Page 96 of The Last Lost Girl

I read about how he felt the first time he saw me, when Pan brought me to Neverland.

I’ve barely skimmed over my arrival when he rips the book from my hand and holds it up in front of me. “You don’t remember everything!” Hudson fumes.

“I didn’t say I did!” I retort. “But I hope you’ll measure my omission the same way you do yours.”

The way he looks at me…

When I used to read in books that the character swallows thickly, I’d mentally groan. But if I make it out of this hellhole, I vow never to do it again. Because I now intimately know why they had to do it.

Swallowing thickly is the only way to down the fear that crawls up my throat. If I don’t swallow, it will choke me, and I’ll asphyxiate and die right here at Hudson’s feet the way he probably hopes I will.

I stretch my hand out like I might have a chance at holding him off as he steps slowly toward me, his sodden shorts hanging dangerously low on his hips, clinging to his powerful frame. My borrowed pair, despite having rolled them at the waistband, are hanging off me thanks to the extra weight of the sea water I brought aboard. I gather them at my side before retreating a step. A feather sticks to my right heel.

He continues to prowl forward. I ease away, keeping my knees soft in case I need to make for the door. It’s behind him, which means I’d have to get around him to leave this room.

I collect another feather… this one on my left sole.

Our dance ends when my backside bumps the edge of his desk. There’s no time to wiggle around the massive slab of injured wood before his hook and hand land on either side of me, and Hudson cages me in.

I grip the desk’s edge until my knuckles ache from how tightly I’m holding it. Against his onslaught, I try to steady myself when Hudson seems determined to obliterate my ability to focus on anything but him as he leans in closer…

Closer….

His breaths are as ragged as my heart feels. They fray with me.

“Is your name Ava or Savannah? Both are in that book, and both refer to you,” he says with his mouth only inches from mine.

Savannah? My pulse pounds when I consider how close that is to our home on Tybee Island, but I can’t think about that now. “Tell me how you filled an entire book with words about me.”

He leans in farther.

I bend backward.

His nose is beside mine. His lips hover an inch away… If I just took a full breath, they would meet. Touch. Taste.

“How do you think?” he asks.

“I want to know everything. I’m tired of being in the dark.” Alone. Where I don’t belong. I want someone to sit with me in the shadow.

His fingers curl around the gold chain at my neck and drag my body to his.

Our chests scrape and his skin meets mine where the shirt I borrowed gapes, the ties loose and waterlogged. My nipples tighten against his borrowed shirt.

With him touching me, it’s hard to think. I can’t do anything but feel.

He stares at me as he says, “Once you know what’s written inside that book, everything will change.”

“How?” I beg.

His dark hair spills down his face. Rivulets of seawater run down his skin and trickle down his chest and down to his stomach, where they drip onto my chest and stomach. His thighs press against mine and drive me against the wood so hard, I wonder if I’ll leave a permanent impression. Something other than ink and paper he can remember me by…

Inch by inch, I part my knees. My hands slide farther back on his desk.

Hudson wastes no time filling the space between my thighs, pressing into another part of me. A part no other person has touched.

He’s hard and unyielding despite the soft brush of his pinky against the back of my hand.

“Why?” he rasps.

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