In a blink, his hands are on my hips again. Pressing me back against the wall, then pulling down my jeans and panties. I kick them both away while his calloused fingertips lightly caress up and down my thighs, raising goosebumps of anticipation up my back.

  "It's been so long since I tasted you," he murmurs.

  My body feels on fire, both aching for his touch and feeling that the sensation will be too much for me. I shut my eyes, preemptively grip the wall for support.

  Just in time.

  In the space of a breath, I feel his tongue against my wet pussy. I gasp a sharp exhale and my nails claw at the wall; moaning, begging, wishing the wall were a bed, that it gave me something more to hold on to because I don't know how much longer I'll be able to stay standing.

  His tongue is like nothing else—testing, teasing, stroking, slavishly loving my pussy.

  "Oh god, Jackson. Oh fuck, I love how you eat my pussy.”

  Almost nothing else compares to the feeling of having this man between my legs, his tongue pleasuring me.

  "I missed you so fucking much," He growls, his tongue sliding up my pussy, teasing my clit. "I missed this so fucking much, your sweet, tight little cunt."

  I'm melting. I'm on fire. The pleasure is so intense I feel like I might lose consciousness.

  I grab onto Jackson's hair. Squeeze it tight.

  "More," I urge him. "More, Jackson. I've missed this, I've missed you. I want all of you. I want you inside me. I want to feel you."

  He kisses my pussy. Slow, his tongue fluttering against my clit and sending my world spinning.

  "I'm going to make you come for me, Maddy. I need to feel it."

  He grabs my ass, pulls me forward, devours me. Reaching down, I grip his head for support while I grind my pussy into his face. I'm so close, my body burning to explode in a way it hasn't in nearly five years. No one has ever made me come the way Jackson Reid does.

  "I want you to scream my name. Scream it. I don't care who out there hears. Scream my name. I want you to scream it so everyone knows that this pussy belongs to me. Not Alexander, not anyone else—your pussy is mine.”

  "It's your pussy," I moan. “You own my pussy.”

  His tongue, his lips, his hands grabbing my ass, pulling me into him, my hips grinding my aching, wet pussy into his face. I'm so close.

  So fucking close.

  "Come for me, Maddy," he moans. "Come on my lips. I need to taste you."

  My body goes stiff and my legs buckle.

  My entire body quakes.

  My pussy clenches, releases, along with the rest of me.

  I am cumming, cumming, and cumming.

  "Ahhh, Jackson," I scream, my palms smashing against the wall, and ecstasy overwhelms me. "Fuck, Jackson. Oh my god, Jackson, no one makes me cum like you do."

  I collapse against the wall, my body shuddering in delight.

  He laughs, looks up at me, my juices dripping off his chin. "You're so fucking wet for me, Maddy."

  I smile. "I've been wet for you since the first time you held a gun to me," I tell him, remembering the moment when he ripped me away from Alexander. "Well, once I knew it was you."

  "Can you stand?" He says, offering a hand so I can steady myself.

  "Not just stand. I can bend."

  "You mean?"

  "I mean, I want you to fuck me from behind."

  "I'm going to fuck you into oblivion, Maddy."

  "I'm ready for it.”

  He grabs my wrists, lifts them above my head. "Are you?"

  "I am."

  He presses me into the wall, the cold tile making me shiver. "You're mine."

  "I'm yours."

  He kisses me. His tongue in my mouth. Possessing me, owning me.

  I moan into his mouth. “Please, Jackson. Take me. Fuck me.”

  "I'm never letting you go," he says.

  "Never," I agree.

  He reaches down, grabs my ass, pulls me to him. His hard cock pulsing at the entrance to my pussy. My soaking wetness drips, glistening on his cock.

  "I'm going to take your pussy, Maddy. I'll bend you against the wall when I’m ready, but right now, I want to stare into your eyes while I fuck you senseless."

  The sense of him entering me is like coming back to life after years of years of heartless, empty existence.

  I gasp, my body filled with a joyous ache at his fullness.

  We stare into each other's eyes as he takes me. As he fucks me, slow, deep, more intimate, more caring, more loving, more lustful than I've felt in years. I want to give everything to him, to this man who is willing to give it all just to keep me safe.

  "I love you," I tell him between kisses. "I tried to fight it, but I can't."

  "I love you, too," he answers.

  He fucks me harder, deeper, my ass slapping against his thighs while he drives his cock into me. Reaching my hands around, I grab his ass and pull him deeper, his cock filling my entire body with the bliss that only Jackson can give me.

  "Oh, Jackson. Fuck, I love the way your cock fills me," I tell him, dragging my nails across his ass. "Fucking love it."

  "I love the way your pussy grips me," he answers. “Oh fuck, you’re tight, Maddy.”

  "I'm going to cum again," I tell him, my body aching for another orgasm. Pressure building, my heart pounding with the desire to come while his thick cock is deep inside me. I want to see the look on his face, in his eyes, as my pussy clamps around his hard cock.

  "Then cum," he urges me on. "Cum for me, Maddy."

  "Oh god, Jackson, I'm so close. I'm cumming," I tell him, my whole body trembling with the rush of pleasure.

  "Come, Maddy. Cum for me. Cum on my cock."

  "Oh fuck, Jackson, it feels so good," I moan, my body shaking, my pussy tightening around his cock. He grabs my hips, thrusts his cock deep in me. My whole body quakes.

  "That's right, Maddy," he growls. "Cum for me."

  His thrusting increases, the speed intensifies. I clutch him tight, pulling him into me; I want it. In his eyes I see the building pressure, the need to release; Jackson's close, and I want to make him cum, want to feel him cum deep inside me. He thrusts deep, his cock filling me, and I rock my hips into him, bringing him deeper.

  "Jackson," I moan, my body melting under the heat of his lovemaking. "I've missed this. I've missed you."

  He thrusts deep and I gasp; his cock is so hard, so thick, so deep.

  "Tell me, Maddy. Tell me how much you’ve missed me."

  "I've missed you so fucking much."

  I can feel my orgasm building—unstoppable, uncontrollable, all-consuming.

  "I need you," I say, my voice desperate. “Need you always.”

  "You've got me, Maddy," he says. "You've got me."

  "I love you, Jackson."

  "I love you, Maddy. Always will."

  "Cum inside me, Jackson," I beg him, my voice so urgent from the strength of my growing orgasm I don’t even recognize it. "I want to feel you cum in me. I want all of you."

  He grabs my chin, stares into my eyes. "You've got all of me, Maddy." He thrusts into me. “All of me. It’s yours.”

  "Jackson," I plead. My voice is ragged. Hoarse. Shaking with the intoxicating desire that floods through me as I come once more. "Oh god, I'm cumming."

  "Maddy," he moans. Then I feel it. Feel him release. Feel him fill me with his cum, again and again, as he thrusts his cock deep inside me. "Oh, Maddy. Fuck."

  We're both cumming, my pussy pulsing around his thick cock, his cock exploding inside me.

  My body feels… I can't think of a word that does it justice. Gloriously satisfied. Salaciously used. Utterly Fulfilled.

  "Oh fuck," I moan as I fall against him, and we both hold each other, staring into each other's eyes as we orgasm together. I feel whole in his arms. Complete. Fulfilled. More myself than I have in years. This man loves me, loves me wholly; in all the ways I am, in all the ways I've been, in all the ways I will be.

  "I love you," I tell him.

  "I love you, Maddy," he tells me. "I'll never stop loving you."

  He kisses me and I know he means it. I know he'll always love me. Always be there for me, always protect me.

  And that's a problem.

  A big problem.

  It’s a love that could ruin all the plans that we've put together; a love that puts my family in incredible danger; a love that could lead to Jackson and I finding ourselves thrown in jail for orchestrating this kidnapping and extortion, or even worse, dead if Alexander's men ever find us.

  Though he says nothing, I'm sure he sees it in my face, that nagging, bone-chilling question: what have we done?

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bullet

  Words that we've both wanted to say, words that can't be unsaid, words that change things between us forever, hang in the air.

  She's not just my hostage anymore. She’s something so much more.

  The realization hits her at the same time it hits me.

  "I want to get out of here. Now. Please," she whispers, voice low, urgent, desperate.

  We dress. On the way out, I slap a handful of cash on the bar to cover the tab. Outside, we make straight for my motorcycle without speaking, and when she slips behind me and grips me for support, it doesn't feel nearly as close as it felt when we came here. She's distant, withdrawn.

  The ride back to the lighthouse passes in silence with only the sound of the engine in the night. The entire ride, thoughts race through my mind. How could I slip up like that? To tell her how I really feel when everything depends upon being able to treat her as a hostage? It was a mistake.

  It was a mistake to tell her I love her; it was a bigger mistake to let her tell me the same.

  We're both smart enough that we should've known better.

  But sometimes your heart doesn't give a damn about what's the smart thing to do; it knows what it wants, and it takes control.

  Even if it throws everything else in your life into chaos.

  At the lighthouse, she leaps off the bike and storms to the door. The lighthouse is a ruggedly beautiful sight, and I find myself momentarily lost in awe of its magnificence—a jagged, crumbling tower thrusting up into the sky. Its long-dead lamp shines with a haunting glow, a gentle reflection of moonlight in the darkness, a shining dead dream surrounded by the twinkling black. The stillness of the night air is broken only by the sound of crashing waves against the cliffs below us.

  I follow Madison.

  "Hey," I say as I close the door behind me. She's seated on the cot, surrounded by blankets, her laptop open and the glowing screen illuminating an unreadable face. "What we said back there..."

  "Was a mistake," she says with sharp finality. Her voice shaking with anger. Is it at me? At herself? At it all. "An absolute mistake said by some girl drunk on negronis and thirsty for cock. It was meaningless. Utterly meaningless. I'd take it back if I could."

  As much as I love her and want to fight those words, I need to agree with her. It's too dangerous for us to be in love.

  "You're right. It was a mistake. We can't be in love with each other. It'd ruin everything."

  She flinches as if I'd physically struck her.

  "I can't love you, Jackson. I can't. We're too different. You're jeans and beer and motorcycles, and me, well, fuck, I like negronis and nice cocktail bars and I actually enjoy the opera. Yes, the literal opera. I think if you actually set foot in an opera house, you'd burst into flames like a vampire entering a church."

  She's right. About most of it. About the opera house thing, fuck, I have no desire to even test it, because Maddy's smart enough that I'm sure there's a reasonable chance she's right about that, too. I have no fucking inclination to see myself spontaneously combust. What would my road name be then? Smoke?

  Actually, Smoke ain't half bad.

  "So what do we do?" I say. “How do we fix this?”

  Her eyes flicker to her laptop screen and then back to me.

  "Well, I have to focus. There's a thesis paper I have to finish. I'm going to get to work so I don't screw up what I've worked on for these last four years. And you, well, you still have hours on your shift guarding me, right?" Her expression softens as I nod. A quirk quickly tugs the corners of her lips upwards into a heated, welcoming flicker that lasts for a moment. "If you can focus on what's important, I wouldn't mind if you stayed the night."

  * * * * *

  Morning comes. The tide outside changes, dawn creeps upon us, and the sound of singing shorebirds echoes through the holes in the concrete lighthouse walls.

  I haven't slept for a second.

  She's at her laptop, as she has been the entire night, her face aglow with sunrise, with light from the screen, with the vibrancy of knowledge sparking around inside her head. Her mouth is open—sometimes in a beaming smile, sometimes lecturing. Right now, it's lecturing.

  Because I've just asked a question.

  I don't even remember what the question was about, because the second I ask it and her face lights up with enthusiasm, I forget everything else.

  Though it was probably: 'what is that and how does it work?'.

  Getting the answer isn't as important as hearing her talk, in letting her shine with enthusiasm and knowledge.

  Fuck, she's beautiful when she's giving me an answer I don't understand to a question I don't even understand, either.

  "This is a variation of the Monte Carlo method that I'm working with. The Monte Carlo method is basically an algorithm that uses randomness, tons and tons of random sampling, to find a numerical solution to a problem. It's used a lot in math and physics, and..."

  She trudges out a lot of math.

  A fucking lot of math.

  Complex math—math with letters, symbols, and signs that look like they're in a foreign language and have nothing to do with numbers.

  My eyes glaze over.

  My ears glaze shut, or whatever the equivalent of going-deaf-from-boredom is; I don't know. I'm not a scholar like she is.

  But that glazed-over state only lasts for a second, until I remind myself that this is important to her, that she's willing to risk her life for this math—which I will never, ever understand, because, personally, I'd risk my life to get the fuck away from math—and that it is important to her makes it important enough to me that I can at least show some interest.

  I lean in. "Really? That's so interesting. So you're finding a new way to use this..." My voice trails off for a second, grasping at the name for the formula or whatever that she's using. Then I remember it's got the same name as a shitty coupe put out by Chevy. "This Monte Carlo method?"

  "Yes. It's the foundation of my thesis paper," she concludes. She grins, sheepishly, and it's as if my heart is tied by strings to the corners of her luscious lips, pulled to life with each quirk of her mouth. Fuck, she is stunning. So stunning I'd listen to math for her. No, I'd even learn math for her. Which is something far more serious than taking a bullet for someone, because a bullet either passes through you and gets removed during surgery, or it kills you; but math, math sticks around in your brain forever and you have to live with that knowledge. "I know it's boring. You have to be a certain type of person to find it interesting. But I love it."

  "Love it?"

  "Well, yeah. I really do.”

  "Math? You love math?" I repeat. It's one thing to have a general idea about a person, it's another for them to tell it to your face. It'd be like Marcus telling me he thought the Bimota V-Due wasn't as bad of a motorcycle as it was made out to be; it'd be confirmation of what I've suspected for a while: his childhood habit of occasionally eating paste has had dire consequences for his brain.

  "Yes and no," she says. "It sucks sometimes, and it can be arcane, and yes, sometimes I zone out like you did when I first started talking—don't think I don't know every single expression you make, Jackson, because I do, I never forgot—but when it clicks, it just gets me so excited that it feels like my entire body is humming. Do you ever get that way?"

  Oh, I do, but what winds me up like that is the one thing she and I promised we wouldn't talk about.

  "I'll bet you know what I'm going to say," I answer, delighting in the flush of color that floods her cheeks. "When I've taken a stock bike and tweaked the air intake, upgraded the exhaust, or flashed the ECU, and I hear the engine roar and feel that bump in power between my legs, yes, I know what you mean. So you get that way about the Black-Karasinski model, too?"

  "Fuck, you actually were listening, weren't you?"

  "You were talking. Of course I was listening."

  "Really? Through all of it?"

  "All of it."

  As if I wouldn't hold on to every word out of her mouth; I spent four and a half years living off the fading memory of her voice. Now that I have her in front of me, I'm going to hold on to every syllable, even if she's reading the phone book.

  "This is just my chance to do something, Jackson. I've always had this idea that if I got my degree, if I made the right connections, if I was just successful enough on my own, I could save my parents' business without the Covington's help. Maybe I could find them a different investor or a partner, something, anything." Her voice rises with excitement, then as she continues, it slows, goes quiet. "I don't want my family to be beholden to those criminals, but getting engaged to Alexander is a way of hedging my bets. If I can't figure out a way to do it on my own, I'll do what I have to do to keep my mom and dad from losing everything."

  "I get it, Maddy. You have to keep your focus on what's important, even if it hurts. There's people I feel the same way about, too."

  Maddy opens her mouth, then pauses as the sound of an approaching motorcycle fills the room. My shift is over.

  "I can't let anything impede that, Jackson. You understand?"

  "From the start, this has all been about getting you away from Alexander and getting your life back, Maddy. I want you to be safe, happy, and free. So whatever it takes to make that happen, I’ll do it.”

  I watch as Madison pauses, her smile outshining the morning sun. Her bright emerald eyes look me up and down, as if she's assessing me for something, but whatever it is, she keeps it to herself.

  For a moment, I'm lost in her beauty, wondering what she'd say if I asked her what was going through her mind right now. But before I can speak, the sound of a revving motorcycle mixed with laughter from outside startles us both and breaks the spell.