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But Juliette is so damned beautiful in her fury, her dark eyes sparking and her full lips parted to deliver what will no doubt be a cutting remark.
It’s not even a matter of choice.
I need to kiss her more than I need the sun on my face and the rolling deck of my ship beneath my feet.
So I do.
I hook the back of her neck and pull her against me. She’s so fucking soft, it drives me wild, especially when she makes a furious sound against my lips and digs her hands into my hair, dragging me closer.
It’s strange how so much can change and yet this hasn’t. I memorized the taste of her, even with so many years between us, memorized the feel of her body giving against mine, the little sounds she makes as she tries to writhe closer.
That reasonable voice in the back of my mind is screaming to stop this immediately, but I’m not listening. Juliette is the north wind, sweeping away all else before her.
We stumble toward my bed in a tangle of limbs and grasping hands. She yanks off my shirt, and I manage to get her dress down past her breasts before I’m distracted by their perfection, the curve of them begging for my mouth, her brown nipples tight and needing my tongue. “Juliette.”
“Don’t you dare say something to ruin this.”
I manage a choked laugh. Any thought of reason, of regrets, is drowning in a sea of desire. “Take off your clothes.”
“Only if you get rid of those pants.” She glares at my pants as if they’ve insulted her personally. With how hard they are to get off, perhaps they have. “Now, Maura. We can fight later. I missed you too much.”
Again, reason tries to interject, to demand I stop this before my body makes promises that I have no intention of following through on. Again, I ignore it.
Juliette doesn’t actually let me get my pants all the way off before she shoves me back onto the bed. I still have one boot on, and my pants are stuck around my calf, but I couldn’t give a fuck when her mouth is on mine and her bare skin is pressing against me.
“I am so angry at you,” she murmurs against my throat.
“The feeling is—”
She nips the curve of my breast and then sucks my nipple into her mouth. Hard. What was I saying? I can’t think, can’t speak. “More.”
“You are such an asshole.” She delves one hand between my thighs and cups my pussy. Despite her harsh words, her breath shudders out in time with mine.
That gets me moving. I grab her hips and pull her up and over until she’s straddling one of my thighs and I’m doing the same to hers. I can’t get over how soft her skin is. Not weathered from the sun and air and water. Not scarred from far more fights than a single person can remember. Untouched by all the harsher elements the world brings to the fore.
I grip her big ass and urge her to grind on me. I want to touch her, to taste her, to inhale every bit of this experience so I can tuck it away for when it’s gone forever. The greediness of my desire isn’t new.
It’s always been like this with Juliette.
She’s someone I was never meant to have, and the thief in me, the hunter in me, cannot resist marring her perfection with my bloodstained hands.
No matter where she goes, whom she inevitably marries, no matter how gilded and perfect her life, she will always carry the imprint of my fingers, my mouth, my words.
I really am the villain her father named me.
5
JULIETTE
Maura kisses me like she always has. Like she wants to ruin me for all others. I’ll never tell her the truth, that she accomplished that goal when we were sixteen and virgins, fumbling at each other’s clothes and laughing in the giddy way that only seems to come with first love.
Or maybe it only comes with this woman.
I hate that. She wants to ruin me, but I want to ruin her right back. She left me and had no intention of keeping her promise. She is determined to drop me at the nearest port and wash her hands of me for good.
Fine. So be it.
But I’ll make her regret it. I’ll make her miss me…even if she’ll never admit it aloud.
I ignore her sound of protest and slide down her body. The bed is a strange contraption that is almost like a hammock but with more structure. It sways as I move, and I have the distant thought that the movement could be really interesting for bedroom games before I get distracted parting Maura’s thighs.
She’s a marvel. It’s honestly upsetting. She had a few scars even when we were teenagers, but she’s covered in them now. They slice down her toned stomach and pucker the skin at her hip and thigh. There are even two jagged spots on her other thigh from magical weapons, the flesh obviously seared on contact.
