Chapter Thirty-Seven

Safiya

"W ait." He gave the command, then strode out.

Standing in the most palatial bathroom I had ever been in, dripping water all over the marble floors, my thoughts ran rogue as my heart betrayed me.

The moment of impact, when the plane struck the water, kept replaying in my mind as my body relived the bone-jarring shock, but a small voice inside my head kept reminding me of that closet.

I was barely able to hold the towel closed over my ruined sundress that was clinging to my naked breasts as my hands, my legs, my entire body shook. The memory of the crash before everything had gone dark, the kidnapping, the guns, the shooting, my rapidly cooling skin—all of it was making me tremble.

But where he had grasped my ankle, it burned.

The kind of burn that had nothing to do with heat or muscle fatigue. The latter was reserved for the rest of my body and every other muscle and tendon that felt as if I had been slammed into a concrete wall, torn apart, then put back together but with every single piece misaligned. I trembled with the effort to remain standing.

But Grayson was not trembling.

He did not even look like the blood soaking through his shirt bothered him as he strode back into the bathroom. His cold blue gaze, his shirt, his wet pants—he looked like more of an advertisement for impossible strength that defied nature than the aftermath of a crashed plane as he dissolved the distance between us.

With unspoken dominance, he turned me to face away from him and pulled my hands from the towel that I had been holding up like a shield.

A useless shield.

Because in the next instant, the towel was gone, and my soaked dress was whipped over my head. Then the softest, silkiest material I had ever felt was sliding down my body as my arms were fed into long sleeves by an American Navy SEAL pilot assassin who kneeled.

But as the material covered the disintegrating fragments of my modesty, its source stripped me to insecurity. "Whose blouse is this?"

He said nothing.

"I want my dress back." My demand useless, I still said it.

Reaching around me, he threaded three delicate buttons on the silky material with a deftness that fed not only my insecurity but fueled a jealousy so consuming that I forgot about the towel and privacy he had stripped from me.

I asked the question again. "Whose blouse is this?"

Soft taupe pants appeared in front of me, but so did two large hands that held the leggings as if I were meant to step into them. His breath feathered the back of my knee a moment before his voice traced up my half-naked body. "Did they touch you?"

I forgot about the owner of the clothes. "I was drugged."

"You know what I'm asking, Safiya."

Did I? How would I know if my body had been violated? "I will dress myself. Please leave."

"Lift your right foot."

"I asked you for privacy."

"You didn't ask me for anything. Lift."

It did not matter that the blouse covered my backside or that I was about to step into clothes that did not belong to me. I had survived a plane crash. I had endured being kidnapped not once, but twice. I had persisted despite losing every blood relative I had ever known.

And now I was on a multimillion-dollar yacht that was majestically gliding through an endless ocean.

Probably not the same ocean I had first spied as a young girl, but an ocean nonetheless, and that was the point.

I was here.

This was my full circle.

This was where I had wanted to be the moment I had first laid eyes on endless blue.

Sea blue, not cold blue.

Turning, I looked down at a man resting on one knee who was harder than the stone underfoot. "Do you know what I thought when I first saw the ocean?"

So slight a movement, I would have missed it if I had not been staring directly into his gaze, his right eyebrow lifted.

"I wanted to be there. I wanted to touch that endless blue mystery and feel it between my fingers and against my skin. I wanted it to surround my body. I wanted to see if it was as resplendent in color up close as it was from far away. I wanted to know what the air blowing across it smelled like and if it was as cool as those white-capped waves or hot from the sun." I could almost taste the dry dirt of my upbringing that had coated everything, even the food we ate, but mostly how it had clung to my lips that day I saw a vastness so surreal, it had stripped away my childhood na?veté. "I wanted want for the first time. And not even the stories of my father that my mother had told me had ever made me feel need like I had felt it then. Nothing had ever taken a hold of me like that." Until I had met an American military man.

And now it was happening again.

Just like when he had rescued me the first time, the second time, before the plane crash. When he had held me that one night. When the kidnappers had said they were going to kill him. When he had put his hand on my throat, on my ankle, washed my hair, smiled at me after I had earned my degree and told me he was proud of me.

Every ounce of need I had ever felt because of this man was here, right now.

It was a thousand colors of the ocean. It was only the color of his eyes. It was the unmistakable scent of his skin. It was every corner of my life that smelled like cool wind and a whisper of a ghost.

It was him

He made me want, and he made want feel like need.

Rising to his full height, the soft leggings still grasped in one of his hands, he did not take his eyes off me. "You wanted an escape."

"No." Escapism was not real. But that ocean was. This man was. "I wanted what I could not have."