Seduce Me in Flames (9 page)

This man had just saved her life. Of this she had no doubt. It remained to be seen what his motives were for everything else he had done. But she at least owed him thanks for his rescue of her.

“You’ll be warm soon,” he promised her.

“It feels like I’ll never be warm again,” she confessed.

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“Oh! No!” She was horrified for a moment until she realized he was teasing her.
How did he do it
, she wondered. How did he remain so calm and at ease given the circumstances?

“You should be an old pro at this,” he noted as he pushed them through the water.

“Old pro?”

“Cold and wet. You’ve been in here for long periods
of time before. I hear that’s what it’s like. So cold and wet that you feel like you’ll never be warm.”

“Which I suppose makes all of this worse. I wasn’t warm to start with. I’ve been in here at least a week or two.”

“Much longer than that,” he corrected her. He couldn’t see her surprised look, but he must have somehow sensed it. “Time goes by differently when you’re imprisoned, remember?”

She didn’t ask him how he knew how long she’d been there, or how he knew she’d been there for long stretches before. He would tell her everything in his own time, she imagined. All she could do was go along for the ride until she decided it was no longer in her best interest.

“I should think you might want to give me your name. I ought to at least know the name of the man who has come to my rescue.”

“Everyone calls me Ender.”

“Ender? Why?”

“Because I put an end to things. You could say I’m really good at getting the last word.”

She believed him.

They began to draw up to Suna, the water level dropping and allowing her to get back on her feet. He gripped Ambrea firmly by her backside and drew her away from himself and onto her feet. He thought nothing of it, whereas Ambrea could only squeak out a sound of surprise and shock. His hand was gone in a second, but the feel of its intimacy was the only warm spot on her body, and it lingered. His hand was so big that his fingers had reached all the way between her legs to her private places, albeit through the layers of her sodden clothes. So why did it feel as though those cold, wet clothes hadn’t even existed? She was so shaken by that and everything else that she almost lost her footing again. But
he made sure he kept hold of her elbow and set her steady in a second.

“We’ve been in the water much too long,” he told them brusquely. “Hypothermia is already setting in. You’re already losing control of your limbs and probably your reasoning. We’ve got to get out of here quickly. Besides, there’s still a chance we’re being pursued, although I find it highly unlikely.”

“Well, where exactly are we supposed to go? It’s not like I see an exit sign,” Suna said with a sarcasm that even overreached what she was usually capable of.

“In lieu of that, will you accept this?”

He calmly pointed to a shadow in the upper curve of the tunnel. At this level the tunnels were untouched by man. They were purely part of the aqueduct system that nature had wrought. What he was pointing to looked like a hole, a smaller tunnel perhaps that had once fed water into the one they were in. The duct had since gone dry, or at least as dry as anything down there could get. As she looked up, Ambrea could feel heavy drops like rain falling onto her from the tunnel above them.

“And how are we supposed to get up there?” Suna wanted to know, her tone surly and tired all at once.

Ender didn’t take it personally from what Ambrea could see. She watched as he closed his eyes again and tilted his head, as if he were listening to his own thoughts for a moment.

“Step back,” he instructed Ambrea a moment later, laying a hand on her chest and guiding her gently back a few steps.

There was a sudden explosion of sparks, and then light from the tunnel. A heavy ladder made of rope unfurled and dropped into the water in front of the would-be empress of Allay.

Rush “Ender” Blakely handed the heir of Allay up to his commander, Bronse Chapel. He didn’t let go of her until he was certain she was settled snugly in the belay harness they were going to use to pull her up and out of the long tunnel to the surface. He yanked the straps up tight, making sure they fit snugly to her backside and kept her fastened in at the crotch. Bronse worked from his position above to tighten a chest strap around her so she wouldn’t turn or flip over once she was in the process of being hauled to the surface. There wasn’t much room to move in there, and even a skinny little thing like Ambrea could become jammed if she didn’t head up straight and steady.

They had used a sonic worm to bore a connecting tunnel from the surface, a campsite they had specifically chosen in the deep forested preserve that ran completely around the walls of Blossom City. Using geo sonar to map through the solid bedrock, they had found this unused aqueduct and tracked exactly how to connect from the deep tunnels to the surface and what it would take to make an exit route out of them. A fast exit at that. And a relatively hastily put together plan.

The sonic worm they’d used had been blessedly silent, devouring all the rock and silt and using the minerals found within to power itself as it dug a hole just wide
enough to lower a large man down, or to pull a very important woman up.

Rush backtracked down the ladder and waited in the water with the other girl, the annoying one with the big mouth. Actually, he could appreciate her need to question everything, perhaps even more than the princess’s lack of confrontation. But he made no snap judgments about the heiress of Allay. She had found herself in dire circumstances, even more dire than she had realized, he was sure, and after being locked down in the dark like this she was surely not functioning at her stellar best.

He was impressed with her calm, however. She had truly been stoic, no complaints and no shrill, squealing behaviors as he had anticipated from her before this mission had begun. Rush had had his doubts about being the one to go into the prison, but his commander, as usual, had been right. His size had made a good deal of difference in the operation. As had his heritage. Outside of the differences in his bone structure and the lighter touches of racial coloring that could be easily dismissed as being from anywhere here or there in the Three Worlds, the tribal tattoo on his arm had been easily recognizable for what it was. Which, he supposed, was the whole point of getting it in the first place. He wasn’t ashamed to let everyone know he was from Tari. In fact, bring it on. And as Commander Chapel had anticipated, within five minutes of rolling up his sleeve in the Allay marketplace, Rush had had two city guards on his ass. Within ten minutes the count had tripled. By the time he’d reached the space dock, there’d been very obvious bait walking up to him. A woman trying to look like an average space shipper had played damsel in distress, using winning, flirtatious smiles to get herself onto his ship. Which, coincidentally, was exactly what they had wanted. When she’d snuck a peek at his illegal cargo, he had been swarmed and arrested.

The trick had been getting them to throw him in a cell on the same level as the princess, or somehow being able to quickly locate her even if they didn’t. Commander Chapel had planned a tremendous distraction that would keep the exterior guards from entering again once they exited the catacombs, leaving Rush to deal with those left inside.

Fortune had also smiled on him. They’d actually tossed him in a cell across from his target. Frankly, he’d never had such a seat-of-the-pants mission go so smoothly. The only snafu had been when he’d almost lost the princess downriver. That would have sucked. Literally. The suction force of the current had almost yanked her into the aqueduct tunnel that the water was rushing into. He’d grabbed her in the nick of time. It had been a bitch fighting back against that current, though. She’d wiggled and slipped against him as if she didn’t know how to hold on. He had taken it at face value and shown her how, and from then on it had been better.

Now all they had to do was complete the tricky part of the mission.

After Suna was aboveground, it was his turn to follow. He wasn’t a great fan of dark, underground places, but his job seemed to take him into them a great deal lately. Still, he supposed it wasn’t very different from living enclosed in a military spaceport for months at a time or even on an interplanetary flyer. Truth was, he hadn’t spent much continuous time out of doors since his adolescence.

At first the lowest part of the naturally formed tunnel was plenty big enough for him to scale the walls using the crampons that Chapel had handed down to him, but the hole that the sonic borer had created was a different story. It was going to be an incredibly tight squeeze for a man his size. He trusted his team but it was unnerving to scrape so close to the walls. He envisioned himself
getting stuck tightly at any moment like a cork being pushed the wrong way through the neck of a bottle.

Then he could hear the mechanical whine of the lift that they had suspended over the hole, heard it straining under his weight. They’d had to carry in equipment that broke down into camping gear, or what looked like it anyway, in order to get past the rangers at the park preserve without raising any eyebrows, and that meant the motor and braces had to be light. Light didn’t translate into being recommended for his weight capacity. So they were stretching their equipment a little.

When Rush came over the lip of the hole, he wasted no time putting his hands on the edge and hoisting himself out. Good thing, too. He could smell ozone all around him, indicating that the motor of the overworked lift was burning out. He sat on the edge of the hole and looked up at his team. This part of it anyway.

He saw a mix of smiles and tension. He knew where to look, though, for a real read of the situation. That was at Chapel. The commander was tight and tense, his attention on the wooded park around them. It was true that the team and their royal prize wouldn’t be safe until they were all a good long distance away. With the prison having been so obviously breached, whether or not the city guards believed them to have survived the tunnels, it wouldn’t take long for the guards to start beating the bushes looking for either the princess or the group of strangers who had started the disturbance outside the guardhouse. Rush did a head count and saw that everyone who had dispatched to this stage of the mission was there. Commander Chapel; Captain Justice Muleterre, their resident pilot and a fellow Tarian; and Fallon, one of the very special Chosen Ones handpicked for this mission. Satisfied that none of them was worse for wear and there had been no casualties while he’d been off playing knight-errant, Rush stood up and wasted no
time shucking off the lift harness and helping Justice and Fallon begin to break down the equipment.

As Rush threw the bits and pieces down the hole he’d just come up, he traded his attention between the forest surrounding them and the small tent tucked under the trees. He knew that was where his two charges had been brought so they could change quickly out of their sodden clothes and into something that would hopefully blend in to the Allayan mainstream. It was a minuscule help, he was sure, in the warming up that they needed, but it was the best they could do under the circumstances.

“Not too much trouble, was she?”

Rush looked over to Fallon when the notoriously silent Chosen One attempted small talk of a sort. Of all the Chosen Ones, a special group of young men and women from the wilds of Ebbany who had extraordinary powers, Fallon made him the most uncomfortable. Rush didn’t like the idea that the boy could traipse around inside his thoughts at will. Rush usually did all he could to avoid him. But that had not been possible on this particular mission. It had been Fallon’s powerful mind connected to his that had helped lead him through the tunnels below. Because Rush had been stripped of anything and everything that could have identified him as the soldier he was, he had been left without exterior communication and no way to find the bored-out hole they would escape through.

Except for Fallon. The young telepath, who normally despised the use of his own abilities, had proven just how valuable a team member he could be by making certain that Rush hadn’t gotten lost with his charges. And now here they were, relatively safe and sound, and it hadn’t been so bad after all.

“Easy enough,” Rush replied gruffly. He eyed the young man with suspicion, unable to help himself. What
exactly had Fallon come across while he’d been tiptoeing through his brain?

Fallon seemed to take the hint, a frown touching his lips as he moved away from Rush under the guise of busywork.

“Hey! Let’s go! This isn’t a fashion expo,” Justice snapped out to the women in the changing tent. Clearly she didn’t feel like going in there herself and preferred to harass them through the sheetlite walls. The feather-light fabric, which was dyed to match the strange blue-green foliage of the Allayan forest, weighed close to nothing and was dark enough for utter privacy from the outside world. It was also strong enough to withstand most wild animal attacks. Although it was a fabric, when an electrical current was run through it, the fabric became stiff and impenetrable. The frame supporting the sheetlite was Delran platinum, a highly conductive metal, and it was connected to a control panel that allowed just such a current to run safely through the sheetlite but not anyone who might touch it. Whether the walls were platinum hard or fabric soft, they could be heard through easily enough, and Justice’s barking command had its desired effect. The imperial companion stumbled out first, followed less haphazardly by her mistress.