Page 80 of I Dream of Danger
He started loping for the stairs.
A woman stepped out from a door. Her eyes widened when she saw Lee, a binder dropping from her nerveless fingers. “Dr. Lee—” The tone was a question but it was never answered. Lee jumped to her, hands out to hold her shoulders still as he sank his teeth into her neck. In two strong bites he’d chewed her ear off then dropped her at his feet, bleeding and twitching.
Out. He wanted to be out. He was strong and he wanted—no he needed—to hunt. To kill.
He scrambled down the stairs while he still recognized the concept of stairs. By the time he reached the lobby teeming with people, he’d lost the concept. But it didn’t matter because there was plenty of meat here.
He still recognized the concept of prey.
In the hallway, the woman slowly rose. She raised a hand to the side of her head and frowned. Pain, wet…She had no words for the sensations she could only feel. Her hands drew up to her chest, formed claws. Kill. She wanted to kill. There was prey around, she could smell it. Unsteady but unyielding, she loped down the corridor where two creatures had appeared.
Prey.
Mount Blue
“Eat,” Stella Cummings said, pushing a plate of potato gratin across to Lucius. A very small slice, since he’d only begun to tolerate food. She looked across at him, tortured, suffering yet upright and determined. Any other man would have died a hundred times with what had been done to him. What had been done to her by her stalker was a fraction of what had been done to him, and it had almost destroyed her.
He was an extraordinary man.
“That’s all you ever say to me. Eat,” he replied, dark eyes fixed on her. “You’d think I was five years old.”
Even in his weakened and emaciated state, Lucius Ward was a man to be reckoned with. She definitely didn’t think he was five years old.
“Eat,” she repeated, and smiled at him.
His face suddenly sharpened. His huge hand covered hers. “God, Stella. You are so beautiful.”
You are so beautiful. She’d heard versions of that phrase all her life. The word had been pretty when she was a child actress, but turned into beautiful right about puberty. Through some accident of bones and hormones she hadn’t gone through an awkward pubescent phase at all. She’d continued working as an actress all the way through. By the time she was 35, she’d made 120 films and had been considered one of the most beautiful women in the world.
What had that gotten her? Not much, besides more work. And more work. The men who’d courted her had courted the face, not the person behind it. When they discovered that her life was work, work, work, and very little play, the infatuation disappeared.
It certainly hadn’t brought her love.
And now the face was gone.
“Not so beautiful any more, Lucius,” she said, without any sadness. Crazily, her lost beauty had freed something up in her. Everyone in her life now liked her, not her face. Liked Stella, the member of an underground community, and not Stella, the remote movie star.
She was no movie star now. She could never be in the business again. The stalker had sliced her up too badly. Ninety-seven slashes all over, fourteen to her face. One slice had gone right through her cheek, making it impossible to smile on the right side of her face. She looked like someone had put her into a kaleidoscope and shaken it.
His hand tightened on hers. “Beautiful,” he repeated forcefully.
Oh God.
Sex, love—those were things that had completely fled her life after the stalker. There’d been lots of sex before, though not love. But afterward, both had been out of the question. She’d taken refuge in anonymity while her scars had healed as much as they ever would, cooking in a small diner near Mount Blue belonging to the cousin of her former housekeeper. She’d needed to do something, something tangible, with her hands, the way she’d needed to breathe. And Elena had sent her to her cousin, where she’d buried herself in the kitchen in the back and started creating. The greasy spoon became a diner, and was on its way to becoming a restaurant when the news told her that her stalker had escaped.
She’d been on a break, chatting with a customer, a good-looking, mysterious guy who showed up from time to time and who never told her his name. If there was one thing Stella had learned in her life to respect, it was privacy. ‘Don’t ask don’t tell’ covered a lot of things, not just one’s sexuality. She didn’t want to talk about herself and he didn’t want to talk about himself and that suited them both.
And then the news flash—Steve Gardiner, stalker, slasher, and all-round psycho who’d convinced the judge to put him in a mental institution instead of the deepest darkest cell on earth, had escaped.
She’d been talking to Jon when she heard. Suddenly she began to shake all over, the trembles coming from deep in her core. A fear so great she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
He’d taken one look at her, seen how terrified and broken she was, and simply brought her up to Mount Blue, to Haven, where she’d joined the community of misfits and runaways and had been happy ever since.
Here in Haven she’d found companionship and purpose. But love? It hadn’t even occurred to her that she might find it here, of all places.
She looked down at the large hand covering hers. She remembered well that terrible night three months ago when Lucius and Miguel Romero, Larry Lundquist, and Bob Pelton had been rescued from a lab that had been like something out of a Nazi concentration camp, and brought to Haven. The four men had been starved, full of surgical scars, so weak they couldn’t walk. It had taken Catherine a week of IVs just to get them to be able to sit up in bed.
That’s when Stella had taken over, making it her personal mission to get them to eat as much good nourishing food as they could hold down.
