Jumping all over as if he’d sneaked up behind her, she whirled to stare at the com unit for a moment and finally leapt to answer it as he bellowed into the speaker again. “Sir?”
“Where did I tell you to put the prisoner?”
Mel grimaced, glad the ship was too bare bones to have a vid com unit. “I wasn’t told to treat the prisoners, sir,” she hedged.
“Lena!”
“Uh … I thought we were rescuing her. Is she a prisoner?”
“Are you anxious to check out the brig, doc? Because I can arrange it.”
“No, sir. I’ll send someone down to remove the prisoner from your quarters right away, sir.”
There was a noticeable pause before he responded. “I’ll handle it.”
Mel slumped weakly when he said nothing else.
“You’d be wise to spend a little less time worrying about what Nigel might think and a little more worrying about me,” Dax retorted finally. “I don’t know if he will thank you for putting her in my bed, but I do.”
Mel’s eyes widened at that subtle threat, but although she was tempted to ignore the order to leave well enough alone she didn’t dare meddle any further in the captain’s business.
Dax leaned against the bulkhead beside the com unit for several moments and finally turned to study the woman sleeping in his bunk thoughtfully. He was dead tired, and he’d been looking forward to sleeping on something that wasn’t crawling with bacteria from dozens of other occupants.
He was in no mood to deal with this kind of problem at the moment. The last thing he needed was to climb into bed with a piece of ass he wanted but didn’t dare touch.
He found that the longer he stared at her, though, the more reluctant he was to summon the guards to remove her to a holding cell.
His irritation finally waned.
Crossing the cabin, he placed a knee on the bunk, scooped Lena up, and deposited her against the edge of the bed nearest the bulkhead. As small as she was, and as wide as the bunk ordinarily seemed, it still looked too crowded for comfort--his comfort--but he shrugged the thought off after a moment, slipped beneath the cover and settled beside her, rolling away from her.
It took less than five minutes to answer the question of whether or not he was too exhausted to have to worry about arousal being a problem. Just knowing she was in the bed behind him was enough to make him acutely aware of her, but he began to think he could smell her delicate scent weaving through the faint odor of decon-cleanser on his own skin and hers. He began to think he could feel her warmth radiating into his back, hear the soft sigh of her slow, even breaths. All of it together brought up a mental picture he’d been trying real damned hard to get out of his head.
The mental image of that animalistic coupling between them in his cell shouldn’t have been something to arouse him. It should have made him sick to his stomach, but the unavoidable truth was that he was a sick son-of-a-bitch because it made him hard as a rock every time he remembered it.
He had reacted instinctively to the threat to Lena when she’d been thrown into his cell to be raped to death. It hadn’t been planned. It hadn’t even been part of the plan, but his instincts were rarely wrong, and he hadn’t had time to question it anyway. The guard had ordered up a rape for his entertainment and he provided it.
Nothing else would have appeased the bastard. He knew that.
But he also knew that, even without penetration, even though he’d done everything he could to try to make it as easy on Lena as he could, drugs or no drugs, desperate situation or not, he’d probably scared the living hell out of Lena and thoroughly traumatized her.
The wonder of it was that she’d trusted him enough to help him out of the cell after that so that they could make the escape.
Except it wasn’t a wonder to him. The incident sure as hell wasn’t something he was proud of or wanted to talk about, which was why he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone and still had no intention of doing so. He was relieved he’d managed to give it enough realism by coming to convince the guard, but at the same time uneasy that he had managed it under those circumstances.
The main thing that bothered him about it now, though, the thing that had been plaguing him from the moment she managed to help him get out of that cell, was that Mel was right about how tenderly brought up and protected Lena had been. Between his father and her brother, she’d been shielded most of her life from the ugly things people did to each other.
Lena, the real Lena, he felt certain, would have been terrified of him after that. She wouldn’t have trusted him enough to let him out of that cell. She sure as hell wouldn’t have followed him blindly when he’d told her they were climbing up to the roof.
The only reason he could think of any of the time that would account for it was that she wasn’t Lena at all.
He supposed he should have told Mel. She was a woman and a doctor. She would know better than anyone else he could think of what the likelihood was that Lena’s reaction had been normal--or at least normal under the circumstances.
To his way of thinking it was the most solid proof they had that they’d pulled Lena’s clone out of that fucking prison.
Maybe her brother would know--and maybe not.
From what he’d been able to tell, Lena had spotted his father’s counterfeit right off. He’d trailed her to warn her, uncertain of just how much Morris had told her about him and about the movement and how much danger she presented to the conspirators, because her own danger was directly proportionate to just how threatened they felt by her.
