Breaking Ice (The Jendari Book 2) Page 4

  Rising to her feet, she grabbed her purse from the bed. “Any preferences for dinner?”

  “No. Just make sure there’s plenty of whatever you get. I’m hungry.”

  She eyed his overly-tall, overly-broad body and wondered just how much “plenty” was to his way of thinking.

  ****

  An hour and a half later, she had her answer. She’d gone to two different takeouts, and bought home a mix of burgers, chicken, fries, and vegetables. After she’d taken her portion there was still enough food to feed four people. Kasim ate every crumb, including a peach cobbler and two apples.

  And he did it all in complete silence.

  Winter was grateful for the quiet. It gave her a chance to work through her unusual attraction to Kasim, to acknowledge her feelings, and then put them aside. She had no need or desire to get all misty-eyed over a complete stranger. And she had the feeling he wouldn’t welcome her attentions even if she decided to act on them.

  Yes, he was handsome and powerful, and he scrubbed up like a supermodel. But so what? His looks had nothing to do with his value as a person, and the outside was no indication of what lay beneath. She’d never met a man she could trust, and she didn’t think Kasim would be any different—his alienness notwithstanding.

  After dinner, she cleaned up while Kasim used the bathroom. As soon as he came out, she grabbed her new toiletries, a pair of loose cotton pants, and a t-shirt before heading into the small room. The décor was brown and outdated, but the water in the cramped shower was hot. She stood under the spray long after she’d run the tiny bar of soap over her body, and washed and conditioned her hair. Finally turning off the faucet, she dried off with a threadbare, scratchy towel that was overdue for the trash. She found a blow dryer in the top drawer of the cabinet and finger-combed her hair. When she was done, she pulled on her t-shirt and pants, hoping it wouldn’t be too obvious that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

  When she came out of the bathroom, the curtains were pulled shut and a single lamp burned on the table between the beds. Kasim was under the covers in the bed closest to the window, and Winter could see nothing but the top half of his face. His eyes were open and he tracked her as she put her things away and climbed into bed.

  She lay on her side facing him and when he didn’t turn away, she plucked up the courage to ask some questions. “How did they capture you?”

  He gave one-shouldered shrug. “I got lazy. And stupid.” His voice was quiet, deep, and very intimate in the half light. “I don’t like being around a lot of people, so I like to work night shift at Hope Tower. And I don’t like the city either, so I go for a walk in the gardens at least twice every shift.” His pale-blue eyes held hers. “They must have had the grounds under surveillance and they monitored my habits. One night I went out for my walk, and when I got to the back of the building they shot me full of tranquilizers. When I woke, I was strapped to a bed the room where you found me.”

  Winter nodded, almost too scared to breathe. Kasim had spent the entire day barely exchanging a word, and now he was talking, she didn’t want to do anything to put him off. Unfortunately, her curiosity was stronger than her common sense. “I saw the equipment in that room, and I have some idea what it’s used for. Yet when I set you free there wasn’t a mark on you.”

  “I can hear the question you’re not asking.” He stared at her, holding her with that cold gaze. Winter could do nothing but stare back, willing him to trust her. His full lips pressed tight and she felt a surge of disappointment, certain he was going to shut her out.

  But after a few moments, his dark voice rolled over her again. “At first they took blood and tissue samples. Then they experimented with tranquilizers and sedatives. Then they began testing my limits.”

  “Limits to what?” she whispered, even though Ben had given her the answer when they’d been in the lab.

  “Everything.”

  That one word held so many horrors Winter couldn’t bring herself to push for details. “How many days did they have you?” Please let it only be days, she thought to herself.

  “Four, I think. Maybe five.”

  “Your friends must be worried. Are you sure you don’t want to call them?”

  “They know I’m okay.”

  “How?”

  He moved down the bed a little and propped his hand under his chin, right on the edge of the mattress. “If you and I are going to spend any time together, you should understand there are questions I cannot and will not answer. The Jendari have many secrets, and I will protect each and every one of them with my life.”

  She understood his position, even sympathized with it. But that didn’t mean she was just going to roll over. She was a journalist, after all. “Will you tell me what you can?”

  Again with the shrug. “It won’t be much.”

  “Whatever you can give me will be fine.”

  He was quiet for a while, his piercing blue eyes focused on her face as if searching for something. She had no idea what he was looking for, but she held his gaze as steadily as she could.

  It didn’t take long before the scrutiny became too much and she broke. “Can you tell me about Jendar?”

  He kept his face impassive, and she only caught the brief flash of pain in his eyes because she was watching him so closely. She regretted hurting him, but she wouldn’t take back the question.

  “Jendar is larger than your planet, and it’s more land than water. Our climate is similar, and we have areas that are tropical, temperate, and cold. We have deserts and forests, lakes and oceans, mountains and flat plains.”

  “And what about the place you call home?” Because as curious as she was about Jendar, it was Kasim who held her interest.

  “As a rhe’hashan, I belong to, and serve, all clans. But I was born on the ice fields of the Pennigren Tundra. Our clan lived on the ice year round, with storms of snow and sleet the likes of which you can’t imagine. My mother was a jeweler, and she specialized in fine, delicately wrought pieces set with precious gems. Her work was in high demand, not just among the clans but off-world too.” His expression softened and his full lips lifted just the tiniest bit. “My father was a trapper. He’d go out and hunt for days, sometimes weeks at a time. It was always such a joyous time in our household when he was home.”

  “Your parents sound wonderful.”

  “Yes, they were.” He didn’t sound sad as much as nostalgic, and Winter suspected they’d been gone a long time.

  “How old were you when they died?”

  “Ten. Mama liked to source her own gems, and she’d found a deposit of star stones in a cave high in the mountains. My father went with her to keep her safe, but not even he could defend them from a tunnel collapse in the heart of the mountain.” His gaze had drifted from hers, his focus on the middle distance—and the past. “I went to live with my aunt and uncle and their three children.”

  “That must have been a difficult time for you.” She tried to imagine Kasim as a child, bereft and forced from the comfort his home. The pain in her chest was so sharp she rubbed at it with the heel of her hand.

  “Yes.” There was no mistaking the understatement in that single word. “They took me in and cared for me, but I was the son of a hunter. I knew how scarce food was in the winter, and I understood the difficulty of feeding two adults and four children. And as kind and welcoming as they were, I felt like a burden. When I turned twelve I started hunting for my new family, taking what I’d learned from my father and providing food for the table.”

  “That’s very young for such a big responsibility. Did you go out alone?” The picture he painted was clear in her mind. A slender, beautiful boy arming himself to the teeth and going out into the wild.

  “Yes.”

  “That must have been very dangerous.”

  He jerked and his eyes flew back to hers, cold and accusing. “I was born on the ice. I knew how to take care of myself.”

  Winter stilled. She’d talked to enough victims o
f PTSD to recognize a trigger response when she saw one. Kasim had gone from relaxed and conversational to stressed and angry in the space of a heartbeat. Something bad had happened on one of his hunting trips and, for once, she didn’t want to know.

  Hoping he’d accept her olive branch, she tried for a change of subject. “Your hunting skills must have held you in good stead when you joined the rhe’hashan. How did you come to be one of their number?”

  For a few moments, he didn’t answer and Winter let the silence stretch. Kasim’s breathing slowed, his body began to relax, and when he returned his gaze to her face she could tell he was back with her in the room.

  “The Goddess called me to Her, and so I came.”

  Winter screwed up her nose in frustration. “That doesn’t explain anything.”

  “When Badria calls, a rhe’hashan feels it in here.” He laid his hand on the center of his chest. “It’s a pull that can’t be mistaken for anything else, and it can’t be denied. I packed my bags, saddled a yorgen, and rode for three days until I came to a rhe’hashan training camp.”

  “Okay, two questions. Who is Badria? And what is a yorgen?”

  “Badria is one of the four faces of our Goddess. She is the defender and protector of the clans, and She is the one we pray to for boldness and courage. In Jendari, rhe’hashan means ‘Sword of the Goddess’.”

  Winter’s inquisitive mind sparked at the information he was giving her. “What are her other three aspects?”

  “Gilana the child, Elazar the mother, and Rahtri the wise. Jendari call on every facet of the Goddess, depending on their needs. But only the rhe’hashan belong to Badria.”

  Winter nodded. “And the yorgen?”

  “A beast of burden. Slow, strong, and hardy enough to survive the extreme cold.”

  “Sounds interesting. Do you—”

  “No more questions.”

  Clamping her lips closed, Winter fought the urge to argue. She sensed Kasim wasn’t talkative by nature, and she had a feeling she should be grateful he’d been as forthcoming as he had. And she was. She just wished their conversation could have lasted a bit longer.

  Kasim plumped his pillow and turned his hard eyes on her. “Your turn now. What was your childhood like?”

  The glib, well-practiced answer to that question got stuck on the back of her tongue. Kasim had opened up to her about his childhood, including the no-doubt painful memory of his parents’ death. The least she could do was answer him with the same kind of courage.

  “I don’t normally tell people this story.” When anyone asked about her early years, she simply hit the highlights and glossed over the difficult times. “My parents met when my mother in her late teens. She was on her first solo vacation and she spent years saving up to go on her dream holiday to France. My father was French-Algerian, and, according to Mom, it was love at first sight. When she returned to the States they both worked and saved until they had enough money for him to fly over. They married the week after he arrived.”

  Winter always suspected her father stayed in the country illegally, but her mother would never confirm her suspicions. Despite how resoundingly he’d rejected them, her mother wouldn’t have a bad word said against him. “I came along a year later. My earliest memories of my mom and dad are happy ones. There always seemed to be music and laughter, and I remember feeling like I was the center of their world.” That was the easy part of the story, the part that people knew. She licked her lips and braced herself for the part she only shared with her closest friends. “Everything changed when I was four. I don’t know what happened, but the music and laughter stopped. My parents fought, or didn’t speak at all. Dad started disappearing for days on end and Mom would burst into tears at a moment’s notice.”

  It was a frightening time for Winter. The instability in her parents’ relationship had saturated her in feelings of immanent abandonment. “Two days before my sixth birthday my parents had an argument so loud, so angry, I spent the night hiding under my bed. The next day my dad packed up his things and left, and I never saw him again.”

  “He made no effort to see you?”

  “No. Not to my knowledge.” Even after all these years that reality formed a hard, painful lump in the center of her chest.

  “Then what happened?” His voice was quiet—deep and soft. Intimate.

  Winter had the wild urge to climb out of her bed and into his. To snuggle up against all that warm, hard strength and let him soothe her old hurts.

  Which was ridiculous. She’d learned early and often never to trust a man, and she knew for damn certain no male—of any species—was interested in sharing her emotional burdens.

  Shaking her head at her own weakness, she finished her tale. Not for Kasim, but for herself. To prove that she could. “It turned out my mother didn’t do well on her own. For the rest of my childhood and into adolescence, Mom embarked on series of semi-permanent relationships.” And what a roller coaster that had been. Brief periods of her mom being lost, lonely, and incapable of standing on her own, interspersed with months—sometimes years—of being in relationships with one bad bet after another.

  Luckily, Winter was a late bloomer. By the time her body began to develop, she was old enough and smart enough to understand the long, speculative looks her mother’s boyfriend gave her. When her mother turned a blind eye and deaf ear to Winter’s complaints, she got a friend from school to put a lock on her bedroom door.

  “I left home when I was sixteen and went to live with some friends in a share house.” They had all been young and employed in minimum-wage jobs. They’d barely managed to survive. “I worked in a department store through the day, and went to school at night. I studied hard, got good grades and—with the help of one of my teachers—I applied for every scholarship for which I was eligible. I was lucky enough to be able to go to college, so I grabbed that opportunity with both hands.” Which meant she had a full study load, two part-time jobs, and no social life whatsoever. But it was worth it.

  “When I finished college I got a ground-floor job at a small newspaper. While working there, I started submitting freelance articles to online news outlets and magazines. As my work improved, so did the job opportunities and I climbed my professional ladder. Now I have a steady job in a field I love, I have great friends, and I live in the best city in the world.”

  Which was quite the success story, if she did say so herself.

  “I admire people who work hard for what they want,” Kasim said. “I know how difficult it is to strike out on your own at a young age. At least when I joined the rhe’hashan I had the support of my brothers-in-arms.” He placed his hand over his heart and bowed his head, a formal and solemn gesture despite the fact he was lying down. “I acknowledge your courage, Winter.”

  No one had ever said anything like that to her. Not one person had ever connected her success with emotional courage. Somehow, that acknowledgment made her all hot inside, and her eyes began to sting. Kasim’s image became watery and she was appalled to find herself on the verge of tears.

  She never cried. Not since she walked out of her mother’s home when she was sixteen. Not daring to speak in case her voice gave her away, she squeezed her eyes shut.

  She heard the rustle of sheets as Kasim moved. “Perhaps it’s time we slept.”

  Nodding, Winter turned over and pulled the covers over her ears. Neither of them said a word as Kasim clicked off the light.

  Chapter Five

  As always, the nightmare came in the small hours. Trapped in the cage of sleep, Kasim was forced to relive the most devastating moment of his life. His small body struggling against rough hands, his adolescent strength no match for a fully grown man. Fear, powerlessness, pain, terror. It flooded him in a poisonous cocktail, ravaging him body and soul.

  He screamed, he begged, he cried, and he bled. But his rapist didn’t stop and nobody heard Kasim’s call for help.

  Then the nightmare altered and suddenly he was a man. A fully grown, fu
lly trained rhe’hashan. The grasping hands felt small now, and with a flex of his muscles, he surged upright, charging until the bastard was pinned against the wall.

  This was Kasim’s chance for retribution, the long awaited moment where he could seek his revenge. He leaned close, wanting to feel that foul breath on his skin as it slowed and then stuttered to a final halt.

  He breathed in deep. And that was when he realised the smell was wrong.

  Instead of stale sweat, bad breath, and dirty furs, his nose was filled with something fresh and clean. Something soft and womanly.

  That thought pulled him closer to consciousness. Close enough that he could hear his name being called in frightened desperation.

  “Kasim, wake up. It’s Winter. Kasim, please.”

  Forcing his eyes open, he dragged himself from the grip of those dark memories, allowing the light from the single lamp to chase away the last remnants of sleep. He was on his feet and pressed shoulder-to-knees against Winter’s slight, feminine form.

  He had her pinned to the door with his body, her wrists shackled tightly in his hands. He loosened his grip but he was too emotionally raw to risk letting her go. If she touched him now she’d throw him right back into his own personal horror.

  The post-nightmare tremors shook his body, but it was the threat he posed to Winter that had him thoroughly rattled. He could have really hurt her. Or worse.

  “Are you all right? Did I cause you injury?” He was almost too afraid to hear her answer, but the question had to be asked.

  “I’m fine. A little winded and a little scared, but physically I’m unhurt.”

  Relaxing his neck and shoulders, he allowed his forehead to rest against the door. Which put his cheek right next to her temple. “I’m sorry I frightened you,” he whispered. He couldn’t bring himself to apologize for almost killing her. Voicing the possibility made it too real.

  “That’s okay.” She also kept her voice soft and quiet, but he could feel her heart hammering against his chest. “After what you’ve been through I’m not surprised you’re having bad dreams.” She shifted against him and her soft pliant body felt so good his cock hardened. He winced at his body’s appalling timing. It wasn’t the right place, she wasn’t the right person, and he sure as hell wasn’t the right male.