“Doing okay, sweet girl?” he asked, nipping her bottom lip.
Her breath caught when he rolled his hips. Nothing would ever be okay again. How did she go back to normal after this?
“Fuck me,” she whispered.
When he moved, some of the discomfort lifted. Nerve endings came to life, making her need climb again.
More of the haze cleared from his eyes. “You’re tight, sweetness. How long has it been?”
She clenched her knees on his thighs and lifted herself before forcing down past the burn. New pleasure surfaced through the pain.
When he pressed a thumb on her clit, she opened her legs wider. She didn’t care about the stones and grass blades hurting her knees even through the protection of his coat. Their rocking was messy and rough, their timing somehow synchronized, because when her inner muscles tightened, his body went rigid.
“Jesus,” he said, throwing his head back with a groan as warm jets bathed her inside.
They rode it out together with her panting in his neck and him kissing the top of her head. It felt right. It felt shameless and beautiful, but then he lifted her and his release ran down her thighs.
She stilled.
What had they done? The heat evaporated, leaving her cold. She wasn’t on birth control. What about diseases? How could she have been so careless? Joss was drunk. She dragged her hands over her clammy face. Shit, shit, shit. She’d taken advantage of him.
Staggering to her feet, she scrambled around for her clothes. She wasn’t going to fall pregnant. She couldn’t. She’d barely finished her period. Still, she should’ve thought about a condom, not that she owned any. Shit! She’d fucked a man who’d come back to town with a woman. What if she took what belonged to someone else?
Damn her lust. It made her a despicable human being.
“Do not regret this,” he said in a deep voice, the slur more pronounced again, only making her feel guiltier. “What happens in the dark doesn’t count.”
She froze. Her heart cracked. Instead of offering absolution, the words cut deep. She stepped into her underwear and shorts before summoning the courage to face him again. He was still propped up against the rock, but he’d adjusted his clothes.
“Hey,” he said, his voice gentle. “Don’t look like that. It came out wrong. What I meant to say is you have nothing to feel guilty about. The responsibility is mine. I knew what I was doing. You, on the other hand—”
“I should call someone to come get you,” she said.
“You think I’ll let you go now?”
She hadn’t felt threatened until that moment. Taking a step back, she said, “I dreamt about you.”
“A nightmare?” He laughed at his own joke.
“You could say that.” A breeze lifted from the sea, carrying salty fog and a smell of rain. She rubbed her arms. “Why did you come back?”
He gripped her ankle, making her lose her balance, but before she could hit the ground, he caught her under her arms and draped her over his lap. “You’re going nowhere.”
She struggled in his grip. “Let me go!”
“Too late for that.”
What was this? A trap? Adrenaline coursed through her veins. She slapped his hands away, straining for distance.
“Keep still,” he hissed, pushing to his feet and lifting her with one arm as if she weighed nothing. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
She clawed for freedom when he dropped her to her feet, her hand catching on a chain around his neck. She pushed hard, making him stumble backward. The chain snapped. She stood with it in her hand, staring at the crystal pendant for a second as he regained his balance only to trip sideways.
Snatching up her backpack, she sprinted through the field. Thorns caught her toes and polls of wild grass cut the sides of her feet, but she didn’t stop until she reached the fence. Only after she’d clambered over the gate did she look back over her shoulder. Joss’s body was a dark shape on the ground, passed out where he’d dropped.
She covered her mouth with a hand, trying to catch her breath and her bearings. What had he been talking about? What had he meant when he’d said he wouldn’t let her go? Goosebumps raced over her body. Hugging herself, she clenched her hands so hard the sharp edges of the crystal pushed painfully against her skin.
She opened her fist. A quartz stone on a silver chain lay in her palm. She should return it, but she wasn’t going back there. Shame heated her face. She’d already committed two unspeakable sins tonight, taking advantage of a drunk man and not insisting he clarified his relationship with the woman he brought to town. What was stealing a keepsake?
Unsettled, she walked back to the tourist office and washed away the evidence of sex on her thighs under the tap. By now, the last bus was long gone. She had no choice but to make it home on foot.
The road was dark and quiet when she set out, but the dark and quiet didn’t scare her. The van with the cleaning service logo parked in front of Joss’s abandoned childhood house did.
Chapter 3
By the time Clelia got home, it was late. She anchored the boat and dragged herself up the veranda steps. She was tired from walking for miles and her feet hurt, but that was nothing compared to the sting between her legs. Worse yet were the guilt and fear that wouldn’t let her go.
She took a moment to school her features before going inside. Erwan sat by the kitchen table smoking his pipe. This made her stop in her tracks. The last time he smoked in the house was when Tella, her grandmother, had passed away.
“Erwan?” she said in an unsteady voice.
Tripod looked up from his cushion by the stove and wagged his tail. From far away, Snow howled. In a distant corner of her mind, she registered how strange it was that Snow wasn’t by the door to greet her.
“We need to talk,” Erwan said, not meeting her eyes.
She rounded the table. “What’s going on?”
“What happened to you?” he asked when his gaze fell on her scraped knees.
“I tripped over a rock.” She waved the incident away, burying it deep down to mull over later. “Erwan, what’s the matter?”
“Do you remember the story I told you about your mother?”
Frowning, she sat down in the chair opposite him. “Yes.”
There was only one story he told about her mother, and that was how a Japanese fishing boat had docked in the harbor thirty-seven years ago and left a little girl behind, the girl Erwan and Tella had adopted and called Katik, her mother.
He looked at his hands. “I didn’t tell you everything.”
A part of her had always known there was more to the story, yet she didn’t want to hear what was coming.
“When the Japanese trawler docked in the Gulf, your mother must’ve been about six years old. There was no way of telling, since she didn’t speak. Obviously, she didn’t understand our language, but she didn’t say a word in any language.”
She sat quietly, afraid to make a sound.
“They found her alone on a yacht in the middle of the ocean and had to assume her parents, and whoever else she’d been with, had drowned in some accident. There were signs of a fire on board, and it was a wonder that she was still alive. There was no clue as to her identity, no papers, no evidence of another soul on that vessel. What happened was a mystery they never solved. They took her aboard and sailed with her as far as Brittany.”