The first bite of icy water crept over his skin like a salve extracting poison.
Swimming seventy-five meters out, he sank into the waters, reached for his still throbbing erection and worked to extinguish the volcanic fire she’d exposed inside of him.
Lauren snapped awake the moment she heard the beep of the alarm. Instantly she knew where she was and got out of bed. Stepping into her fluffy orange slippers, she tracked the earth and water scent of the man who should’ve been lying beside her but wasn’t.
Outside, the sun had broken over the horizon but was still dim and distorted by the thin layer of fog resting over the land. Lauren watched Santiago from behind as he shed his boxers and stepped into the water, which must have been freezing. It couldn’t be any more than fifty degrees outside. Stepping out onto the porch, Lauren rubbed her hands over her upper armsand shoulders, as if to generate enough body heat to somehow protect Santiago from hyperthermia.
Drawing closer to the lake, she watched, teeth chattering, as Santi swam out with strong strokes, tread water as he faced the horizon, then sunk like a stone into the water’s depths.
Recalling that Lina called Santi “little fish,” Lauren wasn’t immediately concerned. She shifted her gaze to her new house and shivered, not from cold but because she felt like it was looking back at her. No threat, just observing.
Turning her eyes to the right of her, she saw Julian St. James walk down his porch, moving toward her. She estimated she had a good five minutes before he reached her.
Turning her gaze back to the lake, she scanned and still saw no sign of Santiago. It had to have been at least two minutes since he went down, and she saw no signs that he’d resurfaced somewhere else.
Heart thumping fast, she waited one minute, two minutes, then three minutes that felt like two hundred. When she’d watched Santiago step into the water, she’d waited, expecting to see him walk out of the water like some naked, bronzed-skinned, black-haired Poseidon. Instead she was beginning to panic.
She wasn’t the greatest swimmer but that didn’t stop her from kicking off her Garfields—the bite of the freezing stone was painful—but she took one step, then another toward the water’s edge, willing him to surface. He never did.
He could be dead. Could’ve become tangled in something, attacked by something, and she’d just stood here watching, trusting that he would return as she lost herself in fantasy when he could literally be fighting for his life.
Throwing caution to the wind, she ran toward the water only to be caught up in stony arms that pulled her back just as she stepped into the lake. She screamed from the biting pain of freezing fucking water that felt like encroaching death.
Julian held her around the midsection and swung her around, away from the water as if she were a rag doll.
“You don’t want to do that,” he said.
She struggled to free herself and pushed him away.
“You don’t understand, Santiago’s been underwater for over five minutes, he hasn’t resurfaced!” She moved back toward the water but he ran in front of her, blocking her off.
“If he doesn’t come up in the next four to five minutes, then we can both panic,” Julian said. “This is what he does, Ms. Green. Everyday. He’s safe in the water, you wouldn’t be. Not this close to shore.”
In her panic she’d forgotten about the lake’s history.
“The spirits in this water aren’t very nice to people who aren’t from one of the three bloodlines. If you trust anything I ever say, trust me when I tell you Stillwater is just fine. The first time I saw him strip naked and go in the lake, he had to have been in there seven or eight minutes before I ran in after him. I made it out because Santiago came to my rescue. Not because I couldn’t swim, but because I saw them, saw flashes of them dying, being killed, felt their rage and grief, their need for vengeance...and I panicked; began screaming like water was air. Even for the descendants, you gotta be a strong person to wade in those waters. Even for a man who writes about death and horrible things…” His hands slipped inside the pockets of his well-creased chinos and they watched as the sunlight made the surface of the water look like fire.
“Why would he put himself through that every day?” she wondered.
“I’m not sure he experiences the same things as we might. Stillwater probably survived horrors like that more times than either of us could count. When you’ve lived with terrible things during your waking life, sometimes you get numb.”
Lauren knew Santiago had been in the military, but she’d never considered what he’d experienced. Never wondered why he so adamant about maintaining peace and calm around him.
About thirty feet away from shore, the water rippled, rolling toward them. The ripples looked like they were caused by something much larger than a man.
“Uh...are there alligators in the lake?”
St. James laughed. “No Ms. Green?—”
“Lauren.”
“No Lauren, that’s a beast of another nature.”
And like some ancient spirit, Santiago emerged from the lake with the power of the morning sun covering him in a new light as mist and steam radiated off of him.
Lauren’s breath caught, eyes widened, as water sloshed off his hips and hard thighs, and the erection he displayed had her walking forward as if she were summoned by a siren.
Ghosts be damned, she treaded into the water up to her calves, and he didn’t stop advancing until they were chest to chest. Soft pelvis to hard pelvis.
