Besieged Read online

  She sighed. The situation was getting weirder and weirder.

  Chapter Three

  One week later

  By the time Peggy and Benjamin left the outskirts of Barrow in order to dogsled into a remote village, over a week had passed since their last excursion. More than enough time for the memories of the fright she’d been given out on the tundra to wane in significance, if not die out altogether.

  Not one oddity had occurred over the course of the past week. No bizarre feelings of being watched, no worries of being stolen by what had to be mythical men. No nothing.

  Peggy had come to believe that Benjamin’s family had invented the legend of the stone dwellers as a way to keep Aunt Chari’s memory alive. If they believed she’d been kidnapped, when in fact she’d probably been attacked by a hungry wolf or polar bear, then they could believe she was still alive, still able to—hopefully—find a way back to the village one day. Without the legend of the stone dwellers, they had nothing. Just a missing, beloved woman who was no doubt long dead. Sad really.

  This hypothesis was the only one that made sense to Peggy for she found it a bit odd that no other anthropologist had ever recorded any Inupiaq legends about the stone dwellers. Nor had she heard any other indigenous person speak of such, with the small exception of Benjamin and Sara.

  Peggy smiled up at Benjamin as she took his extended hand and allowed him to help pull her up onto the coach of the sled. “Brrr,” she grinned. “Looks like another freezing cold journey.”

  Benjamin’s eyes softened. “You should stay behind. I’m used to this but you—”

  “Need to get used to this too,” she interrupted. She smiled warmly, but firmly. “Besides, I enjoy our conversations when we ride over the tundra together.” They were trekking back to Chakuru today in order to trade precious whale blubber for homespun parkas. She settled into the cab of the settee-like contraption, nestling into the polar bear furs Benjamin’s mother had packed for her. “You never did finish telling me that story about your reindeer herder of a great-grandmother.” Her eyes squinted a tad. “What was her name?”

  “Sinrock Mary.” He grinned, a boyish dimple denting one cheek. “She caused quite a stir in her day. Women didn’t own property back then, of course. But granny not only held onto her herd, she did it better than any man.”

  Peggy chuckled at that. “Sounds like my kind of woman.” She smiled fully at Benjamin, causing him to blush and look away. It wasn’t until that moment that she realized the teenager had developed a small crush on her, a fact that made her oddly proud. To a sixteen-year-old boy, after all, her twenty-nine years must sound rather old, she mused. “So tell me all about Sinrock Mary.”

  Over the course of the next five hours Benjamin told her all about his great-grandmother, as well as countless other familial stories. The Inupiaq, she knew, relished a good tale in the same way a chef relishes good food. Indigenous people told their stories with exquisite care, thereby preserving their verbal lore from the taint of time and from the tarnish of contact with outsiders.

  They arrived in the small hunter-gatherer village of Chakuru during the sixth hour, none the worse for their ware. The dogs were tired by the time they arrived and Peggy’s backside hurt from prolonged sitting, but other than that everything was as it should be.

  Peggy smiled at the indigenous children who rushed up to excitedly greet the sled, breathing deeply of the brisk wind while she ruffled the hair of one slight boy. She loved visiting this village for when she looked around it felt like she’d taken a step back in time. And in many ways she had. This village was so remote that it wasn’t even on the official Alaskan map.

  Benjamin politely inclined his head toward the elder female who’d been speaking to him, then turned to Peggy. “She says her son and his new wife are off visiting family in Nome so she’s taken the liberty of fixing up their hut for you.” The old woman said something else in a tongue Peggy was not well versed in. Benjamin nodded, then translated. “She hopes you will find the privacy enjoyable and the warmth of the home agreeable.”

  Peggy smiled, ignoring the nagging voice that told her to keep close to the others and forsake her privacy as she usually did on these trips. Not wanting to offend the old woman, she ignored the voice and nodded. “Thank you,” she said, modestly inclining her head. “Your hospitality is very generous.”

  * * * * *

  Wearing a thin white shift Benjamin’s mother had stitched together for her, Peggy rolled onto her back from beneath the polar bear furs, a wrinkle marring her brow. From within the throes of deep sleep, she recognized on some surreal plane that something was slowly pulling her out of the world of dreams and into the world of semi-wakefulness. She had that feeling again, that bizarre feeling of being watched…

  Peggy’s eyes flew open. Her irises immediately tried to adjust to the pitch-black darkness. She could see very little, almost nothing in fact, but she could still make out a shadowy shape on the far side of the hut. She gasped as she sat straight up, her heartbeat accelerating. Oh my God, she thought in a panic, I never should have slept in here alone.

  Her chest heaving up and down from the adrenaline pumping through her system, her heart pounding in her ears, she threw off the polar bear furs and scrambled to her knees. She squinted at the shadowy shape on the far side of the one-room hut, trying to discern what the shape was.

  Oh my God. Oh my God! What is it?

  Peggy’s hands balled into nervous fists as she shot up to her feet. Her breathing was heavy, labored, as if she’d just run a two-mile sprint. Preparing to turn on her heel and dash—anywhere—she gasped when a pale beam of moonlight hit the hut and the shadowy shape turned into…

  A parka.

  A harmless, lifeless parka sitting on a log chair by the hut’s small kitchen table.

  Peggy half laughed and half cried. She closed her eyes for a brief moment and exhaled the breath she’d been holding in. Relief—she’d never felt so damn relieved in her entire life. “I’m losing it,” she muttered, her fingers threading through her hair and smoothing it back. “I’m a step away from being escorted out of Alaska by the men in white coats.”

  Taking a deep breath and shaking her head at the mistake, Peggy smiled at her own stupidity. “Get a grip, girl. It was just a…”

  Her smile faded as comprehension slowly dawned. A tremor of terror lanced through her as it occurred to Peggy that the parka she’d worn today was hanging near the crude fireplace/stove to dry out. It was not, nor had it ever been, placed on the chair by the kitchen table. She swallowed roughly, her turquoise eyes widening.

  Get out of here! Now!

  Her heartbeat racing like mad, Peggy prepared to run from the hut when a heavily muscled arm snaked firmly around her belly. She gasped, opening her mouth to scream. A large palm slapped over her mouth before she could get it out, all but muting the wail of fear that erupted from her throat from behind the hand.

  Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.

  Peggy felt a pinch to her neck a threadbare moment before her body went limp into the awaiting arms of what she assumed was a human predator. The world spinning, her head lulled onto her shoulders and her eyes closed. She fell backwards, passing out.

  Her last coherent thought before the blackness overpowered her was that the stone dwellers were real.

  And that she’d never live to tell Dr. Kris Torrence about her breakthrough discovery.

  Chapter Four

  Her brow wrinkled in anxiety, Peggy’s eyes slowly flickered open and tried to adjust to the dim light of…wherever she was being held. Her brain had actually awoken a full five minutes ago, but she had yet to open her eyes. She was afraid to look, afraid to find out if she’d been dreaming or if she’d really been—

  “Please,” the voice of a female softly cried from behind her. “Please let me go home.” The voice was frightened, confused. A knot formed in Peggy’s throat. “I won’t tell anybody,” the female vowed, her tone desperate. “I swear I—”
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  A muffled sound, followed immediately by silence, filled the dimly lit chamber. Peggy closed her eyes tightly, somehow realizing the female had been gagged.

  Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.

  “Er dama våken?” a man’s voice inquired in a language Peggy had never heard before. She stilled her breathing, afraid for him to know she was awake. “Because I’d like to make it back to the village by this evening,” he muttered in heavily accented English.

  “I’ll go check,” another man answered, his words spoken in the same Old World accent. “The woman was still knocked out last I looked. But I’ll go check the other breeder again now.”

  Breeder? Peggy’s eyes shot open. Her heartbeat accelerated. Am I the breeder they are discussing? She quickly closed her eyes, hysterically trying to figure out a way to get away from the men.

  “Her breathing is too still,” the first man said. His tone was bored. As if he was used to dealing with terrified, captured females all the time. “She’s awake. Wants us to think she’s asleep—” Perspiration broke out on Peggy’s forehead. They knew she was awake. Oh god they knew— “but she’s definitely awake.”

  The second man chuckled. “She wasn’t easy to capture, that one. Wolf himself almost seized her out on the tundra last week, but the Barrow boy managed to get her out before his men could surround her.

  “Wolf?” the first man murmured. “He hunted her?”

  “Ja.” Yes. “He was very angry when he lost her.”

  “He wanted her for himself or to sell?”

  “I’ve no notion. It’s not my place to question a jarl’s son. You know that.”

  Silence.

  “Well then,” the first man murmured. “We best keep a good eye on her. Just to be safe.”

  Peggy swallowed over the lump in her throat. That was definitely not what she’d been wanting to hear.

  “Agreed,” the second man rumbled out. “If Wolf wants her, we’ll be able to barter her for a high sum.”

  The first man grunted. “We must take her back to our own people first. The men of our village should be able to barter for her first. If none are willing to pay the price we set, then we will barter her to the son of the opposing jarl.”

  “Agreed.”

  Peggy gasped when the animal furs that had been draped over her body were unceremoniously ripped off. Her skin chilled immediately, for she was wearing nothing but the thin white shift Benjamin’s mother had hand-stitched together for her. She instinctively curled into a ball, both out of fright and to shield her body from the strange men.

  “Be still, girl,” one of the men muttered as he squatted down beside her.

  Her breathing grew labored. Blood pounded in her ears.

  The tanned, heavily bearded face of a man in his late forties or early fifties drifted into her line of vision. Viewing him upside down on her back, all she could make out was clear blue eyes, a shaggy mane of black hair, and a full salt and pepper beard. “What do you want from me?” she breathed out.

  He shook his head on a grunt, letting her know he’d answer no questions so she needn’t ask them. He ignored her after that, causing her distress to grow more acute. “Hurry up and check her over, Rolf,” he barked out to a younger blonde man who was squatting down by Peggy’s feet. “Make sure she’s clean and then let us go.”

  Wide-eyed, Peggy’s already surging heart rate went wild when Rolf placed a tanned hand on either of her thighs and forced her legs apart. Oh god—somebody help me! she silently cried out, instinctively rearing up to free her legs in order to kick at him.

  She kicked Rolf squarely in the chin, causing him to yelp, then curse under his breath. She tried to roll away, tried to get up and run, but the black-haired man seized her shoulders from behind, locking them against the chilled stone ground in a movement that was as jarring as it was painful.

  “Enough!” the older man shouted. “If you do that again, you will be harnessed!”

  Harnessed? Oh god! Who are these people?

  Thinking quickly, Peggy stilled her body and forcibly calmed herself. The last thing she wanted, she told herself in near hysteria, was to be harnessed. She wasn’t precisely certain what that would entail, but it didn’t take an Einstein to figure out that it would be harder to escape if the men put a containment device of some sort on her.

  The older man grunted, appeased by Peggy’s seeming docility. He nodded to the blonde man, telling him without words to proceed.

  Peggy anxiously wetted her lips.

  “This won’t take too long,” Rolf muttered in his Old World accent, his hard expression letting her know the kick to the chin hadn’t been forgotten. “If you’re still and quiet.”

  She trembled when his rough, callused hands once again parted her thighs. Her breathing grew heavy and sporadic as the thin shift she wore was raised above her head. The shift was then placed over her eyes like a blindfold, making it so she couldn’t see who was doing what to her. She bit her lip from worry, embarrassed when the cold air hit her chest and made her nipples plump up.

  “Ja,” the older man laughed. His hands left her shoulders and trailed down to her breasts. He palmed both of them, kneading them and running his thumbs over the stiff nipples. “Jeg vil feire brystvortene hennes.”

  The two men exchanged chuckles, which worried Peggy. It was bad enough to endure having her body examined without permission, but when they were speaking of her in another language so she had no idea what they were saying about her…that was downright frightening.

  The older man continued playing with her breasts and nipples even as Rolf’s fingers began examining her pubic hair. His fingers sifted carefully through the trimmed, coppery triangle, so she rightly assumed she was being checked for lice. He spent a lot of time there, thoroughly examining her soft mons. By the time he finished, Peggy’s breathing had hitched, both from fright and from her body’s instinctive—and unavoidable—reaction to having her nipples plucked at.

  “She’s clean,” Rolf barked. Peggy let out a breath of relief, assuming that the fondling was over.

  “Is she a virgin?” the older man asked.

  “Let me look.”

  Peggy’s teeth sank into her lower lip as the tip of Rolf’s index finger found her hole. He slid into it slowly, then withdrew. “She’s too dry,” he said absently. His thumb settled on her clit and applied slow, lazy, circular pressure to it. “I’ll let you know in a minute.”

  Her eyes squeezed tightly shut from behind the blindfold. She could only pray that when Rolf discovered she was most definitely not a virgin that she’d be let go…

  A knot of worry and shame formed in Peggy’s belly as her body slowly became aroused by the steady fondling. One captor’s hands were kneading her breasts and plucking at her nipples, while the other captor’s hands were playing with her pussy. His thumb was working its dark magic on her clit, rubbing it and toying with it until her thighs began to softly tremble.

  Peggy’s head thrashed back and forth on the cold, earthen floor. She gritted her teeth, determined not to come.

  “Let it go, girl,” the older captor whispered in a thickly aroused voice. He fastened his knees around her head and secured it so she couldn’t thrash it around anymore. “Let it go.”

  Unable to move, unable to protest, Peggy could no more stop herself from orgasming than she could stop night from turning into day. She knew it was inevitable, knew too that she might as well get it over with.

  Her breathing grew labored and her nipples stabbed upward, hitting the first captor in the palms. Blood rushed to her lower body, puffing up her cunt for the view of her second captor.

  On a growl, Rolf replaced his hand with his mouth. He drew her clit in between his lips and latched onto it, then suckled it vigorously until she was gasping.

  “Oh god.” Peggy broke on a groan, moaning as her body instinctively convulsed. The first captor continued to knead her breasts and run his thumbs over her stiff, aching nipples, while Rolf sucked on her c
lit, not stopping until she came a second time, harder and more violent than before.

  When she came down from the climactic high, mortification stole over her. What had been done to her was embarrassing enough, but to orgasm for men who had forced it on her was humiliating.

  She closed her eyes from behind the makeshift blindfold, feeling more shamed than she’d thought possible. Realistically she knew that her body had merely reacted instinctually, that the orgasm meant nothing beyond a response to a stimulus, yet the feeling of shame lingered nonetheless.

  Rolf reinserted his index finger into her pussy hole. This time it slid in easily, her moisture providing the necessary lubrication to probe her. Her nostrils flared from behind the blindfold. She could hardly wait for the asshole to discover that she wasn’t a virgin so she would be let go.

  “I don’t detect a hymen,” Rolf said. “She is no virgin.”

  Peggy’s eyes opened from behind the blindfold, blazing with righteous indignation at the bastards.

  “Good,” the older captor grunted, shocking Peggy. “Virgins don’t sell very well on the block.”

  She swallowed over the lump in her throat, righteous indignation quickly turning into acute fear.

  “True,” Rolf absently commented as he removed his index finger from her slit. “Virgin bodies don’t know how to worship a cock the way experienced pussies do.”

  Peggy closed her eyes from behind the blindfold, willing herself to breathe. So much for my theory of being let go, she thought, as the older captor continued playing with her stiff nipples.

  Chapter Five

  Peggy’s only consolation was that she hadn’t been raped—yet. She had no idea what the two men had in store for her, beyond the fact that they planned to sell her “on the block”. The situation felt as though it was growing grimmer by the moment. Namely because she hadn’t yet figured out a way to escape her captors.

  Pulling the polar bear furs she’d been given tightly around her body, Peggy glanced toward the other female captive in the party and noted the terrified quality of the woman’s wide-eyed, unblinking gaze. She’d been looking that way the entire trek, she thought, her blue eyes bulging above the gag in her mouth that prohibited screaming. Peggy closed her eyes briefly, fearing that the woman’s mind might have snapped.