Page 35 of Ruthless Scoundrel
Warmth blooms anew between my thighs and Jasper sighs deeply.
“Stop thinking.” His voice is muffled by my hair, and the closeness of him only intensifies my undesired yearning.
“I hate you,” I say, to remind him—and me—that I should not be feeling aroused.
It’s painfully obvious that neither one of us sleeps another second for the rest of the early morning. I do my best not to let my thoughts wander to where they shouldn’t be. I think about escaping him and returning to the rebellion, about Alyse and whether she’s all right, and about my mother, whose life I must take when I get home.
Pink hues infiltrate the shelter and Jasper shifts behind me.
“Time to get up now,” he says as he unchains us.
I pull away the second I’m free and lurch out onto the beach. The crashing of the surf and spray of the sea cools some of the heat in my stomach. I cross my arms over my chest against the breeze. Despite its warmth, I’m getting gooseflesh.
I hear Jasper’s footsteps through the sand behind me. “Eat something,” he says, holding out the stick of smoked fish he prepared yesterday.
“I’m not hungry,” I lie.
“It’s not a debate, princess. Eat. Now.”
I snatch one of the crispy blue fish off the stick and mechanically shove it in my mouth. Jasper watches me as he eats his own fish, as if he needs to confirm I’m swallowing it. He goes back to the shelter and grabs the coconut bowls full of rainwater.
“Drink, too,” he says, thrusting one into my hands. “We have a long, hard day ahead of us and we won’t get many opportunities for breaks. The next island is three miles south, and our paddles are substandard. It will take several hours to get there.”
I drink the water from the coconut shell and then show him the empty bowl.
“Happy?” I ask with a sneer.
He chuffs. “Very.”
“That makes one of us.” I turn away from him and look at the sea.
The island in question looks a lot bigger than this one, and suddenly I’m realizing the gravity of the situation. We’ll be trapped together forweeksbefore we reach any kind of city. We have to depend on one another to survive until then.
More realistically speaking, as he said,Ihave to depend onhim.
“Let’s get moving,” Jasper says as he walks back to the shelter. “Take care of your morning business and then help me re-string these paddles.”
If I’m going to get back to civilization in a timely manner, I’ll have to work with him.
Fucking.
Wonderful.
I do as he says, and we modify the paddles by wrapping them with some of the broad leaves. This will give us more leverage to push the water, he says, but the leaves will also likely rip by the time we reach the next island. We secure a few more coconuts to our raft and push it out into the water just as the sun fully emerges from the sea.
Paddling is harder work than I was expecting. My arms are already tired after just ten minutes, and Jasper looks completely unfazed by the physical effort. He has me switch sides with him to change dominant arms and that helps a little, but my muscles have never shaken like this before. I wish I’d been training my body more, but Mother would’ve noticed a change in my physique.
She needed to keep me weak and docile.
“Break for a moment,” Jasper says after another twenty minutes.
I instantly collapse back onto our raft, panting.
He cracks open one of the coconuts and holds half over me. “Drink. It’ll help with your recuperation.”
I take it, unwilling to put up a fight when my throat is so dry. I drink gulp after greedy gulp of the semi-sweet milky liquid, taking deep, gasping inhales through my nose. My heart thunders and makes my vision pulse with it.
“Never done anything like this, have you?” he asks casually as he strips off his boots.
