Forever... Read online

  When Darci came close to losing yet another bar of chocolate (a Snickers, her favorite), she pulled down the front zipper of her cat suit and shoved all of the candy bars down the front.

  When Adam heard the noise, he turned back to her, ready to strangle her if she didn’t keep quiet. But when he saw her lumpy chest and her with her arm reaching down inside as she fished about for a particular candy bar, he lost his anger. Shaking his head in disbelief, he said over his shoulder, “Are all people from Kentucky like you?”

  “No,” Darci said, still searching for the Snickers inside her tight suit. “Even in Putnam I’m unique.” She looked up at the back of him. “That’s why Putnam’s so mad for me,” she added.

  “Makes mad passionate love to you, does he?”

  She didn’t like his tone, which implied that it was impossible to believe that someone would make mad, passionate love to her. “The maddest, the wildest. All day and all night. He’s quite young, you see.” At that last remark, Darci saw the tiniest movement of Adam’s shoulders, as though he’d been hit with an arrow right between his shoulder blades.

  “Hmph!” he said. “Does this child have a first name?”

  When Darci was silent, Adam stopped walking and turned to look back at her.

  She still had her hand down the inside front of her suit, and had this been another time and another place, he would probably have found such a pose to be interesting, but now there was such a look of deep thought on her face that it intrigued him.

  “You know,” Darci said, “I don’t think I ever asked. If Putnam does have a first name, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it. It’s just so easy to put that one word on everything.”

  “Oh, yes, you’re the one who has the boyfriend with the factories, aren’t you? Fifteen, wasn’t it?”

  “Eighteen,” she said as she pulled her hand out of her suit, then smiled when she saw the Snickers bar and began to peel back the wrapper. “I had a letter from him, and his father’s built some more,” she said as she took a bite.”Want some?”

  “Of Putnam?” Adam asked. “Or the candy?”

  “Either,” Darci said seriously. “There’s enough of both to go around. Putnam played all-star football. He’s six-two, three hundred and fifty pounds.”

  “But you’re—” Adam broke off as he looked her up and down. He doubted very much, even with the candy bars, that she weighed a hundred pounds.

  “Oh, don’t worry about us,” she said blithely. “We manage.” She hoped she sounded worldly, or at least knowledgeable.

  “You have chocolate on this tooth,” Adam said, pointing at his own incisor, then he turned back around, smiling.

  For a moment, Darci had a vision of transforming herself into Awesome Woman, creature of massive strength, and pulling stones from the walls and bombarding his head with them. But when Adam turned back to look at her, she smiled sweetly and finished her third candy bar.

  When Adam stopped abruptly a few minutes later, he put his arm behind him to keep Darci from plowing into his back. And when she opened her mouth to speak, he put his warm hand over her mouth. This so delighted her that she didn’t say a word.

  Bending down so he was eye to eye with her, he put his finger to his lips for silence, then raised his eyebrows in question. Did she understand?

  Darci nodded; then, with a frown, Adam took the half of the candy bar she hadn’t yet eaten and slipped it down the front of her leotard and silently zipped it up to her neck. Pointing to the far wall, he motioned for her to stand against it and stay there.

  Darci didn’t want to admit that his manner was scaring her, but it was. In fact, her heart was pounding in her chest as she watched Adam disappear around the corner of the tunnel. When he was out of sight, she did just what he’d told her to do and stood there in silence and waited. And waited. Then she waited some more. Nothing. No sound whatever. Maybe if she recited some poetry....

  On a dark and gloomy night, she thought, then made herself stop. Maybe he was in trouble, she thought. Maybe he had been captured by evil beings.Maybe he....

  All in all, she thought it was better not to think along those lines while standing in a dark tunnel. There was some light coming from the direction in which Adam had headed, but she couldn’t see his flashlight. Had he abandoned her? Had he—

  With her hands on the rocky dirt wall, she inched along in the direction he’d gone, her shoes making no noise on the dirt floor. Slowly, she moved along, and with each step she took, she dreaded what she was going to see at the end of the tunnel.

  But when she did come into the dim light and was able to see, she wanted to yell at Adam Montgomery that he had no right to scare her like that.

  Carved out of the earth along one side of the tunnel was a room with an iron fence across the front of it. Inside the fence were shelves covered with cardboard boxes that had words like cups and plates written on them. It was an ordinary storage closet. True, it was underground and, true, it had a strong iron fence across the front of it, but it was, otherwise, quite ordinary. Against the wall, just past the fence, was a table and some shelves holding more boxes, but nothing that she could see was unusual or even very interesting.

  So what was her esteemed boss doing in front of the gate? He had bent his body into an awkward position as he leaned toward the fence on the left side, and he had half his left hand inside the fence. She couldn’t see what he was holding, but it looked like a broom handle. Appropriate, she thought, considering where they were. So what was he trying to reach?

  Silently, she walked over to stand beside him. “What are you—” she began, but she didn’t have a chance to say another word because suddenly the air was filled with a deafening screech from a high-pitched siren. Putting her hands over her ears, Darci looked up at Adam. She could see that he was shouting at her, but she had no idea what he was saying. Oh, yes, now she could read his lips: “You set off the alarm,” he was saying. There were some other words added to the phrase, but she preferred not to try to decipher those.

  She wanted to apologize, but behind him she could see a small round light coming toward them: a flashlight, and by the look of it, whoever was holding it was moving fast. She pointed, and, turning, Adam saw the light. In the next moment, he grabbed Darci’s hand and pulled her toward the end of the tunnel from which they’d just come.

  But Darci didn’t move. Her feet moved, but her head stayed where it was. She yelled in pain, but even she couldn’t hear herself above the siren’s screeching.

  In an instant Adam saw what was wrong: Darci’s hair was caught in the lock on the gate.

  Adam moved without thought. Thrusting his arm through the bars of the cage, he grabbed the dagger he’d been trying so hard to get without setting off the alarm, and in one whack, he cut Darci’s hair from the back of her head, leaving a big piece attached to the lock. In the next moment, he picked her up and tossed her onto one of the high shelves outside the fence among some boxes. Darci curled into a ball, making herself as small as possible. But the problem with her position was that she could see nothing. She couldn’t see what Adam was doing or where he was. He wouldn’t do something dumb but heroic, would he? she wondered.

  When the alarm stopped, it took all of Darci’s willpower to stay curled up where she was and not move. She very much wanted to rub her ears, rub her jaw, and stretch her legs out straight. But, most of all, she wanted to see where Adam was.

  “I hate that thing!” said a man’s voice. “Why don’t they get it fixed? Damned thing goes off twice a night.”

  “It is fixed. That’s the way she likes it. Sensitive.”

  “Sensitive, hell,” the first man said. “A sneeze sets it off. And I swear those cats do it on purpose.”

  “Look at this,” the second man said.

  “What is it? I don’t see anything.”

  “Get your glasses changed. It’s a couple of long strands of hair. It was in the lock.”

  “Somebody’s doing a spell, no doubt.”