Read Mackenzie's Pleasure for Free Online

friends, her schoolwork. If he said he would call, then the call came exactly when
    he'd said it would. Every week had brought some small gift in the mail, inexpensive but
    thoughtful. She'd understood why he worried so much about her safety, why he wanted her to
    attend the exclusive girls' school in Switzerland, with its cloistered security, rather than a public
    school, with its attendant hurly-burly. She was all he had left.
    He was all she had left, too. When she'd been a child, after the incident that had halved
    the family, she had clung fearfully to her father for months, dogging his footsteps when she
    could, weeping inconsolably when his work took him away from her. Eventually the dread
    that he, too, would disappear from her life had faded, but the pattern of overprotectiveness
    had been set.
    She was twenty-five now, a grown woman, and though in the past few years his
    protectiveness had begun to chafe, she had enjoyed the even tenor of her life too much to really
    protest. She liked her job at the embassy, so much that she was considering a full-time career in
    the foreign service. She enjoyed being her father's hostess. She had the duties and protocol
    down cold, and there were more and more female ambassadors on the international scene. It was
    a moneyed and insular community, but by both temperament and pedigree she was suited to the
    task. She was calm, even serene, and blessed with a considerate and tactful nature.
    But now, lying naked and helpless on a cot, with bruises mottling her pale skin, the rage
    that consumed her was so deep and primal she felt as if it had altered something basic
    inside her, a sea change of her very nature. She would not endure what they—nameless,
    malevolent "they"— had planned for her. If they killed her, so be it. She was prepared for death;
    no matter what, she would not submit.
    The heavy curtains fluttered.
    The movement caught her eye, and she glanced at the window, but the action was
    automatic, without curiosity. She was already so cold that even a wind strong enough to move
    those heavy curtains couldn't chill her more.
    The wind was black, and had a shape.
    Her breath stopped in her chest.
    Mutely she watched the big black shape, as silent as a shadow, slip through the window. It
    couldn't be human; people made some sound when they moved. Surely, in the total silence
    of the room, she would have been able to hear the whisper of the curtains as the fabric
    moved, or the faint, rhythmic sigh of breathing. A shoe scraping on the floor, the rustle of
    clothing, anything—if it was human. After the black shape had passed between them, the
    curtains didn't fall back into the perfect alignment that had blocked the light; there was a
    small opening in them, a slit that allowed a shaft of moonlight, starlight, street light—
    whatever it was—to relieve the thick darkness. Barrie strained to focus on the dark shape,
    her eyes burning as she watched it move silently across the floor. She didn't scream; whoever or
    whatever approached her, it couldn't be worse than the only men likely to come to her rescue.
    Perhaps she was really asleep and this was only a dream. It certainly didn't feel real.
    But nothing in the long, horrible hours since she had been kidnapped had felt real, and she was
    too cold to be asleep. No, this was real, all right.
    Noiselessly the black shape glided to a halt beside the cot. It towered over her, tall and
    powerful, and it seemed to be examining the naked feast she presented.
    Then it moved once again, lifting its hand to its head, and it peeled off its face, pulling
    the dark skin up as if it was no more than the skin of a banana.
    It was a mask. As exhausted as she was, it was a moment before she could find a logical
    explanation for the nightmarish image. She blinked up at him. A man wearing a mask.
    Neither an animal, nor a phantom, but a flesh-and-blood man. She could see the gleam of his
    eyes, make out the shape of his head and the