Deceived Read online

  “Well…it suits you. They, uh, certainly made you handsome.” Her soft blue eyes flickered over his face and then back down to her hands and he could see a blush blooming in her cheeks.

  “Thank you.” Dark was touched by her shy compliment. For the past five years when he’d been held as a slave, he’d been pawed over by Mistress Hellenix and her friends who had often commented on the sharpness of his features and the length of his shaft. Such treatment had left him feeling objectified…dirty. But Anna’s soft voice and shy blush seemed to warm his heart. She was a slave, just as he had been and he yearned to rescue her.

  But first, he had to gain her trust.

  “You’re very beautiful yourself, Anna,” he said gently and truthfully. He wanted to reach out and touch her again—maybe just brush his fingertips along the soft skin of her cheek. But he sensed this wasn’t the time for touching, no matter how he longed to do it.

  He expected her to blush again and thank him or maybe stammer and go all tongue-tied but Anna surprised him.

  “No, I’m not,” she said flatly, shaking her head. “I’m not beautiful at all. I’m too big—too ‘pleasingly plump’ as my mom used to say. That’s what got me into this mess in the first place.”

  “I…don’t understand.”

  Though she was taller than most of the human women he had met on the Mother Ship, Dark thought she seemed the perfect height. Since he was seven standard feet tall himself, it would have been difficult to communicate with a much shorter female. And as for the “pleasingly plump” part, well—he didn’t understand the objection there at all. An Elite was the most beautiful kind of female—almost all Kindred agreed on that, though Twin Kindred had a special fetish for them.

  “No, you wouldn’t understand.” She sighed. “You’re just a Replicant—no matter how human you act.”

  “Actually, I am made to look like a Kindred—a Blood Kindred,” Dark said, trying to stick as close to the truth as possible. His Dark Healer heritage had given him his gift/curse but the Kindred DNA always bred true and except for his black hair and bronze eyes, he had the build and musculature of a true Blood Kindred.

  “A Blood Kindred?” she looked up at him in interest. “My stepfather, Brex, was a Beast Kindred. My mom met him when he came down to Earth to advise them on some kind of demolition—he’s a munitions expert,” she explained. “I was fifteen when they got married and then we all moved off planet for his work and well…here I am.” She shrugged as though this was the entire explanation of how she had ended up a captive of the horrible Gorn.

  Dark sensed there was more to this story—much more. But since Anna had chosen to gloss over it, he decided to leave it alone.

  “You are from Earth, then?” he asked.

  She took another bite of bread and nodded.

  “Mm-hmm. Originally. I haven’t been home in a long time though.” Her blue eyes went wistful. “Wish I was there now.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Dark said softly. He wondered if she was going to cry—he could feel her grief and loss hovering between them like a rain cloud about to burst. But somehow Anna mastered herself and sniffed back her tears.

  “Well…thank you again for the bread,” she said and nodded down at her plate, which was empty except for crumbs. “I can’t believe I ate it all. I guess I’d better get going now.”

  “Wait.” Dark had to stop himself from putting a hand on her arm to keep her with him.

  “What is it?” She was hovering on the edge of her chair, about to leave at any minute.

  “Wouldn’t you like another slice?” he asked her. “And to tell me what you want to eat tomorrow?” He nodded at the e-clip. “I’m ordering ingredients for delivery now.”

  Anna sighed. “Yes to the second piece of bread—it’s probably the carbiest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth but at this point I don’t care—I’d front-load carbs by the handful if I could get them. After all, it’s not like anyone will ever see me again to care how I look.”

  Her fatalistic words bothered Dark.

  “I see you,” he pointed out. “And you look like you need feeding—which is my job. Please tell me what you want—I only know a few Earth recipes but I’ll try to make anything you desire if you just describe it to me.”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter what you make me—Gorn won’t let me eat it. He wants me to only eat that horrible Trollox food.” She shuddered.

  “Leave that to me,” Dark said firmly. “Whatever you want, tell me. It may not look like the dish you ordered when it gets to the table, but it will taste like it.”

  “So you’re going to make a whole separate dish for me and then camouflage it to look like Trollox food?”

  Dark nodded. “That’s the idea.”

  She looked at him incredulously. “But…why? Why would you go to all that trouble?”

  Because I saw you in my dream, he wanted to say. Because you called to me, even though you don’t know it.

  “I like a challenge,” he said instead.

  Anna shook her head. “I imagine cooking Trollox food is already a challenge.”

  “It’s pretty basic cuisine, actually,” Dark remarked. “Lots of organ meat and body fluids. Blood, bile…sputum…that kind of thing.”

  “Ugh!” She made a face, her little nose wrinkling up in a way that made her look damn near adorable.

  “Sorry, but it’s true.” He grinned wryly, forgetting for a moment to act like a Replicant. “It’s not exactly the tastiest food in the quadrant but it’s not that hard to make either.”

  “Well, I don’t envy you your job,” she remarked. “How do you stand the smells?”

  He shrugged. “You get used to it. In my old restaurant—the restaurant I used to work at, I mean—we had ventilation hoods that sucked it away. Here I just keep the lid on the pots as much as possible and open a window. The smell of the plants coming in is nice.”

  “Yes, the garden outside is really pretty. It reminds me a little of where I used to live on Earth—it was a place called Florida.” Anna’s eyes grew soft as though she was remembering a cherished place she never expected to return to. “It was a sub-tropical climate, so everything grew wild everywhere—it was always so green.”

  “Maybe we could go out to see the garden together,” Dark suggested, before he thought about it. “I mean, to enjoy the plants,” he added, rather lamely.

  She gave him a sharp look. “If you were a real guy I’d think you were trying to get me alone, you know?”

  “I’m sorry if I offended you.” Dark shook his head. “I just…haven’t been here long and I would like to see outside the house.”

  She seemed to consider for a moment.

  “All right—I’ll go with you,” she said at last. “But only because you’re a Replicant and you don’t have the, uh, equipment to hurt me.” She nodded down at his crotch. “And we can only go when Gorn is away like he is now. He gets really, really angry and thinks you’re trying to get away if he catches you outside the house.” She pointed to her bruised cheek and sighed. “Even though there’s nowhere to go.”

  “He hit you?” Dark had suspected as much but now he felt the rage rising in him and his fangs sharpening at the confirmation of his guess.

  She laughed harshly.

  “This? This is barely a love-tap. You should see what he does to his sex bots—the Replicants he buys just to fuck.”

  The word sounded ugly and cynical in her mouth but Dark could see the pain and fear in her blue eyes as she spoke.

  “What does he do to them?” he asked in a low voice, though he thought he could guess.

  The cynicism dropped away from her face, to be replaced by naked fear.

  “He kills them—rips them apart,” she whispered, as though the words were almost too horrible to say. “I’ve seen him do it—it happened to the last Replicant I tried to make friends with.”

  She jumped up suddenly and began to back away.

  “Wait—where are you going?�