He was just noticing the spot on the Persian carpet that told him a large desk had been removed from the room, leaving absolutely nothing to hide behind effectively, when his attention was drawn back to the door by the scuffling of boots and then the turning of the knob.
Two black soldiers came in, informally for soldiers. "The captain wants to meet you now, Mr. Ambassador," one of the men said with a flourish and in a tone of slight mockery.
"I… I don't care to leave my wife behind," he said, lying as convincingly as possible. "She doesn't feel too good!" He was studying the soldiers. There was in insouciance about them that he didn't trust.
One of them grinned broadly. "Oh, don't worry about her none. The captain says if any of us try to fool around, he'll do us in personally!"
Remembering Captain Happy with kindlier feelings than she knew he deserved, Prudence could not help feeling grateful to him for extending his formidable protection over her with these other men. Obviously they would have their fun with her if it were not for the captain! She did not yet know why she and Doug had been taken captive like this. She knew that in a general way it had to do with the move for independence among the blacks, but the specific incidents were so numerous, there was no way of keeping track of all of them. Besides, new ones were popping up all the time. The name of the captain rang no familiar bell in her mind.
A third black soldier entered now. "Which bags are yours, Mrs. Harper?" the young man asked just as Douglas was being led from the room.
The ambassador turned sharply, or tried to. "Why?" he asked heatedly, but a soldier on each side of him all but lifted him out the door.
After he was gone, Prudence asked the question herself.
"You can't sleep here," the young man pointed out, gesturing over the study. "There's plenty of beds upstairs, and the captain says to make you comfortable."
"Can't… can't all the bags go in the same room? We're married, you know," she explained needlessly. "The ambassador and I…"
The boy grinned. "You take that up with Captain Happy, Ma'am. He just said to take your bags up to a room he wants you to have, and show you to the bath. That's what I'm going to do."
Prudence was silent. The way to pull through a situation like this, the young woman was convinced, was to keep calm and to co-operate as much as was humanly possible. She was worried about Douglas. She would prefer to have him by her as much as possible, but there was no point in arguing over a room with a boy who was only obeying orders. On the way, after they had been taken from the train at the water stop, Douglas had told her to remind herself when she worried that hostages were valuable alive and worthless when dead. She told herself that now, but just the thought of death, of Douglas dead, brought a tear to her eye. It will never happen to you, Douglas, she said silently in her mind as she showed the young soldier which bags were hers. They were small bags. She could have carried them herself. The trunk went on with the train! But he picked them up, as she noticed that another soldier was waiting just outside the door.
She was given the most beautiful room she had ever slept in in her life. The soldier had opened a door to show her the bath and had left, explaining that there were numerous guards posted everywhere around the big house. There were, in fact, hundreds of people living and working on the big estate. He smiled mischievously as he warned her.
"It wouldn't be too hard for them to know who you were if you decided to try to run away!"
Yes, she understood that! But there was something else she was beginning to understand about all this, too. She sensed a lack of hostility here, at least of personal hostility. To someone who had been brought up thinking of kidnappers as "the bad guys" with all the meanness and cruelty that "bad" signified, this was surprising. "Bad guys" could not be people you could feel comfortable with, and yet she felt very comfortable indeed! But did that mean she was safe? She just couldn't figure it out! Her long run safety probably depended upon negotiations with her government that were beyond either her or Douglas' control. How safe she was as an object of play or… or even torture from this group of men seemed to depend upon Captain Happy! Well, if that were the case… she had already handled Captain Happy once, hadn't she?
Yes, she would take a bath. It was exactly what she needed. Still a little high and light-headed from the scotch, Prudence undressed quickly, dropping her suit and blouse all down over her shapely hips and stepping out of the fallen clothing without even bothering to pick it up. How fortunate that she had a few things kept out of the trunk for riding with. She moved toward a tall mirror that stood on an ornate stand by the dressing table and watched herself peel down her sheer panty hose and then the panties that Doug had given her. Her gleaming white thighs looked warm and soft in the filtered afternoon light, and she twisted to see the swelling mounds of her asscheeks as she unsnapped and lifted her brassiere over her high-set young tits, flinging it down. Nonchalantly, believing fully in her privacy, she slipped into the ornate bathroom.
As far as she could see there were no bruises on her. She felt dirty from the long hot jeep ride and the sweat of her arousal downstairs, her unsatisfied arousal, but the red marks of her arm had begun to fade. A good bath was exactly what she needed to relax and to put herself into shape for whatever lay ahead. So far everything had happened so very fast that she hadn't really had time to think. Even the long ride from the train had been useless time because of the terror of being kidnapped. But now it looked as though she was being given time. It was not that she was unafraid. There was still a tiny knot of fear in the bottom of her stomach. But she was not as frozen with her fear as she had been in the jeep.
Her encounter with Captain Happy bothered her, not with fear of any consequences, but with guilt. He was the enemy! She was supposed to hate him! But she didn't. Incredibly enough, she actually liked him. He attracted her personably and… and… yes, sexually! Oh, God, that attraction had to go! This was why she prayed that she and Douglas would be allowed to sleep together. She hoped it was not against protocol to have sex with your husband when you were a hostage, because if there was one thing she needed very badly right now it was… sex, yes… but also to forget the exciting Captain Happy!
There was a shower, but Prudence, finding herself getting more and more nerved up as she recalled the big black soldier downstairs, let the water run full force into the tub. Then before it had even started to fill, she tentatively tested the temperature of the water and stepped in. As she lowered herself gently into the old elegant tub with the gilt fixtures, the water, usually too hot for her, felt as soothing as the hot sun on a beach. She adjusted the taps a little, making the spray even more forceful than before and sank down so that her full ripe tits looked like swollen, succulent melons in the rising water. Very soon her childishly slender waist had disappeared completely and slowly, dreamily, Prudence let herself relax into the heat and depth of the filling tub. She hadn't had a tub bath for a month now, not since the first night of their honeymoon, she remembered.
She smiled to herself to think of how she had used the bath as a stall, and how Doug, five years older and more experienced than she, had come to her there and very gently, with infinite understanding, had pulled her out from under the gushing water spout and taught her the first steps of love between a man and a woman.