“Want to take that walk now?”
“Not until you put your pants back on,” she answered.
“Deal,” he said. “Close your eyes. I’m coming for my shorts.”
Syreena had the grace to lower her eyes demurely. As if she hadn’t been watching him the entire time he walked toward her.
He stepped into his shorts, stiff with the salt water, and zipped the fly. “Ready?”
“Can I look now?”
“You’ve been looking the whole time.”
“Have not,” she replied.
“Can’t fool me.” He offered her his hand and pulled her to her feet. “Which way?”
She pointed to the beach leading north. “Let’s walk that way. There’s a little cove up there where things like to wash up after a storm.”
He didn’t want to let go of her hand. It was so small, so delicate. “I’m following you,” he said, letting go one finger at a time.
The beach was wide and the sand was so fine it felt like flour beneath his feet. The sun was near its apex and his shoulders burned with the heat. For the first time since he’d landed on this island, he felt dry. The water was so blue it looked fake, like a retouched calendar.
The cut still hurt when we walked. He was taking it slow, walking in the dry sand out of reach of the water, while Syreena combed the beach for interesting finds. The water. What the hell had that been about?
“Look at this,” she said, dashing back to the water line. The excitement made her voice sound child-like. “I can’t believe it!” Syreena bent at the waist and picked something from the sand. Dylan tried not to stare at her ass. The shimmery skirt was just long enough to make it hard to see anything but short enough to make him hope.
“What is it?”
“It’s a ring!” She dipped it into the water and ran back to him. “Look! A diamond ring.”
It was an engagement ring. A large diamond, catching the rays of the sun, was set into a gold band. “Any inscription?” he asked.
She wrinkled her brow. “Inscription?”
He reached out his hand. Turning the ring over and over in the light, there was nothing on the inside of the band. “Nope. Blank.”
It was just as well; it wasn’t like they could find the owner anyway. They were, after all, in the same boat as Gilligan only without the Professor or the radio.
“It fits perfectly,” Syreena squealed, placing it on her ring finger.
A chill ran up his spine. He wasn’t sure exactly why.
*****
After the walk, Syreena went for a swim. When she returned to the beach, Dylan was drawing in the smooth sand, using a scrap of seaweed as a pencil. “I’m working on plans for a raft.”
Syreena, still a little shaky from the change, sat just outside the shade of the shelter. “Think you can build one?”
He looked up at her with his chocolate brown eyes. “I had to build one when I did my Coast Guard training but that was a long time ago.”
She stood over him and looked down at the scribbling in the sand. “What does all this mean?” she asked.
Dylan loved math. The order, the predictability. Math was black and white, practical. Dependable.
“Just some calculations. We’ll need a raft that will support our weights. Since we have no idea how long it will take us to get to—”
“Saint-Domingue?”
He nodded. “We’ll need shelter. I’m thinking we’ll need a raft that will support at least four hundred pounds. I weigh 195 and I’m guessing you weigh about 120. I don’t want to cut it too close.”
“I weigh only a hundred pounds.”
Women hadn’t changed that much since 1791.
Dylan continued. “There isn’t enough wood here to make much.” He shook his head. “It seems like an impossible task.”
“I could swim and find the things you need. You wouldn’t believe what’s on the ocean floor.”
He bit his lower lip. “I never thought of that. Hmmm. I’ll make a list.”
A couple of hours later, a light bulb went off in Dylan’s head. Water bottles. They were everywhere. Surely they could find enough to build a raft. In his life aboard a Coast Guard cutter, thousands of water bottles had passed through his hands and yet he had no idea how much water they held.
What he did know was Archimedes’ principle, or the law of upthrust. It said, “A body immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid.” Just a complicated way of saying one pound of water will support one pound of weight.
He tried to remember the weight of the bottles. As best he could recall, they weighed about a pound each. It was rough math but he’d have to make it work. If he’d known he was going overboard, he’d have brought a calculator and a pocket knife. And a map. A huge map.
“Have you seen any water bottles?” he asked Syreena.
She looked up from the book in her hand. The book that was so exciting it landed him on a tropical island with a French mermaid. “What do they look like?”
“Plastic, clear, about this tall.” He estimated the size with his hands.
She nodded. “I see them everywhere. They’re used to carry water?” She wrinkled her brow. “That’s silly.”
This wasn’t the time for an argument on the genius, or lack thereof, of twenty-first century mankind. “I need some. A lot of them, actually.”
“How many?”
“Several hundred.”
Syreena sighed and placed the closed book on the rock beside her. “Then we’d better start looking.”
*****
Before Dylan asked for the bottles, she’d seen them everywhere. They washed up on beaches, bobbed in the water, sank to the bottom filled with all sorts of junk Syreena didn’t recognize. Didn’t want to recognize.
She and Dylan had been combing the shore for a long time and they only had a handful of bottles to show for their work.
“This is going to take weeks. Maybe months,” Dylan said. He kicked the sand with his toe.
Syreena understood his frustration, after all she’d been trying to get home a lot longer than he had. “We’ll keep looking. Sometimes a bunch wash up at once.”
“But we need hundreds.”
“I’m sorry you’re stuck here with me.”
He stopped and turned to face her. “It’s not you, Syreena. I couldn’t ask for a better island mate. It’s just that I’ll lose my job if the Coast Guard thinks I’m AWOL.”
“AWOL? What a funny sounding word.”
“It’s an acronym. It means absent without leave.”
“But you didn’t leave on purpose. You were thrown overboard.” Who would jump off a perfectly good boat in the middle of nowhere?
“That’s true. I just need to get back.”
“Me, too.”
“Let’s keep looking, then.”
By the time the sun washed the water into the color of burnished gold, they had a total of twenty-six bottles. At that rate, it would take two weeks just to find the bottles. But what was two weeks when you had over two hundred years under your belt? Fins. Whatever.
*****
Dylan couldn’t stop thinking about the way Syreena tasted. The way she smelled.
He got a hard-on just thinking about the way she spooned next to him at night.
But he couldn’t indulge his mermaid fantasies. His main goal was getting the hell off this island and back aboard his cutter. Even though Syreena was beautiful and charming and he’d love to spend the foreseeable future on an island with a mermaid who cooked amazing food and looked like a MAXIM cover model, his commanding officer would be wondering where the hell he was.
AWOL was not how he wanted to end his career.
Dylan kept a close watch on the sky. No helicopters, no boats. If the Coast Guard was searching for him, they were evidently looking in the wrong place. He combed his mind for an alternative solution. If the Coast Guard wasn’t coming to him, he’d have to find a way to go to the Coast Guard
.
The water bottle collection operation was unpredictable at best. Some days they only found a couple, other days they found ten or twelve. He was beginning to doubt they’d ever find enough to build a raft. He hadn’t even begun to tackle the question of how he was going to tie the bottles together or craft a platform.
Even with the raft, would he be able to get onto it?
Where would he go on the open ocean without a map? Without a place for water stores?
Son of a bitch.
“Are you alright?” Syreena asked.
He looked up at her. “Yeah. Fine.”
“You don’t sound so fine. Do you want to talk about it?”
Dylan shook his head. He’d been on the island for nine days and every day he’d tried to get into the water and failed. Miserably.
He couldn’t bear to even wade, much less swim. He’d used water from the discarded barrel Syreena used to collect fresh rain water to bathe.
It was time to try again. “I’m going on a walk. See if any more bottles have washed up.”
“Want company?”
“Nah. Thanks.”
When he was out of Syreena’s sight, he walked to the edge of the surf and inched forward until he was sure the next wave would catch his feet. When it did, he jumped backward as if he’d been burned.
He had to get ahold of himself. He had to get off this island.
Aquaphobia wasn’t helping.
*****
Syreena didn’t know very much about seduction. While living on a sugar plantation was a far cry from the life of an aristocratic Frenchwoman, she’d still been very sheltered. She knew very little about what when on between a man and a woman. The kiss she and Dylan shared in the lean-to was one hell of a crash course.
Just being close to him made her body burn. It was uncomfortable and exciting all at the same time. He made her feel warm and liquid, like she was the most beautiful person on the face of the earth. She planned to use his attraction to make sure he got them off this cay.
Her body was telling her that there was much more to the relationship between and man and a woman than kissing and she had to figure it out. Quickly.
For now, Dylan was the one.
She’d worry about the rest later.
Syreena retrieved her box and opened it. It was filled with all her most prized possessions, and it was her only toolbox. Maybe a little attention to her toilette was the place to begin. It would be difficult. After all, before The Change, she’d always had Colette’s help. Colette had helped her dress and undress. She’d fixed her hair, put on her jewelry.
Syreena hadn’t had many formal occasions, or any other kinds of occasions, in so long she’d nearly forgotten the excitement that fluttered in her chest when it was time to get ready for an occasion.
Dylan certainly was an occasion. The occasion.
She might have limited resources, but she had to make Dylan fall in love with her. She had to seduce him.
Her whole body tingled with the idea.
After settling herself on a large rock, she opened the box and took her small mirror and a comb that had washed up. There wasn’t much she could do with her curly hair, but she took the comb and ran it through her hair, smoothing it as she went.
She checked the mirror and liked what she saw. Next she chose a fragment of a red ribbon, bleached to a dull brick by the sun, and tied the sides of her hair back. Without the hair spiraling onto her face, her eyes looked much bigger. Clearer.
If only she had something to tint her lips.
By the time she finished, Dylan was back from his walk. She’d cooked some mussels and warmed some seaweed. The food smelled really good to her and for the first time in ages, literally ages, she was going to eat cooked meat.
She hoped she could hold it down.
“I cooked dinner,” she said, pulling the mussels off the fire and checking them to make sure they all opened. “I’m going to eat with you.”
Dylan raised one eyebrow. “You are?”
She nodded and sat next to him on the sand. She placed the large shell they used as a plate between them. “Bon appetite!”
The first bite was delicious. Her taste buds rejoiced at the salty, warm taste. “Délicieux!” she proclaimed in her native French. She took another from the place and used her fingers to pry the mussel from the shell. “Taste,” she said, slipping it into his mouth.
His tongue caught the side of her finger. It wasn’t by accident. He trailed it along slowly making her aware of every millimeter of skin. A delicious shiver raced all the way up her arm. “Délicieux!”
Dylan made the word sound naughty and Syreena liked it.
“Are you talking about the mussels or my finger?”
“I’m not sure. Come here,” he said. His voice was low and it vibrated something deep in Syreena’s belly.
She dropped the shell and scooted closer to him. Heat rippled off his body and she ran her fingers along his bare chest. He shivered at her touch. Syreena looked up at him through her lashes.
His lips brushed hers. This kiss was different. It was softer, slower and she eased into it, delighting in the way it made her body feel languid and warm. Dylan ran his tongue along her lower lip, stopping to nibble lightly along the way.
Syreena kissed him back. His gentle kisses made her more confident and she mirrored what he did. When she ran her tongue along his lower lip, he moaned. “Kissing just isn’t enough,” he whispered onto her lips.
Maybe seducing him wasn’t going to be so difficult after all.
Dylan put one hand behind Syreena’s back and used the other to gently lower her onto the sand. The sand was warm beneath her back and she liked the weight of him on top of her. He moved from her lips, dropping a line of hot kisses along the length of her neck and across her chest.
His touch was so light, so tender it set her teeth on edge.
He stopped kissing her and looked deeply into her eyes. “I can stop,” he whispered.
Syreena shook her head. She didn’t want him to stop.
He nodded at her answer and ran his index finger along the top of her leather bodice. Her nipples tightened at his touch. Down below, underneath the shimmery skirt, a wetness soaked her. The anticipation was so sweet it nearly hurt.
He unsnapped the bodice, snap by agonizing snap, stopping to taste every inch of her that was revealed. When he reached the last snap, he tugged the garment free and tossed it aside. Her breasts were bare to the night air and her nipples were so hard they ached.
Dylan took one between his thumb and forefinger while he nipped at the other with his teeth. Syreena cried out at the exquisite pleasure. He kept both hands on her breasts as he moved down the line of her flat stomach and then he licked a circle around her belly button.
Syreena arched her back and he slid her skirt off her hips. “You are so beautiful,” he said in a voice that sounded more like a growl. “You’re like a fantasy come true.”
“So are you,” she said.
His lips met hers and heat blazed between them. There was a desperation, a hunger that wasn’t there before.
Dylan pulled away just long enough to slide his shorts off his hips and onto the sand. He balanced his weight on top of her and it felt right perfect. She felt his manhood brush against her belly and she shivered. It was so large. So hard.
He took it in one hand and rubbed it against her. Her body reacted to him instantly. She was warm and wet and she liked it.
It was divine.
“Are you sure?” he asked again.
She kissed him in response. It was a hard, demanding kiss. She meant it.
“I can’t wait another second,” he growled.
And then he was inside her. She gasped. It was pleasure mixed with pain. He filled her completely and even though it hurt a little, it was the most magnificent sensation she’d ever felt.
She arched her back and squeezed his ass with her hands. Syreena loved the flexing of his muscles as he moved against he
r. “That feels wonderful,” she moaned.
Dylan began slowly, thrusting in and out of her in a lazy rhythm. He swiveled his hips from side to side, rubbing against her in just the right spot. After placing a hand on either side of her, he bent so that his lips blazed against hers. Every inch of her skin burned for his attention, his touch.
“Oh, Dylan, I love the way you fill me up,” she said.
He thrust faster, bringing her to the brink of something she’d never even imagined. His lips never left her. They were on her neck, her lips, her breasts. His touch made her whole body feel like it was made of liquid.
And then she was flying, above the water, around the sun. The whole world dissolved into soft, filtered images.
Dylan pumped harder and she felt his muscles contract. His release came shortly after hers and he lay on top of her, his nose nuzzled between her jaw and shoulder bone.
“Oh, God,” he said. “That was amazing.”
*****
The next morning, Syreena woke feeling more rested than she had in two hundred years. After making love to Dylan, she’d fallen asleep in his arms. For the first time since The Change she was happy to wake up in the middle of the ocean.
Dylan was still sleeping so she turned onto her side and looked at him. He was so handsome. In the soft light of the morning, his olive skin made him lookhe looked like an Adonis. His eyelashes were jet black and so long Syreena was envious.
A bubble of hope started deep in her stomach and made its way up to her heart. Maybe there was something more powerful at work here, something so ancient she couldn’t understand it. The man who was thrown overboard could’ve been anyone. An old man. A cruel man. A dumb man. But Dylan was none of those. He was kind and smart and close to her age.
Maybe he was the one.
Not just the one to get her off the island but the one. Like Mama and Papa. Two halves of the same heart.
Since the first night, when he’d built the shelter to protect them from the storm, she’d stayed in human form all night. She wasn’t swimming nearly as much as she did before he came. Maybe that meant something.
After a breakfast swim, Syreena dressed in her skirt and bodice. It was time to look for bottles.
Falling in Deep Collection Box Set Page 74
