Fuck, the sight of her ass stretched around my cock was probably the hottest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

Knowing she’d need more, I reached around her with one hand, finding her clit. I flicked the sensitive nub, and she bucked like a horse being mounted. My cock reacted to the movement. I wanted more of that. With my other hand, I pushed my fingers between her folds, and slipped two digits inside her pussy. She was sopping wet, and that had nothing to do with the oil I’d been using on her. She let out a moan and pushed back on me, a sign she wanted more.

I was happy to give it to her.

Somehow, us fucking or fighting almost felt like the same thing.

She was impaled now, her pussy around my fingers, her ass around my cock. She stretched around me, and the oil made my passage slick. My balls were already pulled tight into my body, my ass clenched as I slid back out and drove back into her. Jolie cried out, her hands no longer beneath her head, but gripping the edge of the couch as though to hold herself steady.

I wouldn’t last long, but I gritted my teeth and held on, wanting Jolie to come first. My movements became faster and more frantic, and I somehow managed to keep up my strumming on her clit, even while the fingers of my other hand were embedded deep inside her pussy and I fucked her ass.

“Oh God, oh God. Oh, yes.”

Her pussy spasmed around my fingers, and her ass clenched down hard on my dick. I couldn’t hold on any longer. Pleasure was like an explosion inside me, and cum shot up through my dick. I didn’t even get the chance to pull out, but emptied myself into her ass, shudder after pleasurable shudder wracking through me. She trembled beneath me as I fell forward, covering her back with my chest. I kissed her shoulder and swept her hair away from her neck, but she pulled away.

“No, Hayden. That’s not what this is about, you know that.”

Her rebuttal caught me by surprise. Had I been too rough on her? She hadn’t told me no and seemed to have enjoyed what we’d done.

She snatched up her panties and vanished downstairs to the cabins below deck. Shit. She was one complicated woman, and I didn’t think I’d ever understand her. I collapsed onto the couch, not caring I was still naked. It wasn’t as though anyone was going to see me, except for Jolie, and she’d already seen about all there was to see. She’d literally ripped my towel from my body, and somehow I was left feeling like the bad guy.

Okay, maybe I was the bad guy, but that didn’t seem to stop her wanting to have sex with me.

I reached out and picked up the towel to wrap around my waist, and then went to the lower deck. One of the doors to the cabins was shut, and I hesitated outside, wondering if I should knock and check if she was all right. But I just shook my head and kept going.

I washed up and dressed in a pair of khaki shorts. Leaving my chest bare, I went back up on deck. I liked to feel the sun on my skin and the spray of the ocean. I inhaled the salty tang of the sea air. Once I was locked up for Patrick Dorman’s murder, I’d need to recall these moments to keep me sane inside.

I drove the boat in silence for a while, happy to be on the ocean. I hoped Jolie was okay down in the cabin. She’d seemed perfectly happy when I’d been fucking her, and it wasn’t as though I’d been the one to initiate things. Only after it was over had her mood changed.

I spotted something cresting the waves, and a smile stole across my face. Leaning back in my seat, I called out, “Hey, Jolie, quick! Get up here!”

I wasn’t sure she’d come, but then movement flew up the stairs. “What? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Look.” I pointed into the water nearby.

She gasped and clapped her hand to her mouth. “Dolphins!”

A pod was following the boat.

“Oh, look, babies,” she cried, her eyes shining with delight as two smaller dolphins breached the surface then dived back beneath the waves.

I couldn’t help grinning at the excitement on her face. It was the most animated I’d seen her, other than when we’d been having sex, and her enthusiasm was infectious.

A crazy urge to suggest to her that we just keep doing this rose up inside me. We could live on the boat and travel all over, seeing new places and eating different foods, and experience the world together.

We might pretend we want all the trimmings that came with life—the job and the house, and the nice car, and the expensive holidays—but in truth, all we ever wanted was to feel something. Really, truly feel something. Right down to our souls, as though it was tearing us apart and breaking us down to our most basic element. Love or hate, fear or pleasure. It didn’t matter what that emotion was, as long as we were experiencing it with every fiber of our being.

Suddenly, I wanted that more than anything, but it was stupid to even consider it. Just because we’d shared a moment didn’t mean we would be any good together for any length of time. She hadn’t even let me hold her after we’d had sex. Of course, she hadn’t. I was her kidnapper, and I planned to murder her father. The sex confused things, but that was the truth of it at the end of the day. She was only here to get her freedom back and be rid of me.

We remained on deck, sitting together in companionable silence as the boat rode the waves and the dolphins played in the wake.

“You still haven’t told me where we’re going,” she said suddenly.

“Georgia,” I told her, naming the state where the prison was located.

She nodded and turned back to the ocean. “I probably should have guessed.”

“We won’t be going to the prison, though. We have somewhere else we’ll be working from.”

“We will?”

“Yes. It’s not too far from the prison, so hopefully it won’t take your father too long to reach us, and so will evade being captured again.”

She looked back to me. “Where will we be working from?”

“Your home.”

She flinched. “That place hasn’t been my home in ten years.”

“I know that, but it’s where he’ll come to try to rescue you from me.”

“How will he know to do that?”

“Because you’re going to tell him.”

She swallowed hard. “No, I won’t.”

“That was the agreement, Jolie. You make sure your father breaks out of prison with the help of my people on the inside, and that he knows where to find you, and then I’ll kill him, and you can go free.”

“If I tell him where to come, then the police will know, too. Even if he does manage to escape—if he even bothers to try—then the cops will just pick him straight up again.”

“He will try. I’ll make it look like his baby girl is being tortured the same way he tortured my mother and all those other women before he killed them. You’ll make sure he knows that he’s the only person who can stop me.”

She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “This is crazy. The police will just come straight to the house.”

“No, we’re going to be smart about it. You need to think up a way you can tell him where you are that the police won’t even know about.”

It felt wrong to be talking about such dark things when we were in such a beautiful setting. From the way her expression changed, memories haunting her eyes and fear rounding her shoulders and bringing her knees up to her chest in a way I was starting to recognize, I wished I’d never said anything. But this was the plan, and I couldn’t go back on it now. I wouldn’t let ten years of work and planning go down the drain because of a tight body and a pretty face.

“That was our agreement, Jolie,” I warned her. “You can’t go back on it now.”

She didn’t say anything else but got up from where she was sitting. Leaving the dolphins and the sunshine and the ocean, she went back inside into the dim light of the cabin.

And I sat and hated myself more than ever before.