On Thin Ice

  “I think you’re going to … upset me.”

  “Now that’s a euphemism I’ve never heard before. Look at it this way – you came down to Callivera to minister to the needy and the disadvantaged. Consider this an act of charity.”

  “You’re not disadvantaged.”

  “Three years.” This wasn’t going the way he’d planned. He wanted her to loosen up, but she was just getting tighter and tighter. “Just answer me one question, and then I’ll leave you alone.”

  “You will?” He heard the relief in her voice. Did he also hear disappointment?

  “This thing between us. This pull. Is it my imagination?”

  She looked at him and lied. Flat out lied. “Yes.”

  He moved past her, opened the door, and walked out.

  The night air was cool on his heated skin, and he stood on the deserted deck, staring out at the inky-black ocean. He’d had enough. He wanted to get roaring, stinking drunk, and then pass out for the rest of the voyage rather than breathe in the infuriatingly tantalizing scent of Sister Beth, the purported non-virgin of the year. There were a number of problems with that plan. First, he had no alcohol. Second, even if he did he was incapable of passing out, which he figured was his father’s legacy to him. He knew how to drink, hard, and he knew how to pass it by without a second thought. He just didn’t know how to pass out. Third, he was sharing his room with a teenage boy, rendering dedicated drunkenness difficult to achieve.

  As for Sister Beth … he’d never forced a woman in his life, and he wasn’t about to start now. But one thing was abundantly clear. He couldn’t be around her, not right now, without putting his hands on her. He’d keep his distance, and once they got to Spain he’d put her on a plane and out of his life.

  He breathed in the fresh salt air, trying to relax his shoulders. His entire body felt wound as tightly as a clock spring, and he knew if anyone made the mistake of coming up to him he’d either snap his head off or hit him. No one would make the mistake of approaching him. People steered clear of him when he was in this kind of mood, instinctively recognizing danger. He could clear a sidewalk or a room when he was like this.

  He lifted his head, staring into the bleak night. How far was Spain? One day away? Two? He’d waited as long as he could, and he knew why. He didn’t want the temptation of having too much time with her. One night, two at the most, and then adios.

  Served him right. In the end it was for the best – he was going to get through life very well without ever having a taste of Sister Beth. After all, the most tempting things were usually the most dangerous. At this point he could dump her and forget her, quite easily, thank you very much. After sex it might be harder to walk away.

  What would she do if he stormed back down the gangway, shoved open her door and took her? He’d be like his da, without the hitting. No, she was going to have to accept that she wanted it too. At this point he was done asking. She would have to come to him, and that wasn’t going to happen.

  He took in another deep breath. He was calm now. No longer shaking with frustration. He was under control. He turned, and slammed his fist into the bulkhead, hard.

  He looked down. He hadn’t broken anything, but the skin had split across his knuckles and he was bleeding. And an idiot.

  And then he saw her, standing still and quiet in the moonlight, and as swiftly as it had come the rage left him.

  “What are you doing?” Her voice was low, husky.

  He considered it. “Being a bloody fool.”

  “I should bandage that.”

  “No.” He didn’t want to look at her, all silver in the moonlight. “You’ve done enough.”

  “I haven’t even checked your knife wound.”

  “It’s fine. Go back to bed.”

  “Your hand is bleeding.”

  He wheeled around, the anger rising again. “For fuck’s sake leave me alone! I’ve had as much of you tonight as I can take.”

  She didn’t flinch from his anger. “I thought you wanted more,” she said. She crossed the few feet of the deck, put her cool hand on the side of his neck, and kissed him, a soft, lingering kiss. And then she turned and walked away.

  Beth could barely breathe. She had sat in her cabin, telling herself she’d done the right thing, she was glad he’d left, she didn’t want or need what little he could give her. She didn’t need anything. She would make it even. She would give him the money, all the money. She could go out and buy some silly bra and panties and send them to him, gift-wrapped, and he’d laugh and think of her with less anger.

  She could do it. She could hide. She was afraid of him, afraid of his big, strong body, afraid of his hands on her, afraid of losing herself so completely she’d never come back. She’d learned early on that the world took away the things, the people that she cared about. She was terrified to risk it again.

  But what was the risk? He would go anyway. He wasn’t offering her a relationship, he told her. Just the best sex of her life. Wasn’t it past time she experienced it?

  She knew he hadn’t gone back to his cabin, but the dining hall was empty. Which left the deck. She’d climbed up, into the cool night air, and seen him smash his fist into the iron bulk-head, and she almost turned and ran from the ever-present violence that was a part of him. But he’d seen her, and his expression had been unpromising.

  I can do this, she told herself, hoping he wouldn’t see how nervous she was. “I thought you wanted more,” she said. And she put her mouth against his, a soft, trembling kiss, feeling the hard line of his lips, before walking away.

  He caught up with her outside her doorway, when she almost gave up. He said nothing, simply pulled her into his arms, against his strong, hard body, and his hand slid beneath her hair, tilting her face up to his. “No more running away?” His voice was rough.

  His eyes glittered down into hers, and if she wanted tenderness it wasn’t there. Simply a dark, naked heat sparking between them.

  “No more running away,” she said.

  His kiss was far different from hers. He used his tongue, kissing her hard, and she felt her initial panic begin, and then fade. He wouldn’t hurt her, she understood that instinctively. She let herself relax into his kiss, and it softened, so that he was exploring her mouth, with slow, sensuous need, and her own need flared. He reached behind her and opened the door to her cabin, and then he broke his possessive kiss to lift her in his arms, carrying her into the cabin and kicking the door shut behind him.

  He set her down on the bunk. She’d turned off the light when she’d left to follow him, an ingrained habit, and he didn’t bother to switch it on. The small cabin was lit by moonlight and the reflection of the ship’s lights, and it was a place of shifting shadows. She liked the shadows. She wanted to hide from him, pretend she was somewhere else, pretend…

  “Don’t do that,” he said, pushing the cotton shirt off her shoulders.

  “Do what?” She shivered at the touch of his hard hands against her skin. She was hot, she was cold, and he tugged at the hem of her tank top.

  “You said you wouldn’t run away. That means you look at me, acknowledge me, not pretend you’re in some fairy tale. I’m no magic prince who’s going to wake you with a goddamned kiss.”

  She didn’t even want to consider how he knew what she was thinking. He knew her too well, only one of the many scary things about him. He stripped the shirt over her head, and she was wearing nothing but the baggy jeans. She instinctively tried to cover her breasts, but he caught her wrists and held them down on the bed, leaning over her.

  Her voice caught. “Then who are you?”

  He was looking into her eyes, not at her breasts, and his gaze was intent. His mouth, the mouth she wanted, curved in a slight smile. “Your worst nightmare?”

  She shook her head. “Let go of my hands.”

  He did, and she lifted them, cradling his face, pushing his long, multi-colored hair away from the planes and angles of him. “Fate,” she said. “You can’t
run away from fate.”

  “Are you trying to scare me off, Sister Beth? This is a blip on the horizon, not a relationship.”

  “You already said that. Several times, in fact. Who are you trying to convince?”

  He laughed softly, and the sound curled in her belly, warming her. “You’re evil, Sister Beth. I like that in a woman.” He put his hands on her shoulders, big, strong, rough hands on her, his thumbs beginning to knead the tension, the fear, out of her. They moved down her arms, slowly, so that she could stop him, and then he pushed her back on the bunk, and she felt the mattress against her back, the cool sheets, the soft pillow beneath her head.He let his slow, carnal gaze slide down to her breasts then, and he breathed in a ragged sigh. She waited for him to say something crass, to try to break the strange, erotic lassitude she was sliding into, but he was silent, watching her breathe. He moved then, onto the bunk, over her, straddling her, and he was dark and hot and everything she wanted.

  He put his hands on her waist, letting them slide up to brush against her breasts, barely touching them, and she could feel her nipples contract almost painfully. She jerked, wanting more.

  “Small,” he said in a rough voice. “And perfect.” He leaned down, and she could fee his tongue against her, brushing across her nipple, and she felt her womb contract in fear and anticipation “You’re going to let me suck them, aren’t you, Sister Beth?”

  He waited for permission, but her throat closed, unable to say the words, terrified that he’d leave her. His eyes darkened, and he ran his thumbs across the swollen nubs. “That’s all right, sweetheart. You’ll tell me. Eventually. You’re going to say everything I want you to say. You’re going to cry it, and whisper it, and scream it.”

  The heat between her legs grew hotter even as fear danced across her nerve endings. “We can take this slow, can’t we?” she managed to ask. “You won’t push me?”

  “Oh, my precious one.” He was sounding more Irish, an instinctive croon that made her melt. “I’m going to push you so far you won’t know where you end and I begin. I’m not going to approach you on my knees. I don’t worship virgin queens. I fuck them.”

  “Don’t.”

  “And you’re going to tell me you want me to fuck you. Hard.” Her nipples felt so tight and hard they were almost painful, and the soft brush of his rough thumbs against them was a glorious kind of torture. “No fairy tales. Just you and me. And sex.” He leaned over her, his mouth catching her nipple, drawing it in, sucking, his tongue swirling, and she arched off the bed, burning.

  She heard the sound she made, a soft moan of need. Her hands came up, almost of their own accord, and threaded through the long hair that fell around his face, sifting her fingers through it, dancing across his hot skin. Lifting his head, he blew on her breast, and she cried out as sensations danced through her, and before they died down he moved to her other breast, sucking, licking. She felt his teeth rasp against her, and she shivered in response.

  He moved down, and his hands were at the fastening to her jeans, unzipping them. How many hands did the man have, she thought dazedly, awash in sensation. The tug of his mouth at her breast was like nothing she’d ever felt before, hot and hard and needy. She felt his hand between her legs, against the heavy seams of denim, pushing, stroking through all those layers of cloth, and she arched up again, pushing back, wanting more.

  He lifted his head, looking down at her. “Tell me to take your pants off.” The demand was husky but clear.

  She swallowed, fighting it, fighting the desire, fighting herself. “Are you wearing my pants?”

  His laugh was shaky. She liked that. “Saucy, aren’t you?” he said. And then she felt his hands on her hips, shoving the jeans down, moving back and stripping them off her legs so fast she didn’t have time to react before he was straddling her again, holding her in place with his hard thighs. “There, that was painless, wasn’t it?”

  It took her a moment to catch her breath. “You left my underwear on.”

  “Well, getting your knickers off is half the fun, isn’t it?”

  “Half the fun?”

  He was unbuttoning his shirt, slowly, and his eyes glittered in the moonlight. “Well, no. Just one of the many bits of fun to be had.”

  Fun. This didn’t feel like fun. If felt dark and torturous and powerful, this strangling need that was rushing through her body, but it didn’t feel like fun.

  He tossed the shirt away, and he’d removed the bandage from the knife wound. She tried to angle her head, to look at him, but he pushed her back down. “You can play doctor later, sweetheart,” he said, reading her again. “We’ve got better things to do.”

  “I just want to make sure …”

  “If you make me bleed you can patch me up again. You sure I’m not going to make you bleed?”

  She was glad the moonlight didn’t show her flush. “How many times do I have to tell you that I’m not a virgin? Why don’t you hurry up and get this over with and then you’ll know for sure.”

  “Oh, I’m in no hurry. What’s another hour when you’ve waited three years?”

  “Hour?” her voice rose in a little shriek.

  “Well, perhaps not an hour,” he amended, a dark light in his eyes that shone even in the moonlight. “I have excellent control but I don’t think even I could hold out that long. Not since I’ve spent almost every second of the last six days thinking about doing this.”

  She frowned, trying rapid calculations. “Six days.”

  “I’d say since the first moment I laid eyes on you, but I didn’t even need to see you to want you. I just had to hear your voice in the darkness of that shack where they kept me and I was off.”

  She swallowed. “Nonsense. It was simply because I was female.”

  “Nonsense,” he mimicked. “There were any number of females I could have had in Puerto Claro. There’ll be women everywhere when we get to Spain, and I have a fondness for Latin women. They’re comfortable with their bodies, they’re comfortable with sex.”

  For some reason she felt hurt. “I’m not,” she said flatly.

  “There’s a news flash.”

  “Then why are you here? Apart from the obvious, being that I’m the only female available?” Shit. She was being vulnerable again, when she wanted to be strong and sure.

  “You can stop that right now,” he said. “Sometimes I like a challenge.”

  She hadn’t realized she was clenching the sheets in her hands. He pried them loose, easily enough, and put them on his chest, sliding them up his warm, smooth skin. “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. By the time I finish with you you’ll be speaking Spanish like a native.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  She tasted like fear and need and a thousand other things too complicated, and MacGowan didn’t care. He needed to be inside her, holding her, fucking her. But it took more self-control than he would have thought he possessed to keep moving at this pace when he wanted to do nothing more than yank down his jeans and thrust inside her, over and over again until he was lost in the bone-shaking orgasm her reluctant flesh promised.

  That accident in the apartment only made the need more powerful. He felt an almost atavistic need to claim her. As if, having gotten through the desperate measures of the last few days she was now his trophy of war, to wallow in, to take, over and over again, until he could finally slake his overwhelming hunger.

  He wanted her hands on him, he wanted her mouth on him, he wanted to take her from behind, leaning over the bunk, he wanted her to go down on him, he wanted everything he could possibly think of and more. He wanted it hard and nasty, gentle and sweet. But most of all he wanted it now.

  He moved off her, stripping off his jeans and kicking them off the berth. He would have thought she would be closing her eyes and trying to run away again, but instead she looked at him, and impossibly he could feel his cock swell at her calm regard.

  “That’s not going to fit,” she said.

  He laughed. God, how coul
d she keep making him laugh when things were so intense? How could the laughter not lighten the darkness between them, around them? “Bet you another hundred thousand,” he said.

  He would have liked to linger on the elegant offering of her body, a little bruised but still lithe and beautiful, but his patience was wearing thin, and he knew how to get her ready, fast.

  He nudged her legs apart, and she let him, which surprised him. The underwear was more delicate then he would have expected, and it was easy enough to slide his hands beneath the lace bands on her hips and rip, pulling it off. Shocking her with the sudden violence of the move. But she didn’t pull away.

  “Show time, Sister Beth,” he said, pushing her legs apart. He put his mouth on her.

  She bucked in surprise, but he’d taken the precaution of holding her hips steady as he slid his tongue down, tasting the sweetness of her, the need of her. “Don’t,” she said in a choked cry. “I don’t like this.”

  He didn’t lift his head. He was very good at this – he loved women, loved the taste and the touch and the smell of them, and he knew how to bring exquisite pleasure to the shyest of flesh. If she really didn’t want this she wouldn’t be threading her fingers into his hair, mindlessly stroking him, her hips arching toward him.

  He brought her up slowly, teasing her, feeling the first reluctant tremors of response, the shiver as he slid his fingers inside her, the wetness of her that called to him. Her fingers tightened on his hair, and then released him as she clutched the sheet, but this time she wasn’t searching for control, this time she was simply trying to hold on as he tongued her, kissed her, bit her. And her body went rigid as an orgasm riveted through her, making her tight as a bowstring before she flung herself free, dissolving into shocked, choking cries.

  He had moved up between her legs, resting against her, his arms on either side of her, shaking at the effort. “Hell, Sister Beth, haven’t you ever used a vibrator?” he asked with a soft laugh.

  “That … that was better.”