by Amelia Wilde
“Is it true?” she asks, and for a heart-stopping second I have the foolish thought that she heard my thoughts. “That you killed a whole shipful of people because the captain cheated you?”
My blood heats. “Have you been gossiping, princess?”
She blushes and looks down. “I was chatting with Cook.” When she lifts her head again, there’s a steely determination in her eyes. “He told me about it because I asked. Don’t fire him.”
“Fire him?” I laugh out loud. “Half this crew was there when I killed those people. They cheered when it was done. It was an evil crew on that ship.”
“More evil than you?”
I already know, deep in my bones—deeper than my fucking bones—that I won’t lay Cook out because he was charmed by this little lost princess. I won’t do it because she asked me not to fire him, and if I know anything, I know she’ll keep pressing on the details of her request. Don’t fire him. Don’t punch him. Don’t hurt him.
I won’t make a move in that direction, because if she asks me, I won’t be able to deny her.
Which—fuck.
However, leave it to that self-righteous asshole to put a terrible spin on that night.
I step toward her. “You tell me. Did they deserve it, or am I a cold-blooded psychopath who spends all his time killing people and sinking ships?”
Ashley searches my eyes like she’s going to find the answer there. Like I’ve asked her a serious question. Before she can answer, she shivers.
“Come here.”
Farther down the deck, there’s a bolted-down bench in front of a metal grate set into the hull. Ashley settles into it without asking questions, and I sit down next to her and kick the grate.
Fire crackles to life inside it.
For a rich girl, Ashley looks fairly shocked about this. “A fireplace? Here?”
“People have to keep watch.”
“You don’t get cold out here, I bet.”
Of course I get cold. “What makes you think that?”
She looks back out over the sea. A pool of moonlight shines in the center of black water. “You felt warm when we were out there. You may be a murderer, but you’re not a psychopath.”
“Because I was warm?” If she thinks this, then it’s a miracle she’s survived on this planet for so long. She belongs in some cossetted college campus, not a ship.
“Because you came after me in the first place. I think if you were really a cold-blooded psychopath, you would have killed me on sight. You wouldn’t have saved me. Twice.”
“I took your buoy so you couldn’t save yourself.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t leave. That was an option.”
I don’t tell her that it wasn’t. It hasn’t been an option since I found her.
“Leaving a valuable hostage wasn’t on the table. Don’t forget.” I make my voice hard, and she glances at me. “That’s what you are.”
“And you’re a pirate.” Her tone is measuring. She’s baiting me.
“I’m in shipping.”
“You’re a pirate,” she insists. “You kill people because of some obscure code of honor. And I’m supposed to believe there are people out there worse than you.”
“You just switched sides in the argument.”
“Were they evil or not?” Ashley’s leaning in now. Much closer than she needs to be. “Or did you lie about that?”
Uncertainty flashes through her eyes. I won’t break Cook’s nose, but I will be having a chat with him about not intentionally leaving out half the facts.
Then again… I wanted her to be afraid of me.
I want her to be afraid of me.
Maybe not permanently.
“There are some deals you shouldn’t make. And some things you shouldn’t ship.”
“Like stolen things?”
“Like children, princess. People should not put children in the cargo hold of a ship and sell them for money.”
Her expression softens. Starlight catches in her eyes, and right now I feel as close to the sea as I ever have. Like there’s no ship. No crew. No endless tasks coming across my desk, no endless deals and jobs. No search for a missing treasure that’s taken up most of my adult life.
No hostage.
No ransom.
Just two people on a bench near a fireplace that shouldn’t exist on a passion project of a ship. Just neverending open sea.
Ashley slides closer. It’s an effort, because she’s got eighteen pounds in her lap, but she does it.
She moves in. An inch at a time. Until she’s close enough to kiss.
Her eyes trace over my lips, then back up to my eyes.
Whatever she finds there, it’s enough, because she sits up tall and brushes her lips over mine. Once, then twice, then three times—tentative until it’s not tentative anymore.
It’s a real fucking kiss.
I lean down into it with my mind in pieces. No one has ever, ever, kissed me like this. I would never have let it happen.
But it is happening. It’s happening so much that I can’t ignore it. Can’t shut off the part of me that is massively, painfully turned on by the whole sweet business. Can’t stop the way it sets my heart on fire. She moves me. Moves me in a way that nothing does, save for the sea.
Ashley stops for a single, shuddering breath.
Then she kisses me again.
11
Ashley
Poseidon kisses me back and it’s not like it was in the water. It’s not half of a fight we’ve been having. It’s not a technique to get me to shut the hell up and go along with being rescued. It’s deeper than that.
I feel a little bad that I’m using this as a distraction.
It’s a distraction for me, too.
None of what he said should redeem him. None of what he said should make it tolerable to kiss him. Even if he’s telling the truth about horrible people selling children—and he probably is—he’s the same man who’s keeping me for ransom.
None of it should make me want this.
I’m split neatly down the middle. Part of me wants to make out with him until I’ve forgotten every other person I’ve ever kissed. And part of me knows I’d be better off making another escape attempt than staying here.
I let go of the ball and touch him. The front of his shirt. His collar. The solid body below his collar. I put both hands flat on his chest so that he gets a sense of them.
All the old lessons come back to me.
Keep your hands moving. The art of misdirection is about drawing people’s attention.
I’ve given Poseidon my lips and my hands to focus on, and if I have to, I’ll give him my body. Again. That’s what I was doing before, when he—
No. That’s a lie. I wasn’t. I wasn’t doing anything to him. I was lost to him, and that can’t happen again, because if it goes much further I’ll never be found. I’ll never understand what happened here. I’ll never be able to sort out in my own mind why it felt so good to feel him swim us back to the ship after I spent all that time trying to get away. I’ll never get over it.
But the memory of being beneath him in that bed kickstarts everything I didn’t want to happen. The heat spreading across my face. The desire winding up between my legs. If it weren’t for the damned ball, I’d have them open for him. What the fuck is wrong with me? It takes everything I have to wrap his shirt in my fist and pull him in for the final part of this plan.
The key to the ball and chain is in his pocket. Its slim outline has been obvious since I brushed my hands over his pants. He didn’t notice. He doesn’t notice now. He’s too busy kissing me back with a kind of serious concentration that seems unlike him. Then again, what the hell do I know? Maybe he is like this. Maybe he always kisses like he’ll never get another chance.
This next part is trickier, but I’ve already guided my ankle up onto the bench. I push into him harder, opening my mouth for him, letting him in while I slip the key into the lock around my ankle.
The c
lasp opens.
I kick the chain off as Poseidon pulls back. Surprise chases the heat and lust from his eyes, and before he can grab me, before he can stop me, I stand up and walk the ball to the railing.
It goes over. Falls. Plops into the water with an echoing splash.
I’m free of it.
But also, not free.
I whirl around in time for Poseidon to meet me at the railing. It’s a cold stripe across my back and he pushes in, a hand on either side of me. It’s not the same as in the galley. Not the same at all. Down there, I was pressed against a solid wall. Now I’m one good shove from a quick drop into the ocean.
I have to lean back, almost out over the water, to keep his face in view. It makes my breath shallow and my heart take off in a sprint.
“Where the hell did you learn that, princess?”
“There’s lots of things you don’t know about me.”
I want him to kiss me again, right now. The want is awful, and I have no explanation for why it feels so torturous that he’s not kissing me already. Questions rise like bubbles and pop, one by one. My body is lit up with him. My body doesn’t know that we were playing a game.
“Yeah.” A sharp tone. “What else?”
“Like...” I’m drawing a blank. An enormous blank. My entire life is nothing right now with the night breeze in my hair and Poseidon making a cage of his body and his own ship. He must know—he must know how it feels, but nothing in him hesitates, nothing in him gives me so much as another inch of breathing room. “I don’t know how to swim.”
He blinks, straightening up. One hand comes off the railing, then the other, and the crackling tension that had all my nerves alive with moonlight releases. “I thought you were tired, not… If you don’t know how to swim, then what the fuck were you doing on a yacht?”
Another flush of embarrassment heats my cheeks. All I can manage is a shrug. “We weren’t going to leave the boat.”
Leaving the boat was not on the agenda. Neither was getting shot in the head or getting lost at sea. A piece of me caves in, thinking about the sunlight on the yacht deck and Robbie’s blood pooling red on those coral shorts. It’s enough to cause an earthquake, that hollow space, and I fold my arms over my waist to hold it in.
Poseidon makes an incredulous sound, and I drag my eyes up off the deck and back to his face. “What kind of fucking boyfriend lets you on a boat without knowing how to swim?”
12
Poseidon
That fucker Robbie is dead, and I could kill him all over again.
It is beyond me that anyone, any fucking person with any kind of sense, would take a boat out alone with a person who can’t swim. What was she supposed to do if something happened to him? He was dumb enough to get shot in the head. I didn’t think he was so oblivious that he’d purposely put her in danger. Nobody like that deserves—
No. Fuck no. I’m not going to get into things like deserving and worthiness. That’s not for me.
What is for me is the ocean.
“That ends now, princess.”
“What ends now?” She turns her face away a fraction of an inch, finally wary. Too late. It was bad enough that she trusted Robbie. Worse that she trusted the sea. The sea can be a wily bitch. She’d just as soon drown you as look at you.
“You’re going to learn to swim before the sun comes up.”
“How am I going to do— No, no, no—”
I lift her in my arms and toss her over the railing. Her scream follows her all the way to the splash she makes when she hits the water. I mark the spot, pull my shirt off, and dive in after her.
It’s much more peaceful under the surface of the sea than above it.
Ashley doesn’t seem to know that.
She’s fighting the water as she sinks, but all her motions are uncoordinated. They won’t help her. At this rate, she’ll never get her head above water. None of it makes sense. Her dad is rich enough to have hired all the private swimming coaches money can buy. But here she is, trying to kick and failing. Trying to float and failing. Sinking like she’s got that chain around her ankle.
I swim down to her and she tries to throw a hand out and hit me. The whites of her eyes shine in the filtered moonlight. We’re not down far enough to lose all of it yet, but the quality of it is ethereal and impermanent. You can lose the light fast at night. A few more feet and we’ll be where I’ve wanted to go for almost as long as I can remember. In the cool dark depths.
But not today.
Not tonight.
First, swimming lessons.
I take her hand instead of her waist so she can feel the water on the way up, feel the way it moves. Ashley holds my hand so tight that it gives her away. I break the surface first, Ashley a second after me. The moment she can breathe, she uses all her strength to throw herself into my arms. “What the fuck,” she says in my ear, her fingernails cutting into my skin. “What the fuck. Oh my God. It’s freezing. I can’t swim like this.”
“No. The first step is to relax.”
She bursts out laughing, a high, panicked sound. Her body’s warm and slippery in my arms. “I could have drowned, and now you think I should relax.”
“You could have drowned any day before this. The point of knowing how to swim is to make that less likely. You’re going to have to let go of me.”
“I won’t.”
She’s so close and so tense that it’s making the air around us seem brighter, more saturated with moonlight. I have the probably correct sense that Ashley is putting up a fight because, yes, she is a stubborn brat, but also because she’s locked her fingers into my shoulders with so much force that it would take real work to let go.
I draw a trail of salt water across one cheek. Ashley doesn’t flinch at the touch. And she’s stopped kicking, letting me take most of her weight. One of her hands absently traces down over my chest, toward my abs.
“What are you doing?”
Another slow trace. “You have such strange tattoos.”
Good. She doesn’t see the scars. “My tattoos won’t help you swim.”
“You could tell me about them.” She bites her lip, hopeful and trying her best to be distracting.
“If you’re going to learn before sunrise, we need to move things along.”
“And how do you plan to—”
I put a hand around her throat.
There. Better.
Ashley’s eyes have gone wide, her lips parted. She’s the picture of surprise or desire or both. The main effect of touching her this way is that her hands have gone flat on my shoulders and some of the tension has slipped away from her body.
“Choking people isn’t part of swimming,” she says, and I feel every word through my palm.
“It is if they like it.”
Her cheeks flush. “Who said I liked it?”
“Your body tells me, the way you’re burning up in the cold water. The way you shivered every time you felt the steel against your skin. This poor little rich girl likes it rough. Too bad Robbie never figured that out before he met his maker.”
I take my hand away, and she lets out a breath that sounds almost disappointed. “You don’t know anything about Robbie. Or anything about me.”
“I know you’d be wet if I touched between your legs. Not the thin slick of water. I’m talking about desire. About the feel of you, hot and silky, a pearl made smooth by time itself.”
She lets out a sharp gasp—of shock. Of desire. Both.
“Let go,” I order her, pushing her and her sweet tightness away from me.
“We’re in the ocean. If I let go, I’m going to sink.”
“You’re not. The water is trying to help you. And there’s a ladder twenty feet from you. I’m sure you could make it if push came to shove.”
Ashley grumbles, fear flashing in her eyes. “Trying to help me. That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
“It’s not. Look.”
I unhook her hands from my shoulders and take them in m
ine. God, she’s small. Way too small to have been floating out in the ocean for fuck knows how long.
She’s not going to like the next part.
Ashley’s eyes get wider when I push her away. She’s trying to be stoic about this, and for the second time, I almost feel bad for her. Her arms reach for me with such a rigid insistence that they might as well be a billboard for how scared she is.
“Let it keep you up.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“By—”
“If you say relaxing one more time, I’ll kill you.”
“I’d love to see it, princess.”
“Fine.” She blows out a big breath, and the concentration on her face is so fucking adorable I could kiss her. Again. But that’s not the best course of action. Not for her. Not for me. Not again.
It doesn’t take long for her body to rise toward the surface, and Ashley’s mouth rounds with surprise. “I hate you for this.”
“But you’re floating.”
“I’m not. You’re holding me up.”
I squeeze her hands and let go.
Ashley floats for exactly as long as it takes for her to realize that I’m not touching her, and then she stiffens and sinks, legs falling first, head thrown back to keep her mouth above water. I’m beside her in two strokes, a hand on her belly.
“I hate this.” Ashley doesn’t look at me.
“Spend less time hating it and more time knowing that the water isn’t the enemy.”
“Let me guess. Fear is the enemy.”
The old memory of huge hands around my neck squeezes tight. “No. The enemy is time.”
“Time?” She steals a glance at me out the corner of her eye.
“Time. When you enter water that’s above your head, the clock starts ticking. Sink or float, princess. It’s up to you.”