Page 25 of Prohibited

Alex half laughed. “Tattling, Pony?”

Lindsay looked at Ryan, whose eyes slid away.

“He fucking cut into her,” Lindsay said, trying to minimize the outrage in his voice. “She’s bleeding all over the place.” It would only serve to provoke amusement from Alex. But he didn’t miss how Ryan’s shoulders tightened, the way he glanced at Alex.

“And I’d bet a whole lot of money that you were only getting started,” Lindsay said, looking at Alex with unconcealed anger.

“Then you would be a rich man,” Alex said, watching him with dark, amused eyes.

A slight shrug of the shoulders and Ryan turned away to pull a cigarette out of the pack in his breast pocket. But he didn’t fool Lindsay. He was ashamed of himself. Well, he should have been.

“I understand that you have an agenda.” It was an uncomfortable truth, but there it was. “I understand you want revenge. But do you have to do it like this?”

Ryan struck a match on the side of one of the wooden barstools and held it to the end of his cigarette. He looked at Lindsay with eyes that were unrecognizable. His voice a low rumble of warning. “Don’t interfere, Lindsay.”

“Or what?” Lindsay raised his eyebrows at him. God, he wished his fucking leg wasn’t like a sack of flour he had to drag along with him everywhere he went. Before the war, the bomb, the injury, Lindsay would have happily blackenedRyan’s eye for acting like such an asshole. Lord knew they’d come to blows more than once in their lifetime of knowing each other.

“Don’t.” Ryan’s nostrils flared, his cheeks coloring slightly.

“All I am asking is that you don’t treat her like a fucking animal.” He limped around behind the bar and lowered himself with an annoying adjustment of the fucking leg brace and began to rummage through the cupboards. He found a jar of pickled olives and a couple of oranges.

“He found a pet of his own.” Alex laughed his beautiful, dangerous laugh. Lindsay’s heart throbbed, but he didn’t look at him. He filled a ceramic jug full of water from the tap. “Pony.” Reluctantly, Lindsay looked at Alex, who was watching him with eyes like a falcon. “Don’t get attached. Or you’ll be sad when the chicken goes into the boiler in pieces.”

A chill went over Lindsay, but he said nothing. Just glared between the two of them while he awkwardly stuffed napkins, olives, and oranges in his pocket and then gripped the jug of water in one hand. He picked up his cane with the other and limped back to the door, opening it with the last two fingers of the hand holding the cane. “She needs something besides a robe to wear, considering that it seems like you’ve destroyed all of her clothing. And we’ll need actual food for her. You can’t tell me you’re planning to starve her to death. And unless you want to empty a chamber pot, she’s going to need to be let out of that cell to use the water closet.”

“Emptying chamber pots sounds like a well deserved punishment for an interfering Pony,” Alex said behind him.

Lindsay looked over at him. “No chance in hell.”

Then he closed the door with a snap. He shook his head all the way back down the corridor, pausing to open the door awkwardly.

She was standing at the bars of the cell watching him with a face like an angry cat.

“Let me out of here,” she said, slapping her hand on the metal grating.

“I can’t do that.” Lindsay produced the oranges and the jar of olives and held them out to her. She hesitated before she took the jar of olives. Wanting to refuse, probably, but he didn’t miss the growl her stomach made when she saw the food. “It’s not much,” he said. “But it’ll do until I can get something better.”

Her efforts to negotiate her release fell to the wayside as she opened the jar of olives awkwardly, holding her elbows against her chest to keep her brassiere from falling open. She unscrewed the ring and popped the flat sealed lid off and began to eat them with her fingers like she hadn’t eaten in a week. She moaned softly, a lovely little sound that sent a thrill through Lindsay. He’d been almost exclusively intimate with Alex since he came back from the war. He’d nearly forgotten the soft delicacy that was a woman. The desire for it woke in him like a soft little flame. Hot, hungry, flickering gently.

He offered the oranges again, holding them patiently while she eyed them. Then, she took one of them with a quick dart of her hand. He couldn’t blame her, of course, not to trust him. Alex and Ryan had seen to that. He shook his head.

Idiots.

“I’ll see to it you get something to wear, too. There’s a robe over there on the floor.”

“How long are you going to keep me here?” She had stopped eating, eyebrows drawn up in a look of incredulity.

“I don’t know.” Lindsay slowly lowered himself down onto one of the crates opposite the cell and watched her calmly while she angrily stuffed the rest of the orange in her mouth. He set the water jug close enough that she could reach it through the bars.

After a pause, she knelt and picked up the jug, tipping her head back and chugging so much water that Lindsay worried for a moment she was trying to drown herself. Finally, she set the jug aside, a look of ecstatic relief on her face.

“God,” she said, softly. One beautiful wrist drew itself across her mouth while she panted, trying to catch her air. “What are you, the lackey?” She eyed him with disdain. Trying to provoke him.

Well, it wouldn’t work.

He smiled at her. “Not at all.”

“What is this?” she said, expression imploring. “Why am I here?”

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