Dream Lover

FIVE

The man she'd just blindsided had returned the favor but she still had the knife she snatched from him. Desperate to get away, she let out a growl flipped on to her back and swiped it at him. The knife was still in its sheath. Her intentions had been to scare him in to diving back away from the knife.

He didn't even try to dodge the blow. The smooth leather of the sheath raked across his throat gently stretching the skin there as it slid by. He would have let her kill him. His onyx eyes didn’t even register shock. She hadn’t been too fast for him he’d known what she was trying at and still moving back didn’t cross his mind.

Of all the people to jump in the middle of the wilderness, she found the one man who literally laughed at death.

            He was smirking at her now.

He was handsome, in a tall, dark, and dangerous sort of way. He had black hair, dark eyes, a slightly crooked nose, and a mouth that seemed nearly too sensuous, too soft for a man’s. His jaw and cheekbones were so precise, so strong, they could have been chipped from marble and he was big, much bigger than he had looked from the tree branch. Elle didn’t know if it was the smug smirk or the jolt to her hormones that made her lose focus but she didn’t regain it until he pinned her. He had both her wrists clamped together over her head in one of his hands and was using his weight to pin her legs. With his free hand, he wrestled the knife away from her and put it back in his belt. With no more moves to try, Elle was ready to beg. 

"Alright," she began, "I see now that trying to steal from you was a bad idea. To be fair you looked a lot smaller from up in that tree.” She’d thought he was short and slim maybe a few inches taller than her five-foot-five. She’d been wrong all around he wasn’t slim but lean, hard muscled. He was practically all subtle ripples from what she could see down the loose shirt he wore. And he had to be over six feet tall, well over. Elle realized now that she had been much higher than she realized in the tree to have misjudged his build so spectacularly. “But now you've got your knife back now so why don't we just go our separate ways, no harm no foul?" 

"So you can try that ambush stunt again." Elle panicked a little at the thought of this massive man holding her hostage and started to struggle again. She managed to get one hand free she pushed at him as hard as she could, the blood she had yet to mop up after running from that creature a moment ago had her other arm slipping from his grasp. She twisted her body got a leg up and pushed herself out from under him. she was rolling again back on to her stomach a breath away from springing up to her feet and bolting when the tables had turned against her yet again. When she should have been taking her first steps up and away the mass of her would be victim was pressing her back into the ground again and she was back on her belly with one arm—the one that was already injured of course—twisted behind her back.

"Okay," she wheezed. "Okay, I won't run.”

 He loosened his grip on her arm Elle only had a moment to be relieved, in the next he was dragging her other arm behind her back and tying her up. "Hey!" she bucked but it was too late she was already bound. He turned her again, took her chin in his hand, and forced her to be still. 

Her face didn’t at all match the body he’d had his hands on only a moment ago. She had a woman’s body, one he wouldn’t mind exploring under different circumstances, but her face was nearer that of a child’s. She had a soft oval face with soft cheeks and stained with color from her attempt at escape. She looked out at him through big brown eyes as wide and as scared as any startled child’s. her nose seemed just as childlike. It sat, a round button on her face just above the only part of her face that matched the rest of her. She had full lips just a touch bottom heavy and currently slightly parted. It was a tempting invitation to taste. Byron ignored it.

"You are going to be quiet. You are going to stay close to me and do exactly what I say. You do that and a few days work, I won't drag you to the nearest brothel and neither of us will learn how much I can get for a thief." It took a moment for her to catch on, her brain seemed to be operating on some kind of lag all the time here. She could only hope the time it took her to grasp what he meant looked like defiance before she nodded her understanding. 

He picked her up, put her on her feet and she followed him thinking she could bide her time and escape in the night.  

Elle kept a few feet behind him as they walked further into the woods, he lifted her over a fallen tree branch that looked as if it could have been its own tree instead of an expendable appendage of another much larger tree.

Only some of the trees in the forest were huge. Elle noticed that for a certain distance around one of the monstrous trees all the trees were dwarfs with trunks no wider than a sapling. Father away, thinner trees just as tall as the giants stretched toward the sky. When they came to a small clearing ringed with the small trees and shrubs, her captor dropped to his knees and began crawling forward slowly. Elle simply watched him. 

"Get down here!" he ordered. Since she couldn't use her hands or make noise, she bugged her eyes at him and nodded to indicate her already ruined sundress and the wide-open cut on her arm that she wasn’t about to get anymore dirt and god knows what else in. “We could make it to the w***e house by midnight if we tried." He said patiently. Elle dropped to her knees and scuttled into the brush with him. It only took a second before she began to itch and think of things like poison ivy. At this point, she thought darkly, he'd be lucky if he didn't wake up with his p***s glued to his stomach and his hand in warm water.