Forbidden Captor

But in the dark shadows of the night, when Tasiya felt vulnerable and alone, when she ached for a kind word—for hope—he noticed. He hadn’t said much, but the depth of his voice had resonated every shattered nerve, calming her, grounding her. He seemed solid as a mountain to cling to, yet just as forbidding.

There was a kindness to his perceptive gray eyes that had washed over her like a gentle spring shower. A sadness, too, as though the ugly marks on his body were etched more deeply inside.

He called himself a monster at their first meeting, and she believed him. But last night she saw a glimpse of the heart within the beast. And that paradox gave her the strength to survive one more day….

Forbidden Captor

Julie Miller

MILLS & BOON

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julie Miller attributes her passion for writing romance to all those fairy tales she read growing up, and shyness. Encouragement from her family to write down all those feelings she couldn’t express became a love for the written word. She gets continued support from her fellow members of the Prairieland Romance Writers, where she serves as the resident “grammar goddess.” This award-winning author and teacher has published several paranormal romances. Inspired by the likes of Agatha Christie and Encyclopedia Brown, Ms. Miller believes the only thing better than a good mystery is a good romance.

Born and raised in Missouri, she now lives in Nebraska with her husband, son and smiling guard dog, Maxie. Write to Julie at P.O. Box 5162, Grand Island, NE 68802-5162.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Anastasiya (Tasiya) Belov —Her father’s been kidnapped by the terrorists he dared to betray. The ransom? Cook and clean for—and spy on—an American militia who would gladly kill any traitor in their midst. The price of failure? Losing everything she loves. Including the man who would save her.

Bryce Martin —A battle-scarred warrior inside and out. He’ll do whatever it takes to escape from prison and save his Big Sky comrades—and the one woman who might learn to love this beast of a man.

Boone Fowler —Leader of the Montana Militia for a Free America. An escaped convict who has no love for foreigners. But he loves their money. And if their “gift” will help him take revenge on Big Sky Bounty Hunters…

Marcus Smith —Big as an ox, with the charm to match. He wants Tasiya Belov to be his reward for his service to the militia.

Dimitri Mostek —Lukinburg’s Minister of Finance. He has no patience for men who embezzle money from him. But he answers to a higher power.

Anton Belov —He was only trying to make a little extra money for bills and food. Now his extravagance might cost his daughter her life.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Prologue

St. Feodor, Lukinburg, November 4

9:07 p.m.

The chocolate-caramel torte was a delicious success. And an incredible mess.

But Anastasiya Belov didn’t mind being elbow-deep in suds and dishwater, scraping the sticky topping from the pan. Not when her latest recipe had brought such a delighted smile to her father’s face and earned her a hug even before she’d served him coffee.

Lukinburg, an eastern-European monarchy reformed after the disbandment of the Soviet Union, was a country beset by hard times. Even with her job cooking and cleaning for the minister of finance, Dimitri Mostek, she and her father, Anton, barely made ends meet.

But Anton, one of the senior accountants working for the ministry, had earned a bonus in his November paycheck. To celebrate his success, Tasiya had been extravagant with her market shopping and had prepared her father a feast far grander than anything she was allowed to fix for the Mosteks. Her father’s smile had been worth the extra pound of butter and brown sugar.

“You look so like your mother when I see you in the kitchen like this.”

Tasiya smiled and turned at the sound of her father’s musical accent. His rolling rs and guttural consonants echoed in her own voice. “You mean hot and perspiring, even though there’s snow on the ground outside?”

He brushed aside a strand of curly black hair that clung to her damp cheek. “I mean beautiful. Strong in spirit and body.”

“I love you, Papa.”

He leaned in and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I love you, Tasiya. Now—” he stood straight and tall and clapped his hands “—is there more of that chocolate cake?”

Tasiya laughed. “It’s a torte, Papa.” She reached for a towel and dried her hands, then gave him a nudge back to the living room where he’d been reading the paper. “You go. Relax. I will bring you another slice and a fresh cup of coffee.”

“You spoil me, daughter.”

“You’re the only one who’ll let me. Now go.”

As her father disappeared around the corner, Tasiya went to work. She twisted her long tresses into a bun and secured them with her metal hair clip. Then she set the coffeepot back on the stove to reheat while she prepared a second helping of dessert.

She was glad to do this for him, glad to bring a little happiness into their humdrum lives. There’d been far too little rejoicing in recent years. Not since King Aleksandr had ascended the throne. His solution to creating order and reviving a badly wounded economy had been to rule with a tight, cruel fist. Inflation was out of control. And while the royal family lived in a palace that showcased the elegance and wealth of the Lukinburg of old, basic supplies such as food and fuel couldn’t be guaranteed to its citizens. Financial aid from foreign countries had been rejected time and again, and those who protested the king’s strict policies and isolationist philosophy were often imprisoned, or else they mysteriously disappeared.

So Tasiya took joy in her father’s success. She celebrated it as her own success because it was the only type of achievement she would ever be allowed.

After setting her mother’s silver tray with a plate, fork and napkin, Tasiya reached for the coffeepot and—

Gunshots exploded in the living room. “Papa!”

“Tasiya!”

She ran to her father as the front door splintered and cracked around the lock and swung open. Four or five men dressed in black from head to toe stormed in, along with rifles and curses and a blast of snow and frigid air.

“What are you— Papa!”

She never reached him. One of the men grabbed her around the neck and shoved her back into the kitchen. “Stay back!”

Tasiya twisted to see around the man blocking the archway with his gun. Though her father struggled, Anton was no match for the three men who dragged him outside into the snow. “Papa!”

Not waiting to ask questions, Tasiya pulled the lid from the coffeepot, grabbed the handle and whirled around to sling the steaming liquid into the man’s face. Even with a stocking mask on, the scalding coffee did the trick. He screamed in pain, lifted his hands to his face.

She scooted past him and dashed out the door in her slippered feet. “Where are you taking him? Papa!”

She leaped down the front steps and saw to her horror they weren’t taking Anton anywhere. Instead, two of the men pushed her father down onto his knees in the middle of the street. The third man pulled a gun from his belt and placed the barrel against her father’s forehead.

“No! Don’t!”

Tasiya ran straight into the nightmarish scene. Snowflakes bit into her cheeks, and cold soaked into her feet. She shoved the gun aside and hugged her father’s head to her breast.

“Don’t hurt him!”

“Tasiya, no—”

“What do they want?”

“Isn’t this a pretty picture?”

Tasiya recognized that voice. Smooth and arrogant, used to having its own way. She spun around as the fifth man approached, not dressed in black like the others, but wearing a finely cut suit and expensive wool coat. Keeping her hands on her father’s shoulders, she stared at the familiar face in shock. But she didn’t for one minute think this man would help.

“Minister Mostek.” Her employer. Her father’s supervisor. The man with the beautiful wife and three children and roving eye. “Why are you doing this?” she demanded. “What do you want?”

“Justice.” He trailed the tip of one leather-gloved finger along her jaw and Tasiya flinched. His smile never reached those cold, beady eyes. “Your father has stolen from me.”

“It was so little,” Anton protested. “I only took enough—”

With a nod from Mostek, one of the so-called soldiers of the kingdom rammed the butt of his gun into her father’s temple. Tasiya sank to her knees as he fell, cradling his bleeding head in her arms.

“Your bonus,” she murmured. Not a reward for a job well done. But funds stolen from the coffers of men who would terrorize their own country in the name of order and line their own pockets while citizens starved. “Let him go,” Tasiya pleaded, looking up at Mostek. “He’s an old man. He’s no threat to you. He was only trying to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. You cannot punish a man for trying to survive.”

Dimitri Mostek cared so little for her father’s plight that he’d pulled a tiny cell phone from his pocket and placed a call. “We have him,” he reported, his greedy eyes dropping to the beaded tips of her breasts, made rigid by the wintry air seeping through her blouse. “We will execute him and set an example for others like him who would put themselves before our cause.”

Execute?

“No!” Tasiya bolted to her feet, not knowing where to place herself with three guns all aimed at her father. “Minister…Dimitri…please.”

His black eyes glistened as she used his given name. He’d asked her to do that before. In the pantry one morning where he’d trapped her unloading groceries. In his son’s bedroom when she’d been changing the sheets. One time he’d held on to her paycheck until she’d said his name. Each time she’d reminded him she was there to work, to perform menial tasks for his family, nothing more. But to save her father…

“Take me instead.” Bold words for a woman of no value.

“Tasiya, no.” Her father’s weak voice whispered from the ground at her feet.

Mostek held up his hand. The guns lowered. “You would be killed in your father’s place?”

The man she’d burned inside the apartment came charging down the steps. “You bitch!”

Tasiya whirled around and gasped at the raised hand swinging toward her face.

“No!” Mostek grabbed the man by the collar and shoved him into a snowbank. “Stand down.”

“But she—”

“I said no.” Mostek’s deep, articulate order silenced the man. “No one touches her but me.”

The man in the snow, nursing his scalded cheek and humilated pride, had shed his stocking cap. But it wasn’t enough damage to keep Tasiya from recognizing the chief of security in Mostek’s office. Her heart raced at the discovery. She glanced all around her. Did she know all these masked men?

Dimitri shrugged, straightened his coat and faced her with a smile that oozed a repugnant brand of charm. “So, Anastasiya. You would sacrifice yourself for your father?”

He seemed to doubt her loyalty to the only family she’d ever known, the only person she’d ever loved. “If it will spare his life.”

Tasiya’s deep breaths clouded the air around her as she waited for a response. She lowered her eyes, sensing Mostek’s traditional beliefs that a woman shouldn’t be allowed to address anyone, especially a man, above her station.

“Such a waste of beauty.” She detected the same lustful hunger that had repulsed her when he’d offered to set her up as his mistress that day in the pantry.

“Yes. I’m here.” Mostek’s voice sharpened. He was talking into the phone now, though she could feel his gaze on her. “Anton’s daughter has offered herself to me as a gift in exchange for his life. I would like to accept.”

“No.” Anton tugged at her skirt. He wavered as he pulled himself to a sitting position and clung to her arm. “She cooks and cleans for you, but she will not be your whore.”

Mostek flicked his hand and the guns went up again. “Then you will die.”

“Papa…”

Mostek spun away, arguing with the man on the phone. “I have been your loyal servant, carried out every secret…”

“These are very dangerous people, Tasiya.” Anton reached for her hand. “I knew the risks when I embezzled their money.”

She knelt beside him. “But the punishment does not fit the crime.”

“These are terrorists, my love. They do not care who they hurt, only that their cause endures and is triumphant.”

“And what is their cause?” A long-suppressed anger blended with her fear. “Who benefits from their so-called patriotism?”

“Do not question them.”

Tasiya cupped her father’s swollen face between her hands. She unbuttoned the cuff of her white cotton blouse and dabbed at the blood collecting in his eye. “You are a good man who has been loyal to king and country as long as I have known you. And how do they repay you? With threats and violence.” She blinked back the tears that stung her own eyes. “You are all I have in this world. I will not let them hurt you.”

“Tasiya—”

“It is done.” Mostek stuffed his phone into his pocket as he hooked his hand beneath her elbow and pulled her to her feet. Away from her father. “The arrangements have been made.”

“What arrangements?”

Mostek nodded to the others. “Take him away.”

“No—” Tasiya lunged for her father as two of the men grabbed him beneath his arms and dragged him toward a long black limousine adorned with two flags bearing the Lukinburg coat of arms.

Mostek jerked her arm in its socket, drawing her up against his chest. He moved his thin, shapeless lips against her ear. “In exchange for allowing your father to live, you are going to take a small journey for me.”

Tasiya swallowed hard to keep the bile from scorching her throat. “Where am I going?”

“To America.”

“America?” So big. So far away. The country that had given Crown Prince Nikolai asylum after speaking out against King Aleksandr at the United Nations. America—the country Aleksandr had called an empire-building bully. The country that would join the international movement to overthrow the Lukinburg government.

“My superior…” He seemed to find the word distasteful. Any man Dimitri Mostek feared and reviled must be very dangerous and powerful, indeed. “…believes you can be useful to our cause.”

“I don’t believe in your cause. There has to be a better way to find peace and prosperity for our people.”

He smiled. She hated that loathsome sneer. “Your beliefs are irrelevant. I’m putting you on a plane to America where you will be delivered as a gift to some friends.” Tasiya shriveled inside at the implication. “They will be warned not to touch you. That—” he kissed her temple, making her skin crawl “—will be my reward.”

Tasiya pulled back as far as his unrelenting grip allowed. What else did she have of value, if not her body? “Then what am I to do in America?”

“What you do so well. Cook. Clean. Serve my friends as you have served me.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a squarish device that looked like a miniature version of his own phone. He pressed the ultramodern gadget into her palm and curled her fingers around it. “And call me every day on this secure line to let me know exactly what they’re doing.”

“You’re asking me to spy on the Americans?”

“I’m telling you what you must do to save your father’s life.”

Chapter One

Devil’s Fork Island, U.S.A., November 7

12:00 a.m.

“Alpha-Bravo-Tango—Abort! Abort! Abort!”

“Negative!”

Sergeant Bryce Martin defied the command crackling over his vest radio and slipped a large safety pin into the land-mine housing, holding it in place while he dismantled the trigger assembly. The charge was still there, but it could no longer be detonated by simple pressure.

Taking deep, steady breaths to counteract the racing fury of his pulse, he spared a moment to glance up at the women, children and old men huddled like live bait in the center of the rows of cultivated coca plants turned minefield.

Only three more to go and they could lead the hostages out through a safe zone. He had the mechanics down now. Though the jungle of San Ysidro was laced with these deadly contraptions, their design wasn’t any more complicated than a hand grenade. After diagnosing and learning the procedure on the first one, he could neutralize each mine in just over a minute. He’d come this far, he’d finish the job. “I need three minutes, sir.”

“I don’t have three minutes to give you, Sarge.” Colonel Murphy’s signal was breaking up. His soldiers were on the move. “The damn setup’s an ambush. You gave it your best shot, but you need to get the hell out of there. Cordero’s men are lining up mortars. They’re going to blow your position. I order you to abort. Powell’s hijacked an evac chopper. We’re buggin’ out. Now!”

Bryce moved on to the next mine and dropped to his knees, his big hands surprisingly agile as he opened the trigger housing and slipped in another safety pin. He couldn’t leave these innocent people behind at the mercy of a greedy dictator and his drug-funded army.

Not when he’d been so close to finding something meaningful in his life. Not when he’d been so close to caring.

He jimmied the housing apart and snipped the wire before risking a glance up at Maria. Some of the men in his Special Forces unit saw her as the village madam—older, plumper, past her prime. But he saw her as something special. A kind soul who looked beyond his scarred-up face and truck-size body to offer him comfort and friendship in a decidedly unfriendly country.

Her world-weary eyes had tears in them now as she shook her head.

Two minutes.

“Dammit, Martin—get your ass out of there. You’ve got incoming.”

Bryce averted his ears to the telltale thump of mortar fire. Their fiery trails lit up the sky.

He couldn’t tell the civilians to run.

He gripped his assault rifle and rose to his feet.

He couldn’t save them. He couldn’t save Maria.

“I’m sorry.” He barely mouthed the words. He was already backing up.

“Sarge!”

He shouldn’t have cared. Dammit. Why the hell did he have to care?

“Gracias.” She blew him a kiss. “Be happy.”

Bryce turned, ran. The mortars hit. The mines exploded. Smoke billowed in the air behind him and rushed upon his heels.

White-hot pain ripped through his legs and back, cutting through scars and skin and muscle and bone.

He flew through the air, knowing he’d been toasted long before he hit the ground.

Campbell and Blackhaw charged from their cover. He felt their hands on him, dragging him out of the fire and smoke and death.

Bryce twisted in his scratchy, lumpy bed, reliving the torturous pain, inside and out. Replaying the months of recovery that had tested even his considerable patience, unable to find a comfortable position that didn’t make something itch or burn or ache.

A gunshot cracked through the night air. The sound jerked through him before Bryce went still. His eyes snapped open to hazy darkness. Not a remembered firefight. The real thing.

Dread made his body rigid, suffused him in sweat. God, no. He swung his legs off the cot and ran barefoot across the slimy cold stones of his cell. Over the rattle of his chains, he heard the hoots of laughter and triumph from outside in the courtyard.

Grasping the vertical bars of his cage, he hoisted himself up to look out. “Son of a bitch.”

He dropped to his feet, turned his back to the wall and sank down on his haunches. He knew the wall was as cold and damp from the night air as the floor beneath his feet. But he barely felt it. He couldn’t feel much of anything beyond rage at his captors.

This was worse than his nightmares.

The bastards had just executed an innocent man.

Devil’s Fork Island, U.S.A., November 8

2:13 a.m.

Bryce stared at the soldier’s bloody chest. “Kid?” God, had he ever been that young?

Cruel hands dragged him away from the dead man he’d scrambled into the slick underbrush with. Despite a flying tackle, he’d been too late to save him. Hell. He and his comrades from Big Sky Bounty Hunters had unknowingly brought the enemy with them in the first place.

Tailed. Like a bunch of amateurs. When they’d been trying to help. To warn their old unit of a terrorist attack.

Only, these were no terrorists. Not the foreign kind, at any rate.

The fight was on.

“Grab the big guy! Take him down!”

How many times had he heard that kind of threat?

Three men piled on, forcing him to the ground. He got his hands around the throat of a black-haired man, butted him in the head, kneed him where it counted and shoved him out of the way. Down to two. More wrestling than punching. Idiots. With all the mud and water they couldn’t get a grip. His meaty fists were far more effective.

“Martin!” He heard Jacob Powell’s voice, shouting his name. “Money’s on you, big guy! Take ’em—”

A deep grunt silenced his cheering section. They were outnumbered. Taken by surprise. Going down or neutralized one by one.

Bryce felt the bonds going around his wrists as they finally wised up and started beating on him. He pitched, kicked, pounded—and with a mighty effort, he lurched to his feet, hauling the two men up with him.

The tattoo of an upside-down burning flag swam across his vision before a new fist connected with his jaw, driving him back to his knees in the muddy marsh of North Carolina’s Swamp Lejeune. But it was the telltale click of a military-issue Colt sliding a bullet into the firing chamber that finally stilled the fight in him. “Let me just shoot him like I did the other one.”

The man with the curly black hair and the gun, the only man here who could match Bryce in stature, waited for the okay.

“No, Marcus! The ones out of uniform are not to be killed. You’ve enjoyed enough target practice for one day.” Even with the steel barrel of the Colt pressing into the back of his skull, Bryce turned to get a good look at the scraggly beard and brown ponytail of the tall, well-armed man approaching him.

“Boone Fowler.”

“I see my reputation precedes me.”

Like a rat spreading the plague.

The weasly son of a bitch headed up the Montana Militia for a Free America. Fowler was the fanatic who’d broken out of prison four months ago with his loyal minions, regrouped his own private army and waged a personal vendetta against the men of Big Sky who had imprisoned him in the first place. He didn’t care who he hurt or how he hurt them—only that he got his way.