I sucked in a sharp breath as wetness surged between my legs, coating the bikini bottom I suddenly wished I wasn’t wearing. An impossible ache pulsed in my core, and my hips had a mind of their own, grinding futilely into the padded lounger of the deck.
Needy, I purposely provoked him further. “I’m just getting sun.”
“On your back,” he quietly stated. “Naked.”
A shiver wracked my body because I knew that tone of voice. I knew it, and I loved it. “Only topless.”
“Only.” He leaned closer. “How hard do you want to be fucked?”
It was a rhetorical question, but I answered anyway. “Deliciously hard.”
He pulled the string on one side of my hip. “Is that right?”
“Is the anchor down?” I asked, practically breathless from just the feel of the side of the bikini tugging on my hip, then letting go.
“Do you care?” He swirled one finger over the top of my thigh where my bikini had just been.
I couldn’t see past his tanned, flexed biceps and unbelievable six-pack as he held himself just above me in nothing more than his swim trunks. Crystal-clear aqua waters shimmered under the bright sunlight all around us, but impossibly gorgeous amber-green eyes were staring down at me with possession, and I knew he was right.
I didn’t care. “Kiss me.”
He raised one eyebrow. Playful, but also mouth-wateringly dominant. “Where should I kiss you, Songbird?”
“Wherever you want.”
He pushed himself up in one fluid movement and pulled the sunglasses down that had been on top of his head. A hint of a smile touched the corner of his mouth. “Wrong answer.”
“Wait!” I sat up. “Where are you going?”
He looked over his shoulder at me. “Bridge.”
Heat flushed my cheeks. “I remember the last time you were there.”
Wicked and sinful, he smiled. “As do I.” He disappeared starboard.
Scrambling to tie the side of my bright yellow bikini that he’d undone, I then quickly tied my top back into place and stood. I wanted to have the nerve to follow him naked, but there were some things, even months later, I couldn’t let go of, and one of them was the worry in the back of my mind that paparazzi would find us.
We’d left London and gone off the grid, as Ronan put it. Or as much as someone like me possibly could. We came back to Miami and we got on the Songbird, and Ronan had cast off. We went to the Bahamas, and he stuck to the smallest marinas that could fit us whenever we needed to resupply or gas up, but then we just cruised. We swam in the ocean. He fished. We snorkeled, he taught me to captain the fifty-two-foot beauty, and we made love all the time.
I’d never been happier.
But I didn’t trust walking on the boat naked even when we were off the coast of lightly populated Abaco Island and no other boats were in sight. I knew how far a telephoto lens could reach, and I didn’t want to share my new life with the public.
I wanted our days to last forever and our nights under the stars to never end. But Vance had called Ronan multiple times in the past couple weeks, and he’d even left me two messages to call him. Ronan had taken a leave from work, and while he didn’t need to work for money, I had more than enough for both of us, he insisted that he wasn’t going to be my kept man.
The thought made my lips tip up. If anyone was kept, it was me. Still smiling, I followed the sleek, gleaming white decks and walked to the bridge.
His beautifully sculpted wide shoulders on full display, he sat in the captain’s chair, checking equipment I couldn’t begin to wrap my head around. Radar or sonar or weather instruments or auto pilot, I didn’t know. It was a fancy display panel that may as well have been in a foreign language. All I knew how to do was speed up, slow down, steer and cut the engines.
I ran a hand along his back. “You forgot something.”
“Did I?” he asked absently, reading something on the largest display screen.
I moved in front of him. “Yes.”
His aviators covering his eyes, I couldn’t see where he was looking.
I didn’t care. I reached behind me and pulled the string tied behind my back. My bikini fell away from the sides of my breasts. “You definitely forgot something.”
Pushing his sunglasses up on his head, he focused his intense gaze on me. Then my serious Ronan came out. “Not for one second do I forget about you.”
Warmth flooded my chest at the same time as the deep-seated insecurity that I could lose him at any moment surfaced. An insecurity he had been reassuring me about since the first night I was on his boat. “I didn’t mean—”
His finger landed on my lips. “I know what you teasingly said in jest, but I also know the meaning behind the particular words you used.”
I looked away. “I’m sorry I keep putting you through this.”
“Through what? A normal reaction to an understandable fear that I’ll walk away from you like I walked away from you before?”
I swallowed. “That was my fault.”
“And it wasn’t mine?” he demanded.
I couldn’t look at him when I shook my head.
He grasped my chin hard and brought my eyes back to his. “It was both of our faults, but I can’t make you understand my commitment to you now when you won’t accept a ring and take my name.”
The same argument, the only argument we’d had since we’d been back together, came out in full, brilliant sunlight.
I wanted to cry. “I don’t know how to make you understand.” Not because I didn’t love him with every breath of my being. Not because I didn’t desperately want to marry him. Not because I didn’t see a future with him, but because I only saw a future if he was in it. And the only time I ever saw my mother that focused on something, it was alcohol and it destroyed her. I knew Ronan would never, ever destroy me. But this fear, I didn’t have a reason or rationale or even words for it. All I knew was that sometimes, it felt like I loved him too much.
“Make me understand what? That you’re afraid?”
Holding his arms, looking into his eyes, I knew I couldn’t hold this in any longer and let it drift between us until it became insurmountable.
“Terrified,” I whispered in admission.
“Of what specifically?”
The words were out before I could censor them. “Who am I without my love for you?”
Then it hit me as surely as my thoughts became words. Everything I had done, everything I became, everything I was—it was because I had met a boy. A dark-haired, deeply guarded, mysterious boy with even more mysterious eyes who gave me a nickname that became my identity.
I was in his image.
For a single, breathless heartbeat, the humid ocean air hung between us.
Then that boy, who’d grown into an unbelievably unwavering compassionate man, he gave me words back that touched my very soul.
“Fourteen years ago, you were given to me for reasons I cannot begin to fathom nor reconcile. I don’t deserve you, but I’m far too selfish to let you go. Not now, not ever again. You are my reason. You’re the air in my lungs. You are my gift.” His stare holding mine, his voice quieted to a deep reverence. “If you’re lost without your love for me, then I’m nothing without mine for you.”