Page 327 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 2

She closed her eyes, letting the warm rush of air brush her hair back and kiss the budding sweat from her brow.

"Woot, woot, woot!" a woman in front of her called out, jumping up from her seat to shout out the window. "Hey, fellas! Whose sexy ass is that? Lookin' good, baby!"

Opening her eyes, Tabitha startled to find she must have napped. Gone was the desert. They were in one of the many mountain canyons now, turning into the parking lot of what looked like a poultry farm. The sign read, Male Residential Reentry Facility. It was even more remote than the Travis’s motel. Here, the scrub had turned to grass, and towering pines and white-barked aspen now covered the hillsides.

Well over a dozen men from teen to mid-twenties pulled into a semblance of a line as the bus rolled to a stop beside them. Talking and laughing louder, they clambered aboard, hooting and catcalling, each seeming to have an assigned place where they preferred to sit... and someone they preferred to sit next to. The implications of which Tabitha came abruptly face-to-face with as she caught the eye of the kid squeezing down the narrow walkway toward her.

He couldn't have been more than a year or two younger than she was, but it was just as obvious he had yet to grow into his future masculinity. His was very much a teenaged-frame, lanky and slender. His pale hair had been shaved close to his scalp, like the rest of his brethren. He had two tattoos that she could see. A full sleeved dragon winding its way down his arm with the head poised to lash out just above his hand. The other was a collar of blue-inked words around the base of his neck. She couldn’t read what it said; the words were in Spanish. Were he in a button-down business shirt, neither tattoo would have been visible. But he wasn’t. Instead, he wore red shorts, sneakers, and a well-used black tank top.

"Is it my birthday?" he asked brightly, just a hint of his Hispanic ancestry sneaking into his words. "Look what's in my seat."

Oh, hell no…

“I’ll move.” She grabbed her lunch sack and would have gone over the seat to get away, but he stopped her. Swinging out of the aisle, he bumped her back into her seat and plopped down next to her, so close that she was sure he was trying to pin her to the metal wall.

“What’s your hurry, baby?” Grinning, he held out his hand. “I’m Eli.”

She didn’t take it, but neither did she want to deliberately antagonize him. “Tabitha.”

“The Tabster.” He nodded. “That works. You new?”

She looked out the window, nodding slightly and pretending she couldn’t see the occasional male head on the rows of benches before them turning to look back at her. Feeling very much like the last piece of candy in the dish, she tried to pretend she wasn’t aware of the stares.

“Don’t worry about it,” Eli said with a friendly shoulder nudge. “As long as you stick with me, you won’t have to worry about them. Takes about thirty minutes to get to the farm. Go ahead. Close your eyes and sleep a bit more if you want. I got you, girl.”

No way was she going to close her eyes on this bus. She looked out the window.

"Quiet." Getting comfortable on the seat beside her, he folded slender arms across a chest that was only just starting to fill out. "I like that in a woman. We're going to get on just fine. Did you get food yet? You hungry?"

Reaching into his own temperature-controlled lunch bag, he rummaged through what he had, eventually coming up with a snack pack of powdered mini donuts.

"Yeah?" he asked, so obviously trying to tempt her with the treat. But again, no one in her adopted world did something for anyone for nothing. In prison, there was always a price.

She looked at his knee, flush up against hers. It was a proprietary touch, not an accidental one. She looked for Mara, but she was sitting halfway down the bus with another guy beside her. Years older than Eli, his arm was slung around her shoulder. He was grinning as they chatted. As if sensing Tabitha’s anxious stare, Mara craned her head to glance back at her over her shoulder. When she saw Eli, she flashed Tabitha a quick grin and a thumbs up.

God. Snapping her gaze back to the window, she watched the blur of evergreens flying by her window without seeing any of it. Her chest felt hot. Her throat tightened and her eyes burned, but she stubbornly blinked back the rising flood of tears.

What was the price?

That was the mantra zinging wildly through her panicking brain, right up until Eli’s hand settled on her knee and the creepy warmth of his touch sank through her jeans into her flesh. Her skin crawled. Every instinct cried for her to knock his hand away, and yet, if she did, what was the likelihood that he’d hit her for it? The whole bus had taken on some twisted sense of entitlement the minute the men had climbed aboard. It was like a whole different world in this place and she was terrified that she already knew the dark rules about to consume her.

Every woman from her motel had a man sitting beside her on short bench seats made for kids. She closed her eyes completely, shutting it out when the guy two seats ahead of her, leaned out far enough to see the bus driver, before his hand crept up to cover the back of the tall red-head’s neat bun and pushed her firmly down until she disappeared below the top of the seatback. Tough as hell though she had seemed while they’d been waiting for the bus, she was now blowing the man beside her… for what?

Exactly what was going to happen to her when they got to the farm? How much worse was this going to get and did she really want to alienate Eli and face it on her own?

His hand moved up her leg, abandoning her knee in favor of caressing its way up her thigh. He thumb caressed the outside of her flesh, his fingertips drew softly, relentlessly upward almost to her crotch.

Her every waking nerve was screaming for her to move. To stop this. But how? Did she slap his hand away and risk angering him? Did she get up and move? Where? Every seat but one was taken, and if she moved away from him, would one of, what… she counted the guys without a girl to sit with… the seven single guys here try to claim her instead? Would she become a prize in a free for all?

Swallowing hard, she turned to Eli, hugging her lunch tight. If she didn’t hold onto something, she was afraid she’d shove his hand away and then find out exactly what the consequences of refusing him would be.

If she had to overpower someone, Eli was the scrawniest choice she had, and even then she had zero confidence in her brawling abilities. Her only hope was to go along until she simply had no other choice.

Three more years…

“Would it be all right if I took you up on that nap?” she asked.

Eli’s smile broadened. “I got you, baby.” He took his hand off her thigh and slung his arm around her shoulders again, drawing her in until she had no choice but to lay her head upon his chest.

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