An Untitled Love Read online

  “This is insane! And put your damned clothes back on!” she yelled at him.

  She squinted her eyes as she cocked her head. “Is this some sort of delayed PTSD or a mental breakdown?”

  “No...you said you could not see me as your man. I stand before you bare, heart in hand, asking you to share a life with me. I want you to know that all of this sexy...” he said as he wiggled his dangling parts. “... Is all yours from this day forth.”

  “Oh, lucky me,” she told him. “You know I am not going to agree to this Orlando.”

  “You are going to agree to it and here is why,” he told her with no emotion in his voice. There were several relevant points he made starting with her having no personal form of transportation. Secondly, he told her it made no sense to pay rent on an apartment and a studio space for her art. Third, he explained that her art was all over Atlanta on commission and without a car, she didn’t know if the pieces had sold or not because she had no way to physically check.

  “I will go home and build you a dedicated shed in the back yard as your own personal studio with fantastic morning light. I will get you an SUV, not new, but in very good condition so on the weekends you can haul your stuff to shows to sell. Last but not least, if sales are steady, in a year’s time, you will have your own gallery after the birth of our first child. What is mine is yours and what is yours is mine,” he told her.

  Jacquetta was still shaking her head no. “I guess with this child that I am giving you that I will be expected to share your bed to create it?”

  “Yes we will share a bed starting tonight. We will get to that other part when you are ready,” he told her.

  “But what if I don’t feel that way about you?” she asked him.

  “Eventually, you will get thirsty enough...and you will need a drink,” he said as he gazed deep into her eyes. “I plan to be your bottle of water.”

  “Do you feel that way about me...I mean, I don’t want to be in bed with a man who has to imagine I am someone else in order for us to procreate,” she told him.

  “When I make love to you, there will never be any doubt in my mind who I am in bed with,” he was still gazing into her eyes when he spoke to her.

  To her amazement, her heart fluttered a bit.

  “I’ll be good to you. I will treat you with love and respect, and if you give that back to me, we will be fine,” he told her.

  “What if in two years you want to be free?’

  “I only plan to marry once. I have decided that it is you I am going to marry, so it doesn’t matter five, ten, or twenty years from now, you will still be my wife.”

  “My answer is no,” she told him.

  He said nothing as he reached for his pants on the floor, grabbed his wallet and pulled out a piece of weathered paper that he had laminated, handing it to her.

  “You can’t say no. I am calling in my marker,” he said flatly.

  Orlando Flynn was right. She owed him her life. Almost six years ago she had written him the note with the promise that she would honor it. It never occurred to her that he would call in the marker, especially not this way.

  Chapter 3 – The Unsung Hero

  KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN, 2010

  The vehicle rolled down the sandblasted road hitting bumps, ruts and every pothole in the desert hellhole. Sergeant First Class Jacquetta Mason sat in the back of the military truck behind the mass of medical supplies being shipped to the city. The art work she was sent in to evaluate was hidden inside the containers. Thus far the runs in and out of the city had been very successful, but more importantly, uneventful. She believed today would be no different until the vehicle started to slow.

  “Everything okay up there?” She called out to Callahan, the driver.

  Callahan yelled back, “It’s some kind of blockage in the road.”

  “Can you get around it?”

  “Don’t look like it Sarge,” Callahan yelled.

  “Drive right through it,” she commanded.

  “Can’t barbed wire and....”

  He didn’t finish his sentence. Bullets whizzed by her head as the sound of the metal rounds tore through the soft sides of the truck. She could hear Callahan groaning as he yelled out, “Sarge I’m hit. I’m hit!”

  “Stay calm Callahan, I’m making my way,” she told him. She checked the clip in her weapon to make sure it was fully loaded as she used the slot in the side of the vehicle to brace her weapon and began to return fire. “Put as much pressure on it as you can, Callahan, I am making my way to you,” she yelled as she fired off a few more rounds.

  The direction of the gunfire was becoming too intense and unless she wanted to become a chunk of Swiss cheese, she stopped shooting and got down low. On her belly she lay in the rear of the truck and waited. The firestorm ended as voices could be heard surrounding the vehicle. Jacquetta slid under the tarp. The voices were becoming louder as scurrying feet climbed into the truck and started to unload the cargo.

  Still your breathing.

  Box after box left the truck and the bright light of the sun was illuminating not only the back of the truck but her hiding place. A yell was heard, she understood the word ‘woman’ in Arabic and a hand was on her ankle. Jacquetta kicked and fought, bringing her 9mm upward and firing three shots, taking out a few of the men who were dragging her out of the truck. There was nowhere for her to run as she came face to face with the Taliban soldiers who stood at the back of the truck.

  “Don’t kill her! Lacoste needs fresh women, we can sell her,” the leader of the group called out. A black sack was thrown over her head as her body was yanked and tugged. Jacquetta could feel hands on her head, pushing it downward as she was shoved into the back of a vehicle with her feet and hands bound. She wiggled against the binding that held her hands trying to fight, trying to free her hands and feet but it was of no use. A fist made contact with her stomach. Her breathing was becoming short. She began to hyperventilate until she felt water being thrown over her face through the black cloth sack that shrouded her head.

  Am I about to be water boarded?

  Stay calm.

  Her body was dumped on the floor of a vehicle. The drive seemed to be well over an hour. Once they arrived at the their destination, Jacquetta was pulled from the back of the vehicle and flung across an animal she assumed to be a camel. It smelled horrible. Even worse, her bladder was full and in a few minutes she wasn’t going to have no choice but to let it go.

  A saving grace was the bag over her head, it reduced a great deal of the dust which seemed to almost strangle her as they rode. They came to a stop as she was pulled, not so gently, from the animal to land in a thud on the ground. A woman in a ḥijāb pulled the bag off her head. Jacquetta studied her surroundings trying desperately to adjust her eyes to the bright sunlight. She was in the middle of nowhere.

  No trees.

  No landmarks.

  Just sand.

  Sand.

  More sand.

  The woman untied her hands and feet. “Pee-pee, go,” she told Jacquetta.

  She looked around. Great, I’m stuck in a really big litter box. She unfastened her uniform pants, spread her legs and squatted. The relief was so wonderful, she thought she was hearing things.

  In the middle of nowhere, a helicopter was landing. The woman in the black covering snapped at her, “Come. We go.”

  Struggling to get her pants up, Jacquetta was shoved into the helicopter and it lifted into the air. Desperation consumed her as the comprehension that she would never be found became a reality. Out of fear for her immortal soul, suicide was not an option to her.

  I only have to survive.

  Survive and find a way home.

  In three days, she had been transferred four times. Several instances she had been examined in the most humiliating manner, with fingers probing none to gently, her blood was drawn without her consent, and she witnessed one of the men mixing a powder into the water he tried to give her. She knocked the cup out of hi
s hand, spilling the contents. This resulted in a blow to her mid-section that caused her bladder to let loose. She understood what he spat at her...she was to be sold to the highest bidder.

  “You won’t be so high and mighty when those men finish with you...you will wish you had submitted to me!” her smelly, hairy, big bellied captor said with a thick accent.

  She spoke back to him, knowing he understood English. Jacquetta told her captor, “I would rather submit to a camel before I allow you to touch me.”

  He hit her again, this time in her back, right above her kidneys, buckling her to her knees again.

  “We shall see about that,” he told her. He made a series of yells calling forth six men who lifted her from the floor, carrying her outside the small building where she was being held to be loaded into a black SUV with darkly tinted windows. They drove through the night until they reached the outskirts of Abu Dhabi where she was transferred to another vehicle and driven into the bowels of the city.

  Somewhere deep inside Abu Dhabi, in a series of rooms, she was placed in a shower, her skin scrubbed with a roughly made soap and her body adorned in the finest silk clothes before being dragged into a dimly lit room. When she was redressed, she had not been given any underwear to put on and the silk was see through. She tried to avoid standing in front of any direct lighting in the semi-dark room, although the men who brought her in, intentionally placed her in front of the light. Smoke filled the sour air as men in keffiyehs talked, joked and fondled the women brought into the room for auction. In the center of the dank space, four feet from the auction stage, a high stakes card game was being played. Jacquetta understood that she was the prize thrown in to sweeten the pot.

  “If you like a fiery woman to warm your bed...this one is just the thing. Her value isn’t as high as the blond or the redhead, but this one is trainable,” the large bearded man told the group of men at the table.

  Jacquetta was hauled to the table by the dog collar around her neck for a closer view. One man attempted to touch her breasts to make certain they were real, and she slapped his hand. This brought a rousing chorus of laughs and bawdy comments.

  “I wonder if she would slap my ass like that as well,” another man with an oddly trimmed mustache bellowed.

  “As ugly as you are Lacoste, she would slap your face and probably confuse that with your ass,” chuckled the bearded man.

  Six men sat at the table. One was a white American who only gave her a mild glance as if he had no interest in her. The white man spoke in Arabic to the game players, “Are we in a comedy club or are we playing cards?”

  “I will play for my own freedom,” she said.

  One of the men slapped her, knocking her off her feet. The American didn’t move or turn his head to look at her. The Arab, in the white keffiyeh, pulled a large knife on the man who had struck her.

  “The value is reduced if the product is damaged,” the leader said. “You owe me ten thousand for marking her face.”

  One of the men pushed at the American to help her up. The American whispered as he helped her to her feet, “How much is your freedom worth?”

  “I have fifty thousand reasons for you to get me out of here,” she whispered.

  “Okay,” he said to her. “I will take that as a verbal marker,” he said in an even lower voice.

  She didn’t quite know what happened next, but in seconds the six men were on the ground and she was being lugged outside by the American and shoved into another dark SUV. Although no one was chasing them, her rescuer drove like a bat out of hell to an airstrip where an unmarked plane sat on a makeshift tarmac. He moved quickly, grabbing her by the arm, almost hefting her off her feet and tossing her inside the back of the plane. Her rescuer immediately locked the door and yelled to the pilot, “Go! Go! Take off!” The plane began to taxi down the airstrip rising above the oasis of a city in the middle of the desert.

  Jacquetta was shaking but trying desperately to stay calm. “Can I get a piece of paper?” she asked her rescuer in a shaky voice. Her hand was trembling as she wrote on the linen sheet.

  Feeble attempts were made to cover her thighs and legs with the silky material she wore. Nothing much was left to the imagination in the outfit.

  “A life for a life. ” Jacquetta Mason

  She signed her name and introduced herself, “Thank you, I am Jacquetta Mason,” she told the man.

  “I know who you are. I was sent to retrieve you. Orlando Flynn, Army Special Forces,” he told her. Jacquetta handed him the paper.

  “Here is my marker. I owe you my life,” she told him. Her hand was still quivering as he accepted the note.

  “I may call you on this,” Orlando told her as he placed the paper in his wallet.

  “I will honor it,” she replied as tears began to run down her face.

  Five days.

  Five days and she was nearly forced into the sex slave trade by a winning hand in a card game. The ugly truth also dawned on her, what if Orlando hadn’t been there to be the one who saved her, but instead he had been one of the men who was there to play the game and win the prize. Stupidly she had offered money to a stranger who could have made her predicament worse. The overwhelming feeling of helplessness overcame her and salty droplets of tears poured so deeply from her, she felt as if her soul was being emptied. Orlando Flynn moved closer pulling her onto his lap, wrapping a soft blanket over her legs covering as much of her body that the material failed to shield.

  “You are safe, you can sleep now,” he told her.

  She allowed his words to comfort her as she leaned into his chest, curled into a ball, trying desperately to get warm. The scent of bergamot wafted into her nose as the warmth from his skin seeped into her. For nearly five days she had been awake, trying to remember sounds, smells, potential locations of where her captors were taking her. Stay awake so you can fight. She had eaten very little. She had slept even less and she was nearly dehydrated. Jacquetta knew she would not have been able to hold out one more day.

  A silent prayer was said thanking the Heavens that Orlando Flynn was one of the good guys. The marker she gave him she would honor if he ever needed her to do anything for him. He had but to ask.

  She never expected that almost six years later he would show up to claim the kitty, in the figurative and literal sense of the word.

  Chapter 4- Understanding

  KENNESAW, GEORGIA, 2015

  Jacquetta looked at the laminated piece of paper she had written nearly six years ago when Orlando had rescued her. She made a promise that when he came to claim his winnings, she would honor her word. He was here and her word was starting to choke the hell out of her.

  “I believe the marker was for $50,000,” she told him.

  “I don’t want money. Besides, the marker says a life for a life. I saved yours and you owe me,” he told her.

  “Yeah, but...” she started to say.

  “There are no buts in your response. I saved your life and you made me a promise that you would honor this. I expect you to be a woman of your word. I need you. I need you to honor this,” he told her. The laminated paper he shoved at her.

  Her head pressed into the pillow on the couch. She rubbed her eyes as she looked over at him, still only wearing socks, staring at her. “Could you please put something on?” she asked him.

  “Why? Is all of this sexiness getting to you?” he asked, with one eyebrow arched.

  “No, you need to sit down and I don’t want your naked ass on my couch,” she told him.

  He looked around the apartment. It was sparse. Only one of her paintings hung on the wall. “You don’t have much to move do you?”

  “All of my stuff is in storage. I saw no need to haul it up here, it is not the best neighborhood,” she said softly.

  “I have the basics in my house. It is four bedrooms, with an eat-in kitchen, a formal dining room, living room and a den. I have a bedroom set, a table in the kitchen, a couch and my Big Daddy chair in the den but the other
rooms are empty,” he told her.

  “This is the house you bought last year, right...the fixer-upper craftsman?”

  “Yeah, it is a nice house. I figured with some of your paintings, a few pics of us around the place, some drapes, and your artistic touch, it will look really nice and homey,” he said as he pulled his underwear on and took a seat. “It also has a big front porch, which will look great with a couple of rockers, some planter boxes with flowering colorful plants.”

  She watched him with a new appreciation...husband. Father. Potential lover...

  “Out of curiosity, how do you plan to spring this on your very white parents and family?”

  “When I head back, I will get my brothers to help me get your studio set up in the backyard. That’s when I will tell them. As for the rest, we will reveal our union at the annual Fourth of July family cookout,” he told her.

  She knew the event. He had spoken of it often over the years. It was started by his father, who had owned the local hardware store. A hardware store Orlando now owned. Each year he would roll out the giant grill as families would come and throw grillables on the flame and sit in the park all day on the Fourth. Orlando explained that it had grown over the years with portable water slides added along with games and tournaments with prizes. The whole town would be there for the annual event and the fireworks display once the sun set. Jacquetta could almost envision the scene that she could capture on film, then paint the slice of Americana.

  “And what am I supposed to do with myself in Venture, Georgia?”

  “Whaddaya mean? You will be my wife. You will paint, join the women’s league, sign up to work on a charity and take care of me and our kids,” he said with surprise in his voice.

  “Take care of you?”

  “Yes. Take care of me and I will take care of you. My Mama never worked outside the home. Well, during the holidays and planting seasons, she lends a hand at the store...you can do the same if you want,” he said.