“Why?”
“Why?” He raised an eyebrow, studying me behind his sunglasses. “Why don’t I want staff eavesdropping and watching us?”
“Why do you need peace and quiet?”
He chuckled low and dark. “Why do you think?”
“Because you just killed three of your goddesses?”
His entire body stiffened. “Is that why you’re watching me as if I repulse you? Because you think I killed them?”
“Didn’t you?”
“I was going to.” He licked his bottom lip, tasting different replies. “But…I stopped in time.”
My heart jerked with hope. “Is that the truth?”
He turned a little to face me, keeping one hand on the steering wheel and another balled by his side. “You want the truth? How about the version where Skittles saved your goddamn life? How about the fact if she hadn’t flown to get me, you’d be dead right now instead of on this goddamn boat?”
His face blackened; his voice thick with rage. “You want me to believe you’re so selfless that you already forgive them for almost stealing your life?” He laughed icily. “That leads me to believe two things, Eleanor. One, you were grateful to them, because if you’re dead, you are free of me. And two, that you didn’t fight back because you decided, after I fucked you, that you’ve had enough of whatever the fuck is going on with us, and you’d rather take the weak way out, the only way I can’t fight to bring you back.”
His words were so sharp, so real, they punctured holes in the boat, threatening to sink us. They had sunk us. Not in the literal sense but in every other sense imaginable.
Was Sully finally going to talk to me?
Was Jealousy wrong when she said I had to give him the guise of a mask for him to be truthful? Give him some option to take it all back if he changed his mind?
There was no going back from this…
No pretending either of us doesn’t feel something.
Something…that was everything.
“You’re wrong.”
“Oh, yeah?” He sneered, his temper turning him cruel. “What part?”
“I did fight back…not that it did any good. I will admit I was weak because I couldn’t get free, but there was no way I wanted to die.” I leaned forward, gaping my dress, sending a breeze down my cleavage while clutching the bench on either side of my thighs. “Why would I give up on us…after what we did?”
“Because I proved I’m the one who can’t be fucking trusted.” He cut the engine with a slash of control, left the steering to the whimsy of the currents, and stormed the small distance between us.
Dropping to his haunches, his hands landed over mine, digging them into the bench, blanketing them with power and heat.
That damn electricity sparked from the tiniest of tinder, arching and crackling, making him hard and me wet, liberating our systems from mind-ruled to body-consumed.
I moaned a little as he dug his touch deeper into mine, activating pain and its duplicitous cousin, pleasure.
He licked his lips, his teeth flashing as he snarled, “Look at yourself, woman. You have perfect indentations of my teeth in your neck. My fingerprints line your throat with such precision, they could be used in crime detection. I dread to think what other wounds I left you with. How sore you are. How swollen. I lost myself in you, Eleanor, and in the process, I lost any sense of worthiness I had left.”
His hand caught my hair as the sea breeze blew it over my shoulder. His fingers curled deep within the brown tresses, bringing the mess to his nose. He inhaled hard, his chest straining against his t-shirt, his muscles tight and restrained. “I hurt you. I hurt those I care about. It’s an inevitability. The awful fucking truth. I kill those I love. And if you keep pushing me down this path, if you keep making me care…I’ll make you curse the very thought of me. I will destroy whatever faith you have in me. I will snuff out the very heart you’re trying to give me. I will do all that because love equals betrayal, and betrayal requires no mercy.”
Bringing me forward with the rope he’d formed with my hair, he murmured, “You’d be better off dead, Goddess Jinx. You’d be free right now if Skittles wasn’t so fucking in love with you. We might’ve been saved from the carnage in our future.”
He was fierce and frightening and utterly fearless in his belief.
What had he done to be so sure of his actions?
Who had he killed in his past?
“Sully…I—”
A flurry of green feathers shot past my chin and vanished down the front of my dress. I yelped and fell backward, squirming as Pika wriggled against my cleavage. His talons caught delicate flesh, his wings tickled highly sensitive areas, and the utter stupidity of a parrot popping up from my neckline shattered everything.