Page 47 of Hunting Gianna

She nods, pressing her mouth to mine.

I let her kiss me.

I let her have this.

Tomorrow, she’ll probably regret it. But tonight, she’s letting herself be mine.

The water makes her hair heavy. It drapes over her face, sticking in black lines to her cheekbones. She brushes it aside, fingers clumsy and blue with cold, and for a while we just drift, her legs still hooked around my hips, her breath warm on my jaw.

This is the closest I’ve come to peace in years, and it’s fucking terrifying.

Gianna’s eyes are wide open. She stares at the sky, the low cloud smear above us, the occasional gull wheeling overhead. I think she’s counting the seconds before she ruins it.

She doesn’t disappoint.

“My ex was a captain,” she says. “I never told you that.”

I grunt, holding her tighter so she can’t drift away from me.

“He ran one of those luxury cruise liners,” she goes on, voice thin and flat. “Six months on, three months off. He said he loved the ocean because it made him feel like a god. Like he could go anywhere, do anything, and no one could stop him.”

Her nails dig into my bicep. Not hard, but deliberate. I think she wants me to hurt, just a little. Fair enough.

“He cheated on me,” she says. “Every time he docked. Didn’t even bother to hide it. Told me once, if you can’t handle the freedom, you shouldn’t be with a man like me.” She spits, a hot fleck that vanishes into the spray. “Like it was some gift, his honesty.”

I listen, because that’s what I do. I listen and I remember.

“I stayed,” she says, her voice getting softer, “because I thought it would make me stronger. That if I could take it, I could take anything.” She laughs, sharp and bitter. “Turns out all it did wasmake me hate myself. He’d tell me I was fat. Worthless. Show me pictures of the women he’d fuck in between ports.”

The water laps at us. A piece of moss floats by, catching at her shoulder, and I brush it off with two fingers. Her skin is covered in goosebumps, her nipples peaked and pale as pearls. She doesn’t try to cover them this time. Maybe she’s tired. Maybe she trusts me. Maybe both.

“Why’d you finally leave him?” I ask, just to keep her talking.

She blinks. “I thought I was going to die there,” she says, and now her voice is a whisper. “Not because of him. Because of me. Because I knew if I didn’t leave, I would never leave.” She looks at me, really looks, and I see the hole in her where hope should be. “That make sense?”

I nod, because it does. It makes more sense than anything.

She lets her head fall against my shoulder, lips brushing my neck. “What about you?” she asks, almost gentle. “Any fucked up girlfriends?”

I bark a laugh. “Nothing to tell.”

She snorts. “Bullshit. A man like you? You must have had a whole graveyard of exes.”

I squeeze her, hard enough to make her gasp. “Maybe I buried them,” I say.

She laughs, and the sound is real. “God, you’re impossible.”

We drift, spinning lazy circles, her toes brushing mine underwater. I can feel her getting braver, the way she angles her face up to look at me, the way her hands start to explore my chest, tracing the old scars and the fresh ones, mapping me out like a new country.

After a while, she gets quiet. I watch her, waiting for the next hit.

She doesn’t look away when she asks, “Why me?”

“Why not you?”

“No, I mean—” she bites her lip, frustrated. “Not why did you kidnap me… we went over that. Why do you want me so bad? There’s nothing special about me. I’m not beautiful, I’m not smart, I’m not even that good in bed. You could have anyone. Why this?”

I don’t answer right away. I let the silence fill up with the sound of the falls, the pulse of the water against our bodies, the weight of her question.

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