“Not without them hearing the engine, but if you’re right about what they’re doing, I reckon I know where they’ll come ashore.”
“Is there somewhere we can wait?” Saint spoke for the first time since we’d left Porth Luck behind. He flicked a glance to Sol, then turned back to the lights in the distance. “Watch them land?”
“Only from the sea,” Sol said. “By land, the cove is only accessible to one vehicle at a time and that’s where they’ll bring the truck.”
I nodded, absorbing it all. “Can you take us there?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“We haven’t put a gun to your head,” Saint growled.
Sol rolled his eyes. “Whatever.”
He turned the boat around and headed back inland, pointing us to a rocky shoreline that would’ve terrified me if I’d been in the hands of anyone else. But Sol had been born to these waters and he seemed almost bored as he navigated us to a cliff and told us to scale the wet rock to a centuries-old look-out point. “Ten foot up, there’s a ledge. Follow the rock ladder and you can see the whole of Cursed Cove from there. But be careful. And stay close together. I don’t want you fuckers getting pneumonia.”
I smirked. “That’s sweet.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Sol manoeuvred the boat closer to the jagged shore.
I braced myself to jump out, but Saint held me back.Me first.
We didn’t have time to argue. I let him have his way, and he leapt out of the boat, landing like a cat on the rocks.
I followed and didn’t break my neck, so there was that.
Sol’s directions were laser accurate. We found the stone ladder, carved into the rocks by an ancient Cornish family I’d never heard of, and climbed to a narrow ledge that gave fuck all shelter from the bitter wind but gifted us the bird’s-eye view Sol had promised.
It was so cold that I’d have snuggled Cracker eventually, and the ledge was a small enough space that we didn’t have much choice but to sit on top of each other.
Saint leaned into me, by design or to hide from the gale bearing down on us, I couldn’t tell, but I wasn’t complaining. His body heat was everything and I pressed tighter against him, greedy for the zip in my blood I’d become powerless to ignore, a familiar warmth I craved as much as I did the thrill of the unknown with Alexei.We need to talk. But my brain was too fried to compute which one of them I meant or conclude that it applied to them both.
Beside me, Saint shivered, and I fought a strange urge to put my arm around him. Deep down, my baddest boy was fragile and I hated that he suffered alone.
Like Alexei.My gaze slid to the horizon and I pictured him as a teenage kid, scared and alone in a fucking cage or some shit, at the mercy of whoever his deadbeat father had lost him to. A violent shudder rattled me, laced with a bone-deep fury. I couldn’t put right what had happened to him, but I—we—could stop it happening to the girls in that truck.
“You think he’ll wait for us?”
I snapped my gaze to Saint, for a heart-stopping moment still so stuck in my thoughts that I thought he meant Alexei. “What?”
“Captain Blackbeard.”
Sol. I shook my head to clear it, then corrected myself. “He’ll wait. He’s a mouthy fuck, but loyal.”
“To you?”
“To the sea. If it was us smuggling skin, he’d let us drown.”
Saint hummed, deep and low. It rumbled through him and into me, and how close we were hit home all over again, reminding me of when we’d first met all those years ago. That night had smelled of the ocean too, but the memory hurt. Only thinking about Alexei made it stop, and the fucked-up circle was complete. I wanted them both in ways that were fucking impossible and the realist haunting my heart knew that I’d end up how I’d always been: alone and yearning for someone I’d never have.
A shaky sigh slipped out of me.
Perhaps mistaking it for a shiver, Saint pressed tighter against me, and this time I couldn’t fight the impulse to touch him.
I snaked an arm around his waist, slipping my fingers beneath the leather and cotton concealing his body.
My cold fingers found warm skin. I rubbed a slow circle into the flesh above his hip bone. He made a tortured sound and, for a fleeting, precious moment, dropped his head to rest on my shoulder.
18
