Page 144 of Until the Sea Runs Dry

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She was parched, her mouth was so dry that it hurt.

A dull thud in her head made it hard to hear well, but she could still tell that the waves sounded different today.

They weren’t lapping gently against the shore but hitting against something hard.

Why was the world moving around like it was?

The rocking motion made her stomach lurch, bringing a wave of nausea to the fore. She felt strange, groggy, as if there was a fog wrapped around her head, and instead of the heavenly cushion that she had slept on the night before, the bed now felt uncomfortably hard beneath her.

She rolled to one side, hoping to ease the pain along her spine only for her hip to jut against the hard surface.

She flinched.

What on Earth was she lying on?

“Where am I?”

Her voice croaked out the question.

“Sweetheart, you’re awake.”

The male voice that spoke sounded excited, yet there was an undercurrent of danger that she couldn’t miss. Something about the voice was frighteningly familiar, but she couldn’t place it, not with her head still in that fog. Even so, her body was starting to wake, and with it, her senses began to shriek in alarm.

Something was very wrong.

She pushed up with her hands, trying to get into a sitting position only to discover that they were tightly bound with rope.

The fog lifted immediately, replaced by a terror that left her gasping.

The man bent over the wheel of the yacht was tall and muscular and of a similar build to Logan, but that was where the similarities ended.

This man had hair the color of tar, and where Logan’s eyes were a warm green, his was so dark that they looked as black as the night that surrounded them. A thin scar covered his left cheek that hadn’t quite healed yet.

Her mind crashed back to another time, when her ring had caught this man’s face as she had flailed against him. She hissed out a panicked breath that left her hollow.

She knew this man.

More than knew him.

She had been married to him.

Images assaulted her then, memories and flashes of their previous life together. She saw their whirlwind romance when she had thought he was Prince Charming. When she had been so desperate to leave her sleepy, unloved, and uneventful life, that she had reasoned away the early warning signs.

Mistaking intensity for love.

Controlling behavior for care.

Misogyny for old-fashioned charm.

He had known how vulnerable she was, how much she had craved love that she fell into his open arms, blindly and willingly…

Only to pay for it later, many times over.

He was so good at ripping away her last vestiges of self-esteem that Jane never even realized that she wasn’t the problem. Brainwashed from his mental beatings, and isolated from anyone who could have helped, she’d had no one, not even herself. She never blamed him even when she had been doubled over with pain, especially when he was always so sorry for it, the day after.

For that was how abuse worked.

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