But…in her thirsty grey eyes, I drank a different version of elixir.
Mine wasn’t chemically delivered but entirely designed by my own urges.
I wanted her.
I more than wanted her. I wanted to fucking destroy her.
I wanted to fuck her until I killed her. Until we both stop breathing, straining to copulate, brutal and broken until the end.
She’d cursed me.
In a flash, I knew what her goddess name would be.
Jinx.
Eleanor might’ve been her name when she was a tame, sexually repressed girl dating an equally repressed boy, but while she was mine…she was Jinx.
I shouldn’t call her that—what if her arrival wasn’t just poorly planned, but the beginning of bad fortune on my islands? What if she lived up to the promise of a jinx? A voodoo? A plague upon my shores?
But her eyes flashed again, stormy and as dark as slate, and I accepted that she’d already put a spell on me. She’d become my nemesis. A female who I didn’t know. Who I’d paid handsomely for. A woman who didn’t have to say a word to me, and I’d grown insanely hard with the incessant desire to rip her apart, challenge everything about her, and suck her passion dry by any means necessary.
Bending, I removed her claws from my ankle and hoisted her to her feet.
She squeezed her eyes at the sensation of me touching her. She crowded into me, rubbing against my leg like a cat in full season. “Please…help me. I can’t take it.”
I allowed her closeness.
I permitted one moment where I dabbled with the idea of keeping her as my own personal entertainment.
And then I ensured I’d never have to break my ironclad rule not to indulge in my goddesses. Because I had one last weapon to ensure she might want to fuck any man on this planet, but I’d ensure she’d never want me.
I could remain immune and resist the temptation of killing both of us with undiluted pleasure.
She gasped as I tugged her hair, tipping her head back so I could whisper directly into her ear. She quaked in my hold. Quivered for my touch, any touch.
“I left out a little of the fine-print, Eleanor.”
Her head turned; our eyes locked.
“You didn’t think I’d only ask you to sleep with four men in four years, did you?” I kissed the tip of her nose, sending another wash of lust to incapacitate her.
I smiled as I let her slither down my body to the floor where, this time, she didn’t stop her hand from slipping between her legs.
I watched as she curled into herself, no more embarrassment. No more barriers that society placed on us as people. No more expectations that men and women weren’t meant to be animals and enjoy in our baser desires.
We were animals.
As surely as any other creature.
But we were the only ones who hid sex behind closed doors and buried our true natures until no one was truthful about what they wanted.
I’d just freed her from that oppressive cage.
I let her be true.
I gave her the privilege of sexual honesty.
But that privilege came with consequences.
And my consequences hadn’t been delivered yet.
Ducking to my haunches, I captured her chin again. When her glazed grey gaze met mine, I murmured, “Four men a month, Eleanor Grace. One hundred and ninety two men. And then…you’re free.”
Chapter Nine
IT TOOK LONGER THAN normal for his dark voice to slip past the lust-fogged haze of my brain. It took another moment for the trick to fully be understood.
I’d signed because one man a year for four years was survivable. I’d signed because I’d rather have a guarantee of an ending, than battle for the unknown escape that may or may not eventuate.
But…four men a month?
One a week?
One hundred and ninety two strangers who would touch me, fuck me, make me take this dreadful, heinous, body-stealing, mind-breaking, thought-silencing, rational-killing drug?
No!
No way.
In a flash of coherency, I launched at him.
One moment, I rubbed myself over my knickers in full view of this monster—hating myself, cursing myself, unable to fucking stop—the next, I toppled him backward and straddled his hips.
My coherency faltered, falling beneath the crippling, clawing greed.
God, I needed. I craved. I arched and spread my legs, pressing down until our groins connected.
I couldn’t control it.
It was as if tiny monsters ran in my bloodstream, turning me against myself, shredding my decency, my common-sense, deleting every ethic and moral I’d ever had.
I hated it.
I hate him.
I went to slap him, but he grunted, locking possessive hands on my hips.
The second he touched me, it was all over.
I quaked. Any remaining shred of who I was became tinder under a glowing lava of lust. It sparked, caught fire, incinerated me to ash.
My skin blazed. It burned. It hurt. It hurt so much to be bruised and bitten.
I couldn’t stop it.
My hand fell from the almost-slap, landing on his chest. I undulated on top of him, trying to get off, desperate to dispel the driving, suffocating need to come before he threw me away.