LITMIR.BIZ

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can be anything I wish, señora.” His voice was as cold as the night and twice as dark. “And as ‘cruel’ as I choose to be. Now get out. And don’t ever come back.”

      Then he swung the heavy door shut.

      Melanie stared at that blank, imposing door for a few seconds, feeling the blood drain from her face, the determination ebb from her heart. What kind of a man was he? How could he refuse to help a baby, a child like he must have been? How could he turn her away so callously? She dropped her guard one notch, but swiftly shut it again as she felt him questing at her mind, attempting to storm it with his anger, his own determination to break through her mental barriers.

      A deep rage began to seethe in her, infusing her veins with righteousness, her mind with a nearly blinding fury. How dared he.

      She lifted her fist to the door and furiously pounded, no polite series of timid thuds this time, but a frenzied demand for his return. The doors remained shut. Melanie kicked at them, yelling as she did so.

      “I’ll stay here—” kick “—and I’ll sleep on your damned bench—” kick “—until we die of starvation—” kick “—but I am not going back down that mudslide you have for a road—!” kick, kick “—I am not taking my son back out into the night, into the rain! Open this door!”

      She lashed her foot out at the door for a final savage kick and met no resistance.

      Pale eyes glittered at her either in extreme anger or some other equally intense emotion. Melanie tried stilling her ragged breathing, her too rapid heartbeat. She felt her own anger draining from her as swiftly as it had risen. For the first time since stepping onto his wooden portal, she felt pierced by the cold, exhausted by her journey up the mountain.

      “Please,” she whispered.

      “How did you get here?” he asked her harshly.

      She stared at him blankly. “What difference does that make?” she asked aloud, but inside she was wondering what he might do to the gas-station attendant who had directed them up this strange mountain.

      A bolt of lightning razored across the clearing, bathing the portal in blue light tinged with purple. The entire world seemed infused with ozone. Melanie flinched, but didn’t make a sound, didn’t take her eyes from the silver-blue gaze before her. Please, she begged silently, but still didn’t lower her guard.

      “For the night only,” he rasped. She couldn’t fool herself enough to imagine there was anything remotely inviting in his tone or in his eyes. He melted into the shadows once again, this time leaving the door open. It seemed a yawning black maw, open and waiting for her to enter at her own peril.

      A chill of apprehension rippled down her spine and for some unknown reason her limbs felt oddly languorous. Her knees shook and her heart thundered every bit as loudly as the rumble in the sky had earlier, and yet Melanie managed to force herself to cross that ebony threshold. Somehow the very crossing had taken on a significance of its own—brides were carried across thresholds; in some countries it was considered bad luck to talk across that strip separating the inside from the outside.

      And now, on what seemed to her the very edge of the earth, she had crossed of her own accord, entered the dark domain of a man of rare power, of raw force. She had the prickling sensation of destiny taking over, of having willingly entered the twisted home of something—someone—who lived outside the laws of man, outside the governance of society.

      Dear God, what was she doing here? Why had she insisted that he take her in? This was madness, insanity. This had to be worse than the PRI. But nothing could be worse than that. Could it?

      The door shut behind her with a loud thud, and she knew an atavistic fear of being trapped within these thick rock walls, locked in with a stranger whose very touch granted life or could strip it away. She grasped Chris’s rounded little shoulder and held him tightly against her, as if by protecting him she could ward off danger altogether.

      The windowless hallway was too night-darkened to grant her vision and she felt suddenly light-headed. When he spoke, she was unable to control her start.

      “You should have listened to me,” he said. Disembodied, his voice no longer seemed harsh from disuse but rather as though it came from someplace deep inside him or from the very walls of his home. It was low and carried a note of warning, of promises long broken, of bitter disbelief and harsh resignation to the fates that guided him. In the dark, he seemed much less a man than a vehicle for the odd power he carried inside him.

      She couldn’t see him at all, but felt his eyes upon her though she knew it was impossible. Even Teo Sandoval couldn’t see in the dark. Or could he? She could feel him, inches from her, so close she could smell his heady mountain scent, warm herself from the heat radiating off his body.

      Was he waiting for her to say something? How could she speak when she couldn’t see his eyes, couldn’t gauge his reaction?

      “You leave at first light,” he said.

      “My car is stuck in the mud,” she replied quickly, as if this were argument enough for her to stay.

      “Pablo will help you get it out. I’m sure he’s the fool who sent you up here. I’ll deal with him later.”

      “Oh, no,” she said, but his silence made a mockery of her protesting lie. “I—Don’t be angry with him.”

      “If I am, señora, it has nothing to do with you.”

      Melanie didn’t know what to say to this. If he was angry at the gas station attendant, Pablo, then she’d placed the man in grave danger. For Teo Sandoval was capable of doing anything. The time he’d been angry at the PRI, an entire scientific wing of a building had been smashed to bits.

      “Please,” she said again, although this time she wasn’t quite certain what she was asking of him.

      “At first light, señora,” he said, somehow giving the formal title a derisive intonation that she’d never heard given it before. Suddenly it was a threat and a promise at the same time. Not only that, but the tenor of his voice had changed as he spoke. His rasped voice seemed a caress now, and there was something else, some primal question laced in it that seemed torn from him against his will.

      Though her heart still hammered in her breast, the pounding now had nothing to do with fear of the night, fear of the rock cave that seemed to spill down a cliff side. Now all her fear was of the man beside her in the dark and it stole her breath and made her legs feel weak and insubstantial.

      She felt the dark around her as if it were a living presence. It pressed at her back, at her face, just as his scent did, as his body warmth did. Yet another shiver that had nothing to do with cold ran across her arms, and her fingertips tingled. She fought the urge to send her free hand questing for him in the dark. She wasn’t afraid of what she might find, but of what she might discover about herself.

      “I…could we turn on a light?” she asked. She half wondered if he even had anything remotely resembling electricity.

      “Afraid of the dark?” he asked, still not moving. His voice carried no trace of an accent and yet seemed foreign nonetheless.

      “Yes,” she said, but it was a lie. Before entering his home, she had never been fearful of the dark. And she wasn’t now; she was scared of the tension in her chest, the trembling of her fingers, the ache his voice inspired in her. Most of all, she was terrified of Teo Sandoval.

      A sudden clatter of objects striking the stone floor beneath her made her start and step back only to stop abruptly when she stepped on something. It rolled away from her feet, making her shiver in primal fear, only to realize almost instantaneously what the object was—Chris’s red ball.

      Somehow, incredibly, in the midst of her tension, her fear, and in this dark hallway of an even darker man, Chris had fallen asleep. Only when trying to please his mother or when asleep, did he break the focused attention on his dancing toys.

      “Give him to me,” Teo’s voice

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