Page 76 of Bewitched By the Sea Monster
The weight shoving into my chest vanished.
I was alone again, lying on my side, panting and sweating as I tracked the trickles of color returning to the walls around me.
The mattress dipped again.
I stiffened. But a warm hand pressed against the small of my back, kneading gently.
“Jackson.” I shuddered and arched into him.
“You’re safe, Pippi.”
Oh no.
My blood turned to ice—big, clunky cubes that clinked and clanked their way through my body, smashing bruises and welts into my insides.
That wasn’t Jackson’s voice.
It was Alistair’s.
His hand slipped under the covers and up my shirt, splaying his warm palm against the skin of my back. He chuffed when I shivered and scooted closer, pressing more of his hot body against my suddenly frigid one.
“How are you—” I started to move, to turn, and found that I no longer had control over my body. When I asked my limbs to move, they didn’t.
“You’re safe, Pippi.” Alistair rubbed my back. “You’re safe.”
I stiffened anyway, straining to lift my arms, my legs, my head off the bed.
Alistair crooned to me, muttering velvety gibberish until I stilled.
“Your voice should be illegal,” I snapped at him.
He laughed—a deep, rich, and unadulterated chuckle.
And an image plastered itself across my eyes, only for a second—barely long enough for me to drink in the details. Of a man. A tall, handsome man. Naked, his muscles taut and rippling around his booming laughter.
And he was laughing because I’d shoved him onto a bed.
Mybed.
The man’s face was blurred. No matter how I scraped and dug at the image, I couldn’t get his facial features to focus. But the rest of his long-limbed body was insharpdetail. Every cord of muscle bunching and coiling as he shimmied himself back onthe mattress. His belly fluttered when he propped himself onto his elbows and reached for me, beckoning me to join him.
I stretched my fingers toward him, giggling when he latched his around them and pulled, gently, flipping me onto my back.
Stars. Above.
Literally.
He’d flipped me right out of my bedroom.
I lay on my back, staring up at an indigo sky encrusted with twinkling stars and illuminated by the ivory moon.
But I still couldn’t move.
I couldn’t lift my head.
Couldn’t look at anything except those stars.
And someone was touching me, stroking the insides of my thighs?—
