Chapter 34
Bentley
Douglas Taylor III stood up to his ankles in muck and wanted to cry.
He didn’t cry often. He was more inclined to complain, rage, or threaten to sue.
But that was when he was in his home environment.
He didn’t know where the hell he was now.
He looked up at the square of light three feet above his head and wondered how it was that Madelyn and MacLeod had escaped the tortures and he hadn’t. MacLeod had been speaking the language of his captors; maybe that was it.
Maybe MacLeod was trading Madelyn for special treatment.
It was something Bentley would have done in his place.
He wished he’d had her to hand when he’d been captured.
Now, that was a bad dream he doubted he would ever forget.
There he’d been, innocently wandering out of the forest after having spent a night there to verify the utter stupidity of a pub rumor that such camping would produce time traveling, when what should he have innocently wandered into but a rather rustic session of the Highland games.
Only these rustics didn’t speak English, and they’d carried damned large swords.
He’d threatened to call the authorities.
They’d looked at him blankly, like the brainless natives they were.
He’d given them a brief listing of the clients who owed him favors and what those clients would do to them if they didn’t put away their damned large swords.
He didn’t remember anything after that. Maybe someone had clunked him on the head.
Maybe he’d been abducted by aliens and anesthetized so he wouldn’t remember their painful medical experiments conducted on his admittedly superior physique.
That didn’t explain why he was standing up to his ankles in mud, or why Madelyn and MacLeod had been there with him only briefly, but perhaps the mystery would be solved later when he was released.
Too bad he didn’t have Madelyn to bargain with.
Well, whatever the case, Bentley knew he was in deep crap with no hope of escape. His fertile mind ran amok with possibilities of what the future could hold.
Torture.
Debriefing with sharp instruments.
More days in the mud hole with things he couldn’t see and didn’t dare identify crawling up inside the legs of his pants.
He began to have serious regrets about having followed Madelyn to Scotland.
Scotland, of all places! He should have left her to her men in skirts and her inns with no cable.
Did he really need her to get in good with her dad?
For all he knew, her dad didn’t like her any better than he himself did.
Maybe agreeing with the man on that was the way to win points with him.
He would try that.
Just as soon as he figured out how in the hell he was going to jump three vertical feet, lift the grate keeping him down in the mud, and swing his 190 pounds of muscle out onto the floor above him without alerting his alien captors to his intentions.
He stared up at the light.
“Let me out, or I’ll sue,” he whispered.
No one heard him. No one came to rescue him.
He hadn’t expected they would.