by Robyn Nyx
She thought about her own patterns. How she’d slipped into a world where she no longer truly interacted with others in anything other than a superficial way. She’d spent years denying any connection with another, but she couldn’t deny Elodie. This was something unique, a passion and emotion she’d read about but never experienced. Before Elodie, they were just words written by long-dead poets and movie mavens. Now they were words Elodie had matched with emotions. And she’d knocked on her door so hard, Madison wasn’t just prepared to open it, she wanted to build a new house around her.
She saw Elodie leave Ice and her group of agents and start to jog toward her. Madison’s heart was hammering at her chest, and her breathing quickened. Apparently, love feels like a fucking heart attack.
Elodie pulled her into a tight embrace from the side, carefully avoiding her damaged wrist. “Hey you.”
Madison smiled fondly at what seemed to have become their familiar refrain. “Hey you.” Elodie looked tense. Her whole body seemed ready for action, ready to bolt. She figured it was a natural state of being for a soldier after a battle. Maybe it took time to come down.
“Are you okay?”
Elodie laughed mildly. “Am I okay? How about you? You’re good?”
“A broken wrist and a few scratches, but other than that, I’m fine.”
“So you don’t like to complain even when you’re in obvious agony?”
“You’ll soon learn that.”
A light smile played on Elodie’s lips. “I want to learn everything about you.”
Madison pulled the flower from her jean pocket. “This is for you.” She handed over the squished, limp bloom and hoped Elodie would see beyond its marred appearance and to its allegorical value.
Elodie smiled slightly at the flower and without looking up said, “You’re ready for more than friendship and fucking?”
“The moment your lips covered mine, you claimed me.”
Elodie’s shoulders relaxed and she looked relieved. “So, where do we go from here?”
“Where do you want to go?” I need to know how you feel about me.
“Back to my place?” She smiled and raised her eyebrow, and Madison saw something different from the trademark movie smile. Something deeper. But I have to be sure.
“To fuck? Is that all?” Elodie opened her mouth to say something but looked away. “Tell me…”
“I’m scared. I want you. I want us, but I hurt people, eventually.”
“I’m tough. I’m not going to shatter like a mishandled Christmas bauble, baby.” Madison took Elodie’s face in her hand and kissed her deeply, trying to convey the depth of her feelings.
“There’s so much at stake. I’m petrified of fucking this up and seeing you walk away from me.”
“As long as we turn toward each other, and not away, we’ll be okay.” She could feel Elodie needed to say something else, something more. She wanted to open her mouth and pull the words from her throat. “Tell me…”
“Tell you?” A long, heavy pause. “If you don’t know I’m in love with you by now, your emotional intelligence doesn’t match your IQ.”
Wow. “I don’t think I’ve ever been insulted at the same time as someone declaring their love for me.”
“Then let me take you home and apologize…”
Chapter Thirty-six
It was bad form to disrupt a filming schedule, but Jules had been exceptionally understanding and had told Elodie to take as much time as she needed. The movie and her part would be waiting for her return. Elodie insisted Madison didn’t bring her cell, laptop, or even a book. The cell and laptop had been relatively easy to wrestle from her—the demand of no books had been infinitely harder to enforce.
“La dolce far niente, babe, the sweetness of doing nothing,” Elodie said as she pulled the books from Madison’s hand luggage.
“That sounds like some new age bullshit.”
“Nope, not bullshit, truth. If you don’t concentrate on anything else, your book, my movie contract; if you don’t listen to music, or even the sounds around you, what surfaces is pure life. Your feelings of the moment, good or bad, joy or despair. Your true self emerges.”
“So what’re your feelings right now?”
“Honestly?”
“We’re not doing anything else…”
“Gratitude. Euphoria. I feel complete. You fill in the pieces I didn’t even know were missing.”
Madison enveloped her in a snug embrace and kissed her chest, careful to avoid her healing knife wound. “You’re getting good at this honesty thing.”
*
“Do you realize how clichéd it is to have your own private island?”
“I’ll have you know it’s taken years of hard work to develop this imbued sense of cliché. And anyway, you don’t seem to mind the seclusion it affords.” Elodie patted Madison on her bare ass. She’d found the privacy immensely freeing and had taken to walking around completely naked most of the time, which made it so much easier to tumble into bed…or onto the huge suede couch…or into the beach cabana. Things they’d spent the past week doing a lot of.
Madison shifted slightly and grimaced.
“Your wrist?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty sore today.”
“I bet finishing that article before we left didn’t exactly aid its recovery,” Elodie chastised her gently. She flipped Madison onto her back with ease, taking the pressure from her injured arm, and followed the curves of her body with her fingers.
“It had to be done. I didn’t want someone else writing my exclusive.”
Madison wriggled beneath her touch. Watching her squirm in such obvious delight turned Elodie on more than she could articulate.
“God, woman, you’re so fucking sexy…No one else could have written your story. You’re the one those crazy bitches kidnapped, and speaking of clichés, you lived to tell the tale.” She pressed her lips to Madison’s stomach and began a trail of light kisses down her inner thighs, all the way to her petite feet. “I seem to be developing a fetish for your feet,” she whispered, as she adjusted Madison’s toe ring and kissed each digit. “No, scratch that. I’m just developing a fetish for you, period.”
“You’re just desperate, period, and it’s contagious. You’re making me feel like a horny teenager.” Madison’s hips rose from the daybed, and she sighed. “You know the magazine wanted the first instalment before Therese went to trial. I had to get it done.”
Elodie worked her way back up Madison’s thighs to her breasts. She straddled her and tenderly shifted Madison’s stray locks from her eyes. She usually straightened her hair to within an inch of its life, but had succumbed to Elodie’s pestering and let her hair remain in its natural curls after it had gotten wet when they’d had sex in the ocean under the moonlight. Elodie was discovering she had a romantic side that she couldn’t control. “That trial will be a long way off. The CIA is still tracking down everyone named in your documents, and the warden of the prisons where she was going to harvest the convicts’ organs has completely disappeared. Add that to the additional charge of the first-degree murder of her cellmate, and it’s going to take a while for the prosecution to get all their ducks in a row.”
Madison laughed and tried to push Elodie off with her good hand, to no avail. “You’re just showing off with your clichés now…and your rock-solid abs.” She traced the ridges of Elodie’s stomach with a look that was both appreciative and lascivious. “Ash said he’d keep me up to date, but now that I’m stranded on this island with you, I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Ice will let us know what’s going on. It’s a federal case now, anyway, so Ash won’t know much more than he already does.” Elodie took Madison’s hand and placed it over her heart. “But your words wound me, sweet one. Do you feel like you’re still a kidnap victim?” She smirked mischievously. “If it’d make you feel more comfortable in my custody, I could tie you down…”
“You’re dirty…” Madison’s beautiful blu
e eyes closed for a moment, and Elodie knew she was picturing it.
“You like me that way.”
“And you? How do you feel about me?”
“I really like you.”
Madison scoffed and laughed. “You better do more than really like me.”
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
Madison pulled Elodie close to her as best she could with one arm. “Because I’m giving you my everything, so like isn’t really going to cut it.”
Elodie nestled in to Madison’s chest. She couldn’t get close enough. “What if I told you I loved you and you didn’t take it as an insult? What if I said I can see forever with you? What if—”
“What if you looked me in the eye and said it?”
Elodie lifted her head and stared into the depth of Madison’s soul. My soul mate. “I want to lose and find myself in your eyes. I love you, Mads, like I’ve never loved before, like I never believed I could love.”
“Baby. I love you too…kiss me and never stop.”
Elodie cupped Madison’s face in her hands and kissed her, hard and intense. “I’ll never stop. All the kisses in the world are never enough, but these are the kisses with my heart in them. And my heart is yours, always.”
About the Author
Robyn Nyx is an avid shutterbug and lover of all things fast and physical. Her writing often reflects both of those passions. She writes lesbian fiction when she isn’t busy being the chief executive of a UK charity. She lives with her soul mate and fellow scribe—they have no kids or kittens, which allows them to travel to exotic places at the drop of a hat for “research.” She works hard to find writing time, when she’s not being distracted by blue skies and motorbike rides.
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