by C. C. Piper
“They must have. It’s not here.”
“I’m sorry.”
This was the second time in as many minutes that he’d apologized to me. Surely, this wasn’t the typical attitude of a prison guard. Granted, all I had to go by were books, television shows, and movies, but still. The profession was typically shown to be tough as nails and completely unyielding. Which made sense when dealing with convicts.
But I wasn’t a convict. I was just someone being held accountable for my father’s supposed crimes. Crimes I didn’t want to believe him capable of, even though I knew he could be ruthless when it came to his business interests.
My father loved me and Drew. He loved my mom. I knew this. But he wasn’t overly affectionate. He chose to show his feelings through material gifts more than anything else. Which was great, even though I would’ve preferred more of his time and maybe a hug or two instead.
I remembered a time when I was younger and had sprinted into his office without knocking. He’d been shouting and cursing into a phone, shocking me with his vehemence, with the vitriolic poison he’d been spewing. Then, I remembered a few months ago when he’d fired an employee who’d been working there for ten years. The woman had left not only with tears streaming down her face but full-on sobbing. I’d tried to comfort her, but after a quick embrace, she’d pulled away from me and dashed toward the elevators. I’d thought about that many times, and every time I did, it made my chest hurt.
Yet, I was speaking to a man holding me captive. Sharing personal insights with him, someone who had a vested interest in what my father did—doing so may be shortsighted.
I didn’t know why I’d opened up to him like I had, either. It couldn’t be wise. Joshing around with my kidnapper like we were the best of friends? As if we were an everyday couple hanging out? As if we were on a date or something? Or something worse…like a hookup?
I’d lost my virginity, but that had been to my boyfriend, as doomed as that relationship had been. I didn’t sleep around. And I certainly didn’t sleep with men connected to those willing to harm me and put me in jeopardy. I didn’t even know what this man’s actual name!
The realization of this caused me to jump to my feet and dart out of the room. Once behind my closed door again, I’d burrowed under the covers of my bed and taken stock of everything that had transpired up until that very moment. I thought about the conversation I’d just had with Guard and how it’d made me feel. I could see a pattern. An alarming one.
I gave myself a stern talking to.
“You will not fall for your kidnapper. You will not moon over his lips or his eyes or anything else of his again. Guard is a bad guy, a bad man, not worthy of your attention. You will not give in to this unhealthy infatuation. All this stops right now. You hear me, Rach? Right now.”
And it worked. Four days had passed since then, and we’d experienced zero weird moments since. I’d concluded that it must’ve been that goofy name game. It’d made me relax too much around him. I needed to maintain my distance, so I would. I went back to the song I’d been composing in my head.
I tried not to remember how effortless talking to him had been, how I felt like I could trust him when I knew I couldn’t. I tried to ignore the charge of electricity I felt every time I was around him, one that made him feel familiar to me, like I knew him even though I didn’t.
Even if every night from then on—every single night—those lips and crystalline green eyes haunted my dreams in the best way possible.
10
Christoff
Rachel and I had been tucked away on this island for a week, and my odd awareness of her had only increased. I didn’t think it possible for me to feel what I was feeling, but it whacked me on the skull so hard that I couldn’t deny it. There were sparks between us.
I’d never seen this coming. I hadn’t foreseen us being so…compatible. That day when we were goofing off playing the name game, being together with her felt as natural as if I’d known her all my life. I’d never experienced something like this with anyone else. None of my past relationships had prepared me for such an eventuality.
Not that this was a relationship. It couldn’t be. Rachel and I weren’t lovers who’d gone off together on an island getaway. Her father was the scum of the earth. He’d taken so much from me that I couldn’t even put an amount on it. The cost of the damage had been too great.
Still, I wanted to understand what she thought about things and discover what made her tick. I wanted to learn every small detail about her life and witness each of her idiosyncrasies. How could the man who’d made my life into a nightmarish wasteland have a daughter with so much heart and soul?
Which made the part when she informed me she’d be taking over Brisbane Industries someday almost demoralizing to hear. Like me, Rachel lit up when she had the chance to be creative. She wasn’t some stiff businessperson, she had other skills and talents that would be wasted if she followed the path her parents had laid out for her.
And Rachel seemed nothing whatsoever like her father. When she was relaxed, she had this joyfulness around her that made me forget my anxieties and woes. She and I had similar interests and senses of humor. She’d made jokes about comic book heroes, for God’s sake. In my twenty-eight years on this planet, I’d never met a woman so on my wavelength.
But it didn’t matter. Even though lately she’d backed away and kept a careful distance between us, I still caught myself studying her. Thinking about her. Fantasizing about her. It was a good thing our bedrooms were on opposite sides of this hideaway.
The worst part was that I could tell she was as affected by this sparking phenomenon as I was. That fateful night of our game, she’d laughed with me, gotten close to me, touched me. And the more she did it, the more I wanted her to do it. I began to work out scenarios in my head where she required my assistance with something that would require our close proximity. Like maybe we needed to check out the water temperature together in the shower. Preferably naked.
Jesus.
The fact that she was forbidden fruit only made me crave her more.
What frightened me the most was that the attraction wasn’t merely physical. At least not on my end. I liked Rachel. As a person. A lot. I’d anticipated meeting this spoiled-rotten brat of a girl and instead I’d found this lovely woman with warm eyes and a guileless, yet seductive smile. I didn’t even think she realized how seductive that smile of hers was. How seductive she was.
Rachel was all flaming red hair, alabaster skin, and rich green eyes I could easily drown in. I didn’t think I’d mind much if I went too far under and couldn’t resurface, either. What a way to go.
She’d been avoiding me, though. Staying away and timing her meals so they wouldn’t coincide with mine. Maybe that’s why it surprised me so much to receive a delicate knock on my bedroom door early one morning. After several days of dancing around our shared temporary living space, she’d come right to my door.
I opened it, taking her in. She had no perfume here, and seven days of washing had removed all scents but the one she was born with, yet she still smelled subtly sweet. It reminded me of a cross between sugar and honey. She kept her gaze on this knot in the wood of my doorframe, studying it instead of meeting my gaze, her fingers doing the same strumming thing they’d been doing the other day.
“Do you have paper and a pencil or pen? I’m going stir crazy and I…” She looked up, her line of sight immediately fixating on the view out of my window. Since this place had been built into the basalt and was partially subterranean, the front room—mine—contained the only visible window.
The sun had begun to rise, its steep ascent casting yellow light over the greenery and bare rock of the island, the marine birds winging overhead, and the sapphire jewel of the Pacific glimmering beyond.
The expression on her face arrested me, made my heart twinge, even. She gazed outside with such a look of pure longing that I felt ten times worse than I had before. I was such a homebody, or may
be a work-body. I stayed inside much of the time, so lost inside my own head that sometimes I didn’t think about going outside for days or even weeks on end.
Clearly, Rachel was cut from a different cloth. I didn’t know if it was nature and the great outdoors calling to her, or the simple fact that she had been holed up in here without reprieve, but her face expressed so much need that I couldn’t not give her what she wanted. Only in that moment did I comprehend that I should’ve shared this with her sooner. It’s not like she could get away. Why hadn’t I thought about taking her out there before?
“We’re on an island,” I told her, and her eyes widened. “It’s pretty tiny, but I can show you if you want.”
I didn’t know why I did it, but I offered her my hand. Maybe it was just an automatic response, a gesture when you wanted to take someone somewhere, but as soon as I made it, she accepted. Threading her fingers through mine, she continued to keep her gaze concentrated outside.
“I’d like that.”
Had the Wish Maker put us in a more northerly climate, the coldness and the wind would’ve felt harsh and unwelcoming, but since the island was right off the coast of southern California, the breeze was salty and gentle, the sun warm. In fact, as I stepped outside with her, she seemed to relax deeply.
I watched her, chagrined. She’d been cold inside. I’d seen Rachel rub her arms and huddle into herself more than once. I’d always been the type to run hot, not to bother with extra layers unless the environment grew truly glacial, but obviously, she was the opposite. I realized I hadn’t been paying attention.
Damn, I could be a self-absorbed asshole sometimes.
Rachel released my hand and jogged ahead of me, not as if to ditch me but from the pure elation over the balmy atmosphere. “It’s so beautiful here,” she called back to me, glimpsing over her shoulder and bestowing me with a smile so entrancing I caught my breath.
It was beautiful, but she outshined it all. The rising sun made her fair skin glow as if lit from within, and the vibrancy of her radiant wavy hair surrounded her face like a glossy curtain. I wanted to touch it, to lace my fingers through it and see if it felt as soft as it looked. I quickened my pace enough to catch up to her, my longer stride making short work of my goal, and she turned to me when I did, the lines of her face transported with joy.
Jesus, I ached to wrap my arms around her, to gather her up and hold her. With Hannah, I’d enjoyed her company—especially the sex—but I hadn’t felt this urge to connect with her, to bury my face in her hair just to see how it smelled. What was happening to me?
With effort, I behaved myself. There was an innocence to Rachel, a purity I’d never encountered in any other woman. I wouldn’t have imagined that I’d feel so drawn to it—to her—but I did. I’d realized before that I needed to be careful around her, but now it really hit home that things could go off the rails so easily. She made me want to drop my guard and be myself around her, and I couldn’t. This was a unique and horrifying circumstance, and I could never forget that.
As much as I might want to.
Instead, we meandered around, taking in the spectacular views of the Pacific. I showed her the butter yellow flowers blooming along the side of one hill and the seabirds that had congregated along the steep shoreline, undeterred by the sheer edge. The island was so miniscule that we could see the entirety of it simply by pivoting in a circle.
At one point, she traipsed over to one of the cliffs and stared down into the crashing waters below. Sharp boulders jutted up like shark teeth from the shallows, exposing just how foolhardy jumping in would be. The noise from the surf continued in this nonstop ebb and flow, making any conversation not held at a full yell difficult. Still, when she went too close to the edge for comfort, I told her to stop.
“Look,” she shouted back at me, pointing to the colony of sea lions basking in the sun on a collection of boulders. “Seals!”
“Rachel, wait,” I said again, at a higher volume.
She didn’t. She didn’t appear to hear me. So I rushed forward, visions of her plummeting into the deadly waves foremost in my thoughts. I grabbed onto her, and she gasped, looking up at me. Our faces had never been so close and my body responded, growing erect so fast I instantly began to ache.
“Saved your life,” I said in her ear. It was a joke. A throwaway from when I’d been a kid playing with my grandfather at the playground down the block from his home. He’d stand me up on a bench or picnic table then nudge me over, catching me and saying those words. I could still remember it clear as day.
But Rachel really could’ve lost her life if she’d stepped out too far, and the acknowledgement of that forced adrenaline through me like a Formula One racecar. We were against one another, our hips and torsos aligned, and almost as if someone else had taken me over, my fingers did what they’d been itching to do and combed through all that luscious hair.
She tilted her head back when they did, closing her eyes and letting her lips part, and I felt so much desire searing through my veins that I became lightheaded. Rachel was the most mesmerizing creature I’d ever come across, and for a split second my brain shut off. It forgot that I’d had her kidnapped. It forgot who she was or who her father was. It forgot about everything but the fact that we had this sizzling chemistry begging to be satisfied.
And in a moment of out-and-out insanity, I dropped my head forward and kissed her.
11
Rachel
His juicy lips pressed firmly to mine, the wild heat I’d been feeling between us ignited like an inferno. Throwing my arms around his thick shoulders, my hands drifted along the nape of his neck, playing with the ends of his black hair. He lowered his head to lathe his tongue along my throat and downwards, taking a minute to suckle the divot in my collarbone before rising up to open my mouth with his tongue.
My breasts were pushed up against his chest, and the nipples reacted by hardening into tight peaks, aching for more contact. The longer this kiss lasted, the more I felt pressure building low in my belly, and my panties became damp in an anticipation so overwhelming I lost all ability to think.
I knew myself as nothing but an assortment of sensations and nerve endings. His big hands caressed along my back and the material of the sweater I wore, and I wanted more, more, more. I dropped my mouth to the skin under his earlobe and down his neck, and when I felt him moan in his throat because of it, I felt something coming to life within me that I’d never felt previously.
I felt good. Strong. Impervious to harm. The power of it was hypnotic, like an out of body experience, and I sought out different parts of him that elicited that same response. Every time I succeeded in making him moan again, I held an inner celebration. I felt out of control and more in control than I ever had. It was a heady sensation.
I could get used to this.
I nibbled along his Adam’s apple, along his collarbone, and his bottom lip, making his arms cinch down around me as if afraid I’d pull away. I wouldn’t, though, didn’t want to. If anything, I wanted him to pull me even closer, until we melded into one.
I yanked at his expensive suit jacket, pulling it off and down to expose his t-shirt underneath; today’s was red with a yellow lightning bolt. But I could see what I hadn’t up till now, the defined musculature concealed beneath it, muscles I wanted to touch more than I wanted to breathe. He let me shove it over his head, and my God, it was even better than I’d suspected. His skin tone was slightly darker than mine and smooth, gleaming in the sun. The tips of my fingers outlined the divot between his pectorals, the ridges along his obliques, and the perfect six-pack of his abdomen before dipping inside his pants under his belt.
The slacks gapped a little at his narrow waist, making it easy to reach inside, and he gasped when I touched the long, hard length of him, filling me with pride. We were standing outside and exposed to the world, but because we appeared to be in the middle of nowhere—we could’ve been on another planet for all I knew—it didn’t feel like an exhibition.
Instead, it felt thrilling and completely serene, as if we were the first man and woman ever created. Or the last two left.
“Are you warm enough now?” he asked me, and I nodded.
I didn’t feel anything but warm anymore. In fact, I felt overheated, and yanked my sweater over my shoulders to rid myself of it. Then, I removed the long-sleeved shirt I’d layered on. I noticed how the sea breeze felt on my bare skin, and I took a second to enjoy it before unclasping the front closure of my bra and stripping it off, too.
He stared at me as if transfixed, and that powerful feeling returned. I remembered the term suddenly, one Alicia had mentioned on occasion. Empowered. I felt empowered. Triumphant. After being the good little girl, the devoted and obedient daughter for so long, doing exactly what I felt like was more intoxicating that I ever would’ve imagined it to be.
Right now, I wasn’t Rachel Brisbane, next in line to run Brisbane Industries and one of the heirs of the Brisbane fortune. I was simply a woman high on her own sexually-charged power, and even though I didn’t even know this man’s name, I felt like I knew him on some intrinsic level. The connection between us, ironic as it might be, felt almost spiritual in nature. Beyond something the rational brain could comprehend.
And I was going with it. I felt like I owed it to myself. I deserved it. I deserved to feel something just for me, to live for myself in this moment. I did something I’d always dreamed of doing but never had the nerve to try. I began to massage my own breast and watched to see what my lover would do.
He swallowed, his throat working deliciously as his gaze latched onto what my hands were doing to my nipples. Then, I paused for long enough to remove my jeans, socks, shoes, and panties. We still stood not far from the ledge, the obsidian rock stretched out beneath our feet, and I noticed how warm its surface felt. Finding a flat spot, I settled into a seated position and opened my legs.