Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
D OM THOUGHT HIS orgasm would never end. The hammer-like throbs rang through him, taking forever to slow and fade before becoming latent pangs and twitches.
His arms and legs were trembling with exertion, but he waited until he felt himself slipping out of her before he clumsily made sure she was balanced on her foot. He secured the condom and withdrew, wrapped it in a napkin and tossed it into the bin under the sink.
Then he walked out into the lashing rain, still shaking and soft in the knees.
It was rude, he knew, to exit in silence like that, but he didn’t have a word in him. He was too stunned.
Had it been worth the four-year wait? Quite the opposite. He resented that lost time, which was a ridiculous reaction. That was like saying he wished he’d tried heroin four years ago. He shouldn’t have tried it today .
He walked naked into the crashing surf, then dove into the bracing water, only realizing as he came out that that was also stupid. He could have been stung by jellyfish or carried away on a rip current into the dark ocean. The beach had been deemed safe earlier in the day, but there had also been a hundred people here looking out for each other.
Where the hell were all those good people when he was taking an even bigger risk with his life? If this affair ever got out, both of their families would come after him. Evelina Visconti was absolutely off-limits, taboo and forbidden.
Which had to be the reason that had been the most incredible sex of his life. By a long shot. That, and breaking such a long dry spell.
He knew, though. Deep down he knew it had been like that before he’d known who she was. That’s why he’d obsessed over her for the last four years. That’s why he hadn’t had sex with anyone else. It had to be her.
That’s why, like a rube fresh off the turnip truck, he’d fallen for the “We’ll do it once to get it out of our system” rationalization.
When the heavy rain grew too unpleasant to bear, he made his way back to the shack and used the last light of dusk to find a bottle of wine from one of the crates he’d stored between the pontoons. He’d rather have the Scotch he’d mentally earmarked, but he really would do something stupid if he split a bottle of that with her.
He stepped inside to find her dressed in her shorts and shirt. Her complexion was ghostly in the upturned flashlight of her cell phone. Her ponytail was tidy once again, her profile unreadable as she prepared plates of food.
“Your clothes are there with a towel.” Her elbow pointed in a vague direction toward him. “The tap works. I don’t know whether the water is potable or how much there is so I only used it for washing. I’m drinking bottled.”
“Are you sure the food is edible? Something smells off.” Astringent. He set the wine on the counter and stepped into his shorts, ignoring the beach towel and T-shirt. One look at her and he was already too hot inside his own skin. Better to stay clammy and uncomfortable.
“I used some disinfectant.”
“On yourself or...?”
Her hand faltered, then, “It’s under the sink if you need it.”
What a pair of comedians.
“Glasses?” He took up the bottle and realized it wasn’t a twist-off. “And a corkscrew?”
She handed over both, then took a gulp of what looked like a freshly opened can of Bloody Mary.
“Are you all right?” He was disturbed by the way she was avoiding his eyes.
“Of course.”
“Evie—”
“We said we wouldn’t talk about it.” She met his gaze for one flat second, mouth stretched into a meaningless smile.
Maybe she was having as much trouble processing their lovemaking as he was.
“But you’ll tell me if I was too rough,” he said gravely.
“I’m fine.” She gulped again. “My ankle was hurting so I had another ibuprofen.”
“Sit and put it up. I can finish that.”
“I’m done. I was just fussing.” She shifted a caddy of condiments out of the way and sat on the front counter, setting her back next to the window this time, using the pile of towels and sarongs as a backrest. When she propped her ankle, her outstretched leg was more of a closed gate than an open one.
It was also a more convenient position for her to reach the food, but he felt deliberately shut out by her body language and was irritated with himself for taking umbrage over it.
He poured out the glasses and handed one across, giving the small banquet a proper review as he did.
She’d used the remaining half of the torn sarong as a tablecloth. The pickles and crackers and canned fruit were arranged as beautifully as any thousand-dollar plate he’d ever seen. She’d even found some pistachio nuts and some kind of dip.
“The hummus is from a packet. I used bottled water to make it.”
“It looks good.” He could have eaten all of this himself. It had been hours since breakfast and he’d carried roughly a hundred and thirty pounds across the island before working up an appetite with her.
She was hungry, too. They attacked the food, not speaking again until there were only a few olives and a lick of hummus left.
“Oh. Dessert.” She leaned to dig into her bag. “My protein bar is chocolate-coated.”
He snorted. “I thought you were going to offer me the other condom.”
The look she sent him made him want to bite his tongue. Or hers, now that the air took on an erotic vibration.
“Yes, I want to use it,” she spat with resentment. “Damn you to hell.”
“Oh, I’m quite sure that’s where we’re headed.” He snapped out a beach towel, wafting it onto the floor. Then he stepped across to gather her up and take her down onto it.
“Dom!” Eve snapped awake in the secure spoon of his body. His solid chest warmed her back. His hot thighs were bent behind hers and his heavy arm weighed against her waist. There hadn’t been any other way to sleep in this narrow space down the middle of the shack. As night had fallen, he’d closed the awning, she’d set down fresh towels and sarongs as bedding, and they had crashed harder than the surf.
Now the floor was shifting beneath them.
She urgently tapped his thigh, trying to sit up and find her phone on the counter above her, but his arm tensed, locking tighter than the safety bar on a roller coaster as he drew a long breath, pulling himself into wakefulness. She blinked her eyes wide, but couldn’t see a thing in the pitch dark of this unknown hour. She didn’t think they’d slept very long, though.
“What’s wrong?” he murmured.
“I think we’re floating.”
“We are. It’s okay.” He roamed his hand down her front, ironing her more firmly into the hollow of his sheltering body. “It’s high tide. There was only a short beach when we arrived. Remember? That’s how he gets this thing onto the beach. It’s anchored to concrete blocks underneath. I saw them when I put the booze down there.”
“Oh. Okay.” She relaxed. Mostly. Because now his hand was petting her thigh, fingertips tracing the seam where her legs were pressed together. He was hardening against her butt cheek.
“That means he’ll likely be back in twelve hours to retrieve it,” he added.
“We don’t have a condom,” she reminded, voice growing unsteady with arousal.
“I know,” he grumbled and brought his hand back to her stomach.
“We could do other things.” She rolled to face him.
“Hell, yeah, we could.” He pressed her beneath him and kissed her with urgent, dark passion, invading the recesses of her mouth in a reclaiming of territory he’d conquered only a short time ago.
She met the electric dance of his tongue with her own, greedily taking all that he was willing to give because they had less than twelve hours.
“Stand up,” she urged when he started to part her legs.
He did and she used the darkness to hide her inexperience while she learned how to take him in her mouth and pleasure him in every way she’d ever read a man enjoyed.
He seemed to enjoy it very much. He swore and hissed in shaken breaths and his thighs were like iron beneath her hands as she stroked them. When he hit his release, his jagged cries were both triumphant and vanquished.
Then, while she was still glowing with inordinate pride at delivering him so much pleasure, he lay on his back and arranged her in a most unseemly position to return the favor. It was the most sinfully erotic experience of her life on top of a night of generous caresses and life-altering orgasms.
That really should have exhausted their libidos, but the chuckle of a kookaburra woke her to predawn light and the quiet of a blown-out storm.
Dom was already awake. His erection pressed insistently against her backside. As she drew in a waking breath, her breast shifted in the hand that cupped it.
“Your nipple is hard. It’s been driving me crazy, wanting to play with it while I waited for you to wake up.” He skimmed his hand down and discovered she was already wet.
She moaned with something like relief, shifting her leg so it rested on his, parting her thighs so he had more room to caress into her tender folds.
He groaned with appreciation and opened his mouth against her nape. “Once more? I’ll pull out.”
They shouldn’t. It wasn’t just the risk of pregnancy. It was who they were. This was supposed to be an inoculation against wanting each other, but she feared it was only going to make this incessant pull between them stronger.
“Unless there’s something more to worry about?” He shifted his hand to her stomach. “I get checked regularly.”
She couldn’t bring herself to admit that she had never been tested because she’d never been with anyone before last night. She hadn’t told him that and doubted she ever would. She wouldn’t have the opportunity. They were never going to see each other again. Not if they could help it.
She turned her face into the crooked arm that was her pillow.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “I don’t have anything to worry about. I can take a pill once we’re back in civilization, to be safe.”
“Sure?” he asked in a gratified growl even as he drew his hips back and guided himself between her thighs, seeking.
“Yes,” she breathed, arching to accept the press and penetration that sealed them together one final time.
He swore and clutched his arm hard around her a moment, sounding breathless as he said, “You feel incredible.”
The lack of latex made it more intense. It wasn’t just the heightened sensations, though. It was the intimacy. The naked danger. The morning light that took away the fever dream aspect and made it real.
How would she bear never feeling like this again? She would suffer an emptiness for the rest of her life, yearning for him.
She had him now, though. In this moment, she felt divine.
He moved lazily, fingertip stroking through her folds again. She braced a hand on the cupboard in front of her, holding herself still for his easy thrusts.
She was glad he was behind her. This was so good, tears were pressing against her closed eyelids, wetting her lashes. Her longing for this to last forever rose along with her arousal until both were acute. Before she realized it was happening, she broke with a cry.
“Greedy little Evie,” he said against her ear, teeth catching at her earlobe while he pumped. “You just can’t get enough, can you?”
Her sheath was still fluttering around his intrusion. Her nipples felt bruised under his caress. Her whole body ached from the nonstop lovemaking and the abbreviated sleep on a cold, hard floor. Her ankle throbbed like a migraine and she was tender where he penetrated her.
But he wasn’t wrong. None of that mattered. All she wanted was for him to skim his touch down again and reawaken her desire. She pushed back, inviting deeper, harder thrusts, behaving lewdly because she couldn’t help herself.
“Me, either,” he said, pulling out long enough to bring her onto her hands and knees before him. “This really is the last time.” He returned and she pushed back with a groan of welcome.
The surf was at their doorstep when Eve rose and put on her bathing suit and went for a cool, cleansing swim. Dom joined her, also wearing his shorts, as though there were any eyes here to see them beyond each other’s.
As though they hadn’t seen and touched and tasted every inch of the other’s naked body last night.
They barely spoke, barely looked at each other as the glare of midmorning light forced an end to the madness. A reckoning.
A wreck oning, Eve thought with irony, as she lowered to sit on the overturned milk crate that had been washed up to the sand a small distance from the shack.
She drank in the paradise of powdered sand and sunlight glinting off turquoise waters and rip curls of foam edging ever closer to her feet, as inexorable as reality. She was stranded with the last man on earth she should want and she half hoped they wouldn’t be rescued. She would rather live out their life as castaways.
Dom waded around to join her. He carried two bags of potato chips, her protein bar, and offered her a cup of—
“Coffee?” She sniffed, then sipped. It was terrible. He’d made it with cold, bottled water and it was black, but it was better than none. “Thank you.”
“You cooked last night,” he said drily.
It was such a domestic thing to say, as though they were a couple who took turns cooking for each other, it brought a hot scald of wistfulness to the back of her throat.
What are we going to do? she wanted to ask, but she already knew. Nothing.
His profile was rugged and remote, his jaw shadowed by stubble and his eyes hidden behind his mirrored lenses. It was not the face of someone who thought their upcoming separation was a problem.
“There he is,” he said.
She shot her gaze to the water and saw the flash of a tin boat reflecting the sun. The last thing she felt was relief.
“I realized I had forgotten my sunglasses at the lookout,” Dom said cryptically.
“You’re wearing them.”
“Because I went back for them. That’s when I found you limping up the path.”
He was feeding her their talking points.
“I went to the spit on impulse,” she added. “After leaving Logan barfing on the beach.”
“Really?” His mouth curled with amused contempt.
“I caught my foot on a root and twisted my ankle.” It was true.
“Our slow progress back here meant we missed the last boat. We spent a sleepless night in the shack, but otherwise we’re fine.”
Sleepless. She caught back a ragged chuckle. “It’s always best to stick as close to the truth as possible.”
His mouth stayed in its cynical curl.
“Can I really trust you not to tell anyone?” The raw, searing sensation in her chest wouldn’t subside.
“Can I trust you ?” He was still looking out to sea, not giving her the merest smidge of comfort with that harsh profile.
“Yes.” It was untenable that she had trusted this man with her body, with her life even, given how their families regarded each other, when she didn’t know how to trust him otherwise. Yet here she was. Alive. Unharmed. So sexually satisfied, she was kind of stupid with it.
But changed, too. Not by sex. By him . By the fact they continued to have something between them and always would. Now they had two memories. They were a part of each other’s history that couldn’t be erased.
“I don’t want anyone to ever know I let you...” Her voice dried up as he finally looked down at her. His glare seemed to pierce the mirror of the lenses so she felt it like a pin that poked through her and held her in place.
“You didn’t let me do anything,” he said in a grim tone. “We did that together.”
She turned her hot gaze to the boat bearing down on their cove. The sound of its engine was growing louder.
“I know,” she admitted in a small voice. “I just wish it had been anyone but you.”
Dom snorted, muttering, “Same,” before he waded into the lapping waves, meeting the boat as it cut its engine, but continued to drift closer.
The voice of the astonished operator carried across the water.
“Mate. You two been here all night?” He stammered that he’d been told everyone was off the island.
“No harm done,” Dom assured him. “We helped ourselves to what we needed. Bill me for the alcohol that was ruined by the tide.”
“I can cover the costs,” Eve said when they came ashore. “It was my fault.”
Dom shook his head once, abruptly, as though she had offended him.
That was pretty much the last thing they said to each other. While he helped the young man collect everything and secure the shack for towing, Eve combed the beach for any litter that their party had missed yesterday.
When the tide was high enough that the shack was floating, Dom boosted her into the boat. She watched the empty beach grow smaller as they motored away. Their tryst was over.