“Hold tight, sweet Moira,” I tell her. “This isn’t going to take long for me.”

I f**k her hard, careful to hold onto her h*ps in such a way as not to touch her burned skin. I look down and watch as my c**k tunnels in and out of her warm flesh.

So good.

Feels so f**king good.

My orgasm is quick and catches me by surprise, seizing my entire body as it rumbles through me. Every muscle in my body seizes and clenches, so I lock my knees so as not to collapse.

I slap my hand on the shower wall and yell, “Fuck,” as I shoot hot into Moira’s body, my entire body shuddering in ecstasy.

Never.

Never have I felt anything like that before.

The absolute freedom I had with her body, the trust she placed in me. Her complete surrender to let me touch her in her most secret of places. She did it not because I demanded it, but because she wanted it and was willing to believe I wouldn’t hurt her. She doesn’t need me to provide food or shelter to her, not the way the Caraican women needed me. No, she needs me in a completely different way, and I find it completely humbling.

I look at Moira’s back, pink from the sun, and her chest still heaving from the explosive sex we just had. Her head bowed down in repletion, her body still openly trusting of me.

I run my fingers gently across her skin and think to myself, It’s going to kill me to leave her one day.

Chapter 18

Moira

I wash my hands in the bathroom sink and look up in the mirror at my reflection. Serious eyes bore back at me, contemplating what happened last night between Zach and me in the shower. It was beautiful… terrifying… liberating.

It changed me.

I’ve never had another man touch me the way he did, yet I trusted him fully for some reason. This wild man who never had to care for a woman’s feelings or body before. It was absolutely exquisite, and I felt something change between the two of us when he pulled out of me.

Zach had gently pulled me under the water spray and rinsed the remaining lather from my body. He then massaged shampoo into my hair, followed by conditioner… running his fingers for the longest time through the silky, wet locks.

So gentle with me. Helping me from the shower, wrapping a towel around my shoulders but careful not to rub it across my sensitive back. He had me get my aloe, then he laid me across the bed on my stomach and tenderly rubbed the lotion onto my back. I sighed with a mixture of relief from the cooling essence and sexual longing for the way his fingers played across my skin.

While he handled me with the utmost delicateness over my burned back, his fingers were a bit rougher over my ass as he massaged me. I squirmed, silently pleading with him to touch me intimately, and he obliged. He used his fingers between my legs to get me slick with hunger, then he merely pushed my legs apart and sank into me from behind while I lay stretched out flat on the bed.

Zach f**ked me slowly, bracing his weight above me with this hands dug into the mattress. I wanted to feel his entire body against me, but I know he was being sensitive to my sunburn. Although he went so very slow, he was anything but quiet. As promised, he held nothing back from me.

Every time he plunged into my body, he would groan with abandon, completely giving himself over to the ecstasy of the moment. I came with a quiet force and he followed me over the edge, leaning down to place a whisper of a kiss between my shoulder blades.

After he pulled out of me, I wondered if he would leave and go back to his own room. He had slept with me the previous night, but I wasn’t sure if that was from pure exhaustion or because he wanted to. I didn’t ask because I was afraid of the answer.

Instead, he rolled to the side and collapsed on his back, commanding me, “Come here.”

I turned, scooting over to his side, and he gingerly wrapped his arm around my back, which felt so much better after the aloe treatment he’d given me. We lay quiet for a while, but then I broke the silence.

“Where did you get these scars from?” I asked as I trailed my hand down his stomach, past his right hipbone, and down to the top of his thigh, where I fluttered over four lines of small, circular scars, each line about five inches long. I had noticed them that first night I saw him in Caraica, and while Zach had other interesting, slash-like scars over various parts of his body, these interested me the most.

Zach lifted his head up from the pillow slightly, to see where my fingers rested. “Oh, those. From a green anaconda that tried to make a meal of me.”

My head rose up so I could look at his face, thinking he was joking with me. “You’re kidding me?”

He looked back at me with utter seriousness. “I’m not.”

“Holy shit. What happened?”

Zach chuckled as he let his head rest back on the pillow. “I was twelve, I think, and out on a hunt with some of the other boys in the tribe around my age. We weren’t very good… mostly we were able to bag some monkeys if we all shot enough arrows at one. We stumbled upon an anaconda on the bank of the Itui River. She was all curled up in a spiral, her head tucked down so we couldn’t see it.”

“Her? How do you know it was a girl snake? Did you lift her skirt up?” I asked with a snort.

“No, smart ass. The females are larger, and this snake was massive… probably twenty feet long judging by its coils. Anyway, they normally stay in the water to hunt, and they are super fast. But this one was looking lazy, and maybe she was old… who knows, but all I know is that we thought she’d make a fine meal for the tribe if we could kill it.”