Savage Dom: A Dark Romance: Savage Island Book One Read online

  “Once the storm is totally clear, I’m going hunting.”

  “Let me go with you,” I say, more of a statement than a plea.

  This time, he doesn’t even disagree with me.

  “There’s no point in trying to keep you safe by keeping you away,” he says. “So yeah, babe. You can come hunting. For now, let’s get some sleep. We got hardly any last night.” His eyes look heavy, and there’s a weariness about him I didn’t notice before.

  But he doesn’t sleep. He takes his club and barricades the door, leads me to the bed in the dark, and lays me down. I lay on his chest for long minutes. He’s still rigid. Awake. Watchful. Listening.

  Finally, I fall into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  Fifteen

  Cy

  It makes no sense.

  No sense.

  How can someone else be alive? It has to be Derek. He was the only one who fits the description she gave.

  But it can’t be. How could it be?

  Attacked by insects only six days into our landing here, he died. I saw his blank, lifeless eyes myself.

  Is she going mad?

  She got angry when I suggested she was mistaken, but I’m completely bewildered.

  When Harper finally falls asleep, I get up, carefully, so I don’t wake her, and pace in the darkness around our shelter. I listen for any sounds at all of someone approaching. If it is Derek… and somehow, he… fuck, I don’t know, came back to life? No, what the hell am I saying? I’m a reasonable, rational human being.

  Nonsense.

  I shake my head.

  But this island… this island isn’t normal. Not since the day we arrived. The very fact that I can’t remember how I got here is telling. The way Harper arrived here is too random. After God knows how long of me being stranded here, a cruise ship shows up? No. I don’t buy it.

  And now a man I thought dead—fuck, I threw the dirt on his body myself—now he’s alive? No.

  No.

  I can’t sleep. I pace the small shelter and listen for a sound, anything at all that will tell me to be aware of danger, but there’s nothing but the gentle sound of wind outside the shelter.

  I hear Harper’s soft, whiffling snores, and I’m grateful she can sleep after tonight. She’s been a fucking champ through this. The girl is made of sterner stuff than any woman I’ve ever met. And I will see to it that she gets what she deserves.

  A home. A family.

  Which means off this fucking island.

  Finally, I lie back down beside her. She rolls over and nestles against me, her back pressed up to my chest as if she’s meant to be here, just like this. I hold her to me and breathe her in and give thanks for this moment. I have no idea what will happen tomorrow, or the day after, or the year after. Or if we’ll even make it to the next year. We have to take it day by day. And today, I’m grateful for this sweet woman I’m holding. I could be here alone, but instead I’ve got her.

  She’s all mine. Whoever’s out there—Will, or Derek, or whatever or whoever the fuck else might threaten her—they’ll have to come through me first.

  I finally fall asleep.

  When my eyes flutter open hours later, sunlight floods the shelter through the roughly hewn windows.

  “Morning.”

  She’s up and snuggled up to me like she usually is in the morning, her hand flat on my chest, one knee hitched up on me. Her auburn hair hangs about her in crazy, untamed waves. I reach out and tug a lock.

  “Carrots,” I whisper.

  She smirks. “I wish I had a slate to smack over your head.”

  I smile and kiss her pretty freckled forehead.

  “Took you a while to fall asleep,” she says.

  “Yeah.” I don’t say much else. I don’t want her to be frightened.

  Her stomach growls, and she yawns. “I am so starving,” she says. “You?”

  I sit up suddenly. I don’t know if it came to me in my dreams or my subconscious was working overtime, but the realization hits me so hard it startles me, before I feel anger begin to take over.

  Jesus.

  Motherfucker.

  “What?” she asks, sitting up and staring at me.

  “This happened before,” I tell her. “Same pattern.”

  “What pattern?”

  I get to my feet. “Wolves. Storm.” I frown. I don’t want to tell her what else, but I have to. “If this is the same pattern, when we go out this morning, there will be no food left.”

  She stands beside me and blinks, before she pales. “Cy, you’re not making sense.”

  I sigh. We’ll know soon enough. “We have to see if the food is gone.”

  She shakes her head again, and the look she’s giving me leads me to believe she thinks I’m out of my mind. “Cy,” she says gently, like trying to talk to a patient in an insane asylum you don’t want to upset, “you just need to get something to eat, and you need more rest. I think what I saw last night unsettled you.”

  Unsettled me? Goddamn right it did.

  But she’ll see for herself. Hell, I hope I’m wrong.

  “There’s so much food out there,” she says. “Fish and coconut, fruits and vegetables. We’ve had nothing but an ample supply for weeks on end.”

  “We have,” I say to her. “I’m not denying that, babe. What I’m telling you is that I’ve seen this before. And Christ, I hope I’m wrong.”

  It was just like this before. We woke up after the wolves and storm, and the food supplies had completely vanished overnight.

  Three days into starvation was when they began to grow feral.

  “Well, let’s go look,” she says. I nod.

  Before we go, we eat a simple meal in silence. She freshens up a bit with some of the water we’ve stored, and I do the same. I hand her the stick I gave her the night before, and I tuck a knife into the loop on my pants. We are not going out there unarmed.

  I open the door, half expecting someone rabid to attack, but the only sound is the gentle twittering of early morning birds. It’s gorgeous out here, the sun rising over the ocean, casting golden light on the blue-green horizon, belying the danger we’re in.

  “No matter what happens,” she says softly. “No matter what, I won’t forget mornings like this.”

  A bird calls overhead, and I squeeze her hand. “Me neither.”

  The first sign that something’s wrong is the missing callaloo. The closest source of food for us, it grows right outside our door. Beside it stands the tree where we get our coconuts, but it’s bare. Bare.

  “Well that’s strange,” she muses. Foreboding grows in my chest, because this was how it all started before.

  “Come on,” I say quietly. We need to check the fruit and other coconuts trees.

  We walk in silence until we get to the cluster of trees we always go to. She’s frowning.

  “No coconuts? What? Where did they all go to overnight?” She shakes her head and looks all around the ground around us. “If they were knocked down by the storm, they’d be on the ground. But there’s nothing.”

  I sigh. I won’t repeat what I told her this morning. There’s no need.

  I know what we’re going to find.

  Goddamn it.

  Our search for fruit yields the same. We walk to the water, and the usual signs of sea life are just as quiet as before. It’s as if someone’s set off an atomic bomb, and all signs of living creatures have vanished.

  There’s nothing.

  Fucking nothing.

  “It’s a damn good thing we have some food put away,” she mutters under her breath. “How could a storm have wiped everything out like that?”

  I don’t think it was the storm, but I have no idea what else the reason could be, so I don’t answer. And I’m not sure how long the stores we have will give us.

  “We’ll have to make our supplies last,” I tell her. Until we have food again.

  If we have food again. What if this time there’s no resurgence?

  We spen
d the day looking for something, anything at all that we could use as a food source but find almost nothing. Finally, when we’re reaching midday, Harper looks thoughtful.

  “Maybe we should go look on the other side of the island? Keep looking for anything at all?” It’s a small island, and walking to the other side won’t take long. It also means there’s not much of a chance we’ll find anything. The reason we built the shelter here to begin with was because of the close proximity to food.

  I think about this before I agree. Nodding, I look up at the clear blue sky, dotted with only the faintest wisps of clouds. “We can at least go look by the waterfall,” I tell her. I didn’t look there before. It will at least give us something to do.

  And maybe this is in my head. How would the island itself be conspiring against us? It isn’t logical. But I’ve gone there mentally before.

  I wish we could barricade the shelter so that no one else can get in, but any barricade we use short of a lock—something we definitely don’t have—will keep us out as easily as it would someone else. We hide some of our food, though, and in various places, and then head to the waterfall.

  We hear the waterfall before we see it. Vibrant orange and pink flowers line our way, reminding me of the fruit that I already miss. My stomach growls, and Harper gives me a sad, almost wistful smile.

  “Hungry?” she asks.

  I shrug. “Little. You?”

  She shrugs. “I’m alright. I went for full days not eating when I was in college. I’d just get too wrapped up in what I was doing to care about it.”

  I chuckle. “So you’re one of those girls.”

  “What?” she says, smiling yet defensive. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Dedicated to her work and goals. Overachiever?”

  She gives me a self-deprecating smile. “I suppose you could say that. Not you, huh?”

  “Babe, when I was that age, I’d drink a keg for breakfast and a second for dinner. That was all I needed.”

  She snorts derisively. We’re so close to the waterfall, it’s almost hard to hear one another speak. “So you’re one of those guys,” she says.

  “One of what guys?” I say warningly, drawing close enough to see the faint pink coloring in her cheeks at my warning look. Of course, she’s just as welcome to tease me as I am her, but I like to play this game with her sometimes. It takes my mind off the dire straits we’re in.

  “Those guys,” she says. “A frat boy who kills his brain cells with beer and gets laid more than he cracks a book open.”

  “Kinda. Not a frat boy, though. I enlisted before college.”

  It’s the very short version of the story. There’s more to it. I think, anyway. My mind still plays crazy tricks on me. Somehow, though, talking about this almost reminds me of something. Almost. I pause and frown, pinching the bridge of my nose to try to stoke my memory, but it doesn’t work. There was something I was grasping for there for a minute, but it’s gone.

  “That’s admirable,” she says, swinging her arms as she walks easily through the trees, and hell if she isn’t a sight to see, all tanned and freckled limbs, wavy, unruly hair, full lips and bright eyes that miss nothing. Her dresses have faded from sunlight and use and are a little baggy on her now.

  “What is?” I ask. We reach the clearing that opens to the waterfall, and she smiles at me.

  “Realizing your sorry ass needed discipline and doing what it takes to get there.”

  I shrug. “Part of growing up, isn’t it?”

  She nods. “I guess, yeah.”

  “So this waterfall is fresh water?”

  I nod. “Most waterfalls are,” I tell her.

  “I thought most of the water on earth was saltwater?”

  “It is. Only like three percent is fresh.”

  “Huh. So this doesn’t flow from the ocean, then, clearly.”

  “Nope.”

  Turning to face the waterfall, she breathes in a deep, cleansing breath, then lets it out again slowly. “Wow, I forgot how pretty it is in here.” A shadow crosses her eyes, but she doesn’t say more than that.

  I take her hand. This is the place where I found her. It’s also the place where she was attacked. I doubt she’s forgotten, and I bet she has mixed feelings about it.

  If I have anything to do with this, we’ll make a better memory here, just the two of us.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “I want you to remember this waterfall,” I tell her, tugging her over to me. “How pretty it was. How wild and untamed.” I pull her hand to my mouth and kiss the back of her slender fingers. “Like you.”

  She gives me a shy smile and bites her lip. “Like me?” she asks teasingly. “Do you really think you haven’t tamed me yet?”

  I tug a strand of her wild hair and smile. “Not even close, babe.”

  “Good,” she says with a twinkle in her eye I’m all too familiar with. She takes a step closer to me and encircles my neck with her arms, drawing me near.

  “Kiss me,” she whispers.

  I cluck my tongue warningly. “Hmm. Seems a girl who’s due a spanking should be watching her mouth a little more.”

  Her full lips turn downward into a pout. “I thought you forgot about that.”

  “I told you, I have an excellent memory.”

  “But you should conserve your energy,” she says. “If we have no food…”

  “Oh, I can conserve my energy just fine,” I tell her. “I’ll nap later.”

  “Cy—oh, look!” she points eagerly above, and I look to where she points. It’s one lone bird, flapping its wings mightily. Only one, but it’s one of the larger ones we’ve captured for food. She used to turn her nose up at it but has since learned to appreciate any and all sources of food.

  But without a gun, I can’t capture it. “It’s a good sign, anyway,” I tell her, when she gasps out loud.

  “What?”

  “It just… it just vanished,” she says in a whisper. “It was… it was flying, and then, it was just… gone, like it was a… I don’t know, like I was watching a movie and then someone hit the off switch or something.”

  I don’t respond at first.

  “You don’t believe me,” she says so quietly, it’s almost to herself.

  “Naw, babe. It isn’t that at all. The problem is, I totally believe you.”

  She raises one brow, giving me a quizzical look. “What?”

  I hold her to me, tip my finger under her chin, and raise her eyes to mine. “Something is off about this island. I don’t believe in many supernatural things. Ghosts. Spirits. Whatever. If I did, I would say that I believe something weird is happening here. That the island is somehow responsible for what happens.”

  I close my eyes when my memory is assaulted by a flashback so vivid, I can’t stop it.

  Six of us. All of us taken. In a room, bound, while images are portrayed on screens. In front of us? I can’t remember. All of us, aboard a plane. Drugged.

  “What is it? Cy?”

  I shake my head and open my eyes, looking around me. “We were taken here,” I tell her. “But I don’t remember how or why. A few things came back to me, but…” the memory is fading again. “And you know things don’t add up on this island. You know there’s something behind why we’re here.”

  She frowns. I think she’s finally starting to see that I have a point. “Things like what?”

  “Like the way we feel about each other,” I tell her. “Our insane attraction. I can’t control myself half the time, and neither can you.” She doesn’t deny it.

  “The way the other men went slowly insane. The way you ended up here and there was no reason why or how.”

  Her eyes grow wide and frightened as I go on. “The fact that I knew there would be no food after the storm, and how it all just vanished. No fruit scattered on the ground or dead fish floating in the water. Nothing. Gone.”

  I hold her hand and gently squeeze. “What you just saw now. A bird that
was here one minute and gone the next. Does that make any fucking sense to you?”

  She swallows hard. “Not much of it does. But if there… was… something… supernatural or something, what could we do to stop it?”

  “Babe, if I had any clue, I’d have already fucking done it.”

  She nods. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “Honestly, so would I.” She looks over my shoulder. “Hey, do you think those really vibrant flowers are edible?”

  I shake my head. “No idea, but I doubt it. I’ve never seen any wildlife eat them, and we haven’t tried.” I sigh. “Let’s go for a swim,” I suggest, pointing to the beautiful, bright blue water by the falls. The temperature’s been rising all day, and it’s nearly unbearable. We’re both already slick with perspiration.

  “Sounds good to me. There are no, like… sea creatures, right?”

  I shake my head. “Nope. Not here.”

  “If it’s freshwater, no sharks then.”

  I smile. “Definitely not.”

  “Okay, then,” she says. “Let’s do it.”

  I stand there like an idiot when she begins to undress, because the sight of her naked never gets old.

  “Fuck,” I mutter.

  “What?” she asks innocently, lifting her dress right up over her head and revealing her fucking perfect breasts. “Something wrong?”

  I step out of my clothes and leave them on the bank by the water. My hardened cock springs to life. “Nothing’s wrong,” I groan. “You’re just perfect.”

  She snorts, walking over to me. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Good. If you got a big head, I’d have to take you down a peg or two.”

  “Oh, would you?” she says with mock displeasure. “And I bet you’d like it.”

  “I’d fucking love it,” I say, taking her by the hand and leading her into the water.

  I like that despite the fact that we’re in danger, that we have very little food and no prospects of getting off this island, that we’ve somehow managed to grow this relationship. That somehow, despite all the odds against us, we’ve even… dare I think it… fallen in love.

  “Hmmph, of course you would,” she says.

  I pull her into my arms when we step into the water. It’s cold and clear and feels refreshing after the day we’ve had. She straddles my legs and wraps her arms around me, buoyed by the water, and I groan when she pushes herself against my hard cock. I can’t keep my hands off her, even when it’s inconvenient.