Page 79 of Dagger in the Sea

He fisted a hand in my hair and devoured my mouth. The warm caramel flavor of the whisky still on his tongue flared over mine. His teeth nipped and bit, his tongue demanded and burned a path through my mouth, my being.

His fingers dug into the sides of my face, his breath hot on my lips. “What’s the matter, sweetheart? Your boyfriend too tired to get it up for you tonight? Is that why you came looking for me?”

He waited for me to react, to strike back. I only held his fierce gaze. The desperate clawing, the frenzied scratching. I knew it so well.

“We’re leaving,” I said. “You and me.”

A cruel, cold smirk lashed his weary features. “You and me, huh?”

I put a hand against his cold cheek, and his eyes narrowed, a muscle ticking under my touch. “I called a friend who owns a small restaurant on the island, a fisherman with his own boat. He’s out on the water now and coming here.”

His eyes searched mine.

“I’m getting off this boat. Come with me,” I whispered, my fingers curling in his shirt.

“To shack up at some hotel?”

“To leave Mykonos. He’ll take us to the port and we’ll get on the first ferry. There’s always a ferry by seven or eight in the morning.”

“And go back to Athens?”

“No. Not Athens. I don’t want anyone to know where we are.”

“Not even your man?”

“Come with me,” I repeated.

“Why?”

“Because I won’t be toyed with and used, not by Luca Aliberti, not by Evgeny Berezin. Not by anyone.”

“Good answer.”

“This once, let me do something for you,” I said.

His eyes narrowed at me, his movements stopped. Had he never heard that before?

For the first time in a very long time, I was going to trust my instinct. And that instinct had been right about Turo from the beginning. He’d been a rock, a rock where everything else around me felt like quicksand. Always felt like quicksand.

He was different from anyone I’d ever met. A brisk intelligence, a dry wit I really enjoyed. He treated me like a human being he actually liked and wanted to get to know. I could see it in his eyes, the way they lingered, in the words he used, the way he listened, the questions he asked me. It wasn’t only lust or desire or fascination or wanting to score entry into my realm. It was real interest, enjoyment, curiosity. In that piercing amber gaze of his I wasn’t Adriana Lavrentiou, I was a woman.

My own woman.

In the gold and lilac haze of dawn, that harsh gaze now softened, and that tide of heat that was us together washed through me afresh.

“Where to?” he breathed.

“Another island. We passed it on the way here. It’s quiet, not touristy or crowded like Mykonos. It takes a little over two hours from here on the ferry. ”

“And how will your boyfriend take the news when he discovers we’re gone together?” The angle of his jaw tightened again. “Won’t he come after us?”

“No, Alessio and I have an understanding.”

He let out a harsh laugh. “Isn’t that convenient?”

“He has a lot going on here this week, the store, dinner parties—he can’t leave Mykonos.”

Turo’s fingers dug into my neck, a thumb at my throat. “Doesn’t he need you for that?”

---