door. I swung my head up, looking around us. We were still in the woods! As we entered the dimness of a tiny shack, an awful realization dawned on me. He wasn’t one of the Shadow Hill people. And we were all alone.
As he set me on my battered feet, I ignored the pain and tried to dart away from him. His huge sweaty hands wrapped around my waist and he yanked me back against him. I trembled at the feel of his wet lips against my neck and fought the urge to be sick. I yelled in outrage and raked my fingernails along the skin of his hands. The stranger growled and whipped me around. I caught a glimpse of a rough face, drooping eyes and a toothless mouth surrounded by a beard, before his meaty hand walloped me across the cheek.
Ringing burst into song in my ear as I crumpled to the ground, dazed, my left cheek blazing with heat and throbbing with pain. Disoriented, darkness fell over my eyes.
A few minutes later, as I came to, I felt a tugging at my feet and looked to see the huge mountain man tying my ankles together with rope. Disbelief cleared my head and I thrust my legs, trying to get away from him. Horror flooded me when I saw he’d already tied my wrists so tight with rope that the slightest movement caused the scratchy material to chafe.
Distantly aware of his hands sliding along my legs, I searched the room, looking for anything—a weapon, some way out. I lay on a soggy pallet in the far corner. And there was nothing. Nothing else in the room but a large hunting knife, a pail, and a door. There was one window. Tiny. Not nearly big enough to climb out.
No. No!
My eyes widened as his hand crawled up the inside of my thigh. I snarled and shook him off me. Mountain man did nothing but smile and crawl alongside me, the stench of his body odor making me gag.
“Now, now,” he admonished, and I shrunk back at the bright lust in his eyes. My stomach roiled and my lips quivered. Tears splashed down my cheeks.
I choked on a sob and he grinned wider. “No tears, wife.” He shook his head as he touched me between the legs.
I roared like an animal in his face and he flinched back in surprise. Then he gave a huff of laughter. “Good wife.”
“I’m not your wife!” I screamed through tears and snot. “Let me go! I’m not your wife!”
I was rewarded with another heavy slap, across my right cheek this time. My teeth pierced through my lip at the impact and I tasted blood on my tongue.
Glaring through my lashes at the mountain man, I noted his fascination with the blood staining my lip. My heart stopped at the brightness in his eyes. The lust had deepened. I swallowed back a rush of vomit.
Mountain man reached out and touched my cut lip. “Yer ma wife,” he growled, pushing his face into mine. I closed my eyes, holding my breath so I didn’t have to inhale his stink. “I find ye. Ye be ma wife.”
Brint had warned me. Brint had told me there were people out here who had gone crazy with the isolation.
“I’m goin’ huntin’. But I be back. I be gone awhile. But I be back, wife. I be back and feed ye, wife. And then ye be seeing to my husbandly needs.” He stroked himself and I turned away, biting back screams of denial.
Whimpers escaped between my pinched lips.
I shuddered at the feel of his fingers on my face. He gripped my chin, jerking my head around. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know his face was inches from mine. His lips came down wet and hard on my mouth, his beard scratching me as I struggled against him, my lips tightly closed. A large hand encircled my neck and squeezed. I gasped, giving him the opening he needed. His tongue forced its way into my mouth. I gagged on the foul taste of him, his rancid stench clogging my senses. No matter how much I jerked my head this way and that, he followed, his lips drinking me in like a fish gulping for air. The skin around my mouth was raw from his beard and wet from his fetid saliva. I was running out of air, close to hyperventilating, when I felt his hand squeeze my breast.
My anger