Hurt flashes in her eyes and echoes through me, but I’m too far gone to take it back, to tell her the truth—that in all the ports I’ve visited around the world, there’s been no one like her. That I give Nicholas such unholy shit for his girl back home because I don’t have one. It’s been years since I brought a woman on board with me.
There was no one before Ashley.
And after she’s gone—
“You don’t know anything about women like me.” She sets her jaw and tilts her hips to get more pressure on her clit.
She’s right. I don’t know anything about anything. I’m a hurricane about to make landfall. I’m a twisting spiral of wind and rain and screaming steel. “I don’t care about women like you.”
Her chin lifts, and I’ve never seen anything so hot in my whole life. Defiance, while her hips work and her pussy clenches around my fingers. “I want this.”
“No, you don’t. You’re taking what’s available—”
With a frustrated groan she arches in my grip, getting just enough leverage to find more points of contact. Ashley’s lips meet mine in a bite hard enough to break skin. “You said to decide after this is over,” she says, tightening around my fingers. “It’s never—it’s never going to be over.” She can hardly breathe for how she’s panting. The poor little rich girl does like it rough. “I don’t care what you say. I don’t care how mean you are. I’m not changing my mind.”
An inner wall collapses like the hull of the Trident. Christ, it hurts. Every heartbeat is a punch to my veins. A pressure so intense there’s only one way to release it. I bend to kiss her shoulder. “I don’t want anything to do with you.”
Her eyes widen, but it’s a split-second shock that disappears under the slow roll of my thumb on her clit. “Fine.”
“I should have taken the money. It would have been easier.”
“But you didn’t,” Ashley breathes, “and now you’re stuck with me.”
“I’d rather have the money.”
“You’d rather have your ship,” she whispers in my ear, and then—despite having her wrists pinned brutally to the tree, despite that I’m the least deserving person ever to live, Ashley kisses my cheek.
I nudge her head back into position so I can kiss her like the feral animal that I am. She moans into my mouth, pushing down harder on my fingers, and then she’s fighting for air, fighting for an inch of space. I give it to her but not because I want to take my mouth off her.
It’s because she’s going to come.
From this. From me finger-fucking her and being too rough with her and caging her against a tree like she’s prey.
Ashley’s eyes go wide, and her head falls back to the bark. “Don’t stop,” she pants, and I haven’t, I’m still fucking her as relentlessly as I have been—
“You’re nothing.” Her eyelashes flutter with her next breath, but she keeps her eyes open. She knows better than to take this from me. “You’re a warm body with nice tits and all I want from you is to fuck you senseless. You’re tight, princess. You’re wet for this. Hate me all you want.”
“I don’t—” She gets tighter. Impossible. A miracle. “I don’t hate you,” she says, and then she comes hard on my fingers. If anyone has climbed up into the hills, if anyone has wandered away from the shipyard, they’ll hear her.
I’m the only one who gets to feel the breathy vibrations of her voice move through her body. I’m the only one who gets to feel her become an earthquake made flesh.
Ashley keeps her eyes on mine while she comes, and my soul tips over into that tearful blue. If she can be an earthquake, then it’s fucking fine that I’m a hurricane, it’s fucking fine that we are both natural disasters.
Though she doesn’t look like one with pleasure painting her cheeks pink and her lips parting again and again in an attempt to speak to me. I can tell she wants to say more, feel it, but all she gets out is one ragged, “Poseidon.”
I tug her hands around my neck and her grip grounds me while I deal with my belt buckle. Rain bursts through the leaves, harder now, and I don’t care. It’s like being tapped on the shoulder. It’s like something is demanding my attention. I have nothing to give. Everything I had is at the bottom of the sea except one backpack and this woman, this woman, who should run as fast as she can in the opposite direction.
She is not running.
She’s clinging to me, opening her thighs for me, and bracing herself against the tree so I can thrust hard into her. Ashley’s so fucking tight. She’s so fucking wet. I get a hand under her ass and take her weight while I fuck her like the storm I’ve been since the first explosive on the Trident blew apart. I feel it happening still. Feel it happening now, but the heat of her and the squeeze of her muscles around my cock shoves the memory out of the way. Banishes it at sea, where it can’t touch me.
Frigid rain batters my skin. The droplets are tiny shards of ice dropped from the sky. Goose bumps sprint across my arms, the back of my neck, and it’s such a tearing contrast between Ashley’s heat and the numbing rain. Mud tries its best to pull me off-balance, but fuck that, fuck that all the way to hell. Mud won’t keep me from her. Nothing will keep me from her.
I’m driving the breath out of her, emptying her lungs with every thrust, and Ashley surrenders to it. Her body relies on mine to keep her out of the mud, to keep her safe on this hellhole of an island, and I watch that line of explosives ignite again in the space between thrusts. I can live with this shredded void if I can have her.
A sick pleasure crests like a wave in high seas, three stories high and coming on fast. I love that she’s crying, that tears slip down her cheeks while she moans and her body gives itself over to being fucked. I love that I caught her out here alone so I could do this.
Fucking her becomes a kind of prayer. The worst is over. Please, let the worst be over. Go in peace. Ite in pace.
Ashley lets out a sob at the same moment her pussy clamps down tight around me in a frantic rhythm. Her muscles work on my piercing, causing a tugging pleasure all the way to my base. This time she can’t keep her eyes open as she comes, and I don’t make her.
My own release has been waiting for hers, and when it breaks—
The sky splits open above us.
Lightning cracks. So close. Louder than a gunshot.
My next breath is laced with the electrical-fire scent of a nearby strike and I spill myself into Ashley, fucking her all the way through it and beyond.
Thunder booms next, the sound refracted through the trees.
Ashley doesn’t startle. Maybe the girl I pulled out of the sea would startle. Would insist that we run. But now I’ve put her through too much to flinch at a thunderstorm.
My body doesn’t want to separate from hers. I don’t want to be any farther than this.
Rivulets of rainwater run down through her hair, over her tank top, over her naked legs. She’s otherworldly like this, with my eyes still tingling from the flash of lightning. It’s the middle of the afternoon. It might as well be midnight for how dark it is with these clouds.
I can’t put her down.
I won’t.
Her shorts have been lost to the mud. Her shoes, too.