“Where the hell did you learn that, princess?”
“There’s lots of things you don’t know about me.”
I want him to kiss me again, right now. The want is awful, and I have no explanation for why it feels so torturous that he’s not kissing me already. Questions rise like bubbles and pop, one by one. My body is lit up with him. My body doesn’t know that we were playing a game.
“Yeah.” A sharp tone. “What else?”
“Like...” I’m drawing a blank. An enormous blank. My entire life is nothing right now with the night breeze in my hair and Poseidon making a cage of his body and his own ship. He must know—he must know how it feels, but nothing in him hesitates, nothing in him gives me so much as another inch of breathing room. “I don’t know how to swim.”
He blinks, straightening up. One hand comes off the railing, then the other, and the crackling tension that had all my nerves alive with moonlight releases. “I thought you were tired, not… If you don’t know how to swim, then what the fuck were you doing on a yacht?”
Another flush of embarrassment heats my cheeks. All I can manage is a shrug. “We weren’t going to leave the boat.”
Leaving the boat was not on the agenda. Neither was getting shot in the head or getting lost at sea. A piece of me caves in, thinking about the sunlight on the yacht deck and Robbie’s blood pooling red on those coral shorts. It’s enough to cause an earthquake, that hollow space, and I fold my arms over my waist to hold it in.
Poseidon makes an incredulous sound, and I drag my eyes up off the deck and back to his face. “What kind of fucking boyfriend lets you on a boat without knowing how to swim?”
12
Poseidon
That fucker Robbie is dead, and I could kill him all over again.
It is beyond me that anyone, any fucking person with any kind of sense, would take a boat out alone with a person who can’t swim. What was she supposed to do if something happened to him? He was dumb enough to get shot in the head. I didn’t think he was so oblivious that he’d purposely put her in danger. Nobody like that deserves—
No. Fuck no. I’m not going to get into things like deserving and worthiness. That’s not for me.
What is for me is the ocean.
“That ends now, princess.”
“What ends now?” She turns her face away a fraction of an inch, finally wary. Too late. It was bad enough that she trusted Robbie. Worse that she trusted the sea. The sea can be a wily bitch. She’d just as soon drown you as look at you.
“You’re going to learn to swim before the sun comes up.”
“How am I going to do— No, no, no—”
I lift her in my arms and toss her over the railing. Her scream follows her all the way to the splash she makes when she hits the water. I mark the spot, pull my shirt off, and dive in after her.
It’s much more peaceful under the surface of the sea than above it.
Ashley doesn’t seem to know that.
She’s fighting the water as she sinks, but all her motions are uncoordinated. They won’t help her. At this rate, she’ll never get her head above water. None of it makes sense. Her dad is rich enough to have hired all the private swimming coaches money can buy. But here she is, trying to kick and failing. Trying to float and failing. Sinking like she’s got that chain around her ankle.
I swim down to her and she tries to throw a hand out and hit me. The whites of her eyes shine in the filtered moonlight. We’re not down far enough to lose all of it yet, but the quality of it is ethereal and impermanent. You can lose the light fast at night. A few more feet and we’ll be where I’ve wanted to go for almost as long as I can remember. In the cool dark depths.
But not today.
Not tonight.
First, swimming lessons.
I take her hand instead of her waist so she can feel the water on the way up, feel the way it moves. Ashley holds my hand so tight that it gives her away. I break the surface first, Ashley a second after me. The moment she can breathe, she uses all her strength to throw herself into my arms. “What the fuck,” she says in my ear, her fingernails cutting into my skin. “What the fuck. Oh my God. It’s freezing. I can’t swim like this.”
“No. The first step is to relax.”
She bursts out laughing, a high, panicked sound. Her body’s warm and slippery in my arms. “I could have drowned, and now you think I should relax.”
“You could have drowned any day before this. The point of knowing how to swim is to make that less likely. You’re going to have to let go of me.”
“I won’t.”
She’s so close and so tense that it’s making the air around us seem brighter, more saturated with moonlight. I have the probably correct sense that Ashley is putting up a fight because, yes, she is a stubborn brat, but also because she’s locked her fingers into my shoulders with so much force that it would take real work to let go.
I draw a trail of salt water across one cheek. Ashley doesn’t flinch at the touch. And she’s stopped kicking, letting me take most of her weight. One of her hands absently traces down over my chest, toward my abs.
“What are you doing?”
Another slow trace. “You have such strange tattoos.”
Good. She doesn’t see the scars. “My tattoos won’t help you swim.”
“You could tell me about them.” She bites her lip, hopeful and trying her best to be distracting.
“If you’re going to learn before sunrise, we need to move things along.”
“And how do you plan to—”
I put a hand around her throat.
There. Better.
Ashley’s eyes have gone wide, her lips parted. She’s the picture of surprise or desire or both. The main effect of touching her this way is that her hands have gone flat on my shoulders and some of the tension has slipped away from her body.
“Choking people isn’t part of swimming,” she says, and I feel every word through my palm.
“It is if they like it.”
Her cheeks flush. “Who said I liked it?”
“Your body tells me, the way you’re burning up in the cold water. The way you shivered every time you felt the steel against your skin. This poor little rich girl likes it rough. Too bad Robbie never figured that out before he met his maker.”
I take my hand away, and she lets out a breath that sounds almost disappointed. “You don’t know anything about Robbie. Or anything about me.”
“I know you’d be wet if I touched between your legs. Not the thin slick of water. I’m talking about desire. About the feel of you, hot and silky, a pearl made smooth by time itself.”
She lets out a sharp gasp—of shock. Of desire. Both.
“Let go,” I order her, pushing her and her sweet tightness away from me.
“We’re in the ocean. If I let go, I’m going to sink.”
“You’re not. The water is trying to help you. And there’s a ladder twenty feet from you. I’m sure you could make it if push came to shove.”
Ashley grumbles, fear flashing in her eyes. “Trying to help me. That’s bullshit, and you know it.”