Page 104 of Salt Kiss
I frown. “I wouldn’t call it martyring.”
She doesn’t respond to that. Just continues to look at me. I sigh and frame her face with my hands, using my thumbs to wipe away stray bubbles of shampoo. “Yes, I’m considering quitting,” I say. “I think it’s the right thing to do.”
“You do?”
“Isolde, I’ve fucked my boss’s fiancée a few times now. I’d like to do it some more. I don’t think that makes me very employable.”
“Even if fidelity isn’t expected of me until I marry him?” she asks quietly. Her gaze hasn’t broken from my own.
I sigh and push my forehead to hers, briefly, before pulling back to rinse the shampoo from her hair. “Mark knowing you might have sex with other people before your wedding is one thing. But for it to be with his bodyguard, who would be around after the wedding? His bodyguard, who was supposed to be doing only one thing on this trip and that was ensuring your safety? Isolde, he should never trust me again. And if he can’t trust me, then I can’t do my job right. And if I can’t do my job right, then he deserves a bodyguard who will.”
Isolde looks down as I finish rinsing her hair, her eyelashes almost to her cheekbones as I turn her and reach for the conditioner.
“And if I want you to stay?” she asks. Softly. Not looking at me.
Vulnerability is etched into her voice, into the curl of her shoulders and tight line of her jaw. I rub the conditioner in her hair, not answering, my heart torn into chunks just like the moon on the sea.
Her request, raw and quiet, bruises me with its transparency, with what she’s admitting by it.
And the curse hearkens to it, seeking her, whisperingYes, yes, she wants you. She wants you like you want her.
But what can I do about my own feelings? My own sense of morality? What can I do about still loving Mark and knowing that sleeping with Isolde might worry him or displease him?
Wound him, even?
I rinse the conditioner from her hair, and then she turns. We don’t touch, just look at each other, and I stare down at this woman who lost her mother and then lost her dream of joining the church. Who’s about to lose so much of her freedom just to make her father happy.
I’m kidding myself if I think this is a real choice. All she has to do is ask, and I’m hers.
“If you want me to stay,” I say and bend my lips to hers, “then I’ll stay.”
Thirty-Three
“Shh,”I tell Isolde as she moans. “Be quiet or I’ll have to stop.”
It’s the middle of the day, when most of the staff are taking a break after lunch, and Isolde and I are tucked behind the waterfall of the yacht’s largest pool, pressed into a nook just wide enough for two people to fit inside. I scouted it thoroughly yesterday, checking every sight line, watching as the boat rocked and the waterfall moved with it just to make sure. The nook is dark enough and the waterfall wide and rushing enough that anyone standing behind it is invisible.
Necessary reconnaissance, as Isolde has taken to wearing that godless swimsuit every day, swimming long laps in the pool as I pretend to read fantasy novels on the deck, until I finally give up and stalk back to my room to jerk off.
She thinks it’s very amusing.
But today I’m making her pay for it, and as she swam close to the waterfall, I darted out from behind it and grabbed her, hauling her back like a marauder as she struggled against me. Struggling which only lasted until I pushed the crotch of her swimsuit aside and buried my fingers in her cunt.
And now she’s panting against me, her back to my chest, her hips moving to fuck my hand. Heaven.
“Teasing me all week with this goddamned swimsuit,” I growl in her ear. I band my free arm around her front, reaching up to fill my hand with her breast. Weighing it in the water. Scraping my fingernails over the translucent fabric covering the furled tip. “Making me need it, honey. Making me need it so bad.”
All the while my fingers work underwater, scissoring slowly inside her to stretch her, sliding up to stroke the knot of nerves at the front, teasing once or twice at the tight hole in back.
“Then take it,” she whimpers, echoing my words in the dojo that day. “If you need it.”
I press my face against the side of hers and breathe her in. I taste salt. I’m already pulling down the waist of my trunks and fishing out my cock. Pressing the head against her center and penetrating.
“I don’t know how you do it to me,” I whisper, squeezing her breast. The water is buoyant, resistant to force, and I have to hold her tight to me to wedge into her cunt as hard as I’d like. “We just fucked this morning. I spent all night with my face between your legs. How can I still need itso bad?”
“If you figure it out, let me know,” she says, gasping. My fingers find her clit and start rubbing again. “I think about it all the time. How to get you alone, how to make it not matter if we’renotalone. Last night I was seconds away from taking your hand under the dinner table and pushing it between my legs.”
I groan—quietly—my orgasm already locked and loaded at the base of my cock.
