CHAPTER7COC

CHAPTER 7

Riddick felt the woman watching him.
She’d been doing it for the last three days.
And she wasn’t exactly being subtle about it.
He noticed her right away when she’d signed on to be a “loadie.” Tall, lean, exotic and sexy as hell with her dark hair and hazel eyes, she wasn’t the usual kind of woman who signed on to the rough, dirty, dangerous work of cargo loader. But he gave her credit. Miri Lopresso had the guts and the strength to do the job well. Something most men on the crew managed not to accomplish.
She was definitely a lady who could take care of herself. A few of the tough guys on the dock found that out the hard way. Six hours into her first day, they had trapped her behind a massive container with the intent of having a little “fun.” Riddick hadn’t seen them go behind the container, but he sure as shit saw them come out. And what a mess she had made of them! Bruised and bloody, still staggering from getting their clocks cleaned. She had emerged cool and collected. Nary a hair out of place.
Maybe that’s why he’d noticed her. She was exactly the kind of woman he’d always been attracted to. The kind that could kick a man’s ass both in bed and out of it. The kind that brought out the animal in their lovers. The kind that could hold their own with him. Why he had fallen for Zar, a thoroughly strong but definitely in need of protection kind of woman, he was never sure. She was the extreme exception to the rule.
Lopresso being the kind of woman she was must be the reason why he couldn’t get her scent out of his mind. It always seemed to be hovering right at the edges of his mind. It made him jumpy. His senses on perception overload.
If he was brutally honest with himself, she made him horny as hell. Even worse, he couldn’t seem to control the images of them together in bed that kept running through his mind. Something about her brought out the animal in him.
But something wasn’t quite right about the way she kept giving him looks. They weren’t quite the “come fuck me you big bad man” stares he was used to getting. There was another element involved that he couldn’t quite put a name too. She wanted something from him more than a fuck.
If it weren’t for Zar he might’ve went for it. Given her a good swiv then seen where it led. But he figured if he was going to screw over Zar, it would only be for something a hell of lot better than he had now. That possibility was slim to none. He had it good. Hell, he had it perfect. No use shitting it up just because some skirt made his balls tight.
So he had kept his distance even as his senses became more and more attuned to her. Avoiding eye contact even when every bone in his body wanted to stare her down. But his intuition told him that a staring contest would just make her more determined. It would be like issuing her a challenge and an invitation at the same time. An invitation he instinctively wanted to issue and a challenge he wasn’t so sure he’d win. His control was slipping the more he was around her. A man who prided himself on his self-control, he didn’t like it one bit. Hell, maybe it was the Profearaben coming out in him. Whatever the cause, it made him want to prove to himself and her that she meant squat next to Zar. When she had somehow got herself assigned to his crew today he had studiously ignored her.
But it wasn’t working. He could feel her eyes burning into his back. Running over his body like hot licks of flame. Something was different about her at that moment. Turning towards her he saw she was standing completely still, just staring at him with a little smile.
Then she ran her tongue over her lips.
It bothered him how much his body reacted to the gesture. It bothered him even more when he realized she knew he wasn’t unaffected. Her hooded eyes drifting lazily down to his crotch. The smile went from small to wide as she saw his erection through his pants.
Looking around, he realized they were all alone. Caught in a square made by four containers. Men getting stuck in a “box” was common. There was so much moving around of cargo that it was inevitable that there would be some trapped. It would only last a few minutes until one of the containers got moved. He would’ve normally just sat on the ground and taken a break.
With Miri in there with him, and obviously on the prowl, that wasn’t an option. The only thing left was to try and ignore her. He didn’t hold out a lot of hope of the that succeeding. She wasn’t the type of woman who let the man she wanted ignore her.
When she moved slowly towards him his first inclination was to back up to try and put a little more room between him and temptation. But damned if he’d let her know that she had him fighting his own common sense! So he held his ground. Not moving a muscle. Knowing that to show any sign of tension would give her encouragement.
When she stopped in front of him only an inch separated their bodies. His breathing sped up as he unwillingly inhaled her spicy female scent. Sensing the arousal, along with the intent to seduce, pulsing off her. The impulse to tighten his fists in frustration almost overpowering his determination not to let her know the extent of his excitement.
But all his exertions seemed to blow over her. She was looking into his face with sultry smile. Showing that she knew exactly how she affected him.
He sensed rather than saw her hand move from her side. He knew exactly where she would touch him, but he couldn’t seem to bring himself to stop her. Her fingers danced lightly over his cloth covered erection. Sending lightening along his nerve endings and making his muscle’s jump against his will.
Every cell in his head was screaming at him to grab her hand and push it away. Unfortunately his body was not under his brains’ control at the moment. It was under her control. And she was making it dance like a puppeteer.
“Kiss me!” It came out as a whisper, but it was a command accompanied by her parted lips and bedroom eyes.
He tried to picture Zar’s face if she ever found out. It wouldn’t cooperate. Nothing flashed across his mind except the white-hot need to taste the woman caressing him. She had tapped into his animal side with a vengeance. The part he had worked so hard to lock away in its cell in order to be the kind of man Zar deserved. He had been given a chance at redemption because he had managed to overcome his animal side on Taurus 2.
Now it wanted out ferociously.
Her free hand closed around his hip, then slowly traveled up his shirt covered stomach and chest. Feathering the skin of his neck as it continued rising until it finally came to rest on the back of his head.
Plucking the goggles from his eyes, she ran her thumb over his bottom lip. The contact sent him over the edge. She laughed into his burning, shining eyes softly in triumph.
Grabbing her shoulders he ground his lips into hers in a paroxysm of need. His tongue jabbing and rubbing against her equally aggressive one.
He wanted to take her right there and then. Damn Zar, damn where they were! Nothing else mattered but the taste and feel of Miri. His body’s demand to join with hers overriding every ounce of control, common sense and character.
She was pulling him down to the ground when the sound of one of the containers being lifted brought him back to reality.
Breaking the kiss he stood straight as if shocked with electricity.
What the hell was he doing?!
The animal in him slowly retreated. But he knew it had been awakened and wouldn’t go back to sleep willingly. It would wait for another opportunity. One it was sure that would be presented as long as Miri Lopresso was around. The woman touched a nerve deep within him. Not as deep as the one Zar touched, but definitely a nerve more susceptible to manipulation. And Miri knew just which buttons to press to make it jump. Unlike most nerves it liked to be touched and was urging him to make her touch it more.
“That’s okay Carolyn. My time is coming. You can count on it.” Her face radiated her mastery of his body as she calmly walked away through the now open space.
Miriam Gonzalez felt Richard Riddick’s eyes on her as she walked away. She resisted the urge to wipe her mouth with her hand. Not willing to take the chance that he would see the betraying gesture. It would ruin her well laid plans if he suspected her desire wasn’t real.
Leffner’s tip had been dead on the money. Richard Riddick was alive and well. The fury of first seeing him still burned behind her eyes. The biggest piece of murdering scum to walk the galaxy was living life like a normal man while Johns was just a set of bones in some God-forsaken cavern on a shit hole of a planet.
The gall of it had almost made her puke.
It had definitely made her enraged. And determined to bring Riddick to his knees. By the time she got done with him he’d be begging for mercy! She would make his life such a steaming pile of shit that he would beg for her to kill him. If he held anything dear in his life, she would find out what it was and destroy it in front of him. Let him feel the burn of loss. If he didn’t care about anything, then she would take away all means of support and escape. He would know the frustration of inevitable death or capture.
She had paid Leffner off quickly with the warning not to try any back stabbing crap. Then she had formulated a plan to get close to Riddick.
For two weeks she had shadowed his every move. Using all her skill Miriam made sure he wouldn’t detect her. She knew about his ability to smell trouble from miles away.
Soon she knew where he lived, and with whom, where he went to buy food and drink, who made him smile and who made him angry. What sports he liked to watch, what foods he favored, how hard he worked and what he thought of the people he worked with. Without a single suspicion he gave up every aspect of his daily life.
She had gone through his old records, trying to come up with some better insights into his habits and character. Soon a picture of a psychotic killer with a brilliant mind and almost superhuman survival instincts formed in her mind. A man very in touch with the primitive, and therefore sexual, part of his brain. The only problem was that it didn’t gel with what she observed and heard about him now.
For all intents and purposes, Richard Carolyn, the name he used now, was a hard working family man raising an adopted daughter and involved in a permanent relationship with a respectable woman. Other than his unmistakable physical characteristics, it would almost be laughable at how little he resembled Richard Riddick. He didn’t get into fights, he didn’t whore or carouse around. He rarely left the apartment after he got home from work. The exception being his thrice weekly workouts in a gym. When he left otherwise it was almost always in the company of his woman, Zarifa Cholena or his kid, Audrey McAllister. Once or twice they were accompanied by a friend of the kids and the friends baby.
Miriam found out the friend was Burt Leffner’s step-daughter Toni Platz and the baby was Toni’s son Hill. A little more checking revealed that Leffner had been using Toni Platz as a sex and work slave after his wife’s death (murder?). It was also probable that the baby was his. A result of one his frequent rapes of the girl. She evidently had run to Audrey for protection when things got too bad. Riddick had obviously put the girl and the baby under his protection.
The thought of it had made Miriam laugh in amazement. Richard Riddick playing knight in shining armor for a kid and a baby!
She just couldn’t figure out what his game was. It couldn’t have been a genuine change. A person didn’t go from brutal, cold-hearted, evil killer to loving and protective family man. Even if they had gone through hell and came out changed. There wasn’t that much redemption in the world to make a man like Riddick rejoin the human race. No, he was playing some game. There was some self-serving motive behind his charade. Even with the remote possibility that he wasn’t playing some game, it didn’t change the fact that he needed to pay for what Johns had gone through.
The Cholena woman and he seemed to truly care for each other. She noticed a softness about him whenever they were together. Even caught them holding hands once. An act that brought back memories of her time with Johns. Made her burn for vengeance. Miriam knew she could use her against Riddick as leverage.
Zarifa Cholena would be a pawn to moved in Miriam’s obsessive quest to bring in Richard B. Riddick. Dead or alive. He would probably leave the woman to the wolves once she became a liability, but Miriam might get him to hesitate a very important fraction of a second by using her. She knew that if came down between saving the woman and saving his own life he would always chose his own. Maybe she could use that to create a wedge between the woman and Riddick.
After getting a pretty good bead on his personality she had to find a way to implement the plan. That involved getting close to Riddick on a daily basis. She had learned in her reading that he was pretty damn close to being labeled a sexual predator based on his actions in the slams. Notations were made about his sexual involvement with a number of the female guards and psychologists. He was a heterosexual in nature but not above raping a fellow male inmate if it ensured subservience and material benefits. He seemed to view sex both as an animal pleasure and as a weapon. She didn’t think his needs had changed. And she doubted if the chunky little pale drudge he was living with met those needs very well. She just didn’t seem the type to satisfy a man like Riddick for very long.
Sex would be her way in under his skin.
It had been difficult convincing the loader foreman that she was more than capable of handling the job. But a few credits and a fellatio later and his objections melted away. He warned her that the job, if not one of the men, would probably kill her. She’d just given him a shitty smile and walked away.
She had felt Riddick’s eyes on her from the first day. She had made sure to put a “come-hither” look on her face each time she caught him staring. What disturbed her was that he didn’t seem to take the bait right off the bat. Oh, he was definitely interested. But he was fighting the attraction. Avoiding her if at all possible. More than likely he had learned to be wary of all strangers. A successful habit he had acquired over his year or so of freedom.
There had to be a way to force his hand. Make him awash in the sexual hunger that would leave him to her mercy. And her gauge. Allowing her to either kill him or leave him to rot in a Slam City death cell. Her break came when one of the regulars called off work. She had manipulated the shift lead into letting her fill in for the guy on Riddick’s crew.
She had seen him tense up when the shift lead had told him that Miri would be on his team. Not a happy camper. But he had little choice in the matter and instead had tried to avoid her.
The “boxing” had been an answer to a prayer. She couldn’t have manufactured a better situation. All that was left was a little touchy-feely with the more sensitive parts of his anatomy. He had fought back at first by refusing to respond. But Miriam Gonzalez had learned how to use sex to her advantage and wasn’t about to let a little thing like stubbornness get in her way. So she just kept touching him till she knew he was about to break. She knew he was losing the battle when he didn’t push her away. The whispered order to kiss her had been the straw that broke his camels back.
His rough grabbing and even rougher kiss had signaled her victory. He was hers!
Resolutely she ignored the nausea that accompanied the thought that she was allowing the tongue of Johns probable killer into her mouth. Any indignity and repulsive action was worth bringing him in. Johns would’ve been proud of her performance. After all, he’d taught her by example. No one had been better at pulling the wool over people’s eyes in order to get them to trust him.
When the “box” had finally been broken she had felt his return to reality. She probably could have roped him back, but she didn’t want to spook him away. Being too forceful could make him suspicious. She wanted him to think she was just some little slut with the hots for a bad ass. If he had even an inkling of her true nature he’d probably kill her then bolt.
So she had let him go with a few parting shots. Knowing they would enflame and intrigue him.
Lead him right where she wanted him. Into her trap from hell.
Oh, yes. She knew his hungry eyes were on her as she walked away. Inside she laughed derisively. Who would’ve ever thought Richard B. Riddick could be lead around by the dick?!
My, how the mighty have fallen!