Surviving Raine 01 (13 page)

“Why don’t you kiss my ass?” I snarled.  I closed my eyes and took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm down.  “I’m fucking bored.”

I couldn’t take it anymore and pushed myself up to the raft opening.  After securing myself to the lead, I stripped down to my boxers and dived into the water.  I swam against the current, knowing full well I was using up energy I should be conserving, but I wasn’t going to do myself or Raine any good if I was a complete nutcase.

The water was cool, and I thought I should probably soak my shirt and let Raine wear it to keep from getting too hot.  Doing that too often was a mistake since the salt water could cause sores on skin, but at some point there was a tradeoff between the sores and heat exposure.  At least the nights had been cooler.

I swam a little and then floated on my back, staring up at the sky and trying not to think about anything.  Telling Raine all that shit about me brought too much of it to the forefront of my mind, and I didn’t like it.  Visions of fights traipsed around in my head, but those didn’t bother me too much.  When my thoughts went to a darkened, smoke- filled room and sixteen people standing against a wall…that’s when I had to flip over and start swimming again.

I wanted a fucking drink so I wouldn’t be thinking about any of this shit.

I opened my eyes and blinked against the sting of the salt.  A flash of yellow skimmed near my shoulder.  Then another one went by.  And another.

I broke through the surface and yelled over to Raine.

“Pull the canopy back and flatten it out like I had it last night!”

Raine nodded through her confused expression and did as I told her.  I dived back under, twisting my body around to get a better view of the huge school of Yellowtail Snappers – hundreds and hundreds of them.  There were so many, I couldn’t miss.  As they swam around me, I flexed my fingers a couple of times, resurfaced for one last gulp of air, and went to work.

Catching fish bare-handed isn’t as tough as it seems when you know what you are doing.  I came at them from the bottom and grabbed them by the gills before flinging them up into the air and onto the raft.  Within about ten minutes, there were a dozen of them flopping around on the top of the canopy.

I climbed back aboard and tried to shake most of the water off of myself before getting off the edge of the ladder and back into the raft proper.  Fish were flopping everywhere, so I wasted no time grabbing my knife and getting to work.

“We’re not eating any of it,” I reminded Raine.  “This is just for the water, which is more important.”

She nodded, took a deep breath, and let me tip the torn open spine of the first fish into her mouth.  I took the second one, and then gave her the third.  They weren’t as big as the Black Jack, but there were plenty of them.  We went back and forth like that until they were all gone.  It took a little coercion, but I got her to suck the fluid out of the eyes as well.

“I think that saved us a good day’s worth of water,” I said as I tossed the last of the fish bits off the raft.

“How much water is left?” she asked.

“It was just enough for today,” I admitted.  “Now we can lengthen that out another day.”

“You are incredible,” Raine said.  She fixed her shining eyes at me, and I couldn’t help but feel it.  I gave her a crooked smile back and tilted my head to the side.

“It’s true,” I told her.  “I am.  You should try me out sometime.”

She tilted her head up, and her eyes focused on my mouth.  It seemed like I could hear her heartbeat in her chest as she raised herself up just enough to touch my lips with hers.

I tried to hold myself still because what I really wanted to do was shove my tongue down her throat, pin her down on the bottom of the raft, and tear the swimming suit right off of her.  I wanted to feel her bare skin in my hands.  And fuck, I
really
wanted to get my dick between her legs.

Instead, I remained almost motionless and let her mouth touch mine slowly, remembering how soft her mouth felt on mine the first time, and noting subtle changes in the moisture of her lips from then to now.

Raine pulled away, and I opened my eyes to look at her.

“Why did you do that?”

“I wanted to,” she answered, her eyes looking away from me.

“You know when you do that, I just want to fuck you as quickly as possible.”

“Did you ever think of moving a little slower?” Raine suggested.  “Not all relationships have to have sex right away.”

“I don't do relationships,” I told her.  “I try to keep things a little easier.  No flowers, no commitments.  Just fucking.”

Raine’s face darkened and she looked away from me again.  I couldn’t tell if she was mad or just embarrassed, but I wasn’t going to let her think I could be anything other than what I was.  That nasty, evil part of me who could snap a guy’s neck and fuck his girlfriend afterwards told me to fucking lie to her and get her naked, but I couldn’t do that.  Not to her.

“That’s not quite what I’m used to,” she said after a few minutes of silence.

“Well, I learned my lesson,” I told her.  Before she could open her mouth, I shut her down.  “And no, I do not want to talk about it.”

“Do you want to start back up where you left off last night?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to talk,” I said.  Her eyes looked downcast, and she seemed so disappointed, I got pissed at myself.  “Why don’t you tell me something about you instead?”

“Okay,” Raine said, scrunching up her face a little.  “What do you want to know?”

I thought about it for a minute and wondered what I did want to know about the woman next to me.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty,” she responded.  “How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine,” I said, “but I’m asking the questions here.”

Raine smiled and waved her hand, indicating for me to continue.

“What are you going to study in college?”

“I don’t know yet,” Raine said with a blush.  “There are a lot of things I might like to do, but I haven’t been able to pick one.”

“How did you end up on
The Oblation
?”

“I told you – my friend convinced me.”

“She convinced you to go on a cruise,” I clarified.  “What made you pick my ship?”

“I thought it was pretty,” Raine said with a shrug.  “I’m not one for big crowds, so I wanted the private charter.  I loved the look of your kind of boat…”

“Ship,” I growled.

“Ship,” Raine corrected.  “I thought it looked like an old pirate ship or something.  It looked…exciting.”

“Have you had enough excitement yet?” I asked.

“Quite enough, thank you!”  Raine smiled.

“How did you get the money?”

She looked back down at her fingers and slid her teeth over her bottom lip again.

“I got a settlement when my dad died,” she said.

“Yeah, you said that.  Why did you get the settlement?”

“He died in the line of duty,” Raine said softly, “but he was sent somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.  The private investigator had some information that one of his superiors sent him there on purpose, knowing he would be in over his head.  They ended up giving me the money to avoid the civil suit, but it really came down to him being sent into a situation where he shouldn’t have been.  He wasn’t supposed to be there, so he shouldn’t have died.”

“Where did they send him?”

“No one would ever tell me,” Raine said with a shrug.  “That was part of the lawsuit.  I didn’t care about the money; I just wanted to know what happened to my dad.”

“So what happened to him?”

“Well, from what I could get out of the testimony that was made public, he was executed.”

My stomach muscles tightened up in my gut, and I felt a shiver run down my back.

“Who executed him?”

“It was a crime lord,” Raine said.  “Dad was just a small-town cop – he never should have been wherever he was.  He had no idea what he was walking into.”

“What did he walk into?”

“They wouldn’t tell me,” Raine said.  “There was someone who was there – someone from the organization who offered up his testimony to keep from going to jail, but it was all closed courtroom.  They wouldn’t even let me in, and all the transcripts were classified.  They said it was all too confidential and the investigation was still going on and all these other lines.  I didn’t know what to believe.  I think they gave me all the money just to keep the lawyers from making it more public.  My lawyer was happy with the money and told me I should just take it.  No one else would touch the case, so I did.  It wasn’t what I wanted, so I never spent any of the money before this trip.”

I didn’t even hear the last part of what she said.  I tried to swallow but I couldn’t get anything through my throat.  Various thoughts gathered around in my head like a rugby scrum, and the final conclusion made me want to vomit.

“Raine…” I said softly, finally getting my mouth to form some sort of actual, intelligible word.  “Raine Gayle?”

“Yeah, how did you…?”

“Henry Gayle’s daughter,” I interrupted.  It wasn’t a question; I knew it was true.

I remembered her name from the trial.  One of the lawyers said the daughter of the cop was trying to get access to the courtroom.  Landon used his influence to make sure that didn’t happen.  I looked down at my hands, waiting for them to start shaking, but I think even my limbs were in too much shock to do anything.

“Daniel, how do you know my father’s name?”

“It’s not Daniel.”  As soon as I said it, I regretted it.

“Sorry – I forgot.  Bastian…” Raine paused and then repeated my name.  “Bastian?”

Ah, shit.  I really, really needed a drink now.

“Sebastian?”

She looked up at me, blinked twice, and then looked away.  Her head snapped back to me, and her eyes went wide.

“Sebastian Stark.”

My mouth wouldn’t respond to any mental commands, so I went with a nod instead.

“You were there.”

I nodded my head again.

“You’re the one who testified against the man who killed him.”

Another nod.

“You…you watched him die?” Her voice broke on the last word, making it sound like a question.  I could no longer move my head.

I guess I didn’t need all that anonymity after all.

Chapter 7 – Hurt

All my muscles were tensed and ready, as if they perceived a threat similar to the beginning of a tournament.  There was something different in the feeling, and when I realized my muscles were tensed for
flight
, not
fight
, I wasn’t sure what to make of it.  My natural reaction had always been fight – I had never run from anything in my life.  What was it about this miniscule little girl that scared the shit out of me?  Once she understood everything, she was going to hate me, and the thought was extremely unnerving.  I didn’t want her to hate me.

I waited in silence and watched Raine warily.  I couldn’t even name all the emotions passing over her face as she put the little puzzle pieces in their proper places and realized how big a dick I really was.  Her mouth kept opening up a little like she was going to say something, but then she’d stop and look away from me.

I’d been there when her father was killed.  I heard him beg for the mercy of death as they tortured him.  I heard him cry for his daughter.  I heard him beg for his life before I watched the barrel of a gun point at his head.  It didn’t matter at that point – he couldn’t have survived what they had done to him.  Regardless, I just sat in my seat and didn’t move when the trigger was pulled and his brains splattered on the wall behind him.  I never moved.  I never protested.  I just watched it happen.  Three of them had died before I had managed to stand and move towards them.  At that point, John Paul had grabbed one of my arms and Landon the other, keeping me from going forward.  I still didn’t speak, didn’t tell them to stop.  Gayle and his partner were tortured the worst because they were cops, but they all died.

One by one, they all died while I stood there and watched.

My memories were interrupted by a deafening roar as Raine suddenly threw herself at me.  Her little fists were pounding on my chest while tears rolled down her face.

“You have to tell me what happened to him!” she screamed at me.  “You have to tell me!  Tell me
now
, Bastian Stark, you son of a bitch!”

I was still so tensed, I couldn’t even understand what she was doing at first.  Once I realized she was trying to hurt me, I couldn’t figure out what I should do about it.  I could let her continue, since the most damage she was going to do to me was some slight bruising.  No, that wasn’t going to work because she was using up a ton of energy – energy she couldn’t afford to waste.  I could cold-cock her and knock her out – she might be more sensible when she woke up.  No, I couldn’t do that.  Shit, I’d already hit her once.  I wasn’t going to repeat that, no matter what the reason.  I was going to have to find a way to subdue her…gently.

Was that even possible?

“Raine, for fuck’s sake, stop it!”  I tried wrapping my hands around her arms and pulling her away, but she continued to struggle against me, screaming and crying.  When I let go of her, she went back to her ineffectual poundings, which didn’t exactly hurt but were starting to be fucking annoying.  Finally, I just wrapped her up in a bear hug and held her against my chest, mostly immobilized.

She fought against me for a while but eventually gave in to exhaustion.  Her heavy sobs shook us both as she cried against my chest the same way she had the first night on the raft.  Every few minutes she would reiterate that I had to tell her what happened to him.  I didn’t answer her, though. I knew no one in their right mind really wanted to know how someone they loved died – not when it was like that.

Eventually, she calmed and I lay back, bringing her with me and keeping my arms wrapped around her.  She let out one last shuddering breath and seemed to give up.  Her eyes closed, but I didn’t think she was actually asleep.  I ran my hand over the top of her head, intrigued by the soft texture of her hair.  When she had touched my hair, it seemed to have relaxed me a little, so I thought maybe I could do the same for her.