Chapter 33

thirty-three

“Shh,”I tell Isolde as she moans. “Be quiet or I’ll have to stop.”

It’s the middle of the day, when most of the staff are taking a break after lunch, and Isolde and I are tucked behind the waterfall of the yacht’s largest pool, pressed into a nook just wide enough for two people to fit inside. I scouted it thoroughly yesterday, checking every sight line, watching as the boat rocked and the waterfall moved with it just to make sure. The nook is dark enough and the waterfall wide and rushing enough that anyone standing behind it is invisible.

Necessary reconnaissance, as Isolde has taken to wearing that godless swimsuit every day, swimming long laps in the pool as I pretend to read fantasy novels on the deck, until I finally give up and stalk back to my room to jerk off.

She thinks it’s very amusing.

But today I’m making her pay for it, and as she swam close to the waterfall, I darted out from behind it and grabbed her, hauling her back like a marauder as she struggled against me. Struggling which only lasted until I pushed the crotch of her swimsuit aside and buried my fingers in her cunt.

And now she’s panting against me, her back to my chest, her hips moving to fuck my hand. Heaven.

“Teasing me all week with this goddamned swimsuit,” I growl in her ear. I band my free arm around her front, reaching up to fill my hand with her breast. Weighing it in the water. Scraping my fingernails over the translucent fabric covering the furled tip. “Making me need it, honey. Making me need it so bad.”

All the while my fingers work underwater, scissoring slowly inside her to stretch her, sliding up to stroke the knot of nerves at the front, teasing once or twice at the tight hole in back.

“Then take it,” she whimpers, echoing my words in the dojo that day. “If you need it.”

I press my face against the side of hers and breathe her in. I taste salt. I’m already pulling down the waist of my trunks and fishing out my cock. Pressing the head against her center and penetrating.

“I don’t know how you do it to me,” I whisper, squeezing her breast. The water is buoyant, resistant to force, and I have to hold her tight to me to wedge into her cunt as hard as I’d like. “We just fucked this morning. I spent all night with my face between your legs. How can I still need it so bad?”

“If you figure it out, let me know,” she says, gasping. My fingers find her clit and start rubbing again. “I think about it all the time. How to get you alone, how to make it not matter if we’re not alone. Last night I was seconds away from taking your hand under the dinner table and pushing it between my legs.”

I groan—quietly—my orgasm already locked and loaded at the base of my cock.

“Gonna come, honey,” I mutter, and she arches against me.

“Inside me,” she begs, as if there were any other thing I’d rather do. “Inside.”

I release with a grunt, spurting ropes of heat into her, biting her neck from behind before I tear myself away, not wanting to leave any marks, any trace of this.

Or rather, wanting to but knowing it’s a terrible idea.

I come until my balls are drained, my craving soothed temporarily by the snug channel inside her body, and then I slip out and replace my dick with my fingers, giving her two and the heel of my hand to ride, one of her favorite ways to come.

She curls in the water as she does, convulsing around my hand, her thighs closed tight, and I keep her pinned against my chest, growling at every single pulse she gives me. “Fuck, you’re so sexy,” I praise. “You make me so hard. You make me feral. I want to fuck you every single moment of the day. I don’t know how I’m gonna stop—”

My voice falls quiet as her body gives up the last of its pleasure, and we just stay there for a moment. My fingers are still inside her as she turns in my arms and wraps her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist.

“I don’t know how I’m going to stop either,” she confesses, her voice a husky melody over the waterfall, and feeling something vital inside me tear open, I grab my newly hard erection and slide it inside.

We screw facing each other, my hands on her hips, moving her up and down on my dick as easily as I’d move a toy or my own hand, and we don’t say a word as we stroke ourselves to our next climax.

What else is there to say?

We don’t know how we’re going to stop.

* * *

I’m obsessed with maps.

Specifically the map in the bridge with the blinking dot showing the yacht and how far away it is from Manhattan. Every morning, I meet with Captain Duval on the bridge, and my eyes are fixed on the screens in front of the bridge windows, watching as we pull ever closer to shore.

“Should be tomorrow afternoon,” she says confidently. “The forecast is clear and we’ll be approaching well away from the shipping lanes, so it’ll only be noncommercial boat traffic to worry about. An easy final leg. Is Ms. Laurence ready?”

I glance over to the captain and am relieved to see that her expression betrays no suspicion, no subtext. As constantly as Isolde and I have fucked, there’s no erasing my years as a soldier, my experience as a bodyguard. I’ve been careful, discreet, sure that any time we’re together, we’re not raising conjecture. Making sure we still give the appearance of pursuing our own interests and recreation, all the things we did before, on the first half of the trip.

I’m almost disappointed at how adept I am at deception.

And Isolde thought I was a good man.

“She’s known this day was coming and made all her preparations. And I’m excited to be on solid land again,” I add. I speak as much truth as possible, since lying aloud is still hard for me.

Which is oddly relieving. At least there are traces of my morality left still.

I give the map one last look, let the captain know that I’ll be ready to deliver Isolde to Mark tomorrow, and go to the basketball court. I take shots until my arms hurt and sweat drips into my eyes, and then I go to my room to shower and change.

Afterward, I stand at my room’s balcony and watch the waves move under the afternoon sky.

The ocean is endless. There is no way to make sense of where you are, no terrain association, no dead reckoning. It’s just a vast, blue bruise that defies logic, at least without the sun or stars, without panels of screens, without satellites and GPS transponders. On its own, it’s the opposite of a place.

It’s no place.

And here it felt like I could be no one—for the last week, I’ve been no one. Not a bodyguard, not a man with morals.

Not a man still in love with Mark Trevena.

Tomorrow, that changes. Tomorrow, we will see the shore, and we will anchor, and we will take the tender to the marina.

We will be back in a place. A place where I am no longer no one.

I brace my hands on the railing and hang my head between my shoulders, breathing in the cool, wet air.

The door to the balcony next to mine slides open, and I don’t need to look up to know it’s Isolde. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her come to her own railing, her hair in a white-gold braid.

“You didn’t come to the dojo this morning,” she says.

“I know.”

“Or the chapel after.”

“I know.”

She lets out a breath. I look over to find her staring at the waves.

“You’re ending it, aren’t you?” she asks. Her words are so flat, so dull, that I know she’s already gone somewhere deep inside herself. The place she’s lived inside of for years to cope with her mother’s death, with her father’s plans for her future. And I hate it. I hate that I’m the cause of that voice; I hate that I’m the one sending her to that place.

But she’s right. I am ending it.

I exhale with an unrelenting tightness in my chest. “Yes.”

“Why? Why when I can do whatever I like until the wedding? A wedding which is weeks from now?”

I turn to look at her, but she stays as she is, her eyes on the water.

“We’d have to stop anyway. It’s better we do it before we get home to Mark.”

“Because you’re worried about him finding out,” she says tonelessly.

“Because I love him.” My voice is quiet, tired. Sad.

And she does turn to look at me now.

“I have to be loyal to my own feelings,” I explain. “And while you might be free until your wedding day, I’m not. If I’m going to stay at Lyonesse, then I have to be worthy of his trust. I have to be worthy of my own. I can’t sleep with his bride behind his back, no matter what her own freedoms are.”

“So this is the cost of you staying for me,” she says. Her eyes are wet, but the tears haven’t fallen. I don’t think she’ll let them fall. “If you stay, then we have to end things now.”

“It’s for the best. Besides,” I add in a self-wounding attempt at comfort, “you told me yourself that you didn’t love me. So this was just temporary anyway. Just fun.”

Her jaw flexes once.

“Just fun, that’s right,” she says, voice devoid of inflection. “No harm done.”

“Well, maybe some harm done.” I flex my hands on the railing. “I know what you do before the marriage isn’t Mark’s business, but I’m not convinced it’s the same for me, especially since I’ll be working there after the wedding too.”

It makes me sick to say it out loud but it has to be said. “Are we?.?.?.?going to tell him? Or keep it a secret? And hope he never finds out?”

When I look back, her arms are wrapped tight around herself, and I want so much to jump over to her balcony and pull her close. I want to comfort her, soothe her, drive away any fears or worries. It only adds to my misery right now that I can’t.

That I shouldn’t.

She doesn’t love you, I tell myself. This is hurting you far more than it’s hurting her.

Still, though. The idea of her hurting any bit, any little bit at all, is excoriating.

“I don’t like lying any more than you, Tristan, although I think I might be better at it. But I suppose—if I were thinking with a clear head, which I admittedly haven’t done much of recently—it would be smarter to keep it between us until after the wedding. I shouldn’t risk the marriage, not when we’re so close. And then—after the papers are signed—we can think about it some more.”

It all makes sense, and I nod.

“As you wish,” I say, and pray that I’ll become a better liar in the next twenty-four hours.

I put my hand on the door to my room, sliding it open to step inside.

“Tristan.”

I look at her, slender and steely against the bright blue sky.

“This week was the best week of my life.” She swallows, and before I can reply, she spins, yanks her balcony door open, and disappears into her room.