THREE RYDER
THREE
RYDER
Was this fucking idiot serious? A fucking hooker?
Though Zali would take it as a compliment.
She respected the hell out of sex workers—they got a bad rap, one she felt was rarely deserved.
But I was getting sidetracked—this loser needed off Zali’s yacht right bloody now.
If he ever got his T-shirt and slides on.
I didn’t appreciate his attitude, and there was no fucking way I was going to let him try to insult her in her own place.
It didn’t matter what dickhead thought, though.
He was inconsequential. So was anyone else who didn’t understand Flynn and Zali’s friendship.
It had withstood time and tragedy. Same with Zali and me.
Yes, it started off as me needing to keep a hold of the only connection I had to her brother after he’d passed, but now it was so much more.
I loved her. I’d made myself indispensable to her, doing whatever the hell I needed to do to stay close.
I didn’t expect to fall in love with her. But I had.
I couldn’t ever do anything about it, though. I was too dark for her. Too damaged. Too fucking angry all the time—at myself and the universe. I hated myself for it. But that was the hand I’d been dealt. Zali had lost her mum and brother. I’d lost my dad and my best friend.
She’d turned to sex to make her feel something. I’d turned inward, letting it fester until I was ready to explode. My punching bags helped. But this guy’s face was looking like a better target with each passing moment.
He was still getting fucking dressed, and that was pissing me the fuck off. I stepped closer, and he shrank back against the wall.
“Hurry the fuck up,” I growled and clenched my fists. Fighting in a tux was hardly ideal, but for this dickhead, I’d make an exception.
“I’m leaving, man.” He held his hands up in front of him in self-defence and added, “You can’t blame me for thinking that.”
“Wrong fucking comment,” I grated out, closing my hand around his throat once more and lifting my curled fist up, ready to lay him out.
Zali deserved better than this piece of shit.
She deserved the world. She needed someone who would worship her and love her the way she needed to be loved.
This fuck definitely wasn’t it, but none of her hookups ever were.
She chose them like that. They were always either just as unavailable as she was or they didn’t call the Gold Coast home.
Tourists were good catches—they always chalked the sex up to a getaway tryst, and they never stayed.
They had lives wherever they were from. She’d had a few get clingy, but that’s what I was here for—to remove them.
Then we’d take the yacht up to Jumpinpin and not see another soul for days.
Flynn was always the exception—he slept on the yacht more often than he stayed in his own bed, and we had a runabout moored at the marina so he could always come to us.
Ezra used it too, showing up unannounced every so often.
I ground my teeth and lowered my hand to the neckline of his shirt. Then I dragged him toward the gangplank. He was lucky I didn’t toss him straight off the back, feeding him to the fucking bull sharks that swam in the depths of the marina.
The protective urge in me to check on Zali simmered in my veins. But I had to deal with fuckface here first. I opened the gate and gestured to the plank. “Walk the fuck over that, or I’ll throw you off it. Don’t come anywhere near here again.”
He walked over the gangplank, and once he was standing on the marina, he called out, “She wasn’t even a good fuck anyway.”
“Get the fuck out of here before I put you in the fucking morgue,” I ground out.
At least Zali hadn’t heard that. She’d laugh anyway, and if I knew my girl at all, she’d probably tell him he was lousy too.
Flynn would be keeping her busy, making sure she was getting ready. He made her happy. She deserved someone like him, who was sweet and full of sunshine. He was a good man, genuinely decent, and his heart was as big as his blue eyes. He would love her endlessly; he already did.
If only she wasn’t blind to it.
But he was just a kid too. Half the time, I wanted to wrap him up in cotton wool like I did Zali.
The rest of the time, I wanted to help him shine.
He’d been through hell growing up, but it wasn’t death that had changed him.
It was a shitty childhood where he’d been invisible.
His parents often forgot he existed—to the point where they didn’t even feed him most days—and his older siblings treated him like their punching bag.
When I found out what had happened to him years earlier, my knuckles looked like minced meat.
I had no idea how Flynn hadn’t become jaded with the world, but that just wasn’t him. Where Zali and I preferred the shadows, Flynn lit up every room he walked into. Maybe that was why they were such a great match. His warmth thawed Zali out.
But while Flynn was perfect for Zali in some ways, in others she needed someone more…
assertive. I couldn’t help but picture her guy as older and more dominant.
She needed someone who would take control and snap her out of her self-destructive shit.
They needed to not only worship her, but also teach her to respect herself.
There was nothing wrong with liking sex, not even the public sex she loved, but she had no self-preservation at all.
And that scared me. She picked up random men on an app that had zero security features and freely gave them the location of her permanent mooring.
Then when they arrived, she stripped off and let them fuck her six ways to Sunday.
I wanted her to find someone who read her well enough that they’d figure out what she needed and then made it happen.
The men she chose off those fucking apps always had big dicks, but none of them knew how to use them.
Not a single one had enough brains to realize it either.
I never heard her moan and cry out like she did when she was playing with her vibrators.
Watching the show from the wheelhouse as I piloted the yacht while she made herself come over and over again on the sun loungers on deck was educational.
I knew she loved being stuffed full, the bigger the vibrator or plug in her arse, the better.
I knew she came harder when her clit was played with, and she loved having her legs spread wide as she was bent in half, her knees at her shoulders.
I could do that for her.
I huffed and dismissed that thought immediately.
She deserved someone far better than me.
I wished I was worthy. There was Flynn to consider too.
Not only that, but I needed far more control in a relationship than Zali would ever let me have.
She chose men who usually let her lead. Theoretically, I might be up for that during a hookup.
But I didn’t know if I’d be able to stuff the part of myself that needed control away for long enough to even get off.
Zali may enjoy being bent and twisted like a pretzel with a dick or toy in every hole—something I could help with—but I’d also spank the shit out of her for some of the bullshit she pulled.
I wouldn’t risk our relationship, my friendship with Flynn, or my job for an orgasm.
But I couldn’t deny that pinking up that pretty arse was tempting.
I’d also love to see it stretched around my dick.
It was an eternal struggle to do the right thing.
The only thing that stopped me from marching down to where she was splayed out like a fucking treat and feeding her my dick was knowing that she’d likely bite it off for being so fucking presumptuous.
Her brother’s voice in my head didn’t help either.
Ezra stepped into my line of sight at the base of the gangplank, and I startled back to attention.
I’d been so focussed on my thoughts that I hadn’t even seen him walk up.
He was dressed much like Flynn and I were in a black tux.
Where my shirt was black and my bow tie was strangling me, his shirt was white.
He looked perfectly comfortable in his black bow tie, too—something that made me want to strip him out of it.
How could people wear suits all fucking day, every day? They were fucking straightjackets.
“You’re in a good mood. Was he the good time?” Ezra gestured over his shoulder with his thumb.
I raised my brow at him, unimpressed, but bit back my caustic response. He was hitting a nerve he wasn’t even aware of. I exhaled, trying to calm myself down so I wouldn’t snap him in half like a twig.
Ez didn’t deserve my temper. He was good people.
He could have arrested Zali when she was a kid, but instead he’d hired her and started teaching her how to use her talents for something that wouldn’t get her killed.
We all knew that she basically moonlighted for the Feds and did her own thing most of the time, but Ezra had the decency to ignore it.
He even went as far as giving her the heads-up whenever he thought she needed to protect herself.
She already knew—I was sure she had some sort of monitoring bug or something installed on the whole of the Federal Police’s system—but the fact that a detective risked his job to warn her earned him my respect.
“Just taking out the rubbish.” I stepped out of the way of the gate and motioned for him to climb aboard.
“It looked more like you were removing him.” Ez gestured at the guy with his chin as he stepped onto the yacht.
“Yeah, like I said, I was emptying the rubbish.”
Ezra looked around as if he was checking whether anything was out of place. His brows were drawn and his lips pursed. “Was he giving you trouble? Is Zali okay?”
“She’s fine, but you’re better off not asking what he said, Detective,” I responded. I shook my head, still angry at the fucking idiot who’d just left.
“Or we’d both be kicking his arse?” Ezra nudged my shoulder with his and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“Pretty much.”
“Was he a tourist? I could flag his name for a cavity search on departure.”
I snorted out a laugh and grinned at him. “Ask Zali. She was the one he directed the insult at.”
Ezra’s jaw flexed as he ground his teeth together, and then he breathed out slowly, clearly trying to keep his temper in check. After a moment, he shook it off and asked, “Where is our date?”
“She’s getting ready with Flynn. They’re in her stateroom.”
“We have time.” He leaned back against the railing and crossed his legs at his ankles.
He always looked so put together and confident.
He oozed the kind of sexual energy that drew people in.
He should have been a model or an actor or something—he had that whole Chris Hemsworth vibe about him—but instead he chose the police force.
I admired that about him. He could have gone down the influencer path or tried to get an agent and secure modelling gigs—and he would have crushed it too.
Even I could admit he had that sexy swagger people drooled over—but he wasn’t that kind of guy.
He just wanted to make a difference to the world, and he was doing it.