I was ravenously hungry and equally thirsty. I ate the soup and sandwich much faster than I should have, hoping I wouldn’t regret it. Seasickness and all.

  I snooped around the cabin, but it was bare of anything that would’ve been useful to me. I did find a comb and brush, which was awesome. Calvin didn’t send any of my clothes along. All I had were the clothes on my back. I refused to look out the window at the open water. I curled back up on the bed and fell asleep.

  The next thing I know, I’ve got a man all over me. Freaking Dolph. He waited until I was asleep to ambush me.

  I’m not sure what he was thinking, but he brought handcuffs with him this time. I guess it would’ve taken too long to tie me back up or something? I don’t know, but as I turned to punch him in the face, he snapped the first one on my right wrist like a ninja. He yanked my arm over my head so hard I thought he was going to rip it out of the socket. He locked it onto the towel bar over the bed.

  He’s a big guy. Despite the fact that I put up a pretty good tussle, it didn’t take him long to do the same thing to my left arm.

  I kicked and swore and fought like a demon, but with my arms immobilized, it wasn’t hard for him to retie my ankles to the bed.

  So there I was with very little on in the way of clothing, and a huge pirate man (complete with obligatory scar) staring down at me with naked lust in his eyes. Great.

  I was really scared. I was shaking. I felt like I was going to throw up. Up until that point, I guess I was just too stupid to process what was actually happening to me. It was crystal clear now though—I was about to be raped.

  You always think you’ll know what to do if you find yourself in a situation like that. I was always sure I could save my own skin if push came to shove. I’d fight back and get out of it unscathed. What bullshit. I was as helpless as a kitten laying there on that bed handcuffed and tied. I had no illusions about saving myself.

  His eyes glazed over as he stared down at me. I wondered if there was somewhere I could safely tuck my sanity until he finished.

  He reached out and ripped the tank top right down the front in one quick motion. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of those shelf-bra tank tops, but they seem like they’d be pretty hard to rip. Not for him. Just like tissue paper. My girls bounced out. I heard his sharp intake of breath. I was in so much trouble.

  I went limp and closed my eyes then, because I knew nothing I did was going to save me from this man.

  “I’m not taking you to Saudi Arabia, Gianna,” he said.

  My eyes flew open. I was surprised. “No? So what’re you going to do with me?”

  “I’m keeping you for myself. Here on the ship. My wife will never know. The ship is big enough that she’ll never find you.”

  In another life, I might’ve found Dolph handsome in a rugged sort of way. Dangerous. Seductive. Obviously rich, if this was his ship. Now I just thought he was a disgusting asshole. God, was he serious about keeping me here on this ship under his wife’s nose?

  I called him an asshole to his face. I told him he was a filthy pig. I might’ve even said I was positive that his mother and father were siblings. He just laughed and ran his hands all over me, gently at first. Then he got rough. He’s one of those guys that gets off on hurting women. I couldn’t do a damned thing about it. I just bit my lip and let him know with my eyes that he was now second on the ‘List of People I Am Going to Kill’’. Not that it did me any good.

  He told me he didn’t want to fuck me like this, that he wanted the first time to be all moonlight, dinner, and roses. He was even more of an asshole than I thought. I wanted him to stop touching me. My shorts were way too short, and all it would’ve taken was a quick ninja sleight of hand to rip them from my body. I didn’t think he was going to do that though. He was dead serious about making the first time he raped me a romantic experience. Oh. My. God.

  He wasn’t finished with me though, not by a long shot. He still had something to prove. He stood near my head, dropped his jeans to the floor, and proceeded to jack off all over my breasts and stomach. I have never been so revolted in my life.

  And after he came, he left it there, like he was marking me as his or something. I thought only Calvin could push me into that secret place in my head, the one where I’m safe and no one can get to me. I’m glad I have that place.

  Chapter Three

  I know there are many people out there who like bondage during sex, but I have to tell you, it’s a crashing bore to be tied up for real. It makes you ache like someone beat the crap out of you. There’s nothing sexy about it. I was in agony. Your muscles aren’t supposed to be in one weird position for hours and hours on end. I’ll probably never enjoy bondage again.

  I lay there all night with the handcuffs digging into my wrists, the top I had on in ruins. For some reason, the air conditioning quit. The room turned into a sauna, and I was lying in a puddle of sweat.

  I wanted Dolph’s semen off me. I practically turned inside out trying to wipe it on the bed, but I couldn’t. I screamed until my throat hurt. I raged, I seethed, and I finally had a little pity party. I pictured myself knowing ahead of time about the trap that Calvin laid for me. I made him drink the drugged iced tea and put him on a ship to nowhere.

  After awhile, there was kind of a moment of Zen. The little tantrum my brain was throwing played itself out, and I fell asleep.

  ~***~

  The key in the lock woke me up the next morning. I tensed as the door swung open. My breasts were still exposed. I wondered if Dolph was going to want to do his thing again.

  He looked a little worried actually. He was rather white. He took off the handcuffs, released my ankles, and really didn’t make any eye contact with me at all.

  “What’s with the air-conditioning?” I asked, trying to hide my breasts with my arms as I rubbed my wrists.

  “The engines quit. We have no power right now. We’re dead in the water.”

  Okay, I so did not need to hear that. My head jerked around, and I looked out the window. Yeah, we weren’t moving. There was nothing but water on the horizon.

  “What happened?” Panic started to clutch at me, but I managed to keep my voice calm.

  “I don’t know. Here’s your breakfast. I don’t know if you’ll be getting anything else to eat today, so enjoy it.” He slammed the door, locked it, and that was that.

  Breakfast was a couple of cold raspberry Danishes and a glass of milk. I hate milk, but I drank it anyway. I felt like I had to keep my strength up.

  I wanted to take a shower, but with no electricity to power the pumps below, I couldn’t. I got just enough water out of the lines in the shower to scrub Dolph off, thank God. I threw my ripped tank top away and wrapped a towel around me. Hey, it was better than nothing.

  My brain bounced off the walls of the cabin for the next several hours as it got hotter and hotter. I was sweating like crazy. I had no water. I tried to open the window, but of course, they don’t want you to do that on a ship. Now I know how a dog left in a hot car feels. I started to see and hear things that weren’t there. I had a fight with my mom about Calvin.

  Finally, I lay down on the floor trying to keep myself as cool as possible, but I just knew I wasn’t going to survive this. It was too hot. I was going to die alone, cooked to death on a ship with no air conditioning miles and miles from home, while Calvin drank margaritas made with Cabo Wabo tequila on my beach. It was my last thought for a while.

  ~***~

  I heard the screeching groan from deep in the belly of the ship just about the time I felt the blast of icy cold air come through the vents over me. I honestly didn’t even know where I was for a few minutes. When I revived enough to have a coherent thought, I was shocked as hell to be alive. The floor around me was wet. I think I might literally have been melting on the floor of the cabin.

  The cold air puffed just once for two or three seconds, but it was enough to cool the room off considerably. I heard the noise from deep inside the ship again, and it gave me chills. This sounds overly dramatic, but it sounded like dragons from hell raking their talons over a metallic blackboard. I can’t think of any other way to describe it. The ship sort of shuddered underneath me. That was what brought me to my feet.

  I went across the bed on my knees and looked out the window. The night was inky blackness, but the moon was blood red, shining across the ripples on the water. The moon looked weird to me, really large and close. Half in, half out of the horizon. I could see clouds roiling around it, like a storm was blowing up, but these clouds were moving really fast. An oily, black tendril slid its way across the blood red moon, twisting like a tornado.

  And that’s when the blue and purple lightning started to flash across the sky.

  Let me stop here and say this: I‘ve lived in the Bermuda Triangle since I was a kid, and I’ve never seen anything out of the ordinary. Never talked to anyone who ever said they saw anything weird. At that point, I just thought a really bad storm was brewing.

  I think I was so terrorized by then that I wasn’t willing to face the truth. Nothing about that night was normal.

  Another puff of icy air, and I mean icy. I reached up and touched the vent. It had a thick layer of frost around the edges. I heard the deep metallic grinding sound again, like a steel girder being twisted into a pretzel. The ship quivered and groaned.

  Then the most amazing thing happened. It felt like a giant hand picked the ship up, turned it a perfect 180 degrees, and dropped it back into the water from a great height!

  The sense of vertigo was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It felt like the drop on the biggest roller coaster I’ve ever been on. I crashed to the floor; my head bounced off the coffee table as it slid over the top of me. The drawers of the built in chests in the cabin all slid out into the middle of the room. I scrambled up onto the bed, breathless and bruised, my heart in my freaking throat.

  ~***~

  I don’t want to sound like a drama queen, but when I think about the way the ship felt as it was being tossed around...well...I think maybe I’ve watched too many Syfy movies. It really felt as though something was playing with the ship. One end would tip up in the air, as though a giant, unseen finger were pushing the other end down into the water. Then that end would be up in the air, and the other end would be down. Lather, rinse, repeat for about twenty minutes.

  I can’t even begin to tell you how terrified I was as my insignificant body flew from one end of the cabin to the other, in the dark, with only that bloody moon shining through the small window.

  The furniture and I were rolling around the room like dice on a Las Vegas craps table. I was hoping the wall mirror wouldn’t break and toss razor sharp shards around the room along with me. The only solid thing I could ground myself with was the towel bar I’d been tied to, and that quickly came loose and broke off the closet.

  I finally managed to get myself into the small bathroom and wedge the door shut with my feet. I was sick to my stomach as we rolled end over end, cold arctic blasts of air alternating with so much heat I was sure it could melt concrete. At this point, I wasn’t trying to wrap my brain around anything besides not being human popcorn.

  And then I heard the water. Shit.

  As I said, I hate ships. I hate open water. Water scares me to death. I could hear water sloshing around out in my cabin.

  I didn’t want to look. But I couldn’t not look. If water was flooding my cabin, I had to get the hell out of there as fast as I could.

  I stood up and opened the door of the bathroom to find about three inches of ocean splashing around on my floor. It smelled fishy and salty; my stomach immediately went up into a knot.

  The ship had stopped doing the see-saw motion, but now it tilted downward at an angle. That clearly meant two things: We were taking on water. We were sinking.

  It’s funny where your mind goes when you’re in deep shit like that. All I could think of was Titanic. Rose and Jack, running hand in hand up the halls of a listing ship, blah blah blah. Life is never as neat as it is in the movies.

  Big problem: my door was locked. Water was seeping in under it, getting ever higher around my bare ankles. I pulled and yanked and screamed, but the door didn’t budge.

  I threw my shoulder against it. Again and again. With all of my might.

  I pounded on it and screamed for Dolph. Yeah, like he was going to come down here and risk his life to rescue me.

  Okay, I’m a fighter. I wanted to live. I had hope. But as the minutes ticked by and I couldn’t get the door open, that hope began to melt away, replaced by real, shit-your-pants terror. The water was up to mid-calf on my legs. God, I was going to drown trapped in this room.

  I took a few steps back from the door, swearing and cursing, promising Calvin I would see his miserable ass in hell someday, when the most remarkable thing happened.

  The door swung open into the room.

  Well, it didn’t exactly swing open. It sort of exploded open. The flood of seawater that had been building on the other side of the door gushed in, took me off my feet, and swept me out into the hall.

  I flailed around a bit, then got a toehold on the carpet and started to climb up the hallway, which was tilting upward at a 45° angle. It was pitch black; I couldn’t see a thing. If I was going to get out of here, I would have to do it by feel.

  The water was around my hips. I took several deep, calming breaths and prayed that whatever was playing with the ship wouldn’t start again, at least until I could get up from below.

  To this day, I don’t have a clue how I got out of there.

  I used to have dreams when I was a kid of someone chasing me and I couldn’t run fast enough to get away from them. The water chased me that way now. I didn’t waste precious breath screaming, but man, I had one in my throat ready to go!

  I climbed up the tilted hallway like a monkey up a tree, and the water came after me just as fast. At times it knocked me over and tumbled me around, but I always came up spitting and sputtering, fighting and climbing. It really was like Titanic. I was Rose without the miserable, long, wet dress pulling me under.

  I scrambled up the stairs at the end of the hall, used the banister as leverage, and launched myself up another wide flight of stairs. I finally got ahead of the water. I could hear it behind me, but I didn’t feel like my death was imminent anymore.

  I came up on to the top deck in the bar of the casino, and it was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. The moonlight was bright enough that I could see everything was gone. All the booze, the glasses, the chairs, the one-armed bandits. Gone. Some of it was piled against the stained glass windows of the bar, which remarkably remained intact, but the rest of it had slid out through the open doors and into the ocean lapping further down the deck. Some of the slot machines had just busted through the wall. All of the deck chairs were gone and floating in the ocean. I knew I didn’t want my already battered and abused body to end up in that meat grinder of debris sliding up the deck of the ship as the ocean swallowed it.

  Being in near darkness was terrifying enough, but the sounds around me were taking all of that up a notch. Every now and again, a giant bubble would issue up from the belly of the ship with a giant glug glug. Water was swishing and rolling, coming closer and closer. My heart was pounding. I heard glass breaking, wood snapping, and every now and again, that deep, tortured groan from the belly of the ship.

  Trying to move around at an ever steeper angle as the bow of the ship went under was exhausting. Even so, I scrambled back out the other end of the bar and headed for the stern, almost on my hands and knees.

  I don’t know why I fought so hard. Really, where did I think I was going? I was going to be thrown into the ocean sooner or later. I guess I just wasn’t willing to accept that yet.

  Whatever had been playing with the ship came back for the grand finale. It felt like giant fingers grabbed the bow of the ship under the water and pulled...pulled...it the rest of the way under. So fast it was mind-boggling.

  I didn’t see what happened next. I can only give you impressions. Me, grabbing at the railing of the ship and missing. Me, flying through the air, screaming, pumping my arms and legs, praying I wouldn’t land on anything that would kill me. Then praying I could get my hands on something that would keep me afloat.

  I hit the water feet first. It was hot; I had the absurd notion that it was boiling just before it pulled me under completely. I rolled, pushed, prayed, held my breath. It felt like I was submerged for an eternity. Finally, I bobbed up into the air like a cork.

  Chapter Four

  I came up out of the water gasping like a landed fish. I pushed my hair out of my eyes and tried to find something to grab ahold of. That shouldn’t have been problem with all the stuff that was floating around me, but every time I grabbed something—a chair, a cushion—it started to sink with me clutching it.

  God, I wanted to live! I knew it was hopeless, but I wanted to live! Goddamn you, Calvin!

  I flailed around desperately, turning 180° in the water trying to find something to climb onto when I saw it.

  It was one of those little covered lifeboats, bright orange so it can be seen from the air. It wasn’t that far from me. I’ve never been the strongest of swimmers, but I kicked and stroked for all I was worth. I was going to get to it or die trying. (Haha, Deveraux! You are some kind of comedian!)

  Hope gave me determination, and determination gave me strength. I struggled through the water, finally getting my hands on the back of the lifeboat. Working my way around to the hatch, I spun the handle and pulled. It popped open; had I not been in the water, I’d have done a freaking happy dance.

  Getting it open was one thing. Hefting my body over the side and into it was another. Every time I tried to pull myself up on shaky arms, it tipped in my direction, sending me back into the water. After five or six tries, I was ready to give up. I was worn out and exhausted. One giant, epic fail.

 

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