‘You must. Pretend it’s your precious fiancé if it helps.’
Long after Zach had fallen asleep Tamara lay awake staring into the darkness, fingernails digging into the palms of her hands. She had seen the way the men looked at her, and especially the one detailed to bring them their food, and had been revolted by the way his eyes had roamed hotly, and increasingly boldly, over her body. Was Zach right? If they stayed here … Her mind shied away from the implications of what he had said. Wasn’t it enough that she had already had to endure all manner of physical degradation, forced to share this cell with him, was she now to be forced into actively encouraging the mental rape of her body?
Despite her conviction that she would never fall asleep, the next thing Tamara was aware of was Zach shaking her. Disorientated for a few seconds, she lay on her back, staring up at him, transfixed by the green eyes that seemed to watch her with an almost hypnotic intensity. Wasn’t that how animals of prey stalked their victims, she thought wildly, by using the power of their eyes to dull their sense of self-preservation?
‘I can’t do it, Zach,’ she told him huskily.
‘You can, and you will.’
The calm words brooked no opposition, but neither were they bullying or forceful. They were more like the calm reassurances of a parent to a child uncertain of its ability to perform a difficult task.
A few seconds later, while she was deliberating between wearing her sweat-shirt or the button-up tee-shirt she had worn when making the walk through the forest, Zach handed her the shirt.
‘Wear that,’ he told her softly, ‘and help me to roll up our sleeping bags. They’ll come in useful if we do manage to make our escape. I don’t know how long it will take us to reach safety, but it certainly won’t be accomplished in one day.’ He looked up. As usual he seemed to have heard their breakfast approaching far sooner than Tamara, and she tried to quell the trembling building up inside her as the footsteps drew nearer.
‘How do you know the other men have left?’ she whispered, feeling her courage desert her.
‘They intended to leave at first light. They never bring our breakfast until well after that.’ He looked at her for a moment as they heard the man fumbling with the lock, and then before Tamara could stop him he wrenched open the neck of her blouse, exposing the creamy curves of her breast, ignoring her sharp, terrified protest.
‘You’re acting a part,’ he hissed at her. ‘You’re Eve personified; you’ve seen it done a thousand times, and you’re playing for the most precious prize of them all—your life!’
As the door opened he turned away and she was left alone to face the leering look of their gaoler as he entered with the breakfast tray, his eyes sliding hotly over her exposed flesh, the tiny flames leaping to life there making her go rigid with terror.
For a moment she thought she was going to faint, and then with an almost superhuman effort she forced her lips to part in a stiff parody of an enticing smile, her hand going clumsily to the man’s arm.
His response was immediate, the sourness of his breath overwhelming her as he grasped her by the waist, the bearded face thrusting closer to her own.
‘You want a real man, do you? Well, you have found one in Jaimi,’ he boasted, his hot breath grazing Tamara’s forehead, a calloused hand sweeping upwards towards her breast, as she closed her eyes in mortal terror and disgust, her stomach heaving as her entire body clenched inwardly against the assault to he
r flesh. As the guerrilla swung her round, obviously intending to carry her to her bed, Tamara had a momentary glimpse of Zach’s face; unfamiliar in its hard-boned cruelty, his eyes glittering like frozen jade in a face suddenly devoid of all colour, and then there was a brief movement, the fiery dance of light along the blade of the knife he had removed from the guerrilla’s sheath, a sudden hissed gasp and the suffocating, relentless weight of the man’s body as it fell across hers, crushing her to the ground, until Zach pushed it aside and lifted her to her feet, mouthing words she could not hear because her mind was full of the silent screams of her body and the man who had just died because of his desire for it.
‘Tamara!’
There was a brief, stinging pain, her cheek on fire where Zach had struck her, and the screams faded, to be replaced by the calm decisiveness of his voice.
‘We have to hurry. Roll up your sleeping bag—that’s right. And the food. We have to hurry. Give me your holdall, and the sleeping bag, you can carry the other one. No, don’t look at him.’ He walked softly to the door, and returned, the man’s machine-gun slung over his shoulder in a casual manner which did nothing to deceive Tamara. For the first time she was seeing him in his natural habitat without any camouflage; she was seeing him as the predator with the killer instinct that he really was. She knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that the gun was merely window-dressing. She had seen the way he had killed the guerrilla—without a sound, with the greatest economy of movement—and a shudder went right through her.
‘Quietly,’ he cautioned her as he urged her out into the corridor. ‘Now, just follow me, understood?’
He must have a photographic memory, she decided, as he led her unerringly into the main cavern, which to her relief was empty. Tamara had no idea by which route they had reached the cavern on their initial journey, but Zach seemed to be in no doubts at all.
They were within three yards of it, having carefully skirted the perimeter of the huge cavern when Tamara’s heart practically stopped still to see the figure emerging into the cave.
Zach moved so fast he was little more than a blur. The man didn’t even see him to anticipate the blow that felled him to the ground, his body lying so awkwardly that Tamara knew instinctively that he was dead.
‘There’s no point in leaving him alive to come after us,’ Zach told her as they reached the tunnel. ‘With any luck the others won’t be back for at least a day—possibly two, and by that time we should have gone far enough for them not to be able to pick up our trail. I daren’t risk the path they used to bring us up here—there’s too many of them for that.’
‘But how will we find our way back?’ Tamara protested. ‘We’ve no maps, no compass. The guerrilla leader said that the forest paths are known only to a handful of men.’
‘True, but there are other ways. There’s the sun; and the stars. Finding our way back is the least of our problems. The most important is preventing them from finding us.’
When they finally emerged into the daylight Tamara was almost blinded by it, and she stood blinking, delighting in the warmth of the sun against her skin, weak tears of relief suddenly filling her eyes. Every step of the way out of the cave she had expected to be confronted by their gaolers, and that, added to her terror of the enclosed space, had robbed her of the last of her self-control. Tears poured unchecked down her cheeks as she stood, trembling, unable to move.
‘Tamara!’ She heard the impatience in Zach’s voice and looked mutely at him, hearing his muttered curse, but not aware of anything until she felt the warmth of his arms round her, his breath grazing her temple, the muscles of his thighs taut as a bowstring as he let her lie against him.
She lifted her head, wanting to tell him that she was all right, but looking into the jade depths of his eyes was like drowning in icy green seas. Motivated by a force she could barely understand, she raised trembling fingers, impelled to touch the hard bones of his face, surprised to find how warm his flesh felt to her touch, her breathing oddly constricted, strange sensations coursing through her body, her heart beating almost suffocatingly fast. Bemused and dazed, her lips parted in involuntary invitation, her eyes watching the downward descent of his head, the hard gleam in his eyes, as ruthless as any hunter intent upon its prey.
The touch of his lips against hers was shatteringly cataclysmic, reaction exploding inside her as his mouth moved questingly over hers, destroying everything but the feeling beating up inside her. And then suddenly Zach’s face disappeared and in its place was the face of the guerrilla, and pleasure turned to nausea, the blood draining out of her face as she shuddered in revulsion.