Page 95 of Seduced

“What?” Poppy’s little boat started to drift away from him, and she fought to row back to him again. He saw that she used her good hand to row, as the other one lay on her lap. She extended her weak arm to him once more.

“Come on!” she yelled.

“Give me your other hand,” Alexei yelled back.

“I can’t, it’s holding on to the oar! Come on, Alexei.” Her voice was close to tears now, pleading, begging.

Alexei.

She said ‘Alexei’.

“No,” he murmured, his mouth half underwater.

“Give me your bloody hand!”

Alexei choked and tried to take a breath.

“Don’t swear,” he spat with a lungful of water.

“I shall swear as much as I like!” Poppy was screaming again.

That sounded about right. Abruptly, he slipped under once more.

Water covered his nostrils and he fought to rise above it, spluttering and spitting weakly. The next time he went under, he wouldn’t surface again, he knew it.

He struggled for the surface, and Poppy’s hand was there, waiting for him, and she was still screaming at him to take it, and not be a fool.

“I d—don’t want to hurt you,” he choked.

He sank. She grabbed him again, but it was too late; he was choking, drowning, but somehow, she managed tosnatch his hand from the water and hold on to it. Her grasp on him was too weak to be able to pull him, but with a desperate groan, he grabbed it and pulled himself up, into her arms, into the boat.

He thought he heard her gasp in pain, but he was beyond thinking at this point. He turned his face away just in time to vomit the entire contents of the lake at her feet.

Poppy swore.

“You idiot,” she said, and he felt her cool little hand on his brow, pushing back his soaked, dripping hair.

“Wyatt,” he tried to say, but was seized with a fit of coughing. He couldn’t take a deep enough breath, and he couldn’t stop the water pouring out of his mouth like a river. “Have I…”Have I hurt you?

He couldn’t get enough air in his chest.

Then the darkness mercifully pulled him under and the pain stopped.

Everything stopped.

Poppy

Alexei was utterly still and white on her lap. His lips were turning blue and his every breath came out with a struggling, rattling sound that frightened her.

Then Wilder was there, pulling her little boat to the shore and grabbing her in his arms to carry her ashore, then Alexei.

Alexei woke up as Wilder hit him forcefully in the back, and he bent over at the waist, water pouring out of his mouth.

“That’s it,” Wilder said, his arm firmly around Alexei’s waist. “Get it all out, that’s it. You’ll feel better.”

“Is there no limit to your charm, Persephone?” Alexei turned and said to her, only half-conscious. “DeVere is completely in love with you, hasn’t shut up about it. I am as well. And now I see that Wilder is about to succumb too.”

“Shut up, my lord,” Wilder said, and hit his back again, looking somewhat red-faced. “Are you all right, miss?”

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