The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #1)(32)

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes,” he snapped. “I am perfectly well.”

“Well, that’s good. You know, you look fine. You look totally, completely fine. I mean, honestly, the poster child for fine.”

“Will you please stop talking,” he muttered.

“You could make me. If you kissed me again.”

At that, he stopped and looked over at her. She braced herself to be called a hussy, or some other old-fashioned word. Instead, the full force of his sexual arousal sizzled across the warm, humid space.

“You’re afraid of me,” she said. “Aren’t you.”

“I am not.”

“Yes, you are. You started a game and now you’re afraid of finishing it.” She crossed her arms over her breasts. “Why is that.”

“I am not afraid of anything.” His tone was dead. “This place has taught me to know no fear.”

Nyx opened her mouth to argue with him, but she didn’t follow through on the knee-jerk impulse as all of the life drained out of him. No more light behind those beautiful blue eyes. No more arousal in his magnificent body. No more connection to anything around him, even her.

“What did they do to you,” she said through a tight throat.

He looked away, and she studied his handsome face in the candlelight. When she wasn’t busy being irritated with him, his male beauty captivated her. He had perfect bone structure, and sensuous lips that she now knew all too well, and that torso of his, so strong and wide at the shoulders, so narrow at the hips, was the kind of thing males up above went to the gym to try to get.

“It doesn’t matter.” He shook his head. “After the damage is done, the cause of it is no longer relevant. All you have is what has been broken.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Your commiseration is unnecessary and unwelcome—”

“—that I haven’t taken this as seriously as I should.” She lowered her eyes from him. “You’re right. I don’t think I have any idea how bad this place is.”

After all, if they could break a male like him?

And that was what had happened. She didn’t need the details, like he said, the loss of spirit was enough, and the center of her chest ached for him—and for Janelle. Dear God, what had they done to Janelle?

“Would you like to take a bath?” he said roughly.

“Yes.” Anything to stop thinking.

He turned his back to her and sat down on the ground in a random place—and she was willing to bet he had no clue where he was in the cave. He was like a star in a strange orbit, outside of the galaxy. Outside of reality.

“I can give you more privacy,” he said. As if he were offering her something tangible, something he could hold in his palm and put out toward her. “I can leave.”

“Stay,” she replied. “So I know I have backup.”

His head nodded. “All right.”

She waited a moment, although she wasn’t sure what she expected to happen or change in the pause, and she spent the time looking at the ponytail that ran down his spine. It was very long. Then again, he’d been growing hair for a hundred years.

What would it look like, free of that tie, spilling over his naked chest?

On that Fabio note, she turned her back to his back and quickly got out of her clothes. Covering her breasts with one of her arms, she went to the water, her skin goose bumping both from an awareness of how naked she was and also from the temperature drop. Fortunately, as she stood over the pool, the rising heat eased the chill, although it did nothing for her sense of vulnerability—which, to be fair, wasn’t that big a deal.

Somehow, she knew she could trust him about that.

“Ohhhhh . . .”

As Nyx stepped down into the pool, the sensation of perfectly warm, gently moving water against her body was a revelation sure as if she’d never been in a bath before. It was all just so unexpected, though. The depth. The temperature—which she wouldn’t have adjusted up or down. The movement of the currents.

The fact that this was happening at all.

“Feel good?” Jack commented in a low voice.

“Yes.”

His head nodded. “It has saved me. Many a time.”

Splaying out her arms, Nyx cupped and released undulations within the pool.

Don’t do it, she thought. Don’t ask.

“From what,” she said.



The Jackal tried to imagine what she looked like submerged in what he thought of as his property, his domain. There were other pools in the prison, common-use ones that the confined dropped themselves into from time to time—or were thrown into—but this one was his. If his cohorts, such as Kane or the others, partook on occasion? He always regarded it as a courtesy extended by himself to them.

Her dark hair would be loose, the ends drifting over the gentle, churning surface of the pool, and he imagined that tendrils would begin to curl up around her face. Her cheeks would flush, although they’d already been colored by arousal. Her skin would become dew’d and dreamy.

Not that it wasn’t like that all by itself.

How much explanation do I owe a stranger? he thought as he contemplated her question.

“This prison is a dirty place.” He rubbed his face as he answered her inquiry not at all. “Very dirty. It’s hard to stay clean.”