He spoke as if it truly was a living creature. Very disturbing. “I guess the island and I aren’t that close yet.”
He tilted his head. “No need to be. That’s why there are rules. And approximately two hundred men who will enforce them, which leads me to my point: Everyone must accept their place on this island, and you will be no different.”
“What are you going to do to me?”
“I’ve already done it.” He smugly sipped his wine, not breaking eye contact.
Liv’s heart pounded in her chest. “What did you do to me?”
“I bit you. And now that you have my mark, the rest is simple. I sleep with you and then we find out what the island has decided.”
The conversation made no sense.
“What does it decide?” she asked.
“Whether or not you will carry my child.”
She didn’t even know how to respond to that other than saying, “That’s insane, Roen. Are you listening to yourself talk?”
“Every word.”
“I’m not sleeping with you,” she said with unwavering conviction.
“If you do not, I will lose my claim on you.”
“Uh-uh. I’m not being put up for grabs again.” She’d rather die.
He slowly shook his head, a sinister gaze in his green and hazel eyes. “No. You will not be put up for claiming again. I won’t allow it.”
Now she understood the ugly truth of the ugly conversation: her desire to die instead would be granted. “You’ll kill me.”
“What will happen is much worse than death.”
Liv’s eyes involuntarily filled with tears of fear. The only thing worse than death would be torture. Or being fed alive to those…things.
“So you see”—he scratched the thick growth of rich brown stubble along his jaw—“why when I say that giving yourself to me—willingly—is your best choice, I speak the truth.”
How was that a choice? No, no one had a gun to her head, but what the hell was the difference?
Liv looked away at the flickering fire. This is crazy. These men are crazy. I’m not doing this. She looked at Roen and was about to tell him to go stick his “choice” up his unsunny-hole when he winked at her. Yes, a wink. A friendly, playful wink.
Wait. Was he putting on an act? Or was he just being a cocky, brainwashed bastard? Liv felt a tiny burst of relief. She wanted to believe he could never hurt her.
Roen pushed away from the long table and adjusted the suede around his waist. He looked less savage than the other men with his short hair and tattoo-free body, but he carried himself with every ounce of caged ferocity as the rest of them.
“After you’re done eating,” Roen said, “my men will show you to your room upstairs. You will bathe, dress, and do as they say.”
Not in a million years. She bobbed her head yes.
“Enjoy your meal.”
“Where are you going?” she asked so she could gauge how much time she had to run like hell. Or stay. If he’s putting on an act, then he doesn’t mean a word he just said.
His eyes narrowed on her face, and his skin flushed. He was angry. Enraged even. “I think you’re forgetting your place, woman. Now eat and do what I’ve asked before I get angry.”
He left the room with wide heavy strides while Liv’s mouth gaped open.
What the hell is going on? Clearly, there were eyes and ears all over the goddamned place, so it would make absolute sense that he wouldn’t jeopardize their chances of escaping by breaking character. On the other hand, Roen had told her that he was infected. He’d felt himself losing control.
Take a breath, Liv, and weigh your options. She was out in the middle of the goddamned ocean on an island no one knew existed. She had no means of escape without Roen. Running and hiding wasn’t a long-term option either. Not only was the island far too small, but these men seemed to have the hunting instincts of wolves.
Okay, sharks.
In any case, roaming around in that forest at night was not a smart move either. Whatever those…those things were on the beach, they scared the crap out of her.
So that leaves you one choice: roll the dice with Roen, and hope he’s still in control. If he showed any signs of having completely lost it, she would be ready to knock him hard with a vase or chair or… She looked around the room. Some really, really strange art?
She quickly gulped down her wine and finished her rice. Minutes later, the same two men appeared and removed her empty plate. The red-skirts were watching you. They’d probably been listening to her entire conversation with Roen, too.
“Thank you,” she said. “By the way, why do some of you wear red?”
The one with sandy blond hair shot her a look.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to offend your merman senses,” she said.
“Your question isn’t offensive. But a landlover female should know her place.”
What he really meant to say was that she was offensive and had no right asking questions.
“I know my place—it’s called home—and I’m more than happy to go there. Care to help me?”
They ignored her snide comment and showed her upstairs to a spacious room with bright white carpets and walls and more dramatic sea creature art of intertwining eels. There was an inviting king-sized bed—God, how she missed beds—covered in soft white linens and a large bathroom tiled in natural stone with a large sunken tub and walk-in shower. The room was pristine, modern, and impersonal and a complete contradiction to the uncivilized men on the island.
As soon as they left, Liv turned on the shower and began searching the room for a weapon, but there was little there aside from a black dress—a knit T-shirty thing—and some towels. Even the hangers in the closet were plastic, not wire.
Plastic. On an island like this. It was utterly surreal.
If Roen got out of hand, she would have to make do with the bulbous stainless steel lamps on the nightstands.
She jumped into the shower, quickly washing away the sticky mud on her arms and the sweat from her body. Until she knew for sure where Roen’s head was at, she needed to play along.
Dammit. I can’t get the smell out. Bits of dried shark blood had remained stuck in her hair, and she wondered if she’d ever feel clean again after these past few days. Of course, these men didn’t seem to care. They looked like they bathed every other full moon. Surprisingly, however, they didn’t stink—well, not in a bad way. Most of them smelled like a concoction of fresh sweat, cinnamon, and earth. Not offensive.
She finished scrubbing as quickly as possible, trying to ignore her pounding head from lack of sleep.
She emerged from the shower and wrapped a white towel around her body. When she opened the bathroom door, a large, shirtless male figure sat on the bed. She yelped from instinct, but it was Roen, his hard muscular frame propped against the hand-carved headboard.
“You scared the hell out of me,” she said.
He didn’t respond to that, instead staring with those deep green eyes with inner rings of hazel. “Come closer.”
She didn’t move. Not until she knew what she was dealing with.
“Did you not hear me?”
“I heard you,” she replied.
“Then why are you still standing there?”
She shrugged. If he was still trying to help her and his men were listening, she couldn’t ask him point blank if he was playing a charade. Then again, if he were faking, why couldn’t he wink again or make a gesture to indicate his true intention?
Before she uttered another word, he sprang from the bed, grabbed her wrist and threw her down on the bed. He quickly covered her mouth with his hand. “Be quiet and listen,” he whispered, “the island is watching. She knows everything—sees everything.”
Ohmygod. Roen actually believed they were being watched by the fucking island.
He began kissing her neck, his free hand roaming over her breasts. Liv didn’t know what to do.
His lips once again journeyed back to
her ear. “Just before dawn, go through the kitchen, out the back door and head to the beach east of the island. It’s one mile from here. The crew of my ship will not be able to see the island, so you have to swim out at least one hundred yards. But whatever you do, do not get into the water before the sun rises. Do you understand?”
His soft lips moved back to her neck and massaged her breast, grinding himself against her.
He was putting on an act. An act for the island. How crazy was that?
She nodded, and he removed his hand from her mouth.
“Don’t ever come back here,” he whispered. “Not for me, not for anything.”
Liv jerked her head back and their eyes met. He had absolutely no intention of leaving. No, he has to come. He has to.
She mouthed the word “please,” and Roen knew exactly what she meant but shook his head.
Liv’s heart filled with a new fear: Roen might be punished or killed once the men found out he’d let her go.
He’s not stupid, Liv. He’s got to be thinking about covering his tracks somehow.
God, she hoped so, but any way the situation played out, this place would eat him alive. The worst part was she’d never see him again and she genuinely wanted to. She’d never met anyone like Roen; so goddamned crazy and damaged and fearless. On the outside, he seemed like this cold, uncaring person who only cared about money, but people like that didn’t take risks for strangers like he’d done. Like he’s doing now.
“Roen, I don’t want you to stay here. It’s starting to change you, and I really, really like you just the way you are.”
Roen stared back with an intense gaze, somewhere between joy and sadness, but nowhere close to content.
“Please, I’m begging you,” she whispered. “Because I don’t think I can leave here witho—”
He cut her off with a kiss.
Without you, she wanted to say. But his full, silky lips and the sensual stroke of his tongue completely melted her from head to toe, triggering that voice—the one that told her to let him slip off her towel. The one that told her she really did want to have sex with him.
Sensual aches swept through her body, effortlessly untying those knots of apprehension as they charged their way between her legs. The weight of his strong, hard body on top of her, the heated touch of his hand, and those determined lips surrounded by bristly stubble left Liv paralyzed by her need for him.
“I want you,” he growled in a low husky voice. “I can’t stop thinking about you.” Roen reached for the front of her towel and kissed his way down to her chest, peeling back the white terry cloth, exposing her chest.
A moment of self-consciousness flickered inside her head. She knew the last few weeks had thinned her normally curvy body, but Roen’s deep throaty groan as he looked at her bare breasts relieved any timidness.
His mouth slid over her right nipple, sucking and kissing, while his other hand massaged the left. She’d never felt anything so delicious, like that buzzy energy amplified the pleasure of his touch. She began to see why women would give themselves voluntarily—a strange, strange thought. But not as strange as how empty her body felt and how badly she craved the sexual pleasure he could deliver with that thick cock between his legs.
Roen’s hand slid down her torso and between her thighs. The moment his thick warm fingers slid between her soft folds, gliding over her throbbing bud, she let out a soft moan. Roen began kissing his way down her stomach while his fingers found their way inside her, pushing gently at first, not so gently after a few seconds. When his mouth and heated tongue joined with the deep penetration of his fingers, Liv writhed on the bed, her hips pressing harder into him. What the hell was he doing? It felt so damned good.
His tongue worked at a relentless pace, sliding and kneading with exquisite pressure as that warm hand pumped. She felt her body slipping further and further away from reality and from the situation, leaving only her and Roen, there on that bed, their bodies’ rhythms the only thing that mattered. In that moment, if he wanted to fuck her, her only objection would have been him stopping what he was doing with his mouth.
She glanced down at Roen, whose eyes were closed, seemingly lost in the act of pleasuring her with his mouth. She was about to pull him up, to tell him she wanted him inside her, but she watched his free hand slide down to grip his erection. His size, from the glimpse she’d seen, was pure magnificence—thick and long and so hard that it could’ve been cut from marble.
She’d never watched anything more erotic, and in that moment, she felt her nerve endings wind up and burst open, shooting waves of hard contractions pulsing through her core. A moan escaped her mouth as she grabbed fistfuls of sheets and arched her entire body toward his vigorously sucking mouth.
After a moment, she looked back down at Roen, whose green eyes had been watching her come with intense pleasure. He crawled his way up her body, still pumping his long thick cock with his large hand at a leisurely pace as if enjoying every second. When he laid his body over her again, she was sure he planned to push his way inside and make her come all over again, but instead he kissed her hard, the taste of herself all over his mouth. His hand stayed between them, pumping his cock for several moments and then he broke away and pushed up with one arm. He looked down at himself as he exploded, shooting his cum onto her stomach. Liv had never watched a man come, and she’d certainly never imagined she’d find it so sinfully erotic.
Eyes closed, Roen stilled for a moment, releasing those final drops, and then lay to her side to catch his breath. Meanwhile Liv’s head spun in delicious, post-orgasmic circles, urging her to sleep.
No. Don’t sleep. You have to do something to convince him to leave with you.
Roen abruptly stood from the bed and went to the bathroom, returning with a warm, damp washcloth. He wiped her clean and threw it into a basket in the corner before laying down beside her again. She still hadn’t really moved, perhaps because she was too in shock, perhaps because her body was still floating around somewhere high up in the clouds.
Roen didn’t touch or kiss her. Instead he lay naked on his back, staring at the ceiling, an intense expression on his face.
“Why didn’t you…” Her voice trailed off. It was a stupid question. Obviously, neither of them carried any birth control. In fact, what had she been thinking? Because she would’ve let him. No question about it. This place is messing with my head. That didn’t mean the pull to be with him wasn’t real; it simply meant that being reckless wasn’t her style.
“Have sex with you?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t ask me to.” She hadn’t asked him to do anything he’d just done, but he’d done it anyway. And it was incredible. “It’s the law. The woman must ask to be fucked.”
“Oh.” She was about to say she’d remember that next time, when they were hopefully armed with a box of condoms, but there wouldn’t be a next time. Not if you don’t convince him to leave.
“That and I care about you too much,” he added.
Her heart fell down a deep dark hole. He could’ve told her about the “law” but hadn’t. Likely to protect her from making this mess any bigger than it already was.
“Roen?”
His eyes glanced at her for a moment but quickly returned to staring at the ceiling.
She wanted to beg him to come with her, but she already knew he wasn’t going to leave. Was it really because of his brother, or was there another reason?
“Is your brother all right?” she asked.
“Yes. He’s happy here. It’s his home.”
“So he never wants to leave.”
“No,” he replied.
Then staying to help Lyle wasn’t the reason. “And you?” She hoped his answer might be different.
“No.”
She hadn’t expected him to tip his hand at any plans for escape, but there was no doubt in his voice. It sounded like he wanted to shut the door on her having any hope.
“I don’t beli
eve you,” she said.
“You don’t have to. It won’t change a thing.”
“I don’t think you understand how much—”
“Don’t.” He looked at her like he wanted to say something but caught himself. “The sun will be up soon, and I have a long day ahead.” He shut off the lamp on the nightstand and coldly turned his back to her. He was trying to tell her to leave now. He’d said that she needed to run out the back and head to the beach before it got light out.
Liv lay there for much longer than she should’ve, resisting the urge to stay and “ask” him, to spend just ten more minutes with him.
Roen’s hand slid over hers and gave it a comforting squeeze. The gesture nearly broke her.
Dammit, Liv. If you care anything about him, you’ll get the hell off this island and bring back help. Even if it required force because he was too delusional to help himself. It was the only way.
“Good night, Roen. You’ll be in my dreams.”
She heard a faint chuckle—as if the thought pleased him. Within a few minutes, Roen’s breathing turned steady and rhythmic. This was it. She slipped from the bed and grabbed the black dress hanging in the closet, slipping it quickly over her head as she tiptoed from the room.
With every step she took, the cells in her body protested more violently, screaming at her not to do this. But you’ll be back for him. You’ll see him again, she told herself. Then why did she feel the bond between them ripping away? There’s no other choice. If you stay here, you’ll die. Or worse, as Roen had told her. And if you stay, who will send help for him? The moment she stepped foot on his ship and alerted his crew, she had to believe the entire world would descend upon this godforsaken place looking for him. A man like Roen—powerful and wealthy—was the type of man people would expend considerable resources on to rescue.
As silently as possible, she followed the stairs back down to the dining room and into the kitchen. The entire house was dark and quiet, but Roen’s men couldn’t be far.
With only a bit of moonlight shining through a window over a bank of stainless steel sinks, she felt her way through the kitchen until she reached the back door. Liv carefully pulled it open and slipped outside.
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