Billionaire Bad Boys of Romance Boxed Set (10 Book Bundle) (23 page)

“Another minute,” he said, and it took all my strength not to scream in frustration. When the mounting pleasure had faded, he began again, expertly plying my body, and this time the orgasm built faster and harder and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from shrieking.

Then his hand moved up to just beneath my right breast and he traced the tattoo there, and as he did, his fingers found the jagged scar hidden beneath the ink and followed it tenderly. But he didn't ask about the scar. “Tell me about your sparrow,” he said instead.

My mouth fell open. The sparrow was so small compared to my other tats that it was a wonder he remembered it at all. But then his finger ghosted over the sparrow's beak—exactly where it was—before retreating and stroking against its breast and in a sudden flash of insight I realized he had memorized every tattoo of mine.

The thought shocked me, stunned me.

“Ah... uh... a sparrow... they say the gods mark the fall of a single sparrow...” My voice was a whisper.

“I see,” he said. His thumb moved faster and faster, until I was on the brink again, and again he stopped. This time I kept my wits enough about me that I was able to stifle the moan of frustration. It died in my chest, strangled before it was born.

Malcolm waited for my quivering body to subside. “Good,” he murmured. “Well done.” His thumb resumed its pace and I thrashed and strained against my bonds as he traced his hand up to my throat and the tattoo winding over it. Words this time.

“And this one?” he asked. “What does it say? The script is so elaborate I could hardly make it out.” And his fingers trailed over the scar beneath it. The red smile I was supposed to wear down to the grave.

“It says, 'Might as well live.'” I told him, my voice so soft I could barely hear it.

He gave a low, quiet laugh. “Dorothy Parker,” he said, and with a flick of his thumbnail I was coming, hard and aching around his fingers, my body lost in ecstasy as I yanked against the ropes, but inside everything was tumbled and torn, rent asunder and filled with pain and anger.

He knew my tattoos. Every single one. I was raw and exposed. He'd seen the scars beneath them, and he knew they were important in some way. We were dancing around them, around their significance, and it frightened me. But all he did was wait for my orgasm to pass before moving on to the next. Gently he stroked each one in the dark and asked me, as he circled my clit with his thumb, what each one meant to me.

“The leaping koi fish?” His hand stroking the inside of my upper arm.

Breaking free.

“The cherry tree shedding its blossoms?” My shoulder, the wafting petals spiraling across my chest.

Impermanence.

“The spider? The hand of Fatima? The vulture?”

Infinity. Protection from evil. Cleansing.

And beneath each one, he found the scar, running his hands over it as he brought me to orgasm again and again.

When at last he had received a response for each tattoo and was satisfied, he untied me and he fucked me, gently, as though I were fragile. My exhausted body wrapped around him, clung to him, and we rocked with the ocean and I came around him again and again until at last he found his release and we fell asleep on the swell and fall of the sea.

Chapter Twelve

Time at sea takes on a new meaning. The hours stretch out into days, and a single night can yawn as wide as a week. The sun comes. The sun goes. The water passes by.

We sailed south.

Malcolm and I joined together again and again, and the sea blurred the edges of our time, until it was hard for me to say if we'd been drifting on the water for a day or a hundred days. We met and coupled constantly, and when we weren't fucking Malcolm tried to capture me in art, searching for the elusive thing I carried within me that he thought would reveal the secrets of the universe to him. And when he grew frustrated, angry, enraged at his own inability to speak without words he would throw his sketch pad away, toss his canvas to the ground, squash the small clay statuette he had been fashioning and launch himself at me, wherever I happened to be, and he would force me down to the ground, up against a wall, into the strangest positions, and we would fuck again until we were sore and raw.

*
* * *

“When am I going to stop falling over?”

“When you get your sea legs. You will become accustomed to the rocking of the ship soon. You will be able to walk on the deck as if it were dry land. You simply need practice.”

“Practice makes perfect, I guess.”

“Not, it seems, when we are talking about pastels.”

“I told you, they are a pain in the ass. Stop trying to use them.”

“But the colors...”

“Color says shit. Work in black and white if you want to tell everyone life is meaningless.”

“Not life.
My
life. My life is meaningless.”

“Only if you use pastels.”

* * * *

I wore his clothes, mine having been left behind in our flight. The sun was warm and the boat was heated well, so I wore his underwear. Malcolm had literally fifty pairs of boxers on board, and they mostly fit me due to my ass being roughly twice as huge as my waist. At the very least they didn't immediately fall down. His shirts hung on me like smocks.

"You have a lot of underwear," I said as I modeled it for him. "What's the deal?"

"I used to have a lot of guests on this boat," he said. "Underwear was often misplaced."

I winced. "Misplaced?"

He smiled at me. In his hands he was slowly shaping a lump of clay into something that might have been my likeness, if my parents had been Ewoks. "When you are on a boat and get lost in the moment, sometimes the sea wind sweeps by and carries your fine silk boxers out to sea. Quite a few guests lost their unmentionables that way, even after I told them it took only a moment to weigh them down." He raised his brows. "Since we are going to be in short supply of everything, I expect you to remember that tidbit."

I cocked a hip and put my hand on it. "Seriously?" I said. "Thanks for the tip, mom."

He didn't smile at that. Instead his face went still as he pushed and pulled at the lump of clay, his brows drawing down into a frown. "My mother wouldn't have thought twice about throwing such expensive things away," he said at last. "She wanted the world to be disposable. I recommend you not be like her."

Touched a nerve. A deep one. "Don't worry," I said. "I once wore a pair of gym shorts as pajamas for five straight years and didn't throw them out until they literally fell apart in the wash.”

That coaxed a little smirk from him. "Oh?" he said.

"They were like Swiss cheese."

Putting the little lump of clay down, he leaned back on the couch and tilted his head, studying me. "I would have liked to see that," he said.

"It was the least sexy thing in the universe," I assured him.

"On you, anything is sexy," he said. I tried to ignore the blush that rampaged across my face at his words. "Come here, Sadie. I like to see you in my clothes."

I swallowed and walked toward him. My bare feet sank into the plush carpet, and when I reached him I crawled onto the couch and straddled his thighs. "Yeah?" I said. "We have the same size butt. That's totally sexy."

"It is sexy," he insisted. His hands found said butt and squeezed, massaging my ample ass cheeks, and suddenly I swear I thought my ass might actually be sexy too.

"Oh," I murmured.

Reaching up, Malcolm pulled me down into a kiss. His teeth nibbled at my lips, grazed over my jaw, teased my throat, and all the while his hands squeezed and kneaded, pulling me close until his cock, hard and straining, pressed into the soft hot space between my legs. He rubbed me over himself until I couldn't take it any more and pulled him off the couch. We landed on the floor with a teeth-jarring thud, and he tore his own boxers off me and fucked me as I lay beneath him in his white linen shirt, my hands holding his hips in place as he took his pleasure and gave back to me in return.

* * * *

“What are you painting?”

“The sea.”

“I hate to break it to you, but that's been done a million times before. I thought you wanted to say something totally new.”

“I'm working on it.”

“I can see that... hey, wait. That's me. That's the sea in the shape of me.”

“You can tell?”

“I'd recognize that pear shape anywhere.”

“You are as beautiful and strong as the sea.”

“Then you're hardly saying nothing with this painting.”

“...I might still have things left to say. Let me say them first, before I can no longer speak. I thought you weren't in a hurry to silence me.”

“I thought you
were
.”

“...As tumultuous as the sea, too. I cannot predict you.”

“Neither can I sometimes.”

“Kiss me, Sadie.”

“What will I get out of it?”

“This... and...
this...”

“...Oh.”

* * * *

One day I tried to make waffles. It did not go well.

"I burned the waffles," I told Malcolm when he came to investigate the smoke.

"I see that." He stared at the blackened corpses of several failed waffles. "I could smell it, too."

"Sorry," I said. "I'm a really lousy housewife."

"Boatwife," he said. "You are a lousy boatwife."

"Yeah. That."

He ran his finger over my chin and raised a brow. "Even more of a lousy boatwife because you don't know I hate waffles."

I stared at him, incredulous. "Then why do you have a waffle iron?" I asked. "It's just sitting here, begging to be used."

"Every kitchen should have a waffle iron," he said.

"Even if you hate waffles?"

"Especially if you hate waffles. Every time I see it, it reminds me of how lucky I am to not be eating waffles right now."

I stared at the black waffle discs. "I suppose we could play Frisbee with them."

"Or just throw them into the sea."

"That was the eventual goal, yes." I put my hands on my hips and blew my hair out of my face. "Well, what do you want to eat instead?" We were well-provisioned with dry and canned goods, but pre-processed crap was getting awfully old. The waffles, at least, would have been fresh made.

Malcolm grabbed me by the hips. "I can think of one thing I'd like to eat," he said and lifted me onto the counter top before sliding the boxers down my legs and letting them pool on the floor.

He knelt down and began to lick my pussy, quick and sharp. I gasped, my head lolling. “I... I think this violates some sort of health regulation...”

He paused. "Good thing we're in international waters, then." His smile was wicked, and I didn't object when he returned to his task.

*

“So how did you become so fucking rich? This boat is still blowing my mind.”

“My father made me get rich.”

“Haha! Oh, you're serious.”

“I am. Hold still, you are going to mess up the exposure.”

“But my nose itches!”

“Suffer for art.”

“You.
You
are the one who's supposed to suffer, not your model.”

“Is that so? You see, my father taught me that in business it doesn't matter who is hurt. We all enter with the same expectations. Kill or be killed. If you get killed you might as well lie down and die in the street.”

“Jesus Christ. That's fucked up.”

“Is it? It's held true for most of my time in business, and it's made me quite a lot of money. Hold still.”

“The itch has moved to my boobs now!”

“I will lavish them with attention when we are done if only you will hold still for one more minute.”

“That attention had better be good.”

“I promise it will be.”

“I am entering into this agreement with the expectation to get screwed over now.”

“I wouldn't blame you. I have crushed many an enemy under my heel and heard the lamentations of their interns. But for you, I think I must make an exception. Though we are at war, with two disparate goals, I believe I may fraternize with the enemy as long as I don't let my guard down. You will not convince me to change my course, Sadie. I see what you are doing.”

“I'm not doing anything. And
shit.
I'm really depressed now. Do you really think of every encounter as a war?”

“Of course. What else could it be?”

“Creative. Collaboration. Lo—Sex isn't a competition.”

“...It is if you do it right. And shit, this isn't it either.”

“The photograph?”

“What a mess.”

“Forget it. Come her and lavish attention on me.”

*
* * *

"Where did you go?" he asked me one day, and I realized I had been staring at the waves. I couldn't have said how long I had been watching them, and when I turned to look at Malcolm, their patterns and swirls continued to spiral across my vision.

"I don't know," I said. "I just stopped thinking for a while." I smiled while I said it. "Feels good."

"I wouldn't know," he said, walking up behind me and slipping his arms around my waist, snugging me in close. I felt the swell of his erection against my ass. "My mind has started to run away with me, too, and I have never been able to meditate."

"Mm," I said. I rubbed my ass cheeks over his cock, and he sighed, grinding into me. "It's not all it’s cracked up to be," I told him. "You start thinking about nothing and the next thing you know your ramen is boiling over or someone's cat just threw themselves under the wheels of your car."

"Perhaps you shouldn't meditate while driving." His hands were slipping under the waistband of the boxers I wore, smoothing over my thighs, dipping into my pussy.

"It's just too easy when your head is empty," I joked.

His hands stilled. "Why do you always do that?" he asked me.

I frowned. "Do what?"

"Put yourself down."

I ground against his hands, trying to encourage him to continue, but he was steadfast. "I mean it, Sadie. You have a low opinion of yourself."

My lips thinned. "It makes it easier," I said finally.

"Easier to do what?"

I shrugged. "Deal with the disappointment I feel when I look in the mirror."

Behind me I felt him shake his head. "How am I going to convince you you're amazing?" he sighed.

I could think of one way, but I didn't want to say it out loud. I was trying not to push the issue of the fact that we were living on borrowed time, whether he decided to end it all or not. "I don't know," I said. "Pay me to think I'm amazing? I can do a lot for the right incentive."

His chest rumbled in a laugh. "You and most of the rest of the world. But I think even if I did, that you would just
tell
me you thought you were amazing, rather than actually change."

I shrugged. "How would you tell the difference?"

His lips brushed against my ear, and I shivered down to my toes. "I would be able to tell."

He took me from behind, there on the deck, plundering my core first until I came around him, then withdrawing and placing his cock against the tight hole of my ass. I stiffened, but when I didn't tell him no, he pressed inside, filling me up unbearably, and as he thrust into my ass I closed my eyes and thought of nothing.

* * * *

“I never see the captain. What does he do all day, jack off?”

“He tells me he's writing a book.”

“About what?”

“I'm not sure. Maybe about jacking off?”

“That's gross. Don't be gross. You're rich, you should be classy.”

“You were the one who introduced the subject.”

“Yeah, but you should be classier than me. I'm just a working girl in a rich man's world.”

“I'm just a rich man on a boat with a beautiful woman who makes him think of soft, dirty things. How else should I behave?”

“Mysterious. Enigmatic.”