by Zoe York
“That sounds delicious,” she said. Jackson didn’t say anything, but Leo didn’t wait for his response.
When she and Jackson were alone, the air suddenly felt a lot heavier. Jackson was still pacing, and he hardly even glanced at her. So she climbed across the boat to the front—the bow, as Leo had helpfully pointed out earlier—and when she felt like she could breathe again, laid down on her back.
It wasn’t quite like being on the open sea and having the wind in her hair, but as she looked up at the sky above her, she couldn’t help but let out a gasp.
She’d never seen so many stars before, not in person. The sky was so dark, so wide, that she felt like she was looking at a sea of twinkling diamonds.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” came Jackson’s soft voice.
She jumped. She hadn’t heard him come up behind her. But as he sat down beside her, he seemed to relax slightly—though she could still see the tension in his shoulders.
“It almost doesn’t look real,” she said, feeling like the stars were a safe enough subject for now. “You know, back at home, I handled the insurance for this local museum. I didn’t get to go in there often, but when I did, they’d usually let me sit in on one of their planetarium shows after all their paperwork was done. It was amazing.” She twisted her hands together. “That’s sad, isn’t it? That the only exciting thing about my job was that twice a year I’d get to sit in a planetarium.” How had she survived in that soul-sucking position for so long?
He leaned back on his hands. “You had your reasons for being there.”
He didn’t elaborate, but she knew what he was thinking—she’d had her mom to think about. She couldn’t run off on crazy adventures when she was the only support system her mother had in those last few months.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “If I’d known—”
“It wouldn’t have changed anything. You would’ve left anyway.”
She knew it was unfair to snap at him. He hadn’t been obligated to stay with her just because she had a dying parent. But her mom’s death wasn’t the reason she was so upset. If it had only been her mom’s declining health holding her back, she’d have no reason to feel so disgusted with herself. Deep down, she knew the real reason had everything to do with herself—she’d been afraid, plain and simple.
Jackson seemed to have sensed that her thoughts had fallen into a dark place, because he reached out and touched her shoulder. His fingers skimmed over her bare skin, stopping only when they reached the strap of her dress.
“There’s a reason so many sailors write about the stars,” he said, returning to their original topic. “You haven’t really seen them until you’ve seen them out here. One day we’ll have to go out at night and see them from the open sea—they really seem to go on forever.”
Her heart fluttered at the thought.
“Vincent Rinaldi wrote about them constantly,” Jackson continued. “I think he fancied himself an astronomer as well as an adventurer. His journals were full of sketches of constellations.”
“His atlas, too,” she said softly. She still hated that she’d had to give it up, especially if, as Roth had suggested, it might not have been much help to them after all. Still, she was grateful for the chance to have learned a little more about the previous owner, even if she hadn’t had much of a chance to have the same sorts of adventures.
Jackson’s hand slipped over toward her neck. She trembled as his rough fingers danced across her bare skin, but she wouldn’t let her body get distracted. Not this time. She rolled away from him and sat all the way up.
“What is it?” he asked.
His voice was low, breathy, and she knew the last few hours hadn’t done anything to dampen his desire. If anything, his hunger seemed to have multiplied with his frustrations. She could almost feel his need in the air between them, and it made it hard to breathe.
“Am I in the way here?” she asked.
He’d been reaching for her, but his hand froze. “Why would you ask that?”
“I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know Roth doesn’t want me here. And there’s a lot going on with you guys. I just showed up here and expected to be part of everything. I didn’t mean to get in the middle.”
“You’re not in the middle.” Jackson insisted, drawing closer. Even seated, he seemed to tower over her. “We work with other people on expeditions sometimes.”
“But you’re talking about people who actually contribute. Not people who slow you down.” Or distract you. She wanted to pull away from him, but she was finding it hard to do so. “And none of these guys know anything about me. Why should they trust me?”
“Because I trust you. Because I vouched for you.”
He said it like it was obvious, but it wasn’t that simple, and they both knew it.
“You trusted Tav,” she whispered.
She realized immediately that she shouldn’t have said that name. Jackson went rigid, then pulled away from her, jumping to his feet.
“That’s different,” he said, his voice suddenly hard. “You have no idea what’s going on with him. With any of this.”
“That’s the point.” She stood up beside him. “I don’t belong here. This is your world, not mine.”
“I never said that, Goose. I—”
“But you know it,” she countered. “You knew it all along. That’s why you left me in the first place. And you were right. Why are we pretending any different?”
Jackson didn’t get the chance to reply. At that moment, Leo returned, leaping across the gangplank with an armful of grilled fish.
“Dinner!” he declared, then stopped when he saw the two of them.
“That’s all right,” she said. “I’m not sure I’m hungry. I think I might go lie down for a little while.”
Jackson reached for her. “Goose—”
“Stop calling me that!” she said, slipping out of his grip. Her tone must have gotten through to him, because he didn’t try to follow her as she darted back across the boat and went down below.
Her eyes burned, and she hated herself for it. What did she expect, tagging along on this expedition? That by hopping on a plane and flying across the world she’d suddenly be an adventurer?
Her eyes fell to the small table next to the ship’s kitchenette. Roth had left out the atlas, along with the notebooks she’d assumed were Rinaldi’s journals. Swallowing the lump in her throat, she stepped forward and picked up one of the leather-bound volumes and flipped through it.
Rinaldi’s scrawl was scattered across the pages, along with tiny sketches and hand-drawn charts. She stopped and skimmed a couple of pages. As with the atlas, this journal bore the marks of love and wear. Many of the pages were stained or smudged with signs of use.
One day, Vincent, someone will figure out what you were trying to say. She placed the journal back on the table and picked up the atlas. It still felt like hers, and she ran her fingers over the cover before flipping it open to the maps of the Mediterranean and surrounding regions. As Roth had said, there wasn’t anything obviously useful about these maps. They weren’t particularly detailed—she couldn’t even find the island of Vis in the scattering of dots off of Croatia’s coast, and Hvar was just a squiggle—and the stars sketched in the corner didn’t seem to form any recognizable pattern. Maybe the team had been wrong about Croatia being the place where Vincent met his fiancée. Maybe they should be looking somewhere else completely.
Charlotte glanced back up behind her, but Jackson didn’t seem to be following her. From the soft murmurs above, it sounded like he was talking with Leo. She knew she should leave the team to their investigations—Roth would probably be furious if he knew she was flipping through these books—but she couldn’t help herself. She was curious. She sat down on the bench next to the table and grabbed the closest journal.
For several moments, she just skimmed through the pages. Sometimes she’d let her eyes linger on a passage or a drawing—she found several more sketches o
f naked women to match the one he’d done in the back of the atlas—and in spite of all of Jackson’s comments about Vincent being loony, she found herself drawn in by his words and his obvious passion for life. More than once, she stopped to reread certain passages a couple of times, just to fully appreciate the man’s sense of amazement.
Then, toward the end of the journal, she stumbled across a section that actually made her tear up a little:
The sky is lovely tonight. I swear there are no jewels on earth as beautiful as the ones God put in the heavens. I wish I could pluck them out and put them in a necklace for my sweet Alyssa.
And a few lines below that:
If I recall correctly, there’s a myth about the sky being made entirely of light, and someone—a god?—placing a blanket across it every night to make it dark. But then some trickster came along and poked thousands of tiny holes in the cloth with a pin, trying to let the light through, and that’s why we have stars. Must consult with Holbrook when I get back to London. He’ll know the story I’m thinking of. But I like that image—pinpricks of light. I wonder if the rascal who made them intentionally created the constellations as signs for the rest of us? The more I stare at them, the more I’m convinced that they hold all sorts of messages for us lesser creatures.
Something in Vincent’s wonder and curiosity resonated with her, and she pressed her fingers against the page, trying to soak it in. Vincent did seem to have an obsession with the stars—maybe that was a hint.
She put the journal aside and opened the atlas again, flipping back to the map of the Adriatic Sea. This time she took a closer look at the stars drawn in the corner, but their meaning still evaded her.
Frowning, she continued her search through the atlas. He’d drawn stars on several of the pages, but her knowledge of astronomy was too limited to identify what they were or what they meant.
Finally, she reached the end—and the sketch of the naked woman on the inside of the back cover. She’d always wondered if this was someone the owner of the atlas knew, or just a figment of his imagination. Now, knowing what she knew, she was certain it was Alyssa, Vincent’s fiancée. For all that the sketch depicted a nude woman, it was not obscene or pornographic. It was clear to her that the woman was drawn in love, and she was depicted with her arms outstretched, lying in a bed of stars.
Charlotte studied the stars. Again, her lack of knowledge was frustrating, but she counted nine clusters of the celestial lights. Did that number have some significance? Or was there something more she was supposed to be seeing? Her eyes returned to the woman at the center of the sketch—to her flowing hair, to her gently curved legs, to the delicately drawn globes of her breasts. Eventually, her gaze drifted along those outstretched arms. One of the sketch’s hands seemed to reach lovingly for the nearest cluster of stars, while the other seemed to be pointing up toward the corner of the page.
Charlotte bit down on her lip as her finger traced the path indicated by that outstretched finger. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but when she reached the upper, inside corner of the back cover, the thick paper lining didn’t feel quite as smooth beneath her touch.
Almost as if there’s something beneath the paper, she thought. Like a spot of hardened adhesive. Like someone has glued the paper back down.
It seemed so silly, so unlikely, but something in her gut told her she had to keep investigating. She used her nail to peel up the corner of the paper lining, and sure enough, she found a hard, yellow dot of dried glue beneath it. But it was what was next to the glue that made her breathing stop.
Numbers.
Two numbers, scrawled in what she’d come to recognize as Rinaldi’s handwriting: 43.193 N and 16.374 E.
Her fingers scrabbled about on the table for a pen. She finally found one, but there was no scrap paper to be found—if Roth and Alexei had been making notes, they’d hidden them somewhere else. But it didn’t matter. She scribbled the numbers down on the inside of her arm, determined to investigate them further when she had the chance. She was just finishing when she heard footsteps coming down the stairs. She closed the atlas and shoved it back on the table as she jumped to her feet.
Jackson was on the steps. He glanced between her and the atlas, and while she saw the question in his eyes, he didn’t ask. Instead he stopped right in front of her and said, “I think we should talk.”
There was something in his eyes that made heat rush down her spine. But her back was pressed against the table. She had nowhere to run.
“Jackson, I don’t think—”
“No,” he said, catching her by the chin so she couldn’t look away from him. “We need to talk.”
“I’ve already said everything I need to say.”
His eyes burned into her. “And I haven’t said nearly enough.”
Her heart nearly stopped. She tried to wiggle away from him, but he trapped her completely against the table. He was a wall of muscle, and there was no way to escape him.
“I shouldn’t have asked to come,” she said, desperate. “It was reckless. Stupid.”
“But you did ask to come.” His voice was low and rough like waves against a rocky shore. “You wanted to come.”
“I didn’t think about… about all the complications.” About what being close to him again would do to her. What it was doing to her right now, even though she knew better.
She pressed her hands against his chest, trying to push him away, but he caught her by the wrists.
“Tell me that you don’t want this,” he said. “Tell me that you don’t feel this thing between us, that you’re willing to walk away from this, and I’ll take you to the fucking airport personally.”
She was ready to do it. It would be the smart thing, the responsible thing. But when her eyes met his—when she saw that burning hunger in their depths—the words dried up in her throat.
“I never should have walked away from you like that,” he said.
Her voice was a whisper. “But you did.”
“And I’ve regretted it every fucking day since. I was seeing you everywhere. Tasting you in my dreams. And no matter what I did to distract myself, it was never fucking enough.” He dipped his head a little closer. “It will never be enough.”
“You can’t do this,” she begged. “You can’t say those things.” But that mantra was losing a bit of its power every time she repeated those words to herself.
His mouth moved even closer. “Why not? They’re the truth.”
She could feel his heart hammering beneath her palm against his chest. Feel the heat of him enveloping her, refusing to let her go. And as much as she tried to fight it, as much as she knew this was as wrong and stupid and reckless as everything else she’d done in the past couple of days, she couldn’t tell him so. She just shook her head as one of the tears that had been building up finally escaped down her cheek.
“Don’t cry, Goose,” he said, releasing one of her wrists so that he could wipe away the tear with the pad of his thumb.
“This is a mistake,” she whispered, but she wasn’t sure whether she was trying to convince him or herself.
“Is it?”
His mouth was so close now that she could taste his breath on her lips, but at the last second he turned his head and pressed his mouth against the track her tear had left.
“You were never a mistake,” he murmured against her skin. He tilted her face and brushed his lips against her other cheek. “You never will be. The only mistake in any of this was mine, in thinking that I should walk away from this. In thinking I could.”
Her heart was fluttering so fast she could have sworn it was about to fly away. But she didn’t need to speak. Jackson’s lips touched her eyelids, one and then the other, kissing away any lingering tears. And then his mouth moved across her skin again, temples and cheeks and jaw, until there was nowhere left for him to kiss but her lips.
And there he paused, his mouth a fraction of an inch away from hers.
“Goose…” he breathe
d against her lips.
Her response was even softer. “I told you not to call me that.”
“Then what should I call you?”
She didn’t answer.
“What do you want, Charlie?”
Everything. But the word froze on her tongue. Instead, she felt her fingers curling around the front of his T-shirt, pulling him toward her.
The first touch of their lips was tentative, unsure. A test. But when they parted and their eyes met, it was all over.
Jackson’s mouth came down on hers, hungry and wild. His arms went around her, dragging her against his chest until his heat melded with hers. Need rushed through her like a wave, and she clung to his shirt as it pulled her under.
It was three steps to their bunk. He backed her into the room without breaking the kiss, and when the back of her legs hit the bed they both went tumbling down, him on top of her, still clinging to each other. The whole world shook around her, but she refused to let him go, refused to pull her lips away from his.
His hands slid over her, continuing their explorations from earlier today. They ran from her hips up across her waist and finally to her chest, where her nipples were already prickling with sensation, rising to hard points against her bra.
Meanwhile, she was doing some explorations of her own, reaching her hands beneath his shirt so she could press her palms against his bare skin, feeling all of the ways his body had grown and changed since the last time they’d been skin-to-skin. His muscles flexed beneath her touch, and she curled her fingers against him, drawing a growl from him as her nails bit into his flesh.
He tore his lips away from hers and kissed her jaw, her ear, her neck. His mouth was blazing hot against her skin.
“I need you,” he said against her throat. “Fuck, Charlie, I need you.”
Her entire body throbbed with longing.
“I need you, too,” she whispered.
“Good. Because I don’t think I could go slowly right now.” He was already tugging her dress up her thighs, reaching down between them. Her legs fell apart of their own accord.
