“Bastian! Bastian, please stop! Stop, Bastian! He’s dead, Bastian…please stop…”
Eventually I heard her, though I’m not sure how long Raine had been begging me to stop. Her hands were on my shoulders, trying to pull me from the mutilated corpse underneath me. I stopped the movement of my aching arms and leaned back on my heels. Slender fingers wrapped around my bicep and yanked at my arm. A sharp pain in the back of my leg shot up my thigh from its focal point above my knee and then cascaded all the way down to my ankle. My leg tried to buckle, but I told it to cut that shit out and stood up straight.
My chest heaved as I tried to take in enough breath to counter the adrenaline surging through my system. It didn’t work, and I just ended up panting. I had to make myself stop, or I was going to hyperventilate. I looked around the beach. Were there any more of them? There were four – where’s the fourth body? Then I remembered – he was left to die in the water. There were three bodies on the beach, one at my feet and two a little farther away.
Raine’s fingers were tracing up and down my arm. When I glanced down, I saw her fingers had stopped at the point where the blood covering my arm and hand started. It was even worse on the other side. My stomach and chest were splattered with the red fluid.
A hundred images passed through my brain. How many times had I stood in the center of an arena, bloodied hands held high in victory while I heard the cheers of rich fuckers betting on the deaths of those who played against me? How many times had the elation of winning rolled over me as the blood of my opponents dripped down my arms?
“Come wash off,” I heard her tiny voice say. Mindlessly, I let her lead me to the water’s edge, then inside the shallow waves where I could clean the blood from my hands, my arms, my legs, and my stomach. Fuck, it was pretty much everywhere. I walked out farther and ducked under the waves for a brief moment. Raine stayed close to me, which was good. If she had tried to walk away from me, I just might have lost whatever control I had left.
When I stepped back into the shallow water, Raine took my hands in hers and turned them, palms up, then palms down again. I watched her fingers trail over my cracked and bloodied knuckles. It should have hurt, but I felt nothing. I needed to feel something.
I grabbed onto her hands and then ran my fingers up her arms. When I reached her shoulders, I pulled her to me, crashing my lips down to hers. She winced, and I tasted her blood on my tongue, stupidly remembering too late that her lip was split. I moved to the side of her mouth that wasn’t injured, and one of my hands wrapped around her hair. My lips moved over her jaw while my other hand dropped down to her waist and wrapped around her back. The heat from her body covered my wet skin, demanding attention. It was all I could feel – her heat, her life. It was mine. She was mine. I thought about how she looked at me in the life raft while she held my hand and cried. Visions of her laughing as I tickled her danced through my head. I remembered the sensation of joining with her for the very first time and how right it felt. I knew those men had wanted to take that from me – take her from me – and my anger and hatred came rushing back.
“I need you,” I growled and grasped her more tightly around the waist, bringing my immediately hard cock closer to her core. “Now.”
I practically shoved her down on her back in the sand and only barely stopped myself from tearing the sopping wet clothes from her back. Instead, I ripped my boxers down her legs and threw them off to the side. I yanked her shirt over her head before fumbling at the buttons of my pants. Once they were out of the way, I lay on top of her and hitched her leg up over my hip. I was buried inside her a second later.
Maybe I thought I was going to be instantly calmed once I was inside of her, but I wasn’t. If anything, I felt more desperate and volatile. They had tried to take her from me. If I had still been in the jungle…if I hadn’t gotten back to the beach in time…I would have just come back to find her gone.
“Mine,” I growled and slammed my hips against her, feeling my balls smack against her round ass as my cock rammed into her.
What would I have done? If I had come back and not been able to find her, what could I have done? I would have seen the footprints and maybe found evidence of where their boat had landed. I would have known what they were or what they likely were. She wouldn’t have left voluntarily without me, would she?
“Only I do this to you,” I hissed into her ear. “Only me! Do you understand?”