Page 44 of Lash

I growl, gripping her ass so hard it must hurt, but all she does is pant with delight and wriggle her ass into my grip. "Tatiana…"

“Lash?" she breathes.

"If I do not let you go right now, I will have you here on the deck of this boat for all the world to see."

Wide dark eyes search and sear, rife with an insatiable need. "Tempting," she whispers. "I've never had sex in public before."

"Tatiana," I breathe, the sound more warning than word.

She only laughs "So serious." She pushes me backward, reaches behind herself and captures my hands, tangling our fingers between our bodies. "Is that better?"

"I would do very bad things to be alone with you right now, Tatiana."

She bites her lower lip and gazes at me. "I know. So would I."

I lead her away from the railing and to a row of seats, sit with my back to the railing, and pull her down between my legs, her back to my front. "If we can't be alone, this will have to do."

She takes my hands and drapes them over her shoulders, clutching them against her chest. Rests a cheek against our joined hands. I feel her breathing slow almost immediately. "It will do. For now."

across the sea

Tatiana

It is a very long, boring ride across the sea; we are not merely crossing it but sailing far to the north from Split to Ancona, Italy.

Day fades, and the sun sets—and it is one of the most glorious sunsets I have ever seen. I stand at the railing on the upper deck with Lash behind me, his arms wrapped around me, and we watch the huge red sun sink below the waves.

It grows cool, after that, and then cold. We go below, and the handful of passengers shrink away from us, even though we have kept to ourselves and were the ones being shot at. I realize, then, that I am still splattered with blood—it is on my clothing, and I can feel flecks of it when I run my fingers through my hair. And then there is Lorenzo, pale and peaked, his T-shirt stiff with dried blood, bandaged front and back.

I suppose we are a frightening group, especially considering we hijacked a ferry while taking gunfire.

We pass the hours talking. Scarlett replaces Solomon in the cockpit, and then it’s Solomon's turn to stretch out on a row of seats in the lower deck, and is soon snoring. Lorenzo sits in the row in front of Lash and me and he tells us amusing and thrilling stories of his time in the Brazilian military. Lash relates his ownstories from his time in the German counterintelligence unit, and some from his time working for my father.

I have a few of my own stories, like the time I was kidnapped by a group of teenaged boys. It was a gang initiation, and they were young, naive, and foolish. They thought waving guns in my face—clearly unloaded, as if the daughter of Zagreb's most notorious gangster wouldn't know an unloaded revolver if she saw one—would ensure my cooperation. One of them tried to flirt with me, another kept threatening to "teach me a lesson," and the third apologized about twenty times.

When my father's men, guided to me by the tracker in my purse, burst into the room and assessed the situation, they all laughed until they cried. The poor boys pissed themselves when they came face to face with Tata's hardened, cold-blooded killers, armed with machine guns.

Lash and Lorenzo laughed—Lorenzo's laugh shifted to a pained groan.

"What did your father's men do to the boys?" Lash asks.

I shrug. "I don't know. Filip took me home, and I did not see what happened. I would imagine they were killed, though. Tata doesn’t play games with kidnappers.”

Lorenzo sighs. "Unloaded guns. Idiot children playing soldier." He shakes his head, rolling it against the back of the seat. "I experienced something like that once, after I got out of the army. A group of boys, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old. There were, oh, maybe six of them? I owned a pickup at the time. Nothing very nice, just a fourth-hand old Hilux. But these boys thought they could steal it from me, with me in it. They all had handguns and they were shouting and waving them in my face. Not one of them had a magazine in their gun, although I suppose there could have been a round in the chamber." He chuckles and then groans. "Ugh, ow. I gave them a good thrashing and took their guns away. An unloaded gun is only dangerous to the idiotholding it, I told them. If you point a gun at someone, it had better be loaded and you'd better be ready and willing to pull the trigger, or you have no business with a gun."

We doze, chat, and sometimes simply stare out the window at the black water and the starry sky.

Eventually, I doze off, my head on Lash's lap.

I wake up abruptly,and the stars above have been replaced with the amber glow of city light in the distance.

Lorenzo is gone, taking a turn in the cockpit, I assume, and Solomon and Scarlett are sitting with her back to his front, murmuring to each other quietly.

I am alone in the row of seats, my head against the window, pillowed by a folded jacket of some kind, and Lash is nowhere to be seen.

I find him at the prow, watching the lights grow gradually larger. I press myself against his back and wrap my arms around his waist, slide my hands up under his shirt and caress his pecs and abs. "What are you thinking about?" I ask in Croatian.

He shrugs. "The past and the future. What Leonora and Leander would be like, now. Who I would be if…that…had not happened." His answer is English—we've developed a habit of that, where I speak to him in my native Croatian, and he answers in English, which I comprehend better than I speak. "I am considering how we will get to Brazil. I am thinking that once all this is over with, I will happily swear an oath against killing. I have always felt like I have cheated my brothers. I have the brand, but I did not swear the same oath."