But…I also knew what I’d face the second I stepped onto shore and the goddesses noticed me.
Fuck it.
Yanking my black swimming shorts down with one hand, I fisted the aching heat of my long-suffering erection. This was purely medicinal. Nothing more.
Keeping my eyes on the gossiping girls, lulled into the fantasy that they were untamed creatures there to ravish, I stroked harder, faster, creating ripples around my body.
I didn’t need long.
I’d been on the razor edge of coming since I’d poured elixir down Jinx’s throat. The halted orgasm I’d almost had in her presence lurked in every cell. The pain it promised hinted this wouldn’t be a typical release. This would fucking rip me in two with pleasure.
Biting my bottom lip, staying as silent as I could, I gave in to the brutalising pace to make myself come. The girls didn’t see me, surrounded by dark ocean. No one knew I masturbated in full view.
My head tipped back as a lacerating lightning bolt shot from my heart to my belly, dragging claws around my balls.
Ah, shit.
Shit.
A guttural groan couldn’t be contained as liquid fire built to a furnace, scorching blood and bone, crippling me in ways I hadn’t felt in a very long fucking time.
On the cusp of letting go—on the blinding, blistering precipice of spurting seed into the sea, I opened my eyes.
I didn’t know what made me look.
Why my attention searched, found, and snarled as I found the one person I shouldn’t associate with pleasure.
Eleanor stood in the shadows of ferns and palms, hiding in the pockets of blackness, eavesdropping on my goddesses.
She didn’t see me.
But fuck, I saw her.
I saw everything about her.
I drank in the floaty purple dress she wore, scooped low to show pert cleavage and tied at the waist to reveal her willowy frame. Her hair draped over one shoulder, hanging with weight that begged for my fist, gleaming long and rich with starlight, casting it more quicksilver than chocolate.
Her gaze flashed like a cat’s as the girls laughed as a trio.
She scowled and shook her head as if she pitied them, then rolled her eyes as if she couldn’t understand them.
They laughed again.
She sighed and looked out to sea.
She looked through me to the horizon cast in midnight velvet.
She cupped her throat and dropped her touch to her heart as if the life-giving organ inside her was failing.
She looked fragile.
She looked lost.
She was the most intoxicating, provocative thing I’d ever seen, and I couldn’t stop myself.
I came.
I jerked and shuddered as cords of agony exploded from my balls and out my tip, spilling into the sea in thick white spurts.
Wave after wave of savage pleasure tortured me.
And still, she kept staring out to sea, wishing for a way free, totally unaware that she’d just sealed her fate.
She. Was. Mine.
The still pulsing cock I held in my hand would one day plunge inside her.
It was an inevitability.
A promise.
A decree written in the stars.
Chapter Twenty-One
I’D FOUND THE HAREM.
After no one came to claim me, and I grew bored of bobbing in the ocean, I returned to my villa, showered, dressed from the copious choices of summery things in the wardrobe, and then went for a stroll.
The island was a different dimension once the sun had set.
The sandy pathways were arteries leading to some slumbering black beast. The palm trees were sinister umbrellas blotting out the stars, and the roosting of birds was replaced with the steady buzz of cicadas and courting ribbits of frogs.
Without the flickering tiki torches, finding my way would’ve been impossible. Each puddle of light beckoned me forward, leading me in a direction I hadn’t been before. At each bend in the path, I braced myself to meet someone. To bump into a guest, to argue with Sully’s minion, or even battle with Sully himself.
However, I hadn’t come across anyone, and I’d continued my paint by numbers, padding in bare feet, travelling from torch to torch, lantern to lantern until the dense jungle of the gardens thinned out to the humid breeze of the shore.
I’d slammed to a stop.
Stunned and stupefied by awe.
This place…it was dazzling.
Every adjective to describe something that far exceeded extraordinary paled in the view before me. Of the way the sea sparkled with mirroring stars. Of the way far-off lights from other islands winked. Of the way my gaze soared skyward, making me sway at the endless infinity of it all. The sky wasn’t just black with night; it was alive with so many wondrous delights.
Stars and planets, milky ways and flickering clusters.
I’d never been a stargazer, but in one second, I went from confident in my worth as a human, aware that I existed and breathed air and ate food to survive, to not having a clue what I was.
How could I matter when faced with such vastness?