“And that was a perfect catch on my part!”
I heard Jax’s voice and blinked my eyes open while sucking in a few shallow breaths. I no longer had to shield my eyes because the light surrounding us was nowhere near as oppressive as it had been. Instead, it surrounded me in shades of light blue, almost like it was dawn or dusk.
“What happened?” I asked, feeling shell-shocked.
Jax shrugged like the answer should have been obvious. “A wormhole.”
“A wormhole?” I repeated, frowning at him all the while. Although I’d never experienced a wormhole prior to this one, I vaguely knew what they were. They were similar to portals in that they would connect you from place A to place B. The only difference between the two being that wormholes were usually created with the express purpose of kidnapping someone …
I glanced up at Jax’s smiling face and then looked down again to see I was cradled in his large arms. And I was sans pants.
Yes, my missing pants concerned me, but not as much as the realization that I was here with Jax. Jax was a wanted man, both by the ANC and his own people which meant we could be in hostile territory, surrounded by both of our enemies. I immediately checked the area in front of me before doing the same behind me to ensure that I was aware of any possible threats.
“We’re here alone, hot cheeks,” Jax announced in a tone of voice that I found much too familiar for my liking.
But as far as I could tell, Jax was correct—it seemed there was no one else around, just us. And we appeared to be surrounded by numerous, and unusually tall … pine trees? It was no surprise to me when I began panting. My heart was pounding so hard, I half wondered if I might suffer a heart attack. I had to take a few deep breaths before facing Jax again.
“Wh … where are we?” I started before shaking my head as I wondered if I had just died, because this scenery didn’t make any sense. I closed my eyes and opened them again, half hoping or expecting the environment to change, but it didn’t.
“No can say,” Jax responded with a shrug. I wasn’t sure if he didn’t know where we were or if he just wasn’t interested in sharing. But I also didn’t push the subject because I already knew I wouldn’t get far.
“Great,” I muttered as I took a deep breath and reminded myself that at least I was alive. Things could have been a hell of a lot worse. Only then did I remember he was still holding me and then I realized one of his hands was perched securely beneath my ass. “Put me down!”
“Okay,” he replied before releasing me from the cradle of his arms. He took no precautions about placing me carefully onto my feet. Instead, he simply let go and I landed, butt first, on the ground below which was littered with pine needles.
“Ouch!” I yelled as I glared up at him and rubbed one of my offended cheeks.
“What? You ordered me to put you down!” he replied with a shrug while holding his hands up in mock surrender. “A simple thank you would have sufficed.”
“For what?” I snapped. “I should thank you for dropping me right on my ass?” I stood up to brush the impaled needles from my butt.
“No! Thank me for catching you when you plummeted out of the wormhole!” Jax answered. “That was practically a superhuman accomplishment!”
“Well, as a Loki, you’re not exactly human to begin with, are you?” I grumbled. After inspecting my sore butt one more time, I also remembered I was nearly naked from the waist down, except for my panties. And Hallelujah for those. Jax was more than enjoying my predicament by narrowing his eyes on my ass, and then my crotch, until I slammed one hand in front of my thighs and used the other to cover my cheeks. He just laughed at me.
“No, I’m not a human,” he replied before taking several calculated steps to the side so he could more easily observe my backside. I muttered something under my breath that was so unintelligible, even I couldn’t understand it. Then I moved to the side to prohibit him from further glimpses of my family assets.
“I have to admit, I was very pleasantly surprised to find myself up close and personal with that great ass of yours,” he jibed with a shrug. He continued to skirt around me as I continued to thwart all his attempts to improve his view.
“Probably not as surprised as I was,” I muttered.
“At least there was one good thing to come out of that bumpy as hell wormhole,” he commented while eyeing my butt again as if to enact a charade of just what that one good thing was.
“You’re so predictable, you’re beginning to bore me,” I said with my nose in the air.
“Leave the next twenty minutes up to me and we’ll see how bored you are.”
I just looked at him blankly before expelling an exasperated sigh. “Ugh, you’re a pain in my butt whether you’re locked up or free, you know that?”
“Baby, I would like nothing more than to be a pain in your butt,” Jax retorted with a more lascivious glint in his eyes. “A very large pain in your butt, I might add.”
I chose to ignore the whole large comment. Instead, I focused on the fact that our most recent exchange was pretty much my fault. “Yeah, stupid me,” I grumbled with a brief nod. “I set myself up for that one,” I finished while backing up into a tree, thus preventing Jax’s eyes from feasting on my rear any longer.
“Tell me something, has that boyfriend of yours ever had the privilege of …” he started to ask, but I immediately held my hand up. With my palm facing him, I tacitly told him he could talk to the hand because the rest of me refused any part of this conversation. “Well?” he asked, obviously not able to understand sign language.
“We are absolutely not discussing anything else personal now or ever!” I responded, spearing him with my piercing gaze. I then wondered if my magic would work here, wherever here happened to be.
“Okay, okay,” he finally relented. Holding his hands up, he smiled down at me. “May I just finish by saying that your ass felt every bit as tight and round as I imagined it would?”
“No.”
“You know, I think you have single-handedly turned me into an ass man!” he continued, nodding and seeming excited over the fact. “I used to be exclusively a breast man, as I told you, but now I’m thinking better of it.”
“Great, I’m happy for you,” I grumbled. All the while I hoped and prayed my magic would work now, because if it didn’t, there wasn’t much more I could do about my current state of undress. And that was a subject which deeply worried me.
“So I got a little peek at your lower assets but you’ve still given me nothing regarding your upper ones,” he continued with a shrug. “How’s about you take that shirt off and show me what you’re working with upstairs?”
“How’s about you give it a freaking rest!” I yelled while shaking my head. “Oh my God, you are beyond frustrating!” I closed my eyes and fisted my hand, starting to shake it in order to conjure up my magical dust but Jax’s grating voice interrupted me.
“You probably didn’t notice it when I caught you, but I copped a generous feel,” he confessed, clearly ignoring my last comment. Actually, it was probably fair to say that Jax, in general, ignored nearly everything that came out of my mouth. He was exasperating to say the least.
“Yeah, I noticed,” I admitted, opening my eyes to glare at him.
“You did and yet I didn’t get a complaint?” he asked, smiling with true mirth. “Interesting. Should I take that to mean that you enjoyed being felt up?”
“No!” I railed back at him. “In general, it’s safe to say that anything having to do with you and sex leaves me nothing but maddened, disgusted and ready to pull my own hair out.”
“You say that,” he continued, eyeing me narrowly. “And yet, I can’t help but wonder why you didn’t discourage me much earlier, if my roaming hands really bothered you that much.” His eyebrows reached for the tops of the trees as he shook my head. “Methinks the truth is more along the lines of you wanting me as much as I want you.”
“No,” I insisted immediately. “The truth is more
along the lines of me being so shocked by everything that I’d just gone through that I wasn’t paying enough attention to you and your attempts to molest me. Had I been completely coherent, your hand would now be broken.”
“Well, that, or we’d be pursuing other, more pleasurable activities,” he purred with a look of unrestrained hunger again.
But I wasn’t paying him any attention because I was too busy trying to magick myself a pair of pants. Closing my eyes again, I silently prayed my magic would work as I shook my right hand. A few seconds later, I felt a mound of my dust materialize in my palm. Things were looking up …
I opened my eyes when I threw the magical particles directly over my head. As I watched the glittery specks sprinkling down on top of me, I imagined a pair of jeans covering my lower half. Seconds later, I smiled to see I was no longer naked from the waist down, but clad in my favorite Levis.
“And just when I was beginning to really appreciate the view,” Jax said with a frown while shaking his head and acting overly disappointed.
“Okay! That’s enough,” I sniped back at him. Taking a deep breath, I tried to figure out a plan, something to keep me moving forward. First of all, however, I needed to understand what had just happened to us over the last ten minutes or so.
“I’m not sure which is worse—grabbing a healthy feel of your ass, or never having had the opportunity in the first place,” he lamented in dramatic soliloquy.
“I don’t care.”
“I know the answer,” he continued, nodding. “It’s worse now that I’ve had the opportunity,” he finished, obviously ignoring my comment. He might as well have been having the conversation with himself. “Only because now I can’t stop thinking about getting another feel.”
“Oh, my God, you are so exhausting,” I replied with my hands on my hips as I shook my head in pure desperation. “I have no energy left to deal with you anymore.”
“You don’t know the half of how exhausting I can be, baby girl,” he answered with a wink that made me want to vomit.
“I don’t want to know the half of it! I don’t want to know a third of it! I don’t want to know any of it!” I barked, taking a deep breath before entering the more important conversation that we still needed to have. “What I do want to know, however, is what happened back there?”
“What happened back … where?”
My heartrate increased again, but this time, out of growing frustration. “Oh, I don’t know, for starters, how about us both disappearing into the wormhole?”
He shrugged. “Sounds like you summed the whole thing up fairly well. What more would you like to know?”
“Don’t screw around with me, Jax!” I yelled at him finally, feeling my temper starting to fray. “I’m not in the mood for it!” Then I inhaled deeply three times because I was suddenly feeling faint.
“I would never try to screw around with you, Dulcie,” he answered, that pesky smile of his in full effect.
My heartbeat started to pound through my chest again; and despite some more deep breaths to slow it down, it persisted. I felt like I was on overload at the moment. I had no clue what had happened to me, much less where I was. Furthermore, I wondered if there was any way back—was I even still traveling on an Earthly plane? I figured I must have been because my magic worked here; and it didn’t in the Netherworld. Throwing Jax into the mix was just one more question mark and one more answer I didn’t have.
I decided to sit down for a second or two until I could get my fight or flight response under control. Putting my head between my knees, I closed my eyes.
You can handle this, Dulce, I told myself. You’re tough and strong and you can handle whatever curveball life might throw at you. All you need is a little bit of downtime, just enough so you can catch your breath and think more clearly.
“This is good training for you,” Jax interjected.
“I don’t need more training,” I muttered in reply. I failed to suppress my scowl as I glanced up at him briefly before wedging my head between my knees again.
“All good recruits never stop training,” he continued, commanding my attention again as he shrugged, like I should have admitted that he had a point.
“I’m not a recruit!” I yelled in a moment of unrestrained frustration. Yes, I realized almost instantly that it was a bad move. I shouldn’t have been ready to reveal my cards at this point, but I couldn’t say I cared anymore. I just wanted to get him to shut the hell up.
“You’re not a recruit?” he asked, shaking his head. Then he tsked me, but didn’t seem really offended. “It appears the honorable ANC officer hasn’t been exactly straight with me.”
“No, I haven’t been,” I answered with no trace of apology. Then I laughed angrily. “Why should I be? It’s not like you’ve been straight with me.”
“Then we are at an impasse, aren’t we?” he asked. His serpentine smile indicated how much he enjoyed our verbal sparring. But I wished he’d just keep quiet so I could formulate a plan in my mind to get out of this predicament.
“There doesn’t have to be any impasse,” I answered. “Instead, you could start answering my questions, now that you have nothing more to lose.”
“You think I have nothing more to lose?” he asked, eyeing me with keen interest.
I shrugged. “You aren’t locked up anymore, and you seem to know where we are, although I don’t, and you’re physically much stronger than I am, and I’m unarmed. I’d say you have nothing more to lose.”
“Good points, all of them,” he admitted with a curt nod. Then he shrugged. “Okay, ask away, fair lady.”
“You’ve known exactly what was happening all along, didn’t you?” I inquired instantly, sitting up straight as soon as I wondered if he might be willing to give me the elusive answers to my questions I’d been seeking all along.
“What do you think?” he asked with little interest. His expression showed the same lack of concern or surprise as he did when the “earthquake” first started. I suddenly remembered how throughout that episode, and right up until the point when he finally dropped down into the tunnel, his expression never changed.
“I think you had it all planned.”
“Yes,” he answered unapologetically. “It was all part of my sinister master plan,” he added with a drawn-out, well-practiced, malevolent laugh that sounded purposefully evil. “And if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids, I might have actually pulled it off!” he finished, quoting every ridiculous villain ever to appear on Scooby-Doo.
“So what was the point of it all?” I asked as I faced him squarely. My breathing had returned to normal, and the fuzzy feeling behind my eyes was dissipating rapidly. Things were definitely looking up.
“To get you away from Headquarters,” he answered with a shrug, like it should have been obvious to me.
“Why?” I asked while heaving myself onto my feet. I took a few seconds to make sure I wouldn’t get dizzy again and keel over.
“Because those were my orders.”
“Orders? From whom?” I demanded.
He glanced up at the sky before taking a few steps forward. “I already told you—that’s not your concern.”
“I thought we were answering each other’s questions now!” I retorted, wondering if I could ever get him to bend on that point.
“I’m only answering questions that I choose to,” he corrected me. Looking up at the sky again, he seemed to be navigating by using the stars, which were now fast appearing in the dark blue sky. He glanced over at me again with a curious expression. “And I didn’t realize we were answering each other’s questions?”
“We aren’t.”
“You just said we were,” he pointed out.
“I misspoke,” I responded, shaking my head. “Getting back to the subject, since you won’t answer that last question, how about this one? Was the sole reason you turned yourself in designed to get me away from Headquarters?”
“Yes,” he answered without any explanation. Fac
ing the sky again, he took a quick right, and walked forward a few steps.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re the one who just connected the dots,” he responded with a shrug. “If it doesn’t make sense to you, ask yourself why.”
“It doesn’t make sense because I don’t know your reasoning yet. I mean, how does turning yourself in result in protecting me? Especially when you had no idea that you would even end up in Splendor in the first place?” I inquired as I crossed my arms over my chest.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you surrendered yourself in the Netherworld. How could you ever have known that Knight would relocate you to Splendor?” I shook my head the more I thought about it. “There’s no way you could have!”
“Just call it an educated guess,” he retorted before taking a few more steps forward and glancing back at me impatiently. “We need to get a move-on. It’s getting dark, and those clouds in the distance look like rain.”
“Educated guess? How?” I asked without budging.
He shrugged. “As soon as I told Vander about the death threats, he knew he couldn’t keep me confined in the Netherworld. I knew he’d seek as inconspicuous a location on the Earthly plane as he could. And the one place that had to have been always foremost on his mind was Splendor, of course. That way, he could incarcerate me and see his girlfriend all at the same time. Sort of like killing two birds with one stone.”
I couldn’t argue because his reasoning made sense. Well, obviously it did because that’s exactly what had happened. “Okay, so why did you take me away from Headquarters?” I continued. “Are you expecting some sort of ransom in exchange for me?”