by Delta James
His shoulder felt dislocated, so he forced himself to swim with one arm, the other drifting uselessly as he circled the raft. Fariq spared no expense when it came to things that could potentially save his life, and this was no different. The Viking RescYou looked more like a two-man pup tent than a raft, complete with beacon lights on top of the canopy. Finding the opening, he heaved himself up the rope step and tumbled into the bed of the raft.
Outside, he could already hear Fariq ordering his reluctant sister to jump. It didn’t matter how much he hurt right now, he couldn’t lie here. Forcing himself onto his knees, he grabbed his useless arm. God, this was going to hurt. He breathed, finding his center, then pulled. Every nerve through his shoulder and down his back screamed until, with an electrified snap, his shoulder snapped back into place. His ears rang. He almost shouted.
“Jump,” Fariq ordered through the haze of lingering pain.
“Sharks! There’s sharks!” Aliya screamed. “I see them!”
Crawling one-armed around the small, six-man raft, Christian searched the provisions until he found the oars. Bracing himself against the inflated lip of the opening, he turned the raft around and paddled hard to get back as close to the ship as he dared. That first stroke was sheer hellfire, shooting out from his throbbing shoulder. How he kept from dislocating it all over again, he didn’t know, but he got as close to the sinking ship as he dared, within feet of where she might splashdown.
“We are going to be in the water with them one way or another, so do as I tell you.” Fariq soothed the harshness of his rebuke with a single caress to her hair and her cheek. “Take a deep breath, my darling.”
Christian struggled to keep the raft close without getting sucked toward the bow, where the gushing of white froth was the most violent as the water rushed in to fill the ship.
“Jump,” he shouted up at her. For just a second, her wide-panicked eyes latched onto his. “I’ve got you,” he promised, knowing no matter what, she would either be in the raft with him or he’d be back in the water with her.
In that half-minute of indecision, while she was distracted, Fariq made a decision of his own. Ducking out of her side-armed hug, he picked her up around the waist and before she could do more than scream, heaved her out as far from the sinking ship as he could throw her, almost lost his balance on the rails, but she hit the water a good six feet out from the bubbling froth.
Almost immediately, her scream was echoed by someone else’s, a high-pitched warble of panic coming from the throat of a man. Another survivor, swimming madly toward them from only thirty feet away. There was a fin in the water just behind him. He saw it only for a moment, then the man screamed as he was grabbed, and both vanished beneath the water.
Jesus.
Getting the oars in the water, Christian threw his back into rowing and reached Aliya almost as fast as her head popped back into sight. He grabbed her arm, heaving her up into the boat.
Another splash.
He looked up just as Fariq vanished below the ocean’s choppy surface.
Row away.
That thought jumped into his head and straight through his nerves, making his grip twitch on the handle of the oar. Before he could react, though, Fariq broke the surface again.
Use the oar, beat him. Drown him. Leave him for the sharks.
His grip tightened on the short handle of the oar as Fariq shook the water off his face and out of his hair. He turned in the water, orienting himself to the raft. He looked at Christian for several long seconds, then smiled as if he could read those treacherous thoughts lurking in the forefront of his mind.
In long, slow strokes, he swam toward the raft just as the flash of shark’s fin split the water not ten feet behind him.
Christian’s nerves jumped again, the instinctive warning he would have shouted for just about anyone else in the world, dying in his throat. Just as abruptly as it had appeared, however, the fin turned, and the shark vanished back into the depths once again.
Professional courtesy—one shark to another.
When Fariq reached the raft, he extended a hand, and Christian again suffered that half-second of hesitation before grasping it and pulling his nearest and dearest enemy into the relative safety of the raft. He should have left him to drown, and for just an instant, Christian could have sworn Fariq knew it. They stared at one another before a corner of Fariq’s mouth quirked up in another dark smile.
“Circle the ship.”
“Why?” Christian demanded. So, he’d be distracted and bent over the lip of the raft, playing with the fucking oar while Fariq pulled his gun and shot him in the back of the head?
Fariq’s smile only grew.
“Would you rather do all the rowing yourself?” he replied, shifting in the bottom of the raft to wrap his arm around Aliya’s shoulder, drawing her in close to his chest. She looked shell-shocked, dressed in nothing but the thin, silk nightgown that barely covered her to mid-thigh. Wet, the silk was damn near-transparent, showing the dusky hues of her nipples as well as the slightly darker pink hue of her panties. Rummaging through the supplies again, Christian ripped open the emergency blanket, unfolding the thin mylar material and wrapping it around her.
“Do you even know where we are?”
“About fifteen miles from the nearest island port. I have no idea if there was time for anyone to place a distress call, so we’re better off operating under the assumption we’re on our own.” When Christian rubbed his mouth, looking out the yawning entrance of the raft’s canopy, he added, “We might also want to operate under the assumption the Mustang group is coming back.”
It took him a moment to realize exactly what Fariq was saying.
“We weren’t attacked by the Wild Mustangs,” Christian told him, his tone harsher than he was usually careful to keep it. “Those were pirates or Murammar’s men. The Mustangs would have hit us in a chopper, not divided us into two motorized rust-buckets.”
“Find me two survivors,” Fariq softly ordered. “Then get us to port before we’re attacked again. I want my darling sister safe in bed at our fortress in Marshan by nightfall. After that, I promise whoever did this—Wild Mustang or not—will be dealt with most severely.”
Clenching his jaw, Christian scoured the water beyond the raft.
“And if I find more than two survivors?”
Shrugging with his eyebrows, Fariq rubbing Aliya’s back to help warm her under the thin foil of the emergency blanket.
“I won’t risk having our raft being swamped by desperate mercs, who care only about saving their own skin. Also, we have limited rations.”
“We have rations enough for six for three days,” Christian dared to remind him.
“And there’s three of us here already,” Fariq returned. “Aliya should not be made to suffer.”
“I can s-s-share l-like everyone el-else,” Aliya stammered, huddled in her emergency blanket, not looking up from whatever spot in the bottom of the raft held her gaze.
“Of course, you can,” her brother soothed, but the look he gave Christian was absolute. “One ration for you, me, and two men fit to row if we can find them. Two for my darling Aliya.”
A lump, cold and ugly, sat in the pit of his churning gut. He felt sick, though there was no trace of it in his voice as he said, “Everyone else, we leave behind?”
“To be devoured alive by Great Whites? Of course not. I can’t think of a more terrifying way to die.” Rubbing Aliya’s back, Fariq kissed her on the top of the head again and with his other hand, pulled the handgun from the waistband of his pants to check how many bullets he had left.
“Swing us around. If we find more than two strong survivors, we’ll be kind. We’ll shoot them.”
Chapter 9
Aliya hated Fariq’s Marshan fortress. Old and remote, it was built on a rocky cliffside overlooking the ocean. A man standing anywhere on the parapet wall could see an attack coming from any direction for miles before the danger was close enough to strike. In
medieval times, Fariq told her, such vigilance was a necessary thing.
Apparently, it was just as necessary now.
They’d still been miles from land when a low-flying helicopter swooped in to rescue them from the yellow raft. That Christian and Fariq seemed to know the pilot was obvious. It was just as obvious no one would be going back to where the yacht sank. There wasn’t any reason to go back—Fariq had made sure of that.
They had found seven survivors total, and the first two people they’d pulled from the water were not the same two men who had ended up rowing them to Spain. One had been a chef, an older man who had thanked them profusely in a language Aliya didn’t recognize, much less understand. The other was a woman, one she recognized. She’d walked into her brother’s office once to find the woman on her knees between his legs, her dark hair bobbing enthusiastically in his lap just behind the edge of the desk, which had obscured everything from her sight except what was actually happening. It was the first time Aliya had ever witnessed such a blatant sex act, either in person or on the television. It was also the first and last time she’d ever entered any of Fariq’s rooms without knocking.
Then they’d found a merc silently swimming among the floating debris, trying to find a wood table or desk sturdy enough to hold him out of the water. Fariq welcomed him into the raft with nothing more than a pat on the shoulder, and just as warmly beckoned his past paramour to him and the raft’s open entrance. Offering her a sip of water from the ration pack, he then leaned away from her to pass the ration pack around to everyone else and promptly grabbed her by the ass and legs and dumped her out of the raft.
Aliya came onto her knees, yelling, but neither the merc, chef, nor Christian said so much as a word as Fariq pulled his gun. She’d heard the woman splashing and sputtering back to the surface just before he fired, the loud finality of the sound making her jump. As fast as it had all happened, apart from that one startled squawk of sound, she hadn’t protested. Apart from the gun when it fired, she hadn’t seen the murder, but there was no mistaking the meaning of the silence that followed.
“We are in a survival situation, my dear one,” Fariq told her when she stared at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “We will all be required to do things we’d rather not, but it’s the only way we’re going to live through this.”
The next three they found alive, Fariq shot outright, without letting them in the raft. The man they found swimming toward shore not thirty minutes after the yacht had vanished under the waves and once the paddling began, was brought into the boat.
“I don’t need two rations,” Aliya begged when Fariq put the man in the place of the chef and beckoned the older man to crawl up from the back of the raft to the mouth of it. “Please, I can share. Don’t do this!”
Neither merc said a word, and Christian… just sat there, his jaw clenching and unclenching, not saying a word, though it looked as if he wanted to.
“Dry your tears,” Fariq told her. “We can’t afford to waste our moisture.”
The chef had to know what was going to happen, but he went to Fariq, anyway. Resting his hand on the other man’s shoulder, Fariq patted him twice, thanked him for his service, then shot and dumped him into the water.
“You’re horrible!” Aliya screamed at him, bursting into tears. “I’m the most useless person here. Shoot me!”
She tried to shove away from him when he came back to sit beside her, but his arm was like banded steel, and when he drew her to him, no matter how she resisted, she couldn’t pull away. They were on a raft. There was nowhere to go and no help in sight. Only Christian, sitting almost directly across from them, his stony expression impossible to read apart from the tic of muscle leaping along his jaw as he clenched it and only a faint hint of fury winking in and out of his eyes as he glared.
She tried to turn her back to her brother, but it backfired when she lost her will and ended up being drawn down until she laid in the bottom of the bobbing raft with her head in Fariq’s lap, his gentle hand caressing her cheek, her tangled hair stiff with ocean salt, and her shoulders shaking as she cried.
“Hush, love,” he told her. “You’ll give yourself a headache. Close your eyes. Sleep.”
She’d wanted so badly to push away, but ashamedly, she’d curled up and gone to sleep. It was the only avenue of escape she had and was so much better than seeing who he might shoot next.
Then came the rescue chopper.
Now, here she was, no longer a prisoner aboard Fariq’s yacht, but a prisoner in a crumbling Spanish castle along the coastline of Marshan. Her room was at the end of a short hall where Fariq also had his quarters and was guarded at the only staircase leading to and from there. She had a balcony, though, a very small balcony that overlooked the sea. The beautiful ocean, with its endless waves that kept rolling in to bathe the rocky cliff base and its uncannily gorgeous sunsets that painted both water and sky, making it so outlandishly impossible to believe how utterly horrible this place was.
Aristocratic. Elegant.
Brutally awful.
Just like the man who owned it.
She hugged herself against the rough ocean breeze whipping her hair across her eyes, forcing her time and again to push the long wisps over her shoulder and behind her ear.
A flower plopped softly onto her head, slipping down the fall of her waist-length hair before landing on the stones of the balcony floor at her feet. She looked at it, hesitantly bending down to pick it up. She turned the pink and white-streaked water lily blossom over in her hand before, just as startlingly, a tin can on a string dropped almost directly in front of her face, with another lily carefully bound to it with a length of white string.
Reluctantly, she followed the dangling string up to the balcony a good two full stories and a little to the left of hers, where Christian leaned, elbows propped on the stone rail. He brought his finger to his lips, then gave the dangling can on a string a little tug before showing her the other tin can it was attached to. He brought it to his lips, and when she was slow to grasp the concept, to his ear. Her breath caught, her heart giving a tiny leap as she reached for the can. Glancing up at him, she hesitantly brought the can to her ear.
“It’s the only way I could think of to talk to you in a way I’d be sure he couldn’t intercept or overhear,” Christian said into the can.
That she could hear it through a length of string was nothing short of a marvel. Hesitantly, she brought the can to her mouth, swiping the wisps of her hair the wind kept teasing across her face while he moved his can to his ear.
“Can you hear me?”
He smiled. When some of the tension eased from his features, she realized how tense he seemed.
“Yes, Princess. I can hear you. Now, I want you to hear me. Keep your head down. Keep your mouth shut. Be patient and wait for my cues. I’m going to get you out of here.”
So, she waited. She got ready for bed that night and managed not to cringe when Fariq opened the door to her room, approved her choice of nightgown, then helped her into bed,
“Try to forget what had to be done on the raft,” he said, leaning down to kiss her. “Know that I showed mercy to those we couldn’t afford to bring with us by not allowing them to drown or be eaten alive by sharks. Be grateful that once again, I saved you.”
“Yes, Fariq,” she said quietly.
He withdrew, turning off the light as he closed the door. She heard him lock it before heading to his own quarters.
Aliya was looking out the open balcony doors at the moonlit inky skies when she saw a tumble of bedsheets descend from above and Christian sliding down them. He was crazy, but her body came back to life in a way she hadn’t thought impossible.
He put his finger to his lips as he crept into her room and sat on the end of the bed. Leaning down, he kissed her with barely restrained passion. Aliya sat up, drawing her nightgown over her head, and folded back the bedclothes, entreating him to join her. She’d begun to crave his attention—both discipline and lo
ving.
Christian smiled and slid his hands between her legs, parting the petals of her sex as he stroked her.
“We don’t have time, Princess. There will come a day when I’ll remove these silky curls, so I can better see your arousal.”
His words were almost as intoxicating as the delicious fondling he was inflicting on her.
“You know the rule about touching yourself, right?” he growled quietly. “I’m the only one who gets to pleasure you.”
“More,” she pleaded.
“Not enough time. I just wanted to make sure you were all right, but I can’t seem to keep my hands off you.”
“More.”
“I want to have the time…”
“Please? I want whatever time I can have. More.”
Christian stood, pulling his t-shirt over his head and stripping off his jeans. He wore no underwear—no boxers, no briefs, nothing. His cock jutted away from his body, proud and sure.
“I’ll make it good for you,” he whispered as he rolled her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers, making them harder still when he pinched them.
She inhaled sharply but placed her hands on top of his.
“Oh, Princess, I am so going to hell for this…”
Christian knelt between her legs, spreading them wide, and allowed his cock to nudge her labia. Using his cock to rub between the lips of her sex allowed her to be less weary, not only of him but of what he could make her feel.
“Christian,” she’d sighed, tilting her hips into alignment with his hard cock.
He made a place for himself in the cradle of her hips before placing his hand over her mouth and thrusting into her in a long, powerful move, driving to the end of her sheath. She was grateful he managed to muffle her strangled cry as she climaxed just from the act of his possession—and she had no doubt, Christian had possessed her.
