Christine Feehan - Deadly Game

She flicked him a glance. "Sure it will. You're heap big caveman and I'm just the little woman, too stupid to know how to fend for myself."

Jack left the room, following the doctor out to the helicopter, leaving her alone with Ken. Instantly the room felt too small, too intimate.

"Stop baiting the tiger," Ken said. He slipped his arm around her back and gave her another drink of cold water. "We're only going to be here an hour or so, just enough time for you to rest."

"He only thinks he's the tiger. That's what you make everyone think, isn't it?" She made it a guess, but she knew it was the truth.

"Don't think for one moment that Jack wouldn't pull that trigger. He's no kitty cat," Ken said.

"Maybe not." Jack might be the quiet one, the no-nonsense one, but Ken lured the enemy into a false sense of security. He smiled more often than Jack, but it never reached his eyes. There was something inside of him, still and watchful and so full of danger it made her heart beat hard in her chest. "But neither are you."

Ken watched the way her throat worked as she swallowed the water. He could barely keep from leaning down and touching his tongue and teeth and fingers to that fragile expanse of skin. He longed to taste her. To put a mark of ownership on her. To brand her his to the rest of the world. And that need disgusted him. He had faced danger his entire life, but this one woman held more threat to him personally than a thousand rifles had ever done. She would take his honor and his self-respect and expose his deepest, ugliest secret to the world.

"Why wouldn't Briony come to see me, if you really know her?"

"Jack doesn't trust you."

"That wouldn't stop me." She was inexplicably hurt. If she found out where her sister was. she would move heaven and earth to catch a glimpse of her-as long as she could be certain Whitney would never find out.

Ken allowed her to lie back, and he straightened, once again giving her a feeling of loss. "You said you were there to protect the senator. Do you know who gave your team that order? I'm assuming someone said there was going to be an assassination attempt on him."

He looked so remote-so utterly alone. She felt that way inside, where no one ever saw who she was. No one ever cared who she was. She was a soldier. It was everything and yet nothing at all. She sometimes felt, especially recently, as if she had no humanity left-as if it had been stomped or trained out of her. She wasn't certain which, but it was gone. Do you feel that way ? She asked it silently, wanting to reach out to him, needing to connect after she'd raked at him with her claws. Do you feel as if you have no humanity left in you? That they stamped it out and made you into something you don't even recognize anymore ?

His gaze moved over her face, seeing too much. For one moment she felt connected, as if he had managed to crawl into her skin and share it with her. I was born without humanity so I have never had it to lose .

The words were harsh, but his voice, moving through her mind, was a caress, stroking at her insides, raising her temperature and setting her on fire. She was struck by the utter honesty in him, when what he was saying was impossible. Ken obviously believed what he was saying, and that confused her. What kinds of monsters were hidden behind that mask of scars? He'd once had a face of masculine beauty. Had that been a mask as well?

She studied him, trying to be objective, trying to really see him when the chemicals in her body were reacting and rushing through her bloodstream in wild abandon. Whitney was fond of experiments. He had a way of twisting everything good into something that left a bad taste in one's mouth. She had been raised with discipline and control, but to her orderly mind, everything Whitney did seem to be chaotic and wrong-a subtle or not so subtle form of torture.

Mari shook her head. "Whitney has no humanity. He's cruel and callous and hasn't an ounce of kindness or compassion in him. You aren't like that."

"Don't kid yourself, I'm exactly like that."

"You do kind things."

Ken shrugged his shoulders. Most of the time he felt nothing at all, but when he did, it was an icy rage that burned so deep it terrified him. Now his emotions were all out of whack and he wished he could go back to the familiar. He did kind things because he had to do them-it was necessary to keep Jack safe. And above all else, Ken wanted Jack in the world, happy and healthy and living his life. One of them had to survive, and Jack was extraordinary.

Ken bent down once more, his breath stirring tendrils of hair from her face, his expression harsh. "It gets results."

She studied the scars up close. The torture had been recent. She should have been intimidated, but Mari didn't scare easily. She knew soldiers, and she recognized control when she saw it. Ken had discipline and restraint down to an art. She reached up and brushed his face with her fingertips, needing the tactile experience, the flood of information that could accompany a single touch of skin to skin.

Everything inside Ken went still as her fingers traced the pattern of his scars. She left tiny pinpoints of fire burning on his face, when he couldn't feel his own touch. He didn't have sensation on most of his body, yet he could feel her beneath his skin, sparking damaged nerve endings to jump and sizzle with electric current. The sensation spread from his face to his chest, a heat so thick it felt like lava pouring through his veins and tissue, gliding like hot silk over muscle to burn him from the inside out. The fire settled in his groin, bringing him to hard, painful life.

He had always been a large man, well endowed, and Ekabela's men had had a field day with him. One had been a master of torture, and he had inflicted those small, deep cuts in a precise pattern over every inch of Ken's body. He had lovingly called it art, and the men around him admired and encouraged those neat cuts, cuts designed to inflict the most pain while never allowing the victim to lose consciousness. Cuts designed to ruin a man should he happen to escape. They had skinned his back, but it hadn't been as bad- nothing had been as bad as that knife slicing into his most intimate, private part.

He could still feel agony flooding his body, the urge to beg them to kill him. The need to mete out justice to someone-anyone. He had known when he woke up in the hospital and saw the nurses' faces that the monster living and breathing inside of him had been revealed. And he had known he would never function as a normal man again. The raised ridges left him with little sensation, and if he wanted to feel again, feel any pleasure at all, stimulation would have to be rough enough to reach beyond the damage.

"Son of a bitch." He bit the curse out between his teeth, his voice harsh.

His pounding blood flowed hotly to settle in his groin, and he clenched his teeth against the inevitable pain as rigid tissue reluctantly stretched, swelling into a long, thick bulge he hadn't known still possible. His breath rushed from his lungs and sweat beaded on his forehead. He gripped the edge of the bed and forced himself to breathe through the pain. All the while his gaze never once left hers. She'd done, with one stroke of her fingers on his face , what he thought no one could ever do for him again.

"Son of a bitch." he repeated, fighting for air. fighting not to let the pain and pleasure, now mingling together, become the same.

"Ken?" Mari tried to push herself into a sitting position. "What is it?"

He was hunched over, and whether he wanted to admit it or not, he needed help. She couldn't sit up; her leg was held tight, and movement threatened her precarious control, so she did the only thing she could think of. "Jack! Jack! Get in here!"