Florence anxiously waited for William at the mountain pool. This would mean everything to her. If this meeting were to go poorly, her life would almost certainly be forfeit. Weres apart from their mates would lose their way, and inevitably, their minds. As much as her family loved her, they could not allow her to live if she went rogue. Sooner or later, rogues always began to kill indiscriminately, never caring who saw them. For a Were, to go rogue was a death sentence.
She had been waiting on the edge of the pool for well over an hour; it had taken quite some time to place a team around the area to insure that William would not be able to elude them if things went south. And while William had been a combat Marine who had survived the slaughter of two war zones, alone and unarmed, in these woods, surrounded by Were who knew them like the backs of their own hands, he'd have absolutely no chance to escape.
Flo had insisted, unless a combat situation arose, they would
not
communicate with her. They wouldn't speak to her; they wouldn't send to her. She felt as though she needed complete privacy for what was coming; she would allow no one but William inside her head. This was an incredibly dangerous situation as no Were had found their mate with a human in centuries, so she wanted to be able to focus her entire concentration on the situation at hand. Only the Goddess herself knew why a human man who worked for their biggest enemy would have been chosen for Florence. It appeared to be an incredibly large risk for the Lady to have picked William to be Florence's mate.
Having assumed that William would approach her location from downstream where the town was located, she was quite surprised to hear the sound of running from the opposite direction, up above the pool where she was waiting. She looked up in plenty of time, and saw William as he appeared. He dove from the top of the cliff, executing an elegant swan dive and plunging into the direct centre of the pool. She had already begun to smile by the time he surfaced, with an impudent 'so there' look upon his face.
"That wasn't the wisest move that you've ever made," she said, still smiling, "If you would have missed the pool, you would have been squashed like a bug."
"Yes, but you told me that I've have to be going full speed in order to make that dive, so I did it the way you said. Trusting you seemed to be in my best interests, and since I want you to trust me, I figured that it would be best if I made the first move. Umm... and besides that, I wanted to make a good entrance. Did it work?"
"Maybe," she said guardedly. "I like what you said about trust. Let's see what else you have to say. Come out of the water, I have something for you."
When he climbed out of the water, Florence noticed that he was dressed only in his running shoes and shorts, and she liked what she saw. His upper body was well muscled, showing excellent definition, and his chest was hairless, with only a few stray hairs sweeping down below his belt line from under his navel. His shorts were now plastered to his body, hinting that he was reasonably well endowed, that is, if the bulge that was revealed was any indication. There was no way that he could be erect after that plunge into the icy cold water; that shock would have knocked down any man.
Smiling more broadly, she continued her way down, taking a visual tour of William, seeing that his legs were even more defined than his upper body. She was happy to see that he had well-sculpted, runners' legs, rather than weightlifting mass. She could see that he had built himself by honestly working and running and not by wasting his life inside of the gym. He was clearly an incredibly fit athlete, not an iron-pumping narcissist.
Florence wasn't bashful, she was aware that William had already seen her naked... twice, even if it had been from a distance both times. She was going to take her sweet time and inspect what the Goddess had sent for her. After this exhaustive inspection, she decided that other than the odd scars on his left side and back, he was the stuff of her wettest fantasies.
William was all too aware that he was being inspected, but he said nothing, merely waiting for Florence to finish. Finally, she said, "you say that you are willing to trust me. That's good, because what I'm going to ask you to do now will require you to have a lot of it. Are you willing to put yourself in my hands?"
He replied seriously, "I have quite a lot to tell you. I realize now that I should have told you most of this from the beginning, but now, the only way we can make this work is if I provide full disclosure, so yes, I will put myself
entirely
in your hands."
"Come here then," she said, leading him to where a pair of handcuffs dangled from a red cedar branch at a point above William's head. He saw that one cuff was already locked into place, leaving the second, opened and dangling down. "Give me your hand." She said.
His eyes darted quickly from the cuff to Florence's eyes, but whatever he saw there must have reassured him, because he stepped up, put his back to the tree and allowed her to bind him. "O.K. darlin', It's your move. We both know that I could use this cuff to saw through the branch eventually, but by that time I managed it, you would have already done whatever it is that you are planning; so I'm all yours."
She replied expressionlessly, "Tell me about Liz and the kids."
"I had just gotten back from another tour of Iraq when I met Liz in Hawaii. As usual, the tour had been long and bloody, and now, all I had on my mind was irresponsible fun, and unfortunately, that is just exactly what I found. She was hot, and she was looking for a Marine, and Oh Lord, were we ever irresponsible. We drank, and we fucked for two solid weeks."
"She'd had some sort of petty argument with her father, and I suppose that I was her revenge. It was made pretty clear to me that I was not good enough for her, not for daddy's little princess. I was just a working man, a soldier, Heck...I wasn't even white. I was just a dirty Indian; he said as much when he found us in that hotel at the end of the second week. I guess that she didn't really disagree with him either, because when he showed up, she got right up out of bed when he demanded it."
"I figured that would be the end of that. I didn't really need complications in my life right then; I knew that I was slated to return to Iraq. But complications are just what I got, and I got them in spades."
"She was pregnant?" Florence asked.
"Yeah, a couple of months later when I was back in Baghdad, I was summoned into my C.O.'s office. I had no idea why he wanted me; Hell, I was just a grunt. The first words out of his mouth were, "Boy, have you made a powerful enemy!"
"I didn't have any idea what he was talking about; I didn't have a clue who or what Burton Waters was, much less any idea that he controlled most of the privately contracted forces in Iraq. My C.O. brought me up to speed, and then apologizing, told me that he was powerless to do anything about it. Again, I had to ask what he was talking about, and his answer scared the Hell out of me. He'd been ordered, off the record, but still ordered, to give me every single dangerous assignment that came across his desk. He apologized again, but told me that the best he could do for me was to warn me. Evidently Liz was some sort of modern day Bathsheba, and King Burton was going to send me into the heart of battle to be killed."
"I spent the next few months living each minute as though it might be my last; probably even more than most grunts do, because I knew for certain that
both
sides were trying to kill me! I saw so much death, lost so many friends, but I guess my number just hadn't come up until that day in Fallujah. We hit one of those damned roadside bombs, and I got this," he said, pointing to the scars that Florence had noticed earlier."
I was pretty torn up, so they stabilized me and airlifted me out to Beirut, and from there, then on to Germany. I guess Burton was pretty pissed that I'd survived, but I bet he got even madder when Liz showed up in Berlin, now six months pregnant... That was quite a shock by the way; by that time, I'd figured out that Liz was why I was being targeted, but I had no idea that I was about to become a father!"
"Liz threw herself on me, bawling like she actually loved me. I was just out of surgery and was still loaded off my ass on painkillers, so I was pretty blurry then, but the upshot of it was that she had obsessed about our 'love' for months, and somewhere along the line, she had convinced herself that I was her 'one'. I have no idea where she got that idea, but Florence, I had grown up without parents, and there was no way that my kids were going to lack having a father, even if Liz did come as part of the package. And I'll be honest with you; I was thinking that if I married her, maybe Burton would stop trying to kill me."
"Things happened pretty quickly after that. It's pretty easy to get married in a military hospital when you are all shot up and you have a pregnant girlfriend. We had our choice of two ministers, a rabbi, or even a Buddhist Priest of some kind. We were married before Burton had a chance to get his thugs there. After that, I was rotated back to the States and I think that Liz really tried to make it work for a while there. But I was poor, and daddy had cut her off. She had a little money, but what we soldiers get paid is a bad joke. The service sure doesn't want you to have a family."
"We fought about money a lot. I loved being part of the Corps, but she wanted me out of there as quickly as possible. Being in the Corps was like being in a large extended family, and I'd never had that before. Any of us would have died for one another and I loved that, but Liz only wanted tangible things."
"Then Richard was born, and things only got worse from there. Liz even left me for a while after that, but she came back with a compromise. She knew that I only wanted to serve with my brothers, while she only wanted me to succeed and make more money, so she said that if I'd separate from the service and then serve with her daddy's contracting service, she'd come back to me. I missed my son, so I said yes."
"The job wasn't all that different from what I had been doing, but it sure paid a
lot
more, and that amount kept going up every time they would promote me. I figure that I could have just slept through it all, and they would have fast-tracked me for promotions since I was the boss's son-in-law... even if I was just a dirty Indian. But Florence, even though it doesn't look like it right now when I'm handcuffed to this tree, I am damned good at what I do, and Burton realized this pretty quickly, even if he didn't want to admit it. These days, I get sent on all of his most important projects and I think he values me more than Liz does."
"I will admit that I'm a bit confused about why I've been sent on this project. An Indian Casino, that's just a small time con for a man like Burton. I can't imagine why he'd be bothering with this, much less sending his best man on the project. Something just isn't adding up here!"
Florence interrupted to ask a question. "So if your relationship with Elizabeth is dead, why do you continue to work for a man who you hate so much?"
"Florence, it's for my kids. If I stop working for Burton, then I won't be able to see them as often, and maybe, not see them at all. Liz has threatened to make them disappear if I don't do what she says. I'd be stuck without them until they were old enough to ask adult questions. Right now, they are so young; they'd probably just believe whatever lies that Liz told them. She could easily whisk them right out of the country with her father's help; and if I stop working for him, he'd be more than willing to help her do it!"
"Have you considered fleeing with your children?"
