Stripper: The Fringe, Book 4 (2 page)

“We could find her.” Michael spread his arms out to the vast array of technology. His sweeping embrace included the whole of his base, two planets, five moons and all of the guards who would follow his orders. With open arms, Michael offered every considerable resource at his fingertips.

“I’ve told you a thousand times, no.” Duster shook his head hard. “I’m not an idiot. I know what Diane did. I don’t know why. I thought she loved me. I believed her. I believed
in
her. I wanted to protect her and—”

“Make all the ugliness in the Void go away.” Michael’s voice was deeply compassionate. “You played the hero, and you made a mighty fine hero. You saved the damsel in distress and forever changed me from my villainous ways.” He twirled an imaginary mustache. “Unfortunately, Diane played the femme fatale. She used you.”

Shame and humiliation at the bald truth made Duster cringe.

“I know that hurts.” Michael softened his tone even more. “Thing is, if you remove Diane from your mind, you will also remove me. You won’t remember everything we’ve been through.”

“You could bring me back here. We can start all over.” Duster tossed the idea out, already knowing Michael’s answer.

“I can’t. You won’t be my Master-of-Arms and head of security for a growing network of independent worlds. You’ll be my partner in the slave trade. Some guy I barely knew. You’ll be the man I once was, a man obsessed with amassing bundles of script. Diane wouldn’t have shown up to change your mind. You wouldn’t have changed mine. I never would have met Mary if not for you.”

Succinctly, his boss listed every downside to his plan, but Duster pushed on. “I would have changed without Diane. You would have changed without me. I know you would have met Mary.” Duster had no doubt that there was some kind of cosmic hand in Michael and Mary’s relationship. Duster could never trust Mary, but he recognized her as the only woman who would ever capture Michael’s heart and soul.

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Michael shrugged as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. In many ways, Duster supposed he did. “Once the stripper finishes, you can’t go back. She can take your memories away, but she can’t return them. Mind stripping is permanent.”

Another downside he’d long ago accepted. “I could still work for you.” More than anything, Duster did not want to say good-bye to Michael or Windmere. With all he had to abandon, his best friend and his world would be the most painful.

“I wouldn’t trust you,” Michael said, obviously frustrated. “All the history we have together would be gone. We’d have to build it all over again. It’s like dominoes. You take one out of line, and nothing falls the same way. If you get stripped, you can’t come back to Windmere.”

“I know.” Duster nodded, resolute. “Again, Michael, I’m not going into this lightly. I’ve been thinking about it for three years. It’s going to cost me everything—my job, my home, my world, my best friend and all the script I have. I just don’t see any other way.” After a long pause, Duster added, “I’ll give you time to find a replacement.”

“It’s not that simple, and you know it.”

“I think MacKay would—”

“This isn’t about your damn job.” Michael strode back and forth once again. “You’re not just an employee, you’re my friend. My best friend. I’ve known you longer than anyone else in the Void. You seem to be more than willing to piss away seven years with me. Ridding yourself of Diane is one thing, but what of who you are?” Michael stopped pacing once he was close and faced him. Red silk and black leather made him seem even taller than he was. When he tilted his head, the lights glittered in his military-short brown hair. “I don’t care how arrogant this sounds, but, damn it, what of me?”

“Are you going to stop me?” Duster asked, only because they both knew that he could. With one snap of his fingers, guards would imprison Duster for as long as Michael ordered. Michael was so close Duster smelled the citrus and pine aftershave he favored. His scent was as familiar to Duster as his own. And he would miss him more than words could ever say.

“As tempting as it is, no, I won’t interfere with your decision. But I won’t help you either. I won’t support you in doing this, but I won’t stop you.” Michael placed his hand on Duster’s shoulder. “The only thing I can do is ask you, as a friend, not to do this.” Michael looked right into his eyes. “Ask? No. I’m begging you. Don’t do this. You’re tossing away seven years of your life. You’re holding me accountable for Diane’s crimes.”

“No, I’m—”

“You toss her away, you toss your best friend away. Hell, Duster, you’re tossing your entire life away because of that worthless woman. Don’t do this.”

When Duster realized tears filmed Michael’s golden-brown eyes, he almost changed his mind. Still, as touched as Duster was, he simply had no other option. “If you really are my best friend, Michael, you’ll understand that I don’t have any other choice.”

Chapter Two

Diane peered down at her sleeping client.

Duster.

Out of the trillions of people in the Void, the one man she thought she’d never see again landed in her ship to have painful memories stripped away. He wanted to go back to a specific day, a fateful day, and remove it from his mind forever.

Diane stroked his face with trembling fingers. Sensitive tips traced the thick shadow of his beard, then marveled at the smooth plush of his lips. Duster didn’t respond. He couldn’t. Duster would be incommunicado for the next twelve hours.

She leaned close to smell the leather and canvas of him. Most people wore self-cleaning fabrics of strex or enotex, but Duster had said he hated the way they felt against his skin. Natural or nothing, he’d said with a grin that made her vote for nothing. And where most people slathered themselves in a chemical soup of personal products, Duster preferred simple soap and water. A deep breath of his scent refreshed a hundred erotic memories she’d worked desperately to submerge.

Succumbing to long-denied cravings, she put her lips against his, but his drug-slackened mouth didn’t come close to her fantasies. She pulled back.

“Seven years.”

He’d been both willing and eager to pay the hefty 1Mil-per-year fee to be stripped, but she’d put the job off time and again. Seven years was an eternity. Stripping a mind so deeply would cost her dearly, which was why she was alone with him in the ship. To do her work, she needed absolute privacy, not only so she could mentally and physically connect to her client but so that she could recover afterward. Seven years of memories would leave her drained for days. Tenacious, her mysterious client had jumped through hoops to sway her. After a year of negotiations, she’d accepted and signed the contract.

“I had no idea my desperate client was you.” Diane trailed her fingers through his dusty blond hair. Buzzed short, the strands tumbled through her fingers with barely a whisper. In the past, his hair had been long and shaggy, tangling up in her fingers, allowing her leverage to pull him ever closer in a frenzy of passion.

“I have a feeling you came to have meeting
me
removed from your mind.” Regret, sharp and shameful, caused tears to blur her gaze. When she wiped them away, she spied a platinum ring on his finger.

Moving back, she pressed her palm against her chest, feeling the chain-bound ring that hung between her breasts. With a trembling hand, she lifted his arm. After pulling the chain out from the folds of her diaphanous gown, she compared the two rings.

Mates.

She lowered his hand to the table.

Clutching her ring, she left the room, locking the heavy metal door from the outside. She strode to the bridge as fast as she could in her decorative high heels. The fashionable yet delicate gem-encrusted shoes would probably disintegrate under her if she stomped. She yanked the useless fluffs off after she threw herself into the pilot seat. Her fingers flew over the keypad as she activated every defense system on her ship.

Her hand hovered over the panic switch. If she flipped it, members of Network Thirteen would come out to the ship. Diane couldn’t turn Duster in. Maybe not just yet. Maybe not at all. She simply didn’t know enough about him to make that decision. Seven years ago, he’d been a slaver, but she had no idea what he was now.

Duster still had twelve hours before he came out of the anesthesia. Ironically this would have been her grand finale for Network Thirteen. She was determined to change her identity and start working as a stripper on her own, far away from the unrelenting press of their thumb. After seven years, she had the money to do what she’d always longed for, but now that Duster reentered her life, he threw all her plans out the window. Since he’d wanted seven years stripped, she figured she had three days to strip him with four days for each of them to recover. At best she had a week with Duster before her network would come looking, suspicious that she hadn’t returned him.

“A week to do what? Discover just how much he hates me?”

Diane touched the ring on the chain around her neck. She didn’t wear it on her hand like he did, because she couldn’t let the women of Network Thirteen see a wedding ring. But not a day had gone by in the last seven years where she didn’t touch her ring and think of the only man she’d ever loved. Duster Jennings. A slaver.

Just seeing the mate to her ring on his finger filled her with confused terror. He must have still care for her to wear it, or he had vowed to hunt her down and kill her. She didn’t know. She couldn’t read him, his memories, unless he allowed her to. She had to touch him to do her work, and he had to be in the proper situation for her healing touch to be effective.

As a stripper, she would put him into a hypnotic alpha state with drugs so his mind would open to her. Duster had been in such a state when he’d been loaded on her ship. Once she realized who her mysterious client was, she’d panicked and hit a button that automatically injected him to the point he rested in a chemically induced coma. Diane could safely induce such a state in him for only a few more hours, which would extend the twelve-hour lead time she had, but any longer than sixteen hours might cause irreversible brain damage.

What would she do with him after that? She couldn’t strip him. She couldn’t return him to Dahank, the planet she picked him up on. She couldn’t keep him. As pleasing as the prospect of keeping him her prisoner was, she couldn’t. He’d never let her do what she wanted to do with him. Given their history, he’d go out of his way to kill her, and she honestly couldn’t blame him.

Pressing her thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose, she squeezed hard as she considered her limited options. If she kept him in the stripping room and drugged him lightly, he wouldn’t be able to escape. And she could touch him all she wanted. But she couldn’t keep him there forever.

“We haven’t seen each other in seven years. You want seven years stripped. We once had seven days together. I have seven days to decide what to do with you.” Diane sighed. “Seven seems to be our number.”

She turned her mind back to when she’d been a slave and Duster had been her master. Within a week, she made Duster her slave. Encouraging him to mate with her turned him against everything and everyone he believed in. Linking them as mates made them strive toward a common goal—survival for themselves and their potential children. After using her feminine wiles to compel a commitment from him, she’d dumped him off in the Void without a breath of explanation. And she certainly didn’t want to give him one now.

“Eventually, I’ll have to release him. But where? And how?”

Diane studied Duster over the audvid. He hadn’t moved. Anticipation at seeing his mossy-green eyes open filled her with both longing and fear. She wanted to see lust in his gaze but dreaded seeing only burning hatred reflected back.

“How could he ever forgive me for betraying him?”

Duster opened his eyes to find a ceiling the color and texture of cheap sexdroid plastiflesh. Sickening-sweet strains of synthesized music filled the air.

Dear God, I woke up in hell.

“How do you feel?”

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It didn’t sound male or female. It didn’t even sound human.

Duster considered the question. He felt like a drunk coming off a three-week bender. Fearing for his safety, he bolted upright in panic.

Everything in the cramped room swirled around in his drug-hazed vision. Velvet and silk in various shades of pink and purple convinced him he was back at MacKay’s daughter’s wedding, trapped in a closet with the tacky bridesmaid dresses Shadra had begged for, and he’d bought for her, because he couldn’t bear to see the lovely girl cry. And Shadra had been so happy when he’d had the horrid dresses delivered to her thirteen bridesmaids. Those girls were not so happy, but they wore them because they loved Shadra too.

A lingering scent of vanilla-musk crawled up his nose, but then an oddly chemical whiff of flowers assaulted him. If plastic flowers had a smell, that stench would be it. Fighting down a simultaneous urge to throw up and kill someone, Duster took a deep breath to assess his situation. The disgusting odor of chemicals almost toppled him off the sinking-soft table.

“Where am I?” The neoflesh covering the ceiling, floor and table worked in concert with the fabric-covered walls to muffle the low throb of a ship. Duster couldn’t hear the engine so much as he felt it.

Not planetside. I’m on a ship. Going where?