by Robin Lovett
Ironic. Irony. It is strange.
For her to give me this when I’m forcing her to be here . . .
I pull back, my hands holding her cheeks. She holds a blissful smile that is so genuine, it can’t be real.
Chapter Fifteen
He’s gone—one minute he’s here, the next he retreats so far back into himself, it’s like the moment never happened.
“I’ll release the stern line,” he says. “Go up to the front and get ready to release the bow lines when I say.” The dictator is back.
“When you say, huh?”
He detaches the lines on the back of the boat. “Release them too early and we’ll ram into the boat next to us. Too late and we’ll hit the pilings. So yeah, you’ll do it when I say.”
I cross my arms again, rather liking my seat. “You did it by yourself yesterday. I shouldn’t have to do anything.”
His scowl means I’m right. “You’d rather sit there like furniture than do as I tell you? I thought you hated boredom.”
“Maybe all the entertainment I need is watching you get pissed off at me for not following orders.”
His look changes—goes from pissed off and bitter to . . . that look. The one that screams sex, like he plans to take it out on me later in a way that has me weak.
I slump in my seat, and realize I’ve mistaken weak for fire—I just feel like sitting here and burning in his eyes.
“I think you’ll enjoy it,” he says, more gently, and it’s such a contrast to his other orders, I’m intrigued. I get up and do as he says, and we sail out of the marina onto the river, under motor power.
“When do we put up the sails?” I ask.
“When we pass that buoy.” He points to a red channel marker that looks forever away.
The wind blows across the bow and the waves crash against the hull, the sun raining down on our faces. Blake mans the wheel and the farther out we get the more he changes—an easing of his shoulders, a softening of his perpetually wrinkled brow.
“You like being out here,” I say.
“It’s my favorite place, on the water. Here anyway.”
“Did you visit your aunt a lot when you were a kid?”
He nods but doesn’t look at me. “Every school break and half our summers.”
“Why’d you bring me here and not back to where you live in California?”
“I didn’t want you near my sister. She asks too many questions. And if she knew . . .” He shakes his head. “She does not approve of my tactics.”
“Bribery. Blackmail. Kinda—”
“I’m well aware of what I’m guilty of!” he snaps, his eyes firing at me. “But it’s a small price to pay for what my mother suffered. So get over it.” His defensiveness reveals more about his inner pain than anything could.
“What about what you suffered?”
“What I . . . ?” He huffs and turns his gaze forward. “I don’t have anything to do with it.”
“You have everything to do with it. Your mother never asked you to do this. She wouldn’t have wanted you to become a criminal.”
He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look at me, but his face flushes red with anger and all the tension he’d lost is back times five.
We pass the red buoy and he puts the boat in neutral. He doesn’t give me orders like I expect, he just locks the wheel and starts untying the sail.
“I can do that.” I walk forward to untie the rest of it before he can.
He says nothing but goes back to the wheel. His silent treatment is almost amusing, but I won’t laugh at him, yet.
He points to a rope. “Pull that until you can’t pull it anymore.”
I do and the sail rises a bit up the mast, though it’s not easy to pull from the cockpit. The line runs along the deck to the base of the mast and looks easier to pull from there.
I step out of the cockpit.
“Where are you going?” He shouts over the wind. “Don’t go up there.”
“Why not?” A wave slams the side of the boat, and I have to grab onto the railings to keep from falling overboard. “Oh.”
“Put this on.” He digs into the bulkhead below the bench seat and pulls out a bright red life jacket.
It fits, if a bit snugly across the chest. I watch him watch me zip it up with difficulty, then, smirking at his annoyed expression, I walk back up the deck to the mast.
Wanting to see the sail go up as I pull, I stand on the edge of the deck.
“Stand next to the mast,” he shouts at me over the crashing water and the flapping sail.
“I like watching.” I smile, glad to have him shouting his annoyances at me rather than holding them in. Or maybe I would rather him hold them in to save for later.
The waves jostle the boat, but I hang onto the rope for balance.
“I have no desire to practice my man-overboard drills,” he calls out.
I glance at the water over the side. “Maybe I’d like to go for a swim.”
“Not next to the shipping channel in thirty feet of water, you don’t!”
I concede he’s right and finish pulling up the sail standing where he says, then walk back to the cockpit and stand in the middle. “I want to steer next.”
“Sit down, Daisy.” He turns the boat, filling the sail with wind.
My indignation at his orders is fast turning mutinous. “I will not sit down. I want—”
“Daisy! Duck!” he yells.
I look up to see the sail and its metal boom coming straight at my head.
I’m tackled to the floor, my back hitting the deck, a hand cushioning my head.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” His weight is heavy over me. “A hundred-pound boom comes swinging at your head and you don’t duck!”
“I didn’t see it. How was I supposed to know it was going to do that?”
“The sail fills with wind, the boom moves. It’s physics.”
“You could’ve told me that.”
“I did. You didn’t listen.”
“Maybe if you weren’t tossing orders at me even when it wasn’t important, I’d listen when it was.”
“Maybe if you didn’t get off so bad on refusing to do what I tell you, you wouldn’t fight me on it.”
“Maybe if you didn’t get off so bad on me refusing you, you wouldn’t give me orders all the time.”
His voice drops in a deliciously low tone. “And bore you?” He moves his pelvis against mine in a way that makes me not care about orders or refusing him. “Never.”
His lips meet mine and his need is as relentless as his temper. His mouth molds to me and his body presses me and his tongue steals the protest from me.
Refusing him in this, denying him this, denying myself this, isn’t something I’m capable of. Every time he touches me he leaves me before I’m satisfied, running from me like I’ve singed him. But if I am hot enough to burn him, it’s because he fills me with heat.
He yanks down the zipper of my life jacket and pulls it open, his hands cupping my breasts through my shirt like he can’t stay away from them, like he’s been thinking about nothing but touching them for the last two hours.
He thrusts his hands down the neck of my top, into the cups of my bra. Not satisfied, he urges my breasts up and out. His mouth is at my nipples too fast for me to care, his lips and tongue as greedy as they were on my mouth.
Relentless. I’m crying with the pleasurable pain of it—the tingling sensations he creates, blissful and harsh at the same time. I want him to end it, but I never want it to stop.
I pull his shirt up over his head, giving my hands the satisfaction of his bare chest. My legs scissoring over his, arching under him, I beg for him to move his hands. “Lower, please lower.”
He moves against me, hard and rigid between his hips, rubbing me where it makes me not care if he ever removes my clothes. I’m just desperate for him to make me come. Now. Fast.
It’s only two days since he last did, but it feels like a year. A year sinc
e I felt the kind of explosion he can rock through my body—the kind that severs my senses and makes me feel like I am neither brain nor body, only desire.
His mouth returns to mine, and he moves his hand between us, unbuttoning my shorts with shaking fingers. He gets inside and his touch meets my slickened core.
He strips me of all the things I don’t need. Every ounce of reason or control is wiped away by his fingers. They massage and stroke in touches designed to build something in me but never complete it.
“Please,” I beg. “Please, let me come.” I writhe, my hips seeking his fingers inside me, needing something to squeeze. I search for his groin and finding him hard, wrap my fingers around him. “Make me come with this.”
He chuckles low in his throat, then growls in my ear, “No.” For an answer, he slips a second hand into my shorts.
Pleasure pumps through my veins, speeding my heart past what it can stand. His fingers inside me thrusting, his fingers rubbing me tease. Overwhelm. Obliterate. I don’t know and don’t care what he’s doing—there is only my nervous system exploding sensations through my brain, beyond what it can identify as familiar.
I grip him harder with my hand, an instinct in me telling me to move it, to make him come, to make him as desperate as me. Imagining his cock in me at the same time as his hands, imagining I could have both, all, everything.
But it does end.
Splitting my body in two, wrenching an orgasm to steal me away, I come, orgasming with a fierceness that makes me forget to breathe.
I am limp, I am nothing, I am everything. I am awake, alive, and dead at the same time.
I open my eyes to see him staring at me—a puzzled fascination covering his face.
“How do you do that?” he asks.
I’m breathing too hard, my brain still too fuzzy. “Wha’?”
“How do you come like it’s killing you?”
“It does . . . it’s . . . I . . . can’t . . .” Words aren’t coming. I close my eyes again, feeling like a heavy blanket has covered over me and I can’t move.
He lifts me and settles me on the padded bench seat. He tucks my life jacket under my head as a pillow and goes back to the steering wheel.
If he does that to me again, it may kill me.
I can’t wait.
* * *
She sleeps, and it’s a miracle to me that a woman so unstoppable can be quelled to unconsciousness with an orgasm.
Maybe that’s what’s behind all the rebellion and the provoking comments, the teasing and the restlessness—she’s crying out to be satisfied.
But I won’t give up on my mother’s revenge for anything.
I remember her on this boat. I remember visiting my aunt with her, without my father there. Her happiness and comfort, the kind I never saw at home, which she could have while visiting her sister.
I remember her here the last time we visited together, her pregnant with my sister. I was just old enough to understand what it meant—that she’d be having a baby.
“Your sister is going to need you,” she said. “You have to promise me you’ll take care of her.” And in her voice was a seriousness beyond what should’ve been appropriate for a six-year-old to hear. But I wasn’t a normal six. I never had that luxury.
She wasn’t saying it to encourage me to be a good brother—no. She meant Penny would literally need my help to survive in my father’s house. I knew this as well as she did.
Then she hugged me and whispered, “I’m sorry,” in a voice with a fear and regret I’ll never forget. I didn’t ask why she was sorry. I knew. My father was a vicious man—to both of us. So I just said it back, “I’m sorry too, Mama.”
She always went back to him. She could’ve stayed with her sister. She could’ve left him. But with the kind of lawyers he had, he never would’ve let her keep me.
She went back to him for me, so that I wouldn’t be left alone with him.
And she died for it.
No, I won’t be letting go of my revenge against the man who allowed the sins of my father to go unpunished.
I take out the jib and sail under the bridge out onto the ocean. The beauty of it, the crystalline water sparkling with the sunlight, with the scent of the salty sea air flooding my nose—Daisy should see it.
I nudge her shoulder and wake her. “Look.”
Her eyes sleepy and sated, she sits up and gazes across the water. Her awed expression is enough to make me glad I brought her. I shouldn’t be, but I am.
We sail for hours, snacking on sandwiches I stocked the galley with. We don’t speak much, and it’s surprising we can be near each other and not quarrel.
“Can we spend the night on the boat? Like you did?”
I pause in my instinct to say no. What am I hoping we’ll get home to? Spending the night in the same house, it’s going to be as difficult to avoid sleeping together as it would be here on the boat.
Her satiation from earlier is wearing off, and anticipation is reentering her eyes. There’s no way that can be real—for her to want more after that orgasm she just had. She must be playing me, trying to weaken me to her.
It’s time for me to show her that no amount of sex with her will change me.
“Let’s take down the sails,” I say.
She leaps with excitement.
I motor us into a small inlet, the water turns a sky blue, bright and glowing with white sand below. We drop anchor, and there are no other boats, no houses on the shore. We are totally and utterly alone.
A perfect place for me to test her and see how much of me she can take.
She stands and props her hip out, the curve from her waist to her ass an inspiration worthy of a masterpiece painting. “Can we swim?”
I force my gaze to meet hers. “Even if you did have a bathing suit—”
“Who said anything about a bathing suit?” She lets the words roll off her tongue like a sordid temptation.
I point to the eddies swirling in the water. “Not with this current.”
“Oh well.” She sashays to the steps that lead below deck and climbs down.
“What are you doing?”
“You’ll see.”
I don’t want to see. I have plans for her, for us. She may have gotten her fill from my hands, but I have not had my fill of her. And being inside of her for those too quick moments two days ago—too hurried, too short—though I wonder no matter how long, if it will ever be enough.
Desire, the kind I’ve been trying and failing to ignore, has built in me to the point of pain. Burgeoning in me and sucking my will to resist like a black hole of destruction.
She has minutes before I go at her. I breathe—sit, close my eyes, and try to grasp a semblance of control, or I will be at her as fast as the last time, with it over and done. But focusing, quieting myself, makes it worse. Rather than calming, it grows.
She climbs back on deck, her legs in her little shorts impossible to ignore.
“What are you doing?” my voice growls, lower than it should.
She wags her eyebrows suggestively, “Getting a suntan,” as though it’s the most seductive thing she has to offer.
She saunters up the deck, and I crane my neck to watch. She lays a towel across the bow and sits, stretching out her legs, and begins to slather—running her hands up and down them, massaging her skin in tantalizing strokes.
She’s doing it on purpose—touching herself the way I would touch her. It’s a ploy.
I think maybe she’ll stop soon, that doing her arms won’t be near as sexy. But then she takes off her shirt, and her hands swirl over her torso, under the straps of her bra until . . . she unhooks it and takes it off.
Her back is to me, I can’t see her breasts, but I can tell she’s touching them, and the sight of her bare back is as provocative as the front of her.
With each movement of her hands I grow harder, but somehow I manage to stay in my seat, salivating, watching like a hunter waiting for the opportune moment to strike. Enjoyi
ng watching my prey go on—not knowing what will happen next.
She thinks she knows. She’s planning on me ravishing her—that’s why she’s doing this.
But she doesn’t really know. She thinks I’m going to go up there and do what I’ve done before—use my fingers, my mouth and my cock on her like she’s a sex goddess who I’m helpless to resist.
It’s so far beyond that. Beyond any sense of what she can comprehend—the violence that is building in me, the anger she asked for and swears she enjoys—she doesn’t know the half of what I keep caged. She won’t be able to take it.
She won’t be able to take me.
Though she thinks she can.
Her hands pause, like she’s finished, but she doesn’t lay back. I wait, as she waits, wondering if she’ll do it, if she’ll take off the rest of her clothes. She tucks her fingers in the waistband of her shorts, then tugs—until she reveals what’s underneath, what I’ve touched but not seen.
If it’s a thong, it’s a strip of fabric.
I know I packed her clothes, but her intimate clothes I just grabbed in a pile and threw in the suitcase without examination. If I’d known that was in the pile, I would’ve examined it.
Her ass is on full display, round and ripe and plump and ready for my hands—the perfect padding for me to pound it all into her, everything she expects I’ll give her and more.
I’m on my feet before I decide to be—moving toward her with all the need for vengeance bursting in my system. I stand over her and she looks up at me with the expectation I knew would be there.
“Took you long enough,” she says.
I stare at her, letting my gaze flood with all of it—the rage, the desire, the ruthlessness—until she flinches, draws back.
I give her ample opportunity to tell me to go away, to say she doesn’t want this from me. I let her see all I’m planning for her. But she doesn’t opt out. No.
There may be a fear in her expression, but not her body—she opens, slowly, instinctively. Her knees part, her shoulders fall back, her back arches, her head lays back, exposing her neck and her mouth—her lips part and she licks the lower with a slowness, an aching slowness, that has her mouth already elsewhere on me.
