Besides, Kazem needed this. It was the only way he would ever truly consider himself worthy of his family name.
As if to prove Izad’s point, Kazem squeezed Izad’s shoulders and kissed Izad’s cheeks. “I will make you proud, Father,” he whispered.
“Oh, my son.” Izad embraced his boy, hugging him against his heart. “I am already proud.”
Then he watched as his youngest set off after the American, chin high, shoulders back, impatient to end the man who had done so much unspeakable damage to their family.
* * *
10:41 a.m.
“You watching him that way is giving him a face like a smacked ass.”
Alex came out of her daydream to find Chrissy standing above her. Lifting a hand against the glare of the morning sun, she squinted up at the woman. “A what?”
“Here.” Chrissy took off her Clubmaster-style sunglasses and handed them over. “They’re polarized. Put them on and take a look.”
Frowning, Alex slipped the shades over her glasses and looked toward the pilothouse where Mason was doing a bang-up job of captaining the catamaran against the wind and currents. Also doing a bang-up job of conjuring a million-and-one fantasies of her joining him there and slowly pulling off his swim trunks so she could do the things to his boy parts that she’d studied up on while staying at the hotel the last two nights.
Since there was no cellular service on Wayfarer Island, and since they tried to limit their internet activity to save the generator juice for powering the refrigerator and the few lights in the beach house, Alex had taken advantage of her time on Key West to fire up her iPad, go online, and watch some videos.
When and if a man ever got up the gumption to help her get rid of her virginity, she wanted to be sure he found the exercise worth it. And after spending one entire evening having fallen down the rabbit hole of strange fetishes—Diaper bondage? Pedal pumping? Extreme feeding? These were things? Who knew?—last night she’d settled on the basics. Hand jobs. Blow jobs. And something called edging.
After loading up the catamaran for the sail to Wayfarer Island, the memory of what she’d learned and the need to study Mason had been too much. It had been a deep, carnal pull from within. Or without. Or somewhere, and she’d decided—despite his remark about her needing to stop flirting with him—to give in to it.
Plus, she figured her observation of him would go unnoticed. After all, she’d been using her book as a prop, pretending to read the mind-numbingly dull prose of one J. J. Robertson, marine salvor extraordinaire. And with the tinted windows to the pilothouse closed, Mason had been nothing but a silhouette to her. So she figured she’d be nothing but a silhouette to him.
But with the polarized lenses, she could see straight to the captain’s chair. And all those dirty thoughts that had been in her head must have been plastered over her face, because Mason’s cheeks were tinged with every shade of red from the color wheel.
“Damn,” she muttered, embarrassment making her own cheeks burn. She snapped the book closed and tossed it aside. “I thought I was being discreet.”
That got a chuckle from Chrissy. “A little hard to be discreet when the view is that way.” Chrissy pointed toward the front of the boat where the morning sun gleamed over the water, chasing the whitecaps and making them dance as they spread out over the cerulean surface.
“That’s true,” Alex allowed, handing the sunglasses back to Chrissy and turning so her feet pointed toward the sea instead of the pilothouse.
It had been decided that, contrary to the original plan of taking a break from the hunt for the Santa Cristina while LT and Olivia were on their honeymoon, the rest of the crew—excluding Bran and Maddy who had caught the first flight to Houston—would begin diving on the lagoon reef.
Alex could just imagine LT and Olivia’s faces when they returned to Wayfarer Island in seven days to… Surprise! We’ve found the mother lode!
In fact, the idea of such an epic wedding present got everyone so excited that even Chrissy had agreed to join in the fun, leaving Winston, her business partner, to oversee the dive shop and the tourists for the next week. Romeo and Doc, the latter of whom was also a partner in Deep Six Salvage, had eschewed sailing back with them on the catamaran. Instead, they’d opted to stay one more night on Key West—likely because both of them had found a cute tourist to bounce around; lucky tourists!—and then fly to Wayfarer Island with John, LT’s grizzled old uncle, first thing in the morning.
But after that? Let the games begin!
Alex’s blood bubbled with anticipation. She was right about turning their attention to the reef surrounding the lagoon. She could feel it.
“Mind if I join you?” Chrissy waved to the knotted polyethylene netting strung up between the twin hulls of the catamaran.
“Be my guest.” Alex laced her hands behind her head. The netting—affectionately called “the trampoline”—was her favorite spot. She loved to lie there and listen to the sound of the sea hissing against the sailboat and breathe in the smell of the water. Watch as the wind pushed against the carbon-fiber sails and taste the salt on the breeze.
She’d never considered herself much of an ocean or beach person before moving to Wayfarer Island. Blame it on her fair skin and a natural aversion to sand. I mean, the stuff gets everywhere. But in the last few months, she’d come to love the sea almost as much as she loved the dim quiet of a good library.
The open water’s beauty, its vastness, how quickly it could go from calm to chaotic had cast a spell over her. She was enchanted by it.
And maybe that’s what attracted her to Mason too. His natural dichotomy.
He was huge and powerful. Could break a person’s neck in two with little more than a flick of his wrist. But he also had a bulldog he doted on. Like, doted on. So much so that the man should buy stock in baby wipes, because he went through a container a day cleaning Meat’s copious wrinkles to ensure none of them chafed or developed yeast infections. And he painted. With watercolors. Sitting on a stool with a little easel and everything.
Just like the sea, he was a crazy mishmash of strong and gentle, calm yet capable of meting out great violence should the need arise.
She shuddered as she remembered that night on Garden Key when a group of armed men in the employ of a desperate oilman stormed the island, bent on kidnapping the teenage girls who were camping there and selling them to some lecherous desert sultan in exchange for fixed crude prices. Goose bumps broke out over Alex’s arms when she thought back on how Mason and Bran had come to the rescue like the heroic mother-effin’ Navy SEALs they were.
Knowing the men she worked for were retired spec-ops badasses was one thing. Seeing them employing their badassery had been something else altogether.
In fact, she hoped never to see them doing it again. Because talk about Scary. As. Hell.