Chapter Fifty-Three
Isla
I helped Tauk prep dinner.
I helped him cook dinner.
I ate the dinner.
It would’ve made my top five best meals I’d ever eaten… if I’d tasted any of it.
But I was spiraling.
Wolf’s words cycled like a new mantra.
You’re not safe here.
He’s a hunted man, Isla.
Dinner dishes were done. A giant beast of a man was downstairs guarding me so I didn’t do who knew what. And I was lying in a bed I’d been thoroughly ravished on last night by a former SEAL as I read Tauk’s journal entry for the fifth time.
Don’t burn shit.
You can’t undo it.
Tauk.
I rolled onto my back and turned my head.
Then I looked out at the panoramic view of a glassy nighttime ocean undulating in soft ripples like a freshly washed top sheet being shaken out over a newly made bed.
You’re not safe here.
He’s a hunted man, Isla.
Wolf was right.
I wasn’t safe here—in my own head.
And Nix was being hunted—by me and my obsessive thoughts.
I’d never been on the receiving end of a communication blackout before, and I hated it.
Restlessness crawled through my veins, every heartbeat sounded in my ears as if I were wearing a stethoscope, and I was fixating….
His scent, his breath on my skin, his intense gaze when he looked at me.
This couldn’t be healthy, and I didn’t know where the woman was who’d lain by a pool all day with the conviction that a former SEAL would return to her with his pretty words of promise, his dirty, filthy mouth, his thick erection, and his dominant commands that would make all this madness disappear—but that woman was gone.
And I felt burned.
The kind of burn you couldn’t undo because dignity was different than agency, and I’d given the wrong thing away.