatively. “I don’t understand.”
“We have a partial bond,” Roark explained. “The Goddess has enhanced it for a time to allow me to find you. I’m coming, my darling! I swear I am!”
Now Sammi was sure she was imagining things. She knew Roark didn’t believe in the Kindred Goddess from several off-hand remarks he’d made about the foolishness of religion. And she wasn’t sure about the Goddess herself, though she knew most of the Kindred and their wives believed whole-heartedly in the deity.
I’m going crazy, she told herself. Going stark, raving mad because I’m so scared.
“Hey Beautiful, are you tired of dancing already?” Sonny-boy’s harsh voice boomed in her ear, making Sammi jerk her head up to look at him.
“Tired of dancing?” she asked stupidly.
“Yeah? Are you ready for our date?” He raised his bushy black eyebrows at her significantly.
“I…I thought we were on our date already,” Sammi faltered.
“Yeah, but the most important part of our date. You know, where you take me to the bedroom and teach me how to be a man?” His piggy little eyes were filled with lust as he looked down at her, making Sammi long to squirm away from him.
But she sensed that if she made him mad now, things would move very quickly to their ultimate—and probably deadly—conclusion.
“Oh, that part,” she said, trying not to let the revulsion she felt show in her voice. “Um, that’s important, of course, but I think we should keep dancing for a little while longer. I don’t…” She swallowed hard. “Don’t think you quite have the steps down yet and…and I want you to be your best at the Prom, right?”
“Oh, right. Okay.” He nodded agreeably. “Well then, rub yourself against me some—like you did the first time we danced, okay?”
“Okay, sure.” Feeling sick, Sammi rubbed her breasts against his chest, pretending to get into the music which was still playing on the old TV set.
“Mmm, that’s nice.” Sonny-boy nodded in approval. “That’s the way we danced before.”
Sammi didn’t answer. She just closed her eyes and prayed that she would find a way out of this…though she had no idea how.
Fifty-Three
The male who had kidnapped Sammi from the HKR building had said that her stalker had an old shack way out in the woods at the end of a dirt road. As Roark followed her fear, he also scanned for any sign of a shack and a dirt road. He had to fly low to do it—the light was fading fast and the dense forest canopy blocked much of his view.
Luckily, it wasn’t only sight that guided him.
He could feel Sammi’s fear growing and he had even been able to send some thoughts into her mind and receive some of hers in return. Unfortunately, she had decided that his mental voice was a figment of her imagination—a stress-induced hallucination.
Roark gave up trying to convince her what she heard was real and just concentrated on finding her. Now that they had made contact once, her emotions were even clearer to him—a beacon that drew him onward as he raced to rescue her.
At last he saw a flicker of brownish-gray between the tree tops and felt her terror grow even stronger. He caught a glimmer of an image through her eyes—she was pressed roughly against a male’s chest and he was jerking her back and forth as Earth music played in the background.
Keep him dancing, Sammi was thinking frantically to herself. Just have to keep him dancing…
“Yes, keep him dancing,” Roark sent as he landed the shuttle in front of a run down, two-story cabin that looked like it had been new a hundred years ago. “Keep him busy until I can get to you, darling. I’m on my way!”
Fifty-Four
Hearing Roark’s voice in her head again made Sammi jerk in surprise.
“Hey, what’s wrong with you, Beautiful?” Her captor glared down at her. “You tired of dancing?”
“No, no!” Sammi exclaimed. “No, I love dancing! Let’s keep on dancing, Sonny-boy!”
But it was too late. He had already started dragging her to the bedroom.
“Now it’s time for the most important part of our date,” he told her as he pushed her inside the very room she had feared the most. “The part where you show me how a man treats a woman like Sara Daniels.”
“Sara Daniels?” Sammi asked frantically. “But isn’t that the girl you were going to take to the prom? The one you said—I mean, I said—was a whore?”
She was having trouble keeping his twisted mythology straight but apparently she had gotten this detail right, because Sonny-boy nodded vigorously.