Caged Read Free

working around and on him.
    Well, he’d moved one muscle in particular, but she refused to consider that.  The moment she’d begun to wash him, leaning her arm a bit over his hip, she’d felt something moving beneath it, and before her eyes, he’d grown to enormous proportions behind the now straining buttons of his pants.  Rachel had done her best to ignore it, making scrupulously sure that she didn’t go anywhere near it again.
    It was still there, though, proud and big as ever.
    The sight of it prompted her to admit to herself that she definitely needed to restrain him somehow.  What remained of her precious stock of hemp rope was hanging from a nail on the wall and she retrieved it, coming to stand over the bed and biting her lip as she tried to decide what the best approach was.  Logic dictated that she secure his right hand—the one that still clung to the gun like a lifeline—first, but she also thought that there was much more of a chance that she’d wake him up trying to divest him of his weapon and stretching his arm up to the bedpost.
    So she opted for his other arm first.
    It wasn’t the first or last time she’d be seriously wrong.
    Almost the second she had begun trying to secure his hugely thick wrist, with parts of her body hanging over him in a very unladylike position, she knew she’d miscalculated.
    In the silence of the small room, she heard the gun being cocked before she felt it pressed—not to her side, not even to her chin—but to her temple.
    “Just what in the Sam Hill do you think you’re doing there?”
    And there was no viable explanation she could give him.  What he thought she was doing was exactly what she was doing, so Rachel didn’t say a thing.
    After a long, torturous silence, he ordered, “Untie me, then give me the ropes and lie down on the bed beside me, against the wall.”
    Her eyes widened in alarm, but it wasn’t as if she had any choice.  Very few seconds later he was in possession of the same lengths of hemp that she was going to use to tie him up, and she fully expected that he was going to do the same thing to her, once she complied with his order for her to take her place beside him.  With that enormously dangerous gun trained on her the entire time, her mouth dry as the ever blowing wind outside, Rachel carefully, gingerly did as she was told to do, cramming herself into the small space between the mountain of flesh that was him and the wall of her cabin.
    She couldn’t possibly have been more shocked at what he said next.
    “Strip.”
    It was the first time she’d really tried to look him in the eye.  “What?” she asked automatically, knowing she sounded like an idiot.  There was no way she couldn’t have heard his low, firm command.
    The gun poked painfully into her side.
    “All of your clothes—even your skivvies.  Take them off and hand them to me.”  When she hesitated, he reached over and grabbed her chin in his hand.  “Now.”
    There was no stopping the tears anymore, try as she might and she did.  They poured down her cheeks as she did as he commanded, however reluctantly. Her motions slowed as the pile of her clothing where she’d begun laying it on his stomach grew. Soon, she was down to just her thin, threadbare shift, bloomers and stockings.
    “Please,” she whispered, horrified that she’d been so effortlessly reduced to begging, “please let me keep the rest of my clothes on. I promise I’ll–”
    “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.  You’d do anything to get away from me, and I intend to see that you’ll think twice and then think again before you decide to do something stupid.”
    He put his big paw out.  Her stockings landed there first, then her bloomers, and, when she could delay it no longer, she sat up enough to tug her shift over her head, placing that into his hand, too. Her fingers clung to it and he pried them away as he tucked her clothing beneath him for the moment, and then turned back to