Chapter Eleven
Isla
Our eyes locked.
His too green.
Mine too eager.
Then an ocean breeze disheveled his blond hair, and I forgot to hide my real smile.
He forgot to hide his reaction—carnal, fierce, dominant—for a second. Then another gust pushed his hair back from his face, and his darkly sexual expression shut down as his domineering authoritarianism locked into place. “Follow.”
The man moved like the architectural lines of the boat.
Sleek, masculine, powerful, his shoulders strained his shirt, and his thigh muscles flexed as he strode across the deck toward a flight of stairs.
He took the first two steps, and suddenly I understood women who obsessed over a man’s ass.
I was obsessing.
The way the material of his pants stretched across rock-hard muscles, the sheer perfection of his firm, round glutes.
I wanted to grab hold just to feel that kind of power.
But the way he’d removed my hands from his shoulders told me that wasn’t only an unlikely scenario, but that he didn’t let women touch him unless he commanded it.
Which, watching that ass as he cleared the top step had me thinking I’d like to be commanded by him.
It also had me thinking about my own ass—something I never did. Not in the physical sense.
I’d weighed more than I did now, and I’d weighed less. I’d been weaker, stronger, sicker, healthier. I’d had my endurance tested and my mental bandwidth stretched to breaking. I’d skated close to death and breezed through days without a care in the world.
But I’d never thought much about my body beyond how it either served or failed me.
I didn’t grow up around any other women to compare myself to except my mother, and she’d never seemed concerned with how men perceived her physicality or her attractiveness. I’d thought she was beautiful. She’d told me once I was beautiful. Then she’d warned me not to waste it.
I’d never known what she’d meant, but now I was questioning if a man who moved like a Navy SEAL had looked at my ass like I had his.
I wondered if this man even knew what it was to obsess over a woman.
As soon as I thought it, I chastised myself because I knew where those thoughts would lead, and I didn’t want to go there.
Except it was too late.
I was already looking at man who I was sure had been a SEAL, and now I was noticing the glaring differences between us.
He was at least a decade older.
He was faster, quieter, smarter, more cunning.
He was wealthy on a level I didn’t know how to begin to comprehend.
And despite having traveled the world, despite knowing how to hunt, defend, kill, survive, and hit a target from a thousand yards out, despite my sexual experiences and thinking I was smart enough to keep myself out of most trouble, I suddenly felt very, very na?ve.
This man had a villa, a yacht, and his own private security who jumped from helicopters.
My most prized possession was my journal.
We were not similar.
We were not equal.
We were not even in the same stratosphere.
I’d never had a relationship. I didn’t have friends. I wasn’t comfortable being around the same person for more than a couple hours. But this man had picked me up once, looked into my eyes, and now I felt… alive?
How was that possible?
When I was eleven, my father had told me I didn’t have to relate to people. I only needed to navigate them. My mother had raised an eyebrow at him when he’d said it, but she hadn’t refuted him.
Fifteen years later, I still held on to that conviction.
I thought I could navigate anyone. But I’d never related to them. Not unless I asked them to write in my journal, then I could read their thoughts.
It was my version of wealth.
If I met someone who I thought was interesting or kind or had a nice smile or, sometimes, someone who was really sad or angry, I asked them to write one thing in my journal.
It could be anything, but my favorite was when they asked what they should say.
That’s when I’d tell them to write the single best piece of advice they had—in their handwriting, in their native language—and only sign their first name if they wanted to.
I had countless pages of signatures and a lifetime’s worth of inner thoughts because every time I opened to a random passage, each time I reread the words, they landed different.
What I wouldn’t do to have this man write in my journal.
I had a feeling it would be sparse but deep. The kind of soul deep that would change the way my mind knitted together the simplest and most complex of thoughts, and I wanted that.
I really wanted it—from a man who had kidnapped me.
Shaking away the thought, I stepped onto the bridge of the majestic boat and was momentarily stunned at the massive display of high-tech controls and equipment that looked more modern and complex than any cockpit I’d ever seen.
Not that I’d been on many planes, but I had nothing else to compare it to.
Remembering how and why I was here, I asked the question I should’ve the second he’d tossed me into his private helicopter. “Where are we going?”
“Who’s the sniper?” he immediately countered.
Of course he was going to ask that. I would’ve been a fool not to expect it, but I’d somehow pushed it aside the moment he’d tossed me over his shoulder. But now that I was seeing the enormity and complexity of his life, I could understand why he’d want to know.
Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t going to divulge that information or even tell him it had nothing to do with him. Or at least I didn’t think it did. But seeing all of this? I couldn’t be sure.
One of the few things I wasn’t na?ve about was the military and the depth of its tendrils.
Glancing at the warfighter whose large hands and deft fingers were flying across touch screens and controls, I remembered what my father had told me, and I aimed to navigate this man. “Did you enjoy being a SEAL?”
“What makes you think I was Navy?”
Mentally, I tallied the list. I hadn’t heard him come up behind me.
He moved like Special Forces. His hardened gaze harbored that particular, impenetrable signature of war.
He’d leveraged his weapon without discharging it, flew a helicopter without blinking, and was now piloting a giant yacht.
All of that added up. But what really gave it away was his brand and model of 9mm.
“P226 MK25.” I smiled. “Standard-issue sidearm for Navy SEALs.”