Page 50 of The Kraken Games

“You seduced me into showing them to you before… remember?”

“You did a bit more than show yourself—remember?” she countered, then felt herself blushing wildly.

His gaze tangled with hers. “Yeah, I remember.”

Luna’s breath hitched as her eyes skimmed down his body once more, the flat pack of his abs, the bruises she’d inflicted all over his torso. Knowing that heneededto release his tentacles and ease the pain of his injuries.

“I promise I won’t look,” she said.

He smirked again. “Bet you can’t help yourself.”

Luna’s blush deepened. “Want a drink?” she said, trying to sound casual. Would he stay after they talked? Her pussy suddenly clenched. She needed to burn up adrenalin from today’s events but even so, fucking Kai again would be a disaster.

“Whisky,” he said. “Do you have any?”

“Er, yes, I think so.” She remembered some peat whisky that she sometimes drank when the weather got cold and her body needed the warm smoky taste.

“I’ll go make you one.”

As she headed for the door, she heard the bath water churning, the sound of limbs moving, not one or two, but many.

She paused, one hand holding the towel around her, the other on the doorknob. She couldn’t help glancing back. There was Kai, head thrown back, all his tentacles in the water now.

Seeing the blood still seeping from his wounds, something pulled tight in her chest.

He's suffered. Just like you.

And then she turned and closed the door, leaving him to relax.

CHAPTER 16

Kai wandered through the house, his body warmed by his soak in the bath and in much less pain than when he’d arrived. He’d stripped off his wet shorts and, winding a towel around his waist, made his way toward a dim light at the front of the house. The whole place was bare, it felt almost uninhabited. Unable to curb his curiosity, he opened a door and peered in. He flicked on the overhead light. Just a bare bulb. It was clearly her bedroom—a tousled unmade mattress on a metal frame, a wonky old dressing table, and bare, uneven floorboards. That was it. Stark, simple, with no ornaments or trinkets except a metal candelabra with no candle in it on the dresser. His eyes narrowed. There was a slim gold locket on a chain hanging over it. Kai went over and looped it round a tentacle, then flipped it open. Inside was a tattered and torn black and white photo. Of a family. A smiling guy, a woman with golden hair holding a baby. And between them, a little girl with the sweetest angelic face.

Electric shocks tingled through his nerves.

This had to be the family she’d lost.

Gods, this was all the proof he needed.

They had to work out what to do from here.

He tiptoed back out and into the hallway. All was quiet. Where was she? Hell, she was as slippery as an eel, one minute there, not the next.

Surely she wouldn’t have left him alone in her own home and run away?

And then through the open front door he saw a small lamp shining on the veranda.

She was dressed now in a simple cotton dress, sitting on an old crate, legs drawn up, her head resting on her knees. Her profile was sweet, innocent almost, as she watched the moon rising above a bank of clouds, lighting up the patches of water between the marsh grasses. It was kind of eerie here, with no sounds except the frogs in the wetlands. The plop of something into the water.

The fact that she lived here, all alone, with barely a possession to her name, hurt him far more than his bruised and battered body right now.

He went over to her. She didn’t look at him, just pointed to another crate acting as a table with a glass full of amber liquid perched on it. “Yours.”

“Have you got one?”

She unfolded her arm to show him a glass in her hand, half full.

He sat tentatively on another crate. It was uncomfortable as all hell. It would be easier if he slid onto the floor and folded his tentacles beneath him to cushion his butt, in the kraken way. But he was in her world, wearing just a towel, and it felt important to sit as she did.

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