Deceived Read online

  Blood, Dark realized, working to keep his face from showing the horror he felt. That’s dried blood! Goddess above, what did that bastard to do her?

  Anna’s thighs were tightly closed but he sensed through his gift that her pain was coming from between her legs. Gently, he put a hand on either knee and tried to part them.

  “Please…” Anna looked near tears. “I don’t want you to see.”

  “But I need to, baby.” Dark felt sick with rage inside—at Gorn for hurting her and at himself for allowing it—but he tried to keep his voice soft and even. “I need to see how he hurt you before I can help you,” he told her.

  She bit her lip again.

  “I would never let a real guy see it,” she whispered at last. “Because it’s disgusting and humiliating and awful. If you were real, it would make you sick. It might make you sick anyway.”

  “No, it won’t because I’m a Replicant,” Dark reminded her gently. “Please, Anna—I only want to help you.”

  “I don’t think you can,” she whispered, but she allowed him to part her legs at last, though she closed her eyes, as though she couldn’t bear to see the expression on his face when he looked.

  Dark’s eyes flicked over her inner thighs, uncertain at first of what he was seeing. He took in the studded leather harness cinched tight around her thighs and the thick, dull gray, metal disk between her legs. Then he became aware that the disk was part of something else—something that had been jammed into the soft, tender spot between her thighs where it most certainly didn’t belong.

  Leaning closer, he suddenly recognized what he was seeing and his mind flashed back to his first day at Gorn’s domicile. He remembered the rack in the corner of the Trollox’s bed chamber with its array of leather harnesses and the odd, phallic-shaped objects. Gorn’s words came back to him then—words he hadn’t understood at the time and so had dismissed from his mind.

  “Don’t worry about those, pretty boy—they ain’t for you,” he’d said, when he saw Dark looking at the rack and its contents. “Sometimes breeders need stretching, that’s all. ‘Specially when they gotta get bred by my mighty meat.”

  Dark felt sick. How could he have forgotten those words? How had he not put two and two together and realized what was happening to Anna—right under his very nose? No wonder she’d been so skeptical when he’d asked her to call for him if she needed help. She’d needed it this whole time and he hadn’t seen—had missed all the signs! Now her words of the night before made sense.

  “You’re too late—he’s already hurt me,” she had cried when Dark had tried to calm her down and had sworn to her he wouldn’t let the Trollox breed her. No wonder she had no confidence in him—Dark was beginning to lose confidence in himself. How could he have missed this?

  The way you missed it was by being a blind fool, whispered a little voice in his head. It’s time to open your eyes, Dark, and see what your female needs. And right now she doesn’t need your guilt or self-loathing. She needs to be cared for and healed. So fucking get to it.

  The voice was right and Dark knew it. Carefully, he began to unbuckle the cruelly tight leather harness from around her thighs.

  “No, wait…” Incredibly, Anna tried to stop him.

  “We can’t wait, baby,” he murmured to her, brushing her hands gently aside. “We need to get this fucking thing out of you. It’s tearing you apart!”

  “You can’t.” Anna began to cry weakly. “I have to leave it in. He says I have to be ready for when he comes back because that’s when he’s going to…going to breed me.” Her voice broke on the last word and she looked so miserable and trapped that Dark felt as though his heart was being squeezed by a cruel fist.

  “Baby, please—you’re hurt,” he murmured. “Let me help you. You can’t go on like this—you can’t.”

  At last her small hand fell away and she let him finish unbuckling the harness. Then came the hardest part. Slowly and as gently as he could, Dark began to remove the large, metal phallus.

  Anna cried out in pain and then stuffed a fist in her mouth—Dark thought to keep from screaming—before he had even drawn it out an inch.

  “Do you want me to do it fast instead?” he asked, looking up at her. “Would that be easier, baby?”

  She gave him a short, stiff nod, her eyes wide with pain.

  “Fast then,” Dark told her. “Here—hold on to me.”

  He took her free hand and placed it firmly on his side. With direct skin-to-skin contact, he was able to channel her pain into himself. Then, taking a deep breath, he pulled.

  He felt the ripping, tearing agony inside himself as the awful thing at last came free. It was the biggest one, he saw as it finally pulled out. The phallus as big around as his bicep that he’d seen on the rack in Gorn’s room that first day. It was heavy in his hand and covered in raised carvings and ridges, as though whoever had made it wanted to inflict maximum damage.

  And it certainly had. Though he was taking as much of her pain as he could, Dark could see why Anna had been in such agony. Her tender flesh was bruised and torn and her sacred entrance had been wounded by the disgusting thing.

  Goddess, Dark thought, feeling sick. This was a part of her that should be worshipped tenderly, brought lovingly to pleasure—not hurt and abused. What the fuck was wrong with Gorn—with any male—who would hurt a female so?

  “Anna,” he murmured, looking up at her. “I want you to keep touching me—keep holding on to me—we’re going to get you in a bath and get you all cleaned up and comfortable, okay, baby?”

  She looked at him uncertainly.

  “Are you making the pain go away? It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it did before you touched me.”

  “I’m helping it as much as I can,” Dark told her. He could still feel the burning agony between his own thighs, though he had different equipment than she did. “Just keep holding onto me, baby. We’ll get you healed up, I promise.”

  He lifted her carefully into his arms and this time Anna didn’t protest. She leaned her head against his chest and closed her eyes, looking, Dark thought, like a tired, much-abused child. His heart squeezed like a fist and he cuddled her closer. Goddess, poor little female! He’d thought his own ordeal in the punishment box had been awful but it was clear she’d gone through much, much worse.

  He only prayed that he could heal her—both in body and spirit—so that she wouldn’t be scarred by the horrific events of the night before forever.

  Please, Goddess, he prayed. Let me help her. Let me heal her. And as her pain flowed through him, he welcomed it, wanting only to give her hope and make her better.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Anna drifted in and out of consciousness as the big Replicant carried her down the hallway to a bathroom that had a large, oval tub. He ran a warm—but not hot—bath and lowered her into it, making sure all the time that she was still touching him in some way.

  She didn’t know why, but the skin-to-skin contact with him seemed to make the pain less—much less. Grateful for the respite from the constant agony, she made sure to keep her hand on his arm as he bathed her gently, washing away the dried blood and making her feel almost normal again.

  Somewhere deep inside, she acknowledged how embarrassing this would be if he was a real guy. Talk about seeing a girl at her worst! She must look awful down there, she thought—not to mention she was letting him see her naked, which she was extremely reluctant to do because of her numerous body issues. Plus-sized girls had no business prancing around in their birthday suits—or so she’d been taught to believe.

  Even back on Earth she would have been considered too big to be attractive. And after living for years at the Aka’ja mining station where even the tallest women were barely four feet high, she felt like an ugly giant.

  But Dark didn’t make her feel ugly, even though he was so extremely handsome and muscular himself. He made her feel beautiful…cherished…cared for in a way she never had before. His big hands were so gentle—al