Samantha hadn’t moved. He noticed that was getting to be a pattern with her. It should make her seem more tractable, that he left her in one place and when he came back she was in exactly the same place, but it had the opposite affect somehow. It made her seem more intractable. As if she was a chess piece he was going to have to move around in order to win the game.
He dropped the towel casually on a chair and went to the side of the bed facing the door, the one opposite the lamp. It happened to be the side she was sitting on.
“Go on. Get in bed.”
She didn’t move.
“I’m not going to argue with you about this.” He heard a telltale hiccup and to try to ward it off, he offered, “Why don’t you go take a shower. You’ll feel better.”
“I’m fine.”
He leaned down and peeled the oversize tee shirt off her before she could react. He knew she wouldn’t be naked under it anyway and it was damn hot. She crossed her arms quickly over the camisole she was left in. “There, that’s better. I’d take those huge shorts off too, but I’m sure I’d have to wrestle you for that and I’m too tired. So just lie down and switch off the light.”
She scooted over on the bed, the better to stay out of his reach probably, but she made no move to turn off the lamp, just stared at him with those wide brown eyes, although at least they were dry now. He folded back the sheets on the bed and slid into it. The sheets were astonishingly luxurious compared to what he was used to, probably one thousand thread count. He turned the light off himself, reaching over her.
“Now shut up and go to sleep.”
After a minute, she lay down on top of the sheet.
“Underneath the sheet,” he grumbled, pleased a moment later when she obeyed him, although she left a wide space between them and turned her back to him.
That was fine with him. He followed suit, turning onto his side, faced away from her. He needed some time to think, since he hadn’t devoted much time to that in the shower as he pumped his cock dry to the thought of the lovely Samantha, mortified as she would undoubtedly be at the knowledge. He had to figure out what his next step in this mission should be.
He got about a minute of peace and quiet before it started up again. That choked, suppressed version of sobbing. Low, but discernible. And for some reason, understandable as it was, it bugged the shit out of him.
He didn’t know whether to comfort her or to really give her something to cry about.
He chose the middle road instead, muttering, “If you’re going to cry, go in the shower and do it.”
She hiccupped, apparently trying to stifle the sound, which just made it worse.
“Oh no, that’s right,” he needled her. “You’re afraid to go in the shower because you’re afraid I’ll pounce on your naked body.”
“Shut up,” she managed to say, swallowing her tears still by the sound of it.
He sat up, glaring at her hunched-over shoulders at the top of the tiny little corner of the bed she had allowed herself, apparently convinced it was paramount that their bodies never be within two feet of each other. “Will you go in the shower and just have a good cry already? Get it all out so we can both get some sleep here. I promise I won’t join you in the shower and I promise I won’t peek.”
She sat up too and glared right back, though the effect was muted by the near-darkness in the room. “Stop acting like I’m being ridiculous.”
“You are being ridiculous. If I had wanted to rape you, I would have already.”
“Don’t pretend you don’t want to. You keep pointing that, that thing,” she gestured at the tented bed covers over his lap, “at me. How could I not notice that?”
Shit, he’d barely noticed getting an erection again himself. What the hell did she expect though?
“I didn’t say I don’t want to fuck you. Obviously, I want to fuck you. Who wouldn’t want to fuck you? I said I don’t want to rape you. And I won’t. And just for the record, in case you don’t know much about men, honey, it’s hard to control getting an erection sometimes. It just doesn’t work that way. Can you control when your nipples harden?”
She gasped in outrage. “I don’t equate a physical reaction when I’m cold with a—”
“Bullshit. It’s not exactly cold around here in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Go to hell!”
He glanced down. “They’re hard right now.”
“I’m mad!”
He laughed. “You’re turned on.” He had no idea whether she really was or not. He was just trying to make the point and didn’t feel like bringing up the possibility she might be wet. That did seem a little forward. Not to mention he’d be dreaming to think she would be under the circumstances, as she saw them anyway. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of when we’re in bed together, in a position that would normally signal sex. Your body prepares for it. So does mine. It doesn’t mean we’re going to have it.”
She scrambled off the bed. “I am not turned on!”
He was undoubtedly just trying to bug her and she was annoying him, big-time, not least of which because she was a complication he just did not need. But he was tired of whatever game they were playing. He needed to stop playing it so he could think or get some sleep or both.
“I get that you’re a rich girl. I get you’ve probably never had anything bad happen to you in your whole privileged life before this.”
She audibly swallowed a sob. “You kidnapped me!”
“Bad things happen to good people. Didn’t you ever hear of that? They even happen to mediocre spoiled brats sometimes.”
“Don’t you make me out to be the bad guy. You’re the bad guy.”
“Christ! Would you shut up for five seconds?” She did and then he found he didn’t know what to say. He really didn’t want her to fall to pieces. He really did want to get her out of this safely. He leaned back against the headboard and tried again. “I’m sorry you got caught up in this. I am. It isn’t fair. But it is what it is and you just have to trust me that I’ll do everything I can to help you get out of this.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Because you have absolutely no other alternative. You’re not dead. You haven’t been raped. So I’m doing pretty well so far, aren’t I?”
“The night is young,” she muttered.
“Look, get over yourself, Samantha. There’s more happening here than whether every guy on this boat, me included, is lusting after your luscious little body. We are, okay? Big surprise. It’s not the worst thing in the world.”
“What is happening here?” she whispered.
He contemplated how much he should tell her. Given her apparent inability to playact, he figured not much. So he said, “What’s happening is we’ve been contracted to bring this yacht to a very important guy—”
“A criminal.”
“Yeah. Like the rest of us, only bigger, and more dangerous. And when we deliver this yacht to his, er, his headquarters, I guess you’d say, he’s going to let us in on his operation, which is very secretive and very lucrative. That’s what’s happening.”
“The man you killed, won’t this other man be mad at you for doing that?”
He snorted. “Gunderson worked for him, but I don’t think his death is going to come as any shock. He’s not going to care as long as he gets what he wants, which at the moment is a very luxurious yacht that he can use for, ah, things.”
“And the others? They don’t care that you’ve killed that man? Gunderson?”
He shrugged. “You saw. They only care in the sense that they don’t plan on being next.”
“And how do I fit in?”
“You don’t.”
“Then couldn’t you just, I don’t know, drop me off somewhere before you got to this headquarters place? It was the other man who wouldn’t let me go on the lifeboat with my father and the rest. Now that he’s dead—”
“Things have to make sense, Samantha. As far as the others are concerned, I killed Gunderson
to keep you for myself. For greed and for lust. If I tried to drop you off somewhere, to let you go, the others would…wonder. I can’t have that.”
She watched him. “Maybe you’re just a good guy.”
“Believe me. That would be the worst conclusion for them to draw. For me and for you.”
“Is that the reason, though?”
“I told you, use whatever backstory makes you happy.” But because he wanted her to feel better—incredibly enough, even gave a shit about how she felt—he added, “I won’t hurt you, Samantha. I won’t rape you and I promise to do everything I can to keep you safe. Whether I’m a good guy or not doesn’t change that. Besides,” he added, “your father very well may catch up with us before we get through with this. Probably will.”
She looked doubtful, and then said quietly, “I hope so.”
Personally, he didn’t know what to hope for. He wanted her safe. He’d jeopardized his whole mission just so that she would be. But he wanted to complete the mission too.
A royal cluster all around.
And fuck, to make things worse, he did want her—not that that was relevant to anything. But it didn’t exactly put him in a better mood.
Unexpectedly, she said, “I guess I will go take a shower.” She turned back right before she headed in to the bathroom. “But I warn you, I’m locking the door.”
A minute later he heard the shower. Good. That was what he’d been aiming for anyway. It would do her good. And he wasn’t going to join her or peek at her.
Of course, he hadn’t said anything about fantasizing about her.
He resisted it for a while. A good five minutes at least, though it felt like five hours. But then he gave in and his hand went down to his hard-on, freeing it from his shorts.
* * * * *
Damien Reynolds had considered it an act of God to come across the yacht, The Victory, just three or four hours after being marooned on the little raft. Not surprised by acts of God in his favor—like all extremely rich men, he considered immense good fortune to be no more than his due—he immediately explained his situation to the captain of the ship, a fellow who introduced himself as Ryan Chaps.
The explanation he got in return infuriated him.
“Are you trying to tell me that your man allowed my daughter to be kidnapped?”
“He’s on an extremely delicate mission and I can assure you that he is undoubtedly doing everything in his power to keep your daughter safe.”
“Show me a picture of this agent.”
Captain Chaps hesitated. “We don’t keep pictures for security reasons.”
“What does he look like?”
The captain sighed. “Six-four or so—”
“Blond?”
“Dark.”
“Hispanic of some sort?”
“No.”
Damien knew exactly who the agent had been. “That miscreant forced me into the raft.”
“He was probably trying to save your life.”
“How about the life of a twenty-two-year-old girl? Shouldn’t he have been trying to save her life?”
“Mr. Reynolds, I can assure you he is.”
“That isn’t good enough. Goddamn it, somebody get me the president. No, better yet, get my son Michael.”
* * * * *
After clicking the lock on the bathroom door, Samantha shed her clothes and stepped into the shower quickly, as if the door might burst open at any second. When she turned the knobs, the powerful jets of hot water felt familiar and yet surreal at the same time. She turned around in the stream, letting it hit her shoulders, her back, her arms. When had she last been in this shower? Was it only a few hours earlier? What had she thought of? What had she worried about then? It all seemed so petty, so distant. She didn’t think she could even summon up Justin’s neat blond coif and patrician chin if she tried. All she could see was a tanned, hard face and green eyes.
She reached for the soap. She could very well die, very soon. It wasn’t something she had ever thought about and until today death wasn’t something she had ever seen. Not in real life. The red puddle on the deck, so dark it almost looked purple, was so there, so real. She shuddered, cranking the knob farther toward the “H” until it was so hot it burned her skin. And she scrubbed, hard and long, until she wore the tiny rosette of French soap down to just a nub.
But she didn’t cry. Maybe his admonition that she go into the shower and just have a good cry perversely had the opposite effect. She was done crying. It had been a temporary aberration in her character that she wouldn’t indulge in again.
She was going to get through this. She was. For all she was in the middle of a group of bloodthirsty pirates, she hadn’t been harmed and she had a—yeah, go ahead and say it—a protector of sorts. She didn’t know why he was protecting her and his explanations were no better than a bunch of “maybes”, but she believed that he was and that he would.
She just hoped she wasn’t showing what her father had always called her usual horrendous judgment in men.
In any case, she would get out of this. Either her father would come back for her or this Vik would figure something out or…or goddamn it, she would just save herself. Somehow.
She turned the water up even hotter.
Vik listened to the sound of the shower through the bathroom door. Christ, did he ever need this. Despite having taken the precaution of jacking off during his own shower, just arguing with Samantha had made him hot again. Physically, she was affecting him more than he would have expected. Just the thought of her in the shower now…
The steam from the shower was all around them, and she was holding her arms out to him.
“Come here. Come in. I want you to.”
He stepped into the shower, closing the glass door behind him as her arms came around his neck. Pulling her closer, he could feel her tits against his chest as his hands wandered down to her ass.
“Touch me,” she murmured. “I want you to.”
He fondled her ass and brought his mouth down to one sweet, high—
His cock in his hand practically erupted at that image. He squeezed the base to hold it off. Okay, fine. A little less foreplay since it looked as if this wasn’t going to last long. Just as well since who knew when she might come out of the shower. In real life, that was.
He flipped her around so her hands jutted out onto the wet tiles of the wall.
“Do you want this, Samantha?” he whispered in her ear.
“Yes, please, fuck me.”
As impossible, or at least as unlikely, as it was, how sweet that would be to have her ask him for it…
“You sure?”
“Yes. Fuck me, Vik. Now. I want you to.”
She leaned over a little, widening her stance, and looked back over her shoulder at him—her big brown eyes as dark as he had ever seen them—waiting for him to comply. And he complied all right, gripping her hips and standing between her spread legs, before finding that soft pussy and giving her one hard, smooth thrust that he could feel all the way up his cock. She was wet and warm and he could hear her groan right over the sound of the shower. He tugged her closer, just to be all the way up her, and then flicked her long wet hair to one side so he could kiss her neck as he pulled out almost all the way and then thrust back in to that soft, wet cunt. The rhythm as he did it again overtook him and he pounded away as she braced herself against the wet wall, squeezing him with her inner muscles as she drained him to a—
“Oh my God!”
He registered her shocked exclamation just as he was coming, too intent on the relief of the physical release to stop pumping his cock as he orgasmed even in the presence of one horrified little lady.
Fuck! But it was only for a second. He shuddered with it. She had turned her back immediately anyway, standing with her hands up to block her eyes for good measure as well. Grabbing a tissue from the nightstand to quickly wipe up the semen from his belly, he pulled his shorts back up.
He threw the tissue in the
wastepaper basket, swiftly popped up to wash his hands, and then settled back into bed, his head on the pillows, feeling better all in all despite this snafu at the end here.
“You can turn around now. Sorry about that.”
She took a second, probably suspicious his cock was still out, but then turned around in fury.
“You pervert! You did that on purpose!”
He laughed. “Jacked off? Yeah, I did. It helps with that constant erection thing you keep complaining about.”
“You timed that purposely.”
“For while you were in the shower? Again, yeah. Would you rather I did it while you were in bed next to me? Because that works too.”
“You rat! You heard the shower go off. You knew I was coming in.”
“No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t. I was kind of into it. And for that, I am sorry. But I’m not sorry I whacked off.”
“God, you are so crude.”
He realized that even though they were arguing with each other, she was using the same hushed tones as he was. Good girl. She was learning.
She’d never seen a man masturbate. Not even in a movie. It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you ran into every day. It was so…primal. His eyes had been closed, his hand fisting his penis—which, by the way, was huge—so intently it looked as if it hurt. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known he was frustrated. She had. In some bizarre way, she supposed she should be grateful that he was taking care of it without involving her. Unless he meant for her to walk in on him. She felt as though she was involved in some complicated mind game with this man, this criminal. Why was he doing this?
“Just come on and get into bed now, Samantha. I’m inoculated from your considerable charms now.”
She hated how he was making light of this, but given the mess she was in, she couldn’t find it in herself to be as outraged as she otherwise might have been and since there was really nothing else to do, she obeyed, climbing into bed and turning her back on him.
But suddenly, she didn’t feel very tired.
“That was really incredibly embarrassing, you know,” she fumed.
“Everybody does it,” he murmured, sounding as if he was drifting off. The jerk.
UndercoverSurrender Page 7