Desire: A Contemporary Romance Box Set

by R. R. Banks

  One of Hunter's hands slid up my thigh and onto my belly so that he could hold me down. I could feel his breath growing closer to my body and I knew exactly what he had been thinking. He leaned forward and just the tip of his tongue glided up through my folds. His forwardness was so unexpected and his touch so concentrated that the sensation was almost unbearable and I felt myself melting into his touch.

  Hunter drew another long, deep lick through me, and then focused the tip of his tongue on my taut clit. He glided his tongue around the edge of the pearl that he had coaxed forward, before flicking his tongue across it directly again. The deliberate, feathery pattern started me toward climax. I felt delicious, tight pleasure building throughout my belly, thighs, and hips, and let my eyes drift closed again so that I could luxuriate in the feeling. I hoped I wouldn’t finish too soon, not wanting to lose any of the delirious pleasure. Hunter's other hand left my thigh and slid toward my center and two fingers slipped inside of me and I lost all control.

  I cried out and surged up. Hunter hovered over me so that I could wrap around him. I clung to him, gasping into his neck as I rode the final waves of my climax.

  “Hunter,” I panted, “that was amazing."

  Hunter kissed along the side of my neck and into the curve of my shoulder, and I could feel him smile against my skin. The tongue that had just brought me tumbling into oblivion slipped out and glazed across my skin. I felt safe and protected in his arms, as if all of the danger that we had faced together no longer existed, but I didn’t want to fall asleep yet. I didn’t want to let this be the end. I needed to continue, to push him beyond this place and into everything that I knew he was capable of.

  I turned Hunter around and pushed him down onto his back. His thick, impossibly hard cock rose up and I accepted it eagerly. Wrapping my hand firmly around the base, I stroked his erection a few times until his eyes closed and I felt his hand clench on my thigh. I didn’t want the chance that his desire was lessening, and I reached forward to run my other hand down his body, appreciating every exceptional cultivated inch. I wanted to please him as much as he had just pleased me, and I dipped my mouth down to run the tip of his cock over my lips as I had fantasized about in the water. I indulged myself in the smooth, silky feeling of his soft, spongy head and the salty-sweet taste of the fluid that dripped from the slit onto my tongue. Hunter drew in a shuddering breath and I grinned.

  I opened my mouth and brought Hunter's cock in to glide against my tongue and settle at the back, nestling at the entrance to my throat. As I explored every ridge and vein, I sought to memorize the feeling of him, wanting to be able to call back this very moment whenever I longed for him, which I knew would be far more frequently than I wanted to admit to myself in that moment. I sucked him deep, allowing him to dip into my throat as I reveled in the rumbling, primal sound of his groan.

  Hunter's back arched up off of the rocks and he let out an even deeper growl. His hand cupped the back of my head and I felt him hesitate. I paused, wanting him to guide me, to direct me into the pace that he wanted so that he could achieve the exact pleasure that he desired. I wanted to empower him, to show him the strength and beauty of his body, and the way that he could give and receive such exceptional delights. He seemed to understand and began to direct my head so that my mouth slid up and down his cock in a smooth rhythm that I knew he wouldn’t be able to handle for very long.

  Just as I expected, it was only seconds before he pushed back on my shoulder to stop me and guide me away from his body.

  "Are you alright?” I asked.

  He sat up and I leaned out of the way as he clambered to his feet. He crossed the plateau and I watched as he ducked behind a large boulder near the edge. A second later he reappeared, the metal box from the beach tucked under his arm. He brought it over and set it on the ground beside me, flipping the top open to reveal the collection of condoms inside. Hunter reached in and grabbed one of them. He met my eyes and I smiled at him encouragingly. He glanced down at his cock and then back at me. I reached out and plucked the packet from his fingers, peeling it open and slipping the condom from inside. I sat up and nestled the condom on the tip of his cock, then gradually rolled it down to the base of his shaft.

  When it was in place, I released him and lay back. Hunter positioned himself so that he was in between my legs and reached for my hips, pulling me toward him. I gasped as he tilted my hips up so the tip of his cock nuzzled my core. With only a brief moment of hesitation, Hunter sank inside me, his eyes closing as he savored the feeling. He held himself still, getting accustomed to the experience, then eased forward more. My body welcomed him, but I suddenly felt my heart surge and break at the same time.

  I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to let the emotions and thoughts of all that I was hiding from Hunter take over. I just wanted this, all of what he was offering me and all that I could give him. Hunter’s hips rolled against me so that he sank deeper until finally he was settled as far as he could. When my body had opened fully to him, he sat back on his knees and held my hips. The position gave him greater control and leverage so he could increase his speed and intensity.

  The fresh, salty air around us began to fill with Hunter’s deep, unbridled groans and I could see that he was losing control. I reached up and ran my hands down his body, giving in completely to the pure sensual pleasure of his muscles. His thrusts became harder and faster, pushing me into my own spiral, and soon I was gasping for breath, crying out as my body clamped down on him and I tumbled into an orgasm even more powerful than what he had already achieved in me on the beach.

  As my body pulled his deeper into me with my intense spasms, Hunter let out a strangled cry. I felt his cock give a hard pulse and then a cascade of throbbing within me. He remained poised over me as the most powerful rush of his climax flowed over him and then he fell forward, swallowing hard as his body began to relax. I wrapped my hand around the nape of his neck, stroking it tenderly with my thumb as I held him to me. I cherished the delicious weight of him, making me feel blissfully encapsulated, distanced from everything else, able, if only for the time, to pretend that this world could truly be mine.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Gavin

  Two days had passed since I had crashed on the second island and I was starting to greatly regret leaving the raft behind and starting on my quest across the rocks. This is not what I was supposed to be doing with my life. I didn’t spend all of those years in the military, beating myself into the ground to accomplish the special forces standings and learn about what I was supposed to do if I ended up in this type of circumstance only to end up here because I had fallen into this career path. If I hadn’t been discharged…

  I forced my mind out of that train of thought and focused instead on the rocks ahead of me.

  The endless fucking rocks that never fucking ended because apparently the whole fucking shore was made of fucking rocks.

  Fortunately, I had managed to find a few narrow trickles of water that cracked through the rocks, but the meager food that I had been able to scrounge hadn’t been enough to make me feel not like shit and the sun beating down on me wasn’t helping circumstances. I sat in the shadow of a large boulder and took the shirt that I had dipped into the water of the last creek out of the waistband of my pants to press it to the back of my neck. It cooled me enough that I didn’t feel like I was going to die right then and I closed my eyes, resting my head against the boulder. Just as it always did when I had too much time in the quiet to myself, my mind wandered back to my military training and to the excruciating training exercises that we had gone through, then to the night that it all changed and the morning I stood in front of my commander, facing the discharge that had been my greatest nightmare.

  I opened my eyes, letting the glint of the sunlight bouncing off of the minerals in the rocks around me to dissolve the image in my mind. There wasn’t anything more for me to do but keep going, so I peeled myself up off of the rocks and continued on. I figured a
t some point I would either loop back around to the beach or die, and either way I would have finished something.

  I combed my hair back off of my forehead and used my hand to block the sun out of my eyes so I could look around. Like I did what felt like a thousand times a day, I scanned the horizon for ships, didn’t see any, looked up to the sky to look for planes, didn’t see any, and looked down at the jungle for predators who might want to have me for a snack. I didn’t see any of those, either, and I kept walking. It could have been minutes or it could have been hours, the whole time thing had become pretty arbitrary since my entire life had become trying to survive on the second island that I had ended up on in the course of a week. That was a personal life accomplishment that I wasn’t really thrilled that I had managed. The next time I looked up, however, I noticed something different ahead of me.

  It was such a shock after seeing essentially the same thing over and over again for two days that I stopped in place and just stared ahead of me. I closed my eyes tightly, wondering if it was possible to see a mirage on an island like this. I knew that a desert island wasn’t exactly the same thing as a desert, but maybe there were enough similarities that when a person got tired and overheated enough they could have the fun of some hallucinations to usher them on into the death a little more gently. Of course, two days of scarce eating wasn’t really enough for me to be at that point, but that explanation seemed far more viable than the other possibility. I squeezed my eyelids down until I saw lights bursting against the backs of them and then opened my eyes to check what I thought that I had seen.

  Yep. There it was.

  You have got to be kidding me.

  ****

  Virgil

  “What do you mean she’s missing?”

  I gripped the windowsill so hard that I felt like my knuckles were going to break. I kept my eyes trained through the panes at the darkness ahead of me, knowing that if I turned around I was going to strangle the men who were standing behind me. There were chairs in my office, but I hadn’t invited them to sit and they wouldn’t dare do something that I hadn’t offered them. They would stand just as they were, hovering close to the door, on into Armageddon if I required it of them, and at that moment I felt like that was an entirely possible situation.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” one of the men said.

  “I don’t want to hear that you’re sorry,” I growled. “I want to know what happened.”

  “We tried to get her.”

  At that point, I whipped around to face them, not really caring if I did end up throttling either one of them.

  “What do you mean you tried?” I demanded. “You’ve tried a dozen times. I can understand some of those failures. Getting her out of the mall after the fuss that she put up would have brought far too much attention. But this? This is absurd. You were on a cruise ship. Floating around in the middle of the ocean. She literally couldn’t get anywhere.”

  “She jumped off.”

  The man I only knew as Blue and didn’t care to know any more about said the words as if he thought it was his only chance to say them. I blinked a few times as what he said sank in.

  “She what?” I asked, my voice lower now.

  “She jumped off of the cruise ship. We chased her and the man that she was running with up onto one of the decks. I thought that we were going to be able to get her, but they jumped.”

  “They jumped?” I repeated.

  I knew that I was aggravating him, but I didn’t care. I bought and sold him. He would stand there and say what I wanted to to him and he would take it. He really had no choice.

  “The two of them jumped,” he said. “They jumped down into the water and swam to another boat.”

  “What boat?” I asked.

  “There was a smaller boat,” the other man, the one I referred to as Green, told me, taking his turn in trying to explain their epic failure. “It was a few yards away from the cruise ship and they got onboard.”

  That didn’t make any sense. Other vessels weren’t allowed to get near commercial cruise ships. It was illegal and could cause serious problems for whoever had allowed their boat to wander too close to the path of the liner.

  “What did it look like?” I asked.

  “Just a small boat,” Green said. “Large enough for a cabin, but not as big as commercial boats.”

  “So not a tour boat or a fishing vessel?”

  “No.”

  I tried to process what they were telling me had happened. It sounded absolutely preposterous. Yet, the call that I had gotten from the cruise security team had mentioned that there had been an accident and I needed to meet the ship at the next port. Could the men be telling me the truth? Could Eleanor have actually evaded them yet again by throwing herself down into the ocean? I knew her well enough to know that she didn’t like the water and only went on cruises because she knew that the decks, particularly the luxury decks where she always reserved her cabins, were well above the surface of the water. They had mentioned that a man was running with her. Who could that be, and why did he jump with her?

  “You have to find her,” I said. “I don’t care what you have to do. You find out what happened to that boat and where she is now. I’m supposed to meet the cruise ship in two days and when I do, I want to make sure that she really is missing, if you understand what I mean. We don’t need her talking to the authorities finding out what possessed her to throw herself off of a perfectly good cruise ship.”

  Both men nodded solemnly and I dismissed them, sinking down into my desk chair and clawing my hands through my hair. How could this have gone so wrong? I had no choice but to find her. With any luck, she never made it out of that boat, but if she did, I needed to make sure that she never had the opportunity to tell her story.

  ****

  Gavin

  “Please let someone live there. Please let someone live there. Please let someone live there. Please let someone live there.”

  I still hadn’t encountered anyone to listen to me, but I had been talking to the jungle for two days now and it had been a pretty good listener so I figured I would just keep going. I had climbed down off of the rocks and was now moving as fast as I could through the trees in the direction of the shack that I had seen from the ridge. I couldn’t believe it when I had seen it and now that I was down on the ground it was concealed by the trees, making me worry that I really had imagined it, or that I was going in the wrong direction and wouldn’t actually be able to get to it.

  A vine hanging from a tree tried to grab me and I swatted at it, quickly realizing when it moved out of the way that it wasn’t a vine but a massive snake dangling down in hopes of scooping a snack from the jungle floor.

  “Oh, shit.” I said, ducking out of the way and starting at a faster clip through the trees. “Please let somebody live there. Please let somebody live there.”

  I was nearly to a clearing ahead of me when a figure jumped out in front of me. I almost swung at it before I realized that it was a man so wrinkled it was entirely possible that the jungle sun had turned him into a raisin.

  Almost not alive, but I’ll take it.

  “Are you alright, son?” the man asked as I leaned over and rested my hands on my knees to draw in a few calming breaths.

  I shook my head. I had actually intended on nodding, but apparently my mind had decided to mutiny and just go ahead with whatever it thought.

  “Lost,” I managed to say.

  “Well, I would say so,” he said. “I didn’t think that we had any neighbors around these parts.”

  “We?” I asked.

  “Of course. Me and the Mrs. Come on. I’ll introduce you. You look like you could use a cup of tea.”

  Tea?

  I straightened up and followed the crinkly man through the trees toward the clearing ahead. When we stepped out from the cover of the trees I immediately knew that I had seen what I thought that I had. The shack looked much larger when I was standing a few yards from it than it had from the v
antage point of the rocky ledge and I noticed signs that the man and his wife had been there for some time scattered across the clearing around it. There were baskets woven from leaves that were far more complex than the ones we had managed on the other island, stacks of cut stalks, and piles of fruit. A firepit to one side had a spit over it that held two large fish and a chunk of something that I could only assume was meat of some kind.

  We were a few steps away from the shack when a tiny woman who looked even older than the man came out holding another basket filled with what looked like loaves of bread.

  Here I was thinking I was a badass survivalist getting through the few days on the two islands and these two ancient people are just going about their lives, making baskets and baking bread and shit.

  “Well, hello,” the woman said with a cheery smile. “Who do we have here?”

  The old man looked at me, his face scrunched up as he searched his brain for the name that I hadn’t given him.

  “I’m Gavin,” I said, walking toward her with my hand extended.

  “Hello, Gavin,” she said, shaking my hand with the gusto of a woman who was no stranger to hard work, but the softness in her eyes of a grandmother that should be baking apple pie. “I’m Sophie, and this old coot who was so rude to not introduce himself is Edwin.”

  “It’s nice to meet both of you.” I didn’t think that I had ever said anything more sincere.

  “Can I get you some tea?”

  Again, with the tea.

  “That would be nice. Thank you.”

  I followed her around the side of the house toward another firepit. A pot was settled in the glowing embers and she reached for the leaf-wrapped handle. She poured boiling water into a worn cup and tucked a linen-wrapped teabag into it before handing it to me.