She plopped a large plate of bacon and eggs on the kitchen table, and the four men present stared suspiciously at the offering.
“The bacon’s not done,” Marty grumbled.
Doug picked up the strip nearest him, an almost black piece of bacon that had gotten away from her and turned dark before her very eyes. “This one is.”
“Bacon’s not good for you, anyway,” Boone said as he reached for the spoon Jayne had left in the scrambled eggs, took a huge spoonful and dropped it onto his plate.
Darryl grumbled, but he filled his own plate, too, and the four men began to eat. They each took a bite. Three men spit half-chewed eggs back onto their plates.
Boone swallowed, grudgingly. “Sugar, hand me the salt.”
“Salt!” Jayne said, turning around and heading for the kitchen counter. “I forgot all about the salt.”
“We figured that out for ourselves,” Doug said under his breath.
“There’s no need to be rude,” Jayne said as she placed the saltshaker on the table, directly in front of Boone. “I’m not a cook, you know. If you don’t like what I made for breakfast, you can just quietly walk away and either go hungry or make your own breakfast.”
Darryl, the man who had shot Jim, narrowed one eye. He still gave Jayne a major case of the shivers. She didn’t think it was simply his large size that frightened her. He’d shot and intended to kill Jim; he would have shot her without a second thought, without a twinge of conscience. Boone she could handle; the boys who giggled like teenage girls when they thought of sex she could handle. But Darryl…Darryl was much too frightening for her to even consider handling.
“If she’s going to stay here, she’s going to pull her weight,” Darryl said.
“She will,” Boone replied. Without warning, he grabbed her and pulled her onto his knee. “She does,” he added suggestively.
Jayne tried to stand; Boone held her in place. She knew what he was doing and she knew why. That didn’t mean she had to like it. “Not now,” she chided. “I have dishes to do. The kitchen is a mess.” She tried again to stand, and got only a few inches off his knee before he pulled her down again. She landed with a thump on his rock-hard thigh.
“I didn’t bring you here to do dishes,” he said in a voice low enough to be meant for her alone, loud enough to carry to the other three, who ate newly salted eggs and picked at their bacon looking for properly cooked segments. “Doug and Marty can do the damned dishes.”
“Don’t curse,” she said primly.
Boone tightened the arm that encircled her waist and pulled her back. “Don’t tell me what to do.” With that, he nudged aside her hair and pressed his lips to her neck. She couldn’t help it; she let out a squeaky breathless cry.
Doug giggled. “She is a squealer, ain’t she, Becker. Doesn’t that get on your nerves? All that howling?”
“No,” Boone responded, his mouth still against her neck.
“I really should do the…” Something wet trailed across the back of her neck. His mouth…his tongue. “Dishes.”
Jayne wasn’t tough, she wasn’t prepared for a situation like this one, and yet at the moment she felt as if she had absolutely no control. None. The world was spinning, she didn’t know what would happen next…and she was just along for the ride. She hated that, rolling along with no say in the matter, a man’s hands on her body and his mouth on her neck giving her inappropriate and unexpected and unwanted chills. Another man watched, ready to kill her at the slightest provocation. Two other brainless hoodlums looked on, amused.
Boone said that what he did best was lie. It was a game. A deadly one, but a game all the same. If she was to play, perhaps she could gather her wits and play. What would it take to garner a bit of control? Some semblance of order?
She grasped Boone’s wrist and forcefully moved it aside. She stood, removing her neck from his lascivious attentions. When he reached out, she very deftly moved out of his way.
“For goodness’ sake,” Jayne said as she took a step that carried her just out of his reach. “You are incorrigible.” They were supposed to be intimate, and while she knew very little about intimacy, she did know that the woman in such a relationship possessed a power of her own. “All night,” she said, turning to face Boone as she backed toward the sinkful of dirty dishes. “And into the morning. What do you think I am? A…a…” She didn’t have to work hard to manufacture a sniffle. “You should be able to keep your hands to yourself for five minutes. Five minutes! Is that too much to ask?”
Boone lifted two finely shaped dark eyebrows. “You didn’t complain last night.”
“I did!” she said indignantly. Then she remembered his words, what it would take to keep her alive, and she blushed. “At first.”
“This is better than a soap opera,” Doug said with a grin.
“Do the dishes,” Boone finally said, his voice low and his eyes dark.
“You do the dishes!”
“I thought you wanted to do the dishes!” Boone sounded truly frustrated.
“God, now they sound like my parents,” Marty said with a shudder, pushing away from the table.
Darryl slowly rose to his feet, shook his head, clenched and unclenched his meaty fists. Doug popped up, too, not wanting to be left behind.
Marty, still shaking his head, left the kitchen and headed straight for the television in the connecting living room. “Hey, maybe the news about that guy Darryl shot will be on TV!” Darryl and Doug followed.
The expression on Boone’s face changed subtly, darkening. “You missed the morning news.”
“Yeah, but the one station we get kinda clear has an update at ten.” He glanced at his watch. “Just a couple of minutes.”
With his hands positioned so that no one else could see, Boone motioned to Jayne. She had no idea what he was trying to tell her, but she did know one thing: they didn’t want these guys to know that Jim was alive or that she was a senator’s daughter.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said sharply. “You think what happened last night will keep you alive? Piss me off and you’re history, just like your boyfriend.”
Sure enough, a curious Marty glanced into the kitchen. Doug wasn’t far behind. Darryl remained firmly planted in front of the old television, waiting for the update.
“You wouldn’t dare,” she said frostily. “Not after…you know.”
“Sex,” Boone said. “You can’t even say it!” He launched into a tirade, using every foul word she had ever heard and some she hadn’t.
“You…you crude bully.”
As it had last night, the word bully made Darryl laugh. But he didn’t move away from the TV.
“I can be cruder and I can be meaner,” Boone promised.
“Impossible.”
The teaser about the news update came on, sending a shiver down Jayne’s spine. They had a minute, maybe less.
Boone crossed the room and swept Jayne off her feet. “Fight me,” he whispered as he hauled her up and tossed her over his shoulder.