Ashley tips her head back, trying to get control of her breathing. A smile catches at the corners of her lips. Satisfied, for the moment. And sad.
But something has been settled between us. For now.
Lightning arcs again, somewhere behind me, and I lift her away from the tree and fight my way back to the path with her cradled in my arms. Ashley rests her head on my shoulder. Her arms are loose around my neck now. She has no fear of being dropped.
I use the wind and the rain and the thunder as an excuse not to tell her what a relief it is.
Everything else has been blown up and left for dead.
But I have her in my arms.
3
Ashley
It takes me approximately forever to climb the hills around the mansion, and it takes Poseidon no time to climb back down. Part of me wants to insist on walking. The whole point of hiking is to get stronger, and being carried down the slick path isn’t doing that.
But I don’t have shoes, or half the clothes I started with, and he feels warm in the cold rain.
Warm and angry.
Tension clings to him like the water droplets. It’s been with Poseidon since we touched down in the helicopter and he shook himself out of a blank silence and into furious motion.
He spent the entire first night we were here at the shipyard.
More rain, sheets of rain, an ocean of rain cuts off abruptly when Poseidon steps onto the porch at the front of the mansion. Empty air feels like icy wind. The air-conditioned breeze inside the house feels even colder. He takes the stairs two at a time while I shiver.
Our destination is the enormous shower in the en suite of the master bathroom.
The shower is big enough to need its own room. It gleams with dark tiles sheared off from rock and polished to a high shine. Poseidon strips off his clothes and turns it on.
He’s a god silhouetted by the floor-to-ceiling window that makes up one side of the shower. This room might be the only one in the house where he looks like he belongs, and I don’t know whether that’s from the profusion of jets and rainfall showerheads or because the shower could fit six people without anyone feeling crowded.
I get my numb fingers to the hem of my soaked shirt and pull it over my head. My bra goes next. Poseidon’s under the water, his hands in his hair, and yes. He just fucked me against a tree so hard I can feel the ridges of the bark on my skin. But he seems so far away.
He’s closed off from me, the shutters down over his face. I thought sex would take the edge off, but maybe it’s only taken the edge off his fury with me for hiking alone. There’s always more with him. Depths.
A flash of lightning strikes out over the sea. The storm is so close it can’t be muffled by the mansion. The rush of the shower and the raindrops on the roof combine as I step into the hot spray. It’s like being outside in that lash of rain, only it’s hot.
Poseidon pushes his hair back, his blue eyes glittering despite the gray-black clouds outside the window. My breath catches. It’s true, what he said—I am filthy, and I do want him. My pussy aches from him using it, but new heat coils between my legs just to look at him.
“If you want to run away, you’ll have to go farther than this,” I tell him.
His eyes burn across my lips as I say it, and my heart beats faster.
“I’m choosing you. This will never be over, but I’m choosing you anyway.”
His hand comes out faster than I can step back. The palm that locks around my jaw is heated and strong, and my body responds the way it always does—by going still and compliant.
If there’s more of him to take, then I’ll take it. Gladly.
“Get on your knees.” I’m not sure whether I hear the words or if I only feel them through his hand as he forces me down to the tile. It doesn’t matter.
I would have obeyed him either way.
His hand slides down to my neck but doesn’t stay. Neither does he. His towering frame disappears from view. At the same moment his fingers curl into my hair, the water hits me with full force. He has me facing some of the jets. I didn’t realize how much of it he was blocking with his body until now. It’s so much. He’s so much.
Poseidon’s fingers in my hair are a painful pull. I can’t tip my face down, can’t fall to the floor, can’t do anything to get away from the water. I get a half-gasp of air and choke on it, sputtering, and then the water is gone.
Replaced by him.
He opens my lips wider with a thumb between my teeth and I get one final breath before he takes my mouth.
More than my mouth. The head of him nudges the back of my throat. My body panics but I want him, I want him. I want him mean. I want him real. I want him back. That’s what I want. Part of him died when he lost the Trident, but I’m not willing to let the rest of him go.
He’s fighting to stay dead. The thought flickers wildly into my brain. It will be easier for him if he can pretend to be a heartless bastard. It will be easier for him to pretend he hasn’t lost anything. To pretend he’s nothing but a bloodthirsty pirate. Fine. I’ll let him pretend for a little while, if that’s what it takes for him to return.
It’s him I’m choking on now. It takes all my focus to concentrate on taking him, on swallowing again and again while he fucks me. If I do it at a precise moment, it pulls a low animal sound out of him. I can feel it through his skin, through his cock.
He takes my hair in his fists and holds me in place, and this—this degrading, sexy thing he’s doing—it chases away my misery.
Who can feel heartbroken when you’re trying to survive?
I thought the sea was relentless, with its neverending waves and unforgiving current.
All those waves are nothing compared to Poseidon.
There’s only one way to survive, and it’s to hold on tight to whatever’s closest. That happens to be his perfect, muscular thighs. They bunch under my palms as some of his horrible stress dissipates. I can be more than his pain. I’ll replace it with pleasure, even if it means I cry and choke and struggle.
“Fuck,” he says, hot water sluicing down over us both. “Fuck.”
Poseidon
I mean to be crude and awful to her the whole way through, because I’ve lost my fucking mind. I keep trying to get out of this grief and this ripping, lacerating uncertainty and it doesn’t last. It comes back so fast. Nothing is enough. Nothing will ever be enough.
I’m sure of it.
Except Ashley is so sweet, and so sexy down on her knees with my cock shoving into her throat. She looks up at me, wide-eyed and soft. After everything, she’s soft.
I’m not. I’m a hellion. The kind of man they would have warned about in the old days, when they’d spot pirates from the shore and hide the women and children. Never mind that I won’t allow my crew to pillage anything except the ships that deserve it. It doesn’t make me any less dangerous to Ashley.
The instinct to scare her rises like a tidal surge, hard and destructive.
If I scare the living hell out of her, she’ll run.
It would be the right thing to do, to make her see what I am. Nothing I’ve done has convinced her yet. I fuck her mouth harder. Rougher.
Her palms stay flat on my thighs. She offers no resistance to my hands in her hair, though I know it hurts. I’ll terrify her and she’ll run. I’ll make her change her mind. She’ll go to a place I can’t find, and I’ll never see her again.