Or maybe that was just what he wanted to believe, since he was rapidly seeing no way to save the girl unless he did something about Gunderson.
“You don’t have to jack off, Vik. I told you, I’ll give her to you after I’m done,” Gunderson said quietly. “Or with us. Either way. I like a show, but this time I got to be in on the action.” He spared some attention for the girl, staring at her and licking his lips at the sight and then rubbing his stiffening cock through the material of his jeans. “Look at her, man.”
“I told you I don’t like to share.”
Gunderson jerked his head back to Vik at the comment, his lustful contemplation replaced by annoyance. After a career of keeping the dregs of the earth in line under his command, Gunderson recognized a challenge when he heard it. “Just for that, you arrogant fuck, I’m going to let all the rest of the assholes at her, maybe even at the same time, before you get your turn.”
The girl gasped between them.
Of all the things he thought he’d be crossing this maniac over, a damsel in distress was about the last of them.
“Now take her below.”
Gunderson issued the command casually, as if he had no doubt Vik would comply. And actually, Vik was planning to comply—figuring something would occur to him when he got her down below—until the girl took off at a run. Before either of them could stop her she had one foot on the opposite railing, preparing to dive into the ocean. Vik caught up to her at the very last second, whipping his arms around her waist and tumbling them both to the deck as she struggled wildly beneath him.
Half of him thought he should have let her jump, but given the height of the deck and the speed at which the yacht was travelling, she probably would have broken her legs and drowned. She was crying and kicking and he was having a hard time settling her when the both of them were suddenly drenched with water. Gunderson stood above them with an empty bucket, laughing.
“You wanted a swim, baby? I’ll give you a swim.”
Santiago and a few of the others formed a circle around them to watch the spectacle as Vik rolled to his feet, dragging the girl up with him.
“Oh, I like what I see,” Gunderson crooned, honing in on girl’s tits, her tee shirt now transparent with the water. “Forget about taking her downstairs, Vik. I’ll fuck her right now.” His hands went to his belt. “We’ll give the boys a show. What do you say, sweet cheeks?”
“I’ll kill you first.” The girl was soaking wet and panting but Vik, for one, almost believed her. The other men laughed.
Vik held fast to her wrist, but he would need to let her go if he was going to take on Gunderson. The question, though, was whether by doing so he’d be taking on the rest of them.
“Let me handle this,” he said to her in a low tone and she shot him a startled look.
“Hold her down, boys,” Gunderson instructed, his belt now undone.
Vik reached around to his knife in the back holder strapped to his jeans and whipped it out. “I wouldn’t take your dick out just yet, Gunny.”
Gunderson froze.
“I decided I really do want the girl for myself,” Vik said, brandishing the knife. “You don’t want to sell her to me, I’ll fight you for her.”
Gunderson digested that for a moment, but the thing about commanding the dregs of the earth was that it was important not only to recognize challenges, but to meet them, no matter how they escalated.
At least if a person wanted to keep commanding said dregs.
Gunderson extracted his own knife from its holder. “Okay by me, you stupid fuck. I gave you that whore back in Jakarta, but that’s just because I was getting my dick sucked regularly every day for a month or so before that. Now, we been out to sea a while and I don’t feel like letting you go first. You got to learn to play well with others sometimes, Vik. All the time you been with us, I don’t think you learned that too good.” He accompanied the admonition with assuming the crouching stance that often preceded a knife fight.
Vik glanced around at the rest of the crew, gesturing with the seven-inch-long blade that he hoped would see him through this. “A fair fight between you and me, Gunny? Or do you need all this backup?”
Gunderson laughed, starting to circle him. “You don’t think I can take you? Man, you are one arrogant bastard. Too bad because you’re going to be one dead bastard in two minutes. You done okay with us, Vik, but you’re starting to piss me off now. So unless you want to just stay out of the way now and not get all greedy—”
Even as he said it, Gunderson lunged and Vik jumped back, out of reach.
The other men went completely silent and a glance to the side told him Santiago had grabbed the girl’s arm. No need to, though. She looked as mesmerized as the rest of them.
“You’re making a big mistake here, Vik.”
Gunderson was good with a knife. Vik had seen it more times than he liked to remember. And he had no compunctions about knocking off one of his own crew, Bobby Vincent being exhibit A—although Vik supposed he had done the actual knocking off in that case.
But Gunny talked too much. All the time. Even in a fight. And that could turn out to be dangerous when confronted with an opponent who was good with a knife too.
Like him.
“You’re going to die for this whore, Vik? Why’s that? She remind you of your sweetheart back home? Your sister?”
Gunny continued to jabber as the two men circled each other.
“’Cause if it’s your sister, I have to say that’s kinky. I’d like to meet your sister, Vik. I’d show her a good time.”
Vik tuned him out. Nobody here but him and the knife in his hand and the knife in the other guy’s hand.
Not to mention he didn’t even have a sister.
Gunny lunged again, putting all of his considerable heft into it, and Vik just barely made it out of the way in time. The blade might have even sliced his shirt. If he couldn’t hear Gunderson’s pathetic attempts to bait him, though, he could for some reason hear one voice, small as it was. The girl’s. She squealed a little as he jumped out of the way and the reminder of her baited him more effectively than a thousand taunts from Gunderson could have.
He hooked his foot under one of Gunny’s as the big man was regaining his balance from the motion of the lunge and it was quick enough, thank God, to bring him down, hard, the sound of him falling to the deck like the thud of a tree trunk.
Without overthinking it, without thinking of it at all, as a matter of fact, Vik brought his knife down and sliced, the razor edge of the blade making short work of even the toughened skin of his opponent’s throat.
He hadn’t really faced up to the fact that he meant to kill Gunderson until he actually did it. But once he had, he knew there was nothing else he could have done. Gunderson wasn’t going to back down. It was a fight to the death. There was no such thing as a friendly knife fight with this crew and Gunderson could never let Vik live after he’d challenged his authority like this.
The dying man gurgled a little, clutching his throat as blood spurted out, and Vik watched him dispassionately. It was important at this moment to be as cold as possible. Having the others accept the verdict of the knife fight depended on it.
He glanced around at the rest of the men. “Anybody got anything to say?”
They didn’t. A minute later, Gunny’s hands dropped and the head he had been trying to lift conked down on the deck like the rest of him. At least the bastard had died quickly. That was more than a dozen of Gunny’s victims had gotten as far as Vik could tell.
The motorboat was still keeping pace with them, but if they could see what had happened he didn’t worry too much about that. They’d find out eventually and those particular crewmen weren’t any huge fans of Gunderson anyway. He wasn’t a guy who’d inspired loyalty.
Vik dragged the corpse to the side of the deck and with a mighty heave dumped him over the railing. He didn’t bother to watch him sink.
“Fucking Gunny got blood on the deck anyway,” Vik commented
with a look down at the purple-red puddle, wiping his knife on his jeans and then holding the clean blade out to the circle of men. “Anybody else want to fight me for the girl?”
Chapter Two
Silence greeted Vik’s question and Santiago hastily relinquished his grip on the girl’s arm.
“No? Okay then. She’s mine. Mine. Nobody else touches her. Understand?”
Santiago spoke for the group. “Got it.” He shrugged, with a little laugh. “Man, you are one possessive dude.”
Vik sheathed the knife and took the girl’s wrist again, addressing Santiago. “I take it Gunny was lying when he said he was the only one who knew where Visto was?”
Santiago hesitated.
“Because if he wasn’t lying, I might as well slit your throat now too. You and Gunny go back a long way and I don’t want to watch my back this whole time, especially if you can’t get us to our money.”
“I know where Visto is. I been there with Gunny before. And yeah, we went back a long time, but with Gunny that cuts both ways. I won’t be missing him or anything, if that’s what you mean.”
Vik took Santiago’s words at face value. If undercover work had taught him anything, it was that there really was no honor among thieves. And no respect, other than for the sheer brutality of the other man.
He nodded. “Okay. Good. So we stick to the original plan. Gunny being out of it just means more for us. We can split his share evenly. So what do you figure, a day or two for us to get there?”
“At least. Even at this speed.”
“So somebody helms at all times, got it?” They nodded. “Good. Now if nobody minds, I’m going to go fuck my prize.”
Vik tugged the girl with him down the stairs to the lower deck and she didn’t resist, in shock by now maybe. By the time he’d gotten her to one of the cabins and locked the door behind them, he had a lot of explaining to do. He just didn’t know how much he could.
* * * * *
Michael Reynolds buzzed his secretary. “Have you reached my father?”
“No. I’m sorry, Mr. Reynolds. We’re not able to get through to the yacht. The wireless must be out. Our emails keep bouncing back. And the Bangkok office has been trying to get them on the radio to patch us in, but they say there’s no answer. Given the time difference, perhaps they’re all sleeping.”
“Someone’s supposed to be manning the radio at all times.”
“Well, we’ll keep trying, sir.”
“See that you do, Miss Prentiss.”
“Oh and Mrs. Fischer’s here to see you.”
Great. All he needed—his temperamental soon-to-be ex-mistress. After a pause, he said, “Fine. Send her in.”
Michael came around from behind his desk. Tiffany Fischer looked as if she used every penny of her very lucrative divorce settlement from Michael’s best friend to keep herself young and beautiful and fit. Her gleaming blonde hair hung in curls to the tiny waist he knew she had hidden under her mink coat and the cheek she presented to him for a kiss was burnished like sun-kissed cream.
“Not that it’s not always nice to see you, Tiffany, but we’re sort of in the middle of a situation here. Samantha’s taken it into her head to elope with some idiot and Father’s swooped in and spirited her off to the South Seas somewhere.”
“I don’t know why you and your father squander so much attention on that silly girl.”
“That silly girl happens to have an IQ of 160.”
“Well, why does she keep flunking out of college then? Goodness, what is she, twenty-two or twenty-three and she hasn’t even graduated yet? And anyway, you should just go ahead and let her run off and get married. Who cares? It’s not as if she couldn’t always get a divorce.”
Tiffany, who was the recipient of several of them, ought to know.
“Perhaps because when she comes into her trust fund from our grandmother, she’ll inherit a significant sliver of the company and I don’t want that getting in the wrong hands. Not to mention, I don’t like the idea of these dopes taking Samantha for a ride.” He was almost twice his little sister’s age and, like all his brothers, not to mention his father, felt extremely protective of her, whether she liked it or not.
“Why you should defend her, I’ll never know. She hates you.”
“Yeah. Thanks for the reminder. I’m waiting for her to grow out of it.”
Tiffany shrugged off her mink coat—PETA didn’t scare her—and Michael worried at first that she might be naked under there. But the expanse of skin she bared just indicated an extremely low neckline to showcase one of her most appealing assets. Good. He didn’t have time for her theatrics. He needed those papers signed by his father and suddenly this father and daughter bonding exercise had put him out of reach.
“You look so tense, lover.”
Michael hated when she called him that, but after remarking on it a dozen times, he came to the conclusion that she was unteachable. Consequently, he never tried anymore.
“Isn’t there something I could do to make you feel better?”
Her seductive patter followed a well-worn path as well. Feeling better for a man always involved his penis in Tiffany’s book.
As she spoke, she unbuttoned her low-cut silk blouse, suitably red for the occasion of what was apparently a seduction. He sighed. He was tired of Tiffany, and although he found it kinder to break it off with a woman over a nice meal and maybe a parting diamond bracelet or two, perhaps her showing up here was a sign and he should just do it now.
“Tiffany, there’s something I’ve been meaning to speak to you about.”
When the red silk hit the floor, it turned out she had no bra on. God, she really did have magnificent tits. High and full and pink tipped. He’d noticed them more than once through her clothes or in a bikini top when she’d been married to his best friend, but did no more than that, his own personal code being what it was. He’d facilitate a woman’s adultery if he pleased, but never, ever when the husband was a friend of his.
But before the ink on Tiffany’s divorce papers was dry, he’d given her a call and the very first thing he did with her, before even kissing her lips, was to check out those tits and pay the proper amount of attention to them. Even now, after a few months, when the shine of his relationship with her had definitely worn off, he couldn’t help but admire her breasts.
As she well knew.
He perched a hip on his desk, one leg swinging off. He really should get the news of their breakup out to her, but just the sight of those tits was holding him back. She walked in between his legs and leaned over blatantly, bringing one of his hands to her hardening nipple and one of her hands to his hardening cock. He rolled her nipple with his thumb as she unzipped his slacks. He wasn’t quite tired of these, but unfortunately they were attached to the rest of her and the rest of her was quite annoying. If she dropped one more hint about the preposterous notion of him marrying her, he really would have trouble holding off laughing in her face.
He was never getting married. That was the advantage of having so many younger brothers. Let one of them get married and give Father the perfect heir he seemed to have been trying for with one new wife after another, until even he was too tired to try. No, Michael was never getting married.
It certainly wasn’t a prerequisite to enjoying connubial bliss, without the rings of course, in this day and age. He got more pussy than he could want. Not that he’d ever describe it as such out loud. In fact, he found things with women went more smoothly when he was silent on the subject altogether. But they should know, without him having to tell them, that a forty-year-old bachelor was not going to change his spots—although of course that was exactly what his father had done when he married his mother, barely twenty to his forty.
And look how that had turned out.
The extraction of his fully erect cock from his briefs brought Michael back to the moment. Miss Prentiss knew better than to walk into his office unannounced, but he wanted to save her the trouble of even getting u
p to knock should the need arise. Depressing the intercom to his secretary, he said, “No calls unless it’s my father and no interruptions otherwise, please.”
He’d cut the connection before she could get out her habitual “yes sir”. His full attention on Tiffany now, he pulled her up and closer so he could lick and nuzzle her breasts. A parting treat as it were. And indeed, her skin felt as silky and well-tended to as it always did. Her nipples as big and sweet. He sucked contentedly for a moment until her hand stroking his throbbing cock reminded him of one of Tiffany’s other wonderful qualities. She could give head like a trained professional.
With one last tonguing of her nipple, he urged her down lower until her head was right where he wanted it. She licked the tip of his cock delicately and then, eyes open and locked with his rapidly narrowing ones, she deep-throated him. He sucked in a breath at the exquisite sensation, his fingers clutched in her hair as he gave himself over to her expert ministrations.
Whether one part of his probably-not-really-functioning brain was still hung up on trying to get in touch with his father, or whether her ministrations were really too expert for her own good, Michael found himself coming mere minutes later. Way too fast under ordinary circumstances, but he did nothing to draw it out. Tiffany swallowed, as she always did, and then stood up as he quickly tucked his cock back into his pants.
She was right. He did feel better.
“Tiffany, there’s something we need to talk about…”
* * * * *
This cold green-eyed stranger had just murdered another man. Slit his throat and dumped him over the side of the yacht. As calmly as Justin might order another martini. And that wasn’t the most shocking thing. The most shocking thing was that Samantha was glad of it.
She groaned.
He had saved her from being raped, but that was apparently only so that he could rape her himself, without any interference and without any sharing. She swallowed, hard, looking around. Incredibly enough, the cabin he’d taken them to was her own. The very cabin her father had dragged her out of probably less than an hour ago. And in that time, her entire world had changed.
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