He was getting harder, his girth expanding. He moved back and forth against her as she moaned, shook and squeezed him inside.
He flipped her over and entered her from behind, hoisting her hips up into him as he pressed, pushing all the way to his hilt and holding her there until he could feel her insides fluttering again, milking his shaft.
He slid the pillow under her belly, kissed her shoulder, and fondled her bud with his right hand until she started to moan again. His hip movements were fast, getting faster.
“Is this how you like it, Maddie?” he whispered in her ear.
“God yes! Don’t stop.” She reached back and squeezed his left butt cheek.
“I have no intention of stopping.”
He altered the pace, slowing, kneeling back and letting her change positions again so that they were facing one another. His fingers lazily snaked through her scalp as he explored the beauty of her face. He placed her legs up over his shoulders and began the long rhythmic way home, the slow penetrations gradually getting faster and faster until at last he felt her muscles clamp down on him and he reflexively burst inside her, plunging and spilling, filling her with everything he had as her head tossed from side to side. She gasped, pressing his buttocks against her and then held him there.
Her arms flapped to the sides like a rag doll. Ned covered them with his own, clutching her fingers between his and resting his head against her chest as he caught his breath. Her soft body, tanned and lithe, drew out of him all the monsters of loneliness and his thirst for relevance.
He knew he wasn’t done fucking her. It would be food for his soul, watching her come, seeing the way her breasts shook in the late afternoon sun, exploring all the places where the delicate fine hairs on her body lay like gold against her flesh. He craved to bring her to the edge again and again, and then set her free, feeling the power of his desire for this beautiful woman who had opened up all the parts of himself he’d closed down years ago.
There wasn’t any logic to it. He had a need of her that would never be satisfied.
Finally, the sunset was upon them, sending orange fire onto the walls of the bedroom as they watched it set in each other’s eyes. He had never found such peace in a woman’s arms before. She was quite simply, perfect in every way he could imagine, the answer to all the questions he’d had about the world. He was all in and completely captured.
“Do you like to swim naked in the ocean, Ned?” she whispered.
“Don’t think I’ve ever done it,” he answered, tracing her lower lip with his forefinger.
“Would you like to try it? With me?”
“I’ll do anything with you, Madison.”
“Anything? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“No. It used to be, but not any longer. This is right, Madison. You feel it, too, I know.”
“I do.”
“So if you want to swim in the gulf naked, I’ll be right there beside you.”
She got up slowly, combing her hair with her fingers. Her long torso, her nude sex, and her perfect-shaped breasts with her pert upturned nipples were a wonder. He held her hand and allowed her to pull him off the bed.
“Hop on,” he said, bending over. She climbed his back, holding onto his shoulders and wrapping her legs around his waist. “Blanket, please,” he whispered, taking her over to the bed and lowering one knee, so she could pull one of the sheets. “I’m not wanting to get arrested and have to spend a night in jail,” he laughed.
“Only if I could be there with you.”
With the sheet around her shoulders, he ran through the back door, over the sand dunes and onto the beach. He knew his ass was in full view of the sunset watchers as he ran, the sheet streaming behind them like a cape. She was giggling, laughing and celebrating his run until they hit the water. He let her slide down, picked up the sheet and tossed it onto the sand. Her naked body frolicked in the surf until he caught her and pulled her down and they tumbled in the tiny waves, rolling over and over on the wet sand. He picked her up and threw her over the next wave, then dove in beneath her and brought her up to the top again. He rolled over on his back and kicked, while she worked to keep up with him until they got out to the deeper water.
He held her with one arm around her waist while they both tread water, facing the sunset.
She watched the dying sun, and he watched it in her eyes and face. He’d never been happier. She threw her arms around his shoulders again, pulling her knees up and wrapping them around his torso. Leaning back, he floated with her body on top. One hand stroked her backside from her neck to the top of her thigh.
“Are you sure you weren’t born in the ocean? Maybe you’re descended from a God.”
He liked that thought. “And you are my mermaid, my muse.”
“What have we started, Ned?”
“Something better than treasure. Whatever it is, I never want it to end.”
“Me neither. Me neither.”
It wasn’t the water but tears she shed as he kissed her again.
“I like it deep and dangerous,” she whispered into his ear.
He felt the space between her thighs, running along the lips of her sex with his forefinger but not penetrating. “Right up to the edge, Maddie, and then I’ll save you. I’ll get you in the middle of danger. Then I’ll go in deep and save you every time.”
She clung to him as he paddled back toward the shore and quickly retrieved the sheet to protect their nakedness. Together, they walked back to the cottage. He heard a couple of people clapping. Someone else shouted something he couldn’t quite hear.
He looked down at her. “Did we make a stir?”
“I think so,” she whispered back. “But I think they liked it.”
As they got to the back door, he picked her up and carried her into the bathroom. “Time for a hot shower and shampoo. All I can say, Maddie, is your neighbors better get ready, because I’m just getting started.”
Chapter 14
They stayed in bed the entire next day. Only thing that was part of her normal routine was the coffee in the morning, which she brought to him. He barely let her drink hers.
They ate fruit when they were hungry, sipped some white wine she had opened in the refrigerator, and munched on some cheese and almonds, but mostly the day was about sex. The natural way their bodies worked together was thrilling.
Ned kissed her. “That’s what I love about you. It’s fresh, honest. You don’t hide anything.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far!”
“I know it’s true because I’m the same way. I’ve never met anyone like you, Madison. Never.”
“Kiss me, Ned.”
He kissed her lips, her eyelids, her neck under both ears, the palms of her hands, and then back to her lips.
“I want us to stay like this, always,” he whispered as his hand smoothed over her hip and thigh, back and forth. He dipped his head and kissed her breast. “Connected, feasting on each other,” he said as he angled his head, pulling her hair back behind her ear. “Touching the treasure of your golden body.”
His tenderness moved her. She let the backs of her fingers sweep across his cheek. She’d always fallen for the bad boys. The strays in life. What was that all about? Always trying to heal someone broken. There wasn’t a single thing about Ned that was broken.
She’d been thinking about her conversation with her mother and decided to bring it up.
“I figured out something, Ned.”
“What?”
She propped herself up on her elbow, the sheet wrapped around her body. Ned pulled it back with his forefinger because it was blocking his view.
“Go on,” he said after he kissed and nuzzled her nipples thoroughly.
“I think my mother was in love with your father.”
He stopped.
“Your father is the someone special who perhaps broke her heart.”
“You think so?” He was still kissing her chest.
“The pieces all fit. He comes
out here to do a salvage with Noonan and meets her. They fall in love, but then he tells her he’s married. He went back to California to be with your mother. Did you know that?”
Ned sat up, frowning. “He cheated on my mother?”
“I’m thinking so. My mother said this special person was a friend of Noonan’s, and he went back to California to be with his wife. She told me he honored her by keeping his promise to his wife.”
“Meaning if he’d have met your mother first and not second, you’d have been my sister, not my lover?”
She hit him with a pillow. “That’s not funny.”
“I think it’s hilarious. Now the old bastard is somehow responsible for me finding you too. I can’t get away from this jerk.”
She hugged his back. “Ned, consider that he was a different person then. Don’t you remember anything good about him? Anything at all?”
“He kept to himself. My biggest problem was that he wasn’t very affectionate to my mom. I don’t remember when that happened. But she loved something about him.”
“Everyone deserves that,” she said, rubbing his upper arm with her hand, back and forth. “Consider what my mother told me. He honored her with the right decision. He did the right thing. He was married. He never came back.”
“But why, Madison? If he loved her?”
“Because he could put it aside to do the right thing. Maybe he did it for you. Have you ever thought about that?”
She considered perhaps she’d burdened him with too much talk about the past. Maybe Ned’s father always expected to come right back into her mother’s house one day if and when his wife was taken first. But it happened the other way around. Fate made him an honorable man.
At the cost of his soul.
It was just a theory, though. Madison had never met the man nor Ned’s mother. But there was something in Ned’s DNA that brought him back to Florida, and yes, perhaps his father had paved the way.
“Have I upset you?” she asked, rubbing the tops of his shoulders and squeezing the nape of his neck.
“I don’t want to be mothered. I don’t want your help, if that’s what you’re asking.”
She was surprised at his tone.
“Explain.”
He turned on the bed, crossed his legs, and faced her. “Madison, this is my life. This is your life. It has nothing to do with the past. This is about the here and now, about us, and what we make of it. I don’t need to think about the past. I don’t need to know or even suppose all this is connected like some cosmic mystery. My mind doesn’t work that way. I don’t worry about the choices I made or what my dad did. It has nothing to do with me. That was his life.”
He couldn’t see the blind spot that was the size of the Titanic, the flaw in his thinking. But she saw it, and to herself she heard the truth.
Everything is always connected. It’s one big circle.
There was the cook who took his little dog, Otis, on a voyage. The cook’s wife wore the necklace that was a gift of the governor’s wife. The family of that woman wanted to find that necklace, lost at the bottom of the Gulf at Treasure Island, where her mother and his father were once lovers. It was all connected.
It would be hard to prove this to him, and perhaps he didn’t need that. But just like love, she couldn’t prove it existed, but she knew it was real.
Chapter 15
Noonan called a meeting of the crew. Madison took Ned back to his place so he could put on some fresh clothes.
“Just move out,” she said. “Stay with me. It’s only for a few more days. Maybe you’d decide to stay here.”
Looking up at her while he rummaged through his duffel, he was tempted to tell her what she obviously wanted to hear. Heck, he wanted to say it, too. But something was clouding the back of his mind, and until he figured it out, he wasn’t going to commit.
There’s that logic creeping back in.
It was almost like he was two separate men. One made careful, slow decisions, and now he had spawned this other Ned—the impulsive one who would throw away anything to be with her. And he barely knew her.
His logic side won out, convinced that if they were meant to be, she’d be patient to wait just a little bit longer until he could settle what was going on inside him.
He held his arms out to the sides, still seated on the bed. “Come here, Madison.”
She sat in his lap, her legs stretching over his thighs with her right arm wrapped around his shoulder.
“Time for a little talk.”
He could feel her tense.
“No, not that kind of a talk. There’s no question you and I have made this connection and that we were destined to find each other. It makes no sense at all, but it’s true. But it’s like we’re setting out on this journey in a dinghy. We’re talking about the ocean here. Unless you were talking about some beach or vacation romance, and for the record,” he leaned over and planted a soft kiss on her lips, “I’m not.”
She sighed, pressing the side of her face against his. “I ache so bad for you, Ned. Don’t scare me like that.”
“Hey!” He turned her head by tipping her chin. “I need this. I want this, Madison. I’ve just arrived here, and my whole life has changed. I can forget about it when we’re in bed together. I want it to last forever. But I can’t wish away what my past is. What my job is. And you wouldn’t want me to anyway.”
It broke his heart that he could feel hers pumping so fiercely, and not because of her feelings for him, but because she was afraid. He realized he was too. And there it was again, that past. Just like his father, he was caught in two worlds, two realities. Ned didn’t want to make the choice his father did, not only because it was his father’s way, but because he wanted to have it all. And that’s what he hadn’t figured out yet.
She began to stand, and he knew she was frustrated again. He grabbed her arm and brought her back to his lap. “Trust me, Madison. I’m slow. I don’t do things like this. God help me, but I think about things maybe too much, but it’s also who I am and how I’ve been trained. But I always figure it out eventually. What I want to give you is more than a couple of fun days in bed and some sexy time at the beach. I want to give you so much more.”
She hugged him, kissed his ear, and whispered, “Don’t take too long, Ned. Don’t break my heart.”
“Never,” he whispered back as he held her tight. “If I come walking through your door with all my stuff, I’m never leaving.”
Her blue eyes teared up.
“I’m like that guy in the movie who found a mermaid and tried to take her home. In the end, he had to let her go to save her life.”
“Her name was Madison.”
“Really? I didn’t know that. You are my mermaid. But ours is a different story.”
Their kiss was deep. The feel of her tears brushing against his cheek, he took as her honest gift. She trusted that he wouldn’t break her heart, and he’d keep that promise. But he didn’t want to live one life and wish he’d lived another. He couldn’t do that to her.
“I have something for you,” he said as he stood, holding her with his arm around her waist. “Close your eyes.” His impulsive side had completely taken over, and Ned let him rip.
She did as was told. Digging around in his bag, he found the book of poetry, which he’d go over with her later, then found the velvet bag with the pendant in it. He unclasped it and placed it around her neck. He was fully aware of the valuable gift he was bestowing on a near-stranger. Except she wasn’t really a stranger. And maybe the mermaid his father had fallen in love with was gone, but Ned’s mermaid was here, in front of him.
She held her fingers to the pendant and opened her eyes without being told. Turning to see herself in the dresser mirror, he placed his hands on her shoulders. With his face next to hers, he whispered, “He found this here. I’m returning it to where it belongs. I think it was really meant for you.”
Her shocked expression and the floodgate of tears warmed him.
&nb
sp; “I can hardly see it through my tears, Ned. Oh, it’s priceless!”
“He was with Noonan when they found this. He used to wear it all the time, and I resented him for not giving it to my mother.”
He turned her to face him, cupping her face between his hands. “He used to say all the time that he’d had a secret love with a mermaid. I think he intended that I give it to mine.”
“But your mother—”
“Never claimed ownership. She wouldn’t have worn it, ever. My mother had all the rest of him.”
She turned back to look at herself again. “It’s the most precious thing I’ve ever owned, Ned. But with all your family history, are you sure? I don’t want to take a family heirloom.”
He chuckled. “Oh, but I’ve been thinking about what you’d look like with it on for the past day. It’s just a pendant. I already gave you my heart.”
Noonan’s phone call interrupted their kisses.
“Yes, Boss?”
“Where the hell are you guys? I’ve been waiting here for a half hour, dammit. We have things we need to go over, and right away.”
“Got it. We’ll be right there.”
“I’m assuming you’re with Madison ’cause she didn’t pick up, either.”
“You’d be right,” he said, smiling at her fingers covering her lips.
“Well, dammit, get your clothes on and get down right away.”
“You got it.”
He shrugged. Her eyes were still sparkling, remnants of her tears collecting in the sides of her eyes.
“Duty calls.” He pulled her against him. “But I can’t wait to fulfill all those dreams I had about you wearing only this as I watched you call my name.” He brushed the hair back from her face, kissed her forehead, and did a quick change while she looked on.
On their way out, Ned noticed a skinny dog sleeping on the deck outside the back door. If he’d had more time, he’d have fed the poor animal. But before he could make it out of the doorway, he reconsidered.
Treasure Island SEAL: Pirate SEAL Rescues his Mermaid (Sunset SEALs Book 3) Page 10
