Chapter 13
Triton
I HAD TO POSSESS THIS woman. Some need within me screamed for release, to claim her as my own. I didn’t know what this was or where it had come from—stress, trauma, or fear—but I’d never felt anything like it. Her mouth around my erection had felt incredible, and she worked magic with her lips and tongue, to the point that I felt my orgasm pounding towards me. But I wanted more. I needed more. And I recognized the same in her, the way her eyes watched me with bright hunger, her lips parted, her chest rising and falling with rapid breaths.
The power with which I was attracted to her was magnetic, every inch of my body yearning to press against her, feel her warm, soft skin against mine, smell myself mixing with her sea-salt-honey scent that I found so intoxicating. The only thought swirling through my mind was how desperately I needed to sink myself into her.
Capturing her back against the rock, holding her in a cage of my arms, I looked down at her for a moment, taking in the way the moon danced across her creamy skin, bleaching the color, making the bright cherry of her kiss-swollen lips stand out, begging to be kissed, possessed, used.
Looking down at her, the wave of desire that washed over me was so powerful, it made my desperate. I rocked forward, capturing her mouth with mine at the same time I yanked down her bra straps, one hand fumbling with the clasp while the other ripped at her panties. I could still taste myself on her, and the remembered feeling of her mouth on me made me impossibly harder, heat rippling through my body.
She cried out when I plunged a finger into her hot, wet center, her eyes squeezing shut as she bit down into her bottom lip. As I alternated between swirling my finger and plunging it in and out, she moaned breathlessly, her fingers digging into my biceps.
I lowered my head to her breasts again, the salt still on her skin mixing with the ripe fruitiness of the juice. A gasp wrenched from her core lit the air with fireworks as I swirled my tongue around her erect nipples and their pebbled surface, her nails so deep in my skin I thought she might draw blood.
Her skin against mine was on fire, sticky with sweat, salt, and fruit juice, her eyes wild with desire. I worked until she was moaning, tremors dancing under her skin, her hips swiveling to draw me in deeper.
Withdrawing my hand, she seemed to know what was coming, undoubtedly knew, because she tilted her hips forward. I plunged in, and she screamed, her head thrown back, her back arching.
Dimly, as I pumped in and out, I recognized that this was all about the lizard part of my brain needing to release the toxic mix of memories and adrenaline from the day. But I also didn’t care.
There was nothing gentle about any of this. We might not survive the next day, never mind the next week or the next month. All we had was this moment, and at this moment, we were all that mattered. We were hormones and instincts and desire, animalistic in our pursuit, crying out, panting, yelling, giving in to every instinctive desire. The two of us were the only ones in the world, the only two humans in existence.
My head fell back at the overwhelming pleasure washing over me, and I was dimly aware of the ocean of stars arching above us beyond the spreading branches of the fruit trees.
We were both gasping and panting, sweat pouring down my face and body to mix with the sea salt and pear juice. I was dimly aware of discomfort from my bullet wound as she wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my hips. But the new angle meant I could go even deeper, her cries growing wild, her hips moving with my rhythm, and it drowned the pain.
My orgasm thundered towards me with all the power and frenzy of a tsunami, and I pulled out just before it crashed over me with the same raw energy and force. For a moment, even the stars disappeared, a roar starting from my core and exploding out to combine with her scream.
Almost immediately, I felt spent and empty, and the woman sagged in my arms. It wasn’t long before we fell asleep in each other’s arms, exhausted, sticky, and still dripping with sweat. But my mind wasn’t buzzing anymore, my thoughts quiet, for now.
The man beside me was a shadow, a wraith hovering in the liminal space between life and death. Or maybe he was just death. We all were.
We hovered in the shadows, silent and still, barely breathing, waiting for the signal.
Twenty-four hours before, I’d been on leave, on a date, a beer in my hand as we looked out over the harbor from the water-side bar. Then I’d gotten the call that had cut my time short—another one—recalling me to duty. I’d been on the first plane out, a mission brief tucked under my arm. My team and I had been dropped off at a base in the middle of nowhere, then dropped at an unmarked location as stealthily as possible. We’d made our way here, to this compound, under the cover of a moonless night.
I’d been on missions before, plenty of them, even as a relatively new Navy SEAL. But this one felt different. The tension among the team was palpable, the waiting interminable, time moving both too fast and too slow, ticking away endlessly to the inevitable end rushing towards us.
Intelligence had found very little on our target. All the higher-ups knew was that they were a terrorist organization hell-bent on creating chaos. Why, no one knew—many people had died trying to find out just that. But that hard-won information had brought us here, to this compound.
Though the walls were high, I could just see a brightness within, breaking up the intense darkness with artificial light. I could hear indistinct sounds, too, but nothing that would have given away their position unless you were directly on them.
No wonder this cell had been so difficult to find. We were in the middle of nowhere, within a dense jungle with an almost higher chance of killing you than the actual terrorists.
I resisted the urge to look at my watch, knowing even that soft glow could give away our position, but the intensity of waiting was growing with each passing minute.
Then the tap on my shoulder came, and a glance to my left showed a hand waving in the signal. I followed as the shadow beside me moved, materializing into a person in all-black stealth gear, my adrenaline rising with each silent step.
The giant leaves of the trees dragged against my gear as we moved towards the walls, to the place someone had found a weakness, and we would stream in, death on silent feet. Down a tunnel, the mud in the murky water sucking at our boots, and then up towards the compound, guns ready, adrenaline and heart rates spiking.
Suddenly, up ahead, gunfire, bright in the darkness of the tunnel. Half the team was already out, the enemy engaged. The world exploded into movement and sound as we engaged the enemy, gunfire shattering the air and bullets flying. My attention was only on what was in front of me, my next steps, my next target.
Suddenly, I was down, my gun sliding across the ground just out of reach. I rolled onto my feet and immediately engaged in hand-to-hand combat with not one but two terrorists, so close I could see their faces, punching, kicking, blocking. I managed to pull my knife from my belt and stabbed into one of the terrorists’ thighs. A scream and the soldier went down, allowing me to bash the other unconscious.
Then suddenly, the order to pull out crackled over my headset. When I turned around, the soldier I’d stabbed was gone, and I didn’t have time to follow the trail of blood...
I jerked upright, my mind still in the dark tunnel and the chaos of the mission. But it wasn’t darkness that met my eyes—it was the steel gray light of the moon. I had to shake my head aggressively to separate dream from reality, because it had been just that—a dream. But one that had come from a memory of a five-year-old mission to a deep, dark jungle and a suspected terrorist cell compound.