Medusa's Heart: A Contemporary Paranormal Erotic Romance Novel Read online

  As he started to pull apart one boat where the wood was the least rotted, he saw she’d done a good job stripping the interior. Since most of the wrecks were open skiffs that had come from nearby islands, they’d traveled light. But he did note markings, faded paint that told him the owner had decorated the vessel and made it his own. If the boat was still here, the owner had not returned home.

  When she turned someone to stone, did they crumble over time and become part of the sand? His gaze slid to some of the piles of rock in disturbingly uniform sizes, scattered near the boats. Was the beach a garden of bone dust?

  He didn’t flinch from the thought. He knew firsthand what a person under siege would do to survive. Based on the story he knew, she had no reason to retain even a scrap of compassion for her fellow humans. Yet she had. It was evident in her behavior toward him. Or had he arrived when her isolation had become too much, enough she’d been willing to for once give someone a chance to stay awhile?

  Perhaps she toyed with all her visitors this way, obtaining the latest news and some conversation from them before she dispatched them. He might be on a countdown clock and not realize it. She didn’t seem that duplicitous, but he couldn’t ignore the subtle signs he’d seen, the violence and hints of darkness, evidence of a person who’d been alone too long without her own kind, driven here by trauma. Her moral compass might no longer fit a predictable pattern.

  Where was she? Having had only a taste of her company, he wanted much more. But it was possible he’d have to dig in for quite a while. It might be days before she approached him again. The thought frustrated him, but that was why he was doing what he was doing now, to head off that unpleasant outcome. He’d keep coming up with things like the wheelbarrow to interest her, draw her closer again. He could use her curiosity to both their advantages.

  By the time the day started to wane, he’d worn himself out, but he was pleased with the fruits of his labors. He’d created a rudimentary wheelbarrow and cart, both useful for transporting foodstuffs and other things she gathered. He’d repaired a couple buckets he’d found on the boats.

  He’d also created a necklace of wildflowers, just for the pleasure of giving it to her and thinking about her putting it around her neck. Maybe the reason she didn’t let him get too close to her wasn’t all because of mistrust. When she moved, he occasionally heard the snakes hiss or slide across her skin. The peculiar rasping sound had taken him a while to identify, but a day spent wishing for a woman to appear gave a man plenty of time to think about her. Maybe she didn’t want them to take a piece out of him if he got too close. Until she wanted them to do that, that is.

  One of the things he’d also done today was plucked up enough rocks to section off a portion of the beach into a sparring ring. He’d use that court to practice his own fighting skills. Eventually he might be able to talk her into trying it out with him. He’d enjoyed their little wrangle in the ocean, but it had whetted his appetite to match skills.

  As he rinsed off in the ocean, he considered trying to climb back up to her home and initiate another conversation, but that was his frustration talking. After the day’s exertions, he didn’t have enough energy for that kind of climb. Plus, intuition said to let her come to him. She needed to feel comfortable around him in her own time and way. But it was fucking hard, when he’d had such a tempting taste of her the night before.

  After he ate dinner from his rations and the remainder of her morning gift, he worked under the stars, testing the strength of the vines and branches, playing with different options for his ladder system, until he tired enough to lay down and go to sleep. He wished he’d at least felt her proximity today as he’d done before. He expected she’d kept a watch on him from her distant perch, but it wasn’t nearly close enough.

  “Good night, my lady,” he said to the empty sky and whispering surf. “I hope you’ll seek my company tomorrow.”

  She was in his dreams again, and this time she was not in shadows. She stood naked by the shore, her back to him, her golden skin bathed by moonlight. When he came up behind her, he saw a slithering movement within her dark, silken locks, a pair of gleaming eyes, but he would never hesitate to touch her. He never wanted her to think anything could keep him from it. As he wound his arms around her body and pressed himself against her, he was also naked.

  He cupped her breast and molded his other palm over her hip as the snakes slid over his shoulders, down under his arms and to her front, winding around his wrists, binding the two of them together again. Did they do this in dreams to remind him of what he believed so strongly, to reassure him? It would be nice to think so.

  She made a sound of quiet pleasure, and turned her head toward his, as if for a kiss. He met her gaze. It was green like the ocean…for a blink. Suddenly he was gazing into a snake’s eyes, slit-pupiled and focused on prey. Her lips curled back, baring fangs and a forked tongue. The hissing was as loud as a hundred tea kettles in his head, and pain exploded in his chest.

  He wasn’t with her any more. He was back on a road outside Kabul, and the Jeep ahead was immersed in flame. He tried to lift his weapon, to help defend the soldiers against the crowd of insurgents leaping out of the ditches on either side of the road, but he couldn’t. Looking down, he realized he was turned to stone and could do nothing. He was helpless, screaming inside a sarcophagus of rock as they shot the soldiers, as Medusa stood in their midst, eyes frightened, her hands reaching out to him…

  And of course the kid had to be there. The kid was always there, even though that wasn’t the op where JP had met him. His dark eyes stared at John as the life died out of them and blood trickled from his slack mouth. But his hands were still reaching for John, grabbing and holding on, getting tighter and tighter…

  He surged out of the dream to find it was dawn, the sun emerging from the horizon. He was breathing hard, sweat making his slick back gritty with sand. Christ. Damn flashback dreams. He hated his own head mind-fucking him, and it pissed him off worse that it had drawn Medusa into it.

  Shucking off the shorts, he plunged into the water, ducking beneath the surface of wave after wave to wash off the grit, sweat and dream. For good measure, he swam against the current a mile and back to prove he was stronger than those memories. Strong enough for her, for himself. For his friends. All two of them.

  When he’d proven himself an exceptional asset to the DEA at such a young age, eventually that had led to South America, the CIA, and him going deep cover on a drug cartel lord. He’d become one of his fucking personal bodyguards for months. Being built like a tank had its uses, and trusted bodyguards were around to hear pretty much everything.

  But then came the day his op crossed with the mission of a Navy SEAL team. Everybody on the ground was fucked that day, because, as too often happened, the top brass didn’t communicate with each other.

  When the gunfire had started and explosions rocked the compound, he’d snatched up Manuel, a four-year-old kid playing freaking Legos on the carpet. He’d headed for the nearest and safest escape route, but the SEAL team breached the compound a breath later.

  The kid was what had saved JP’s life. Lot had pulled his gun muzzle up when he and JP came face to face.

  “DEA,” JP had said shortly, to save a lengthy explanation of his shared status between DEA, CIA and other special teams that had no clear reporting connection. Plus, since he identified Lot as a SEAL, he figured saying CIA might get him shot anyway.

  Lot’s eyes had widened a fraction and then the drug cartel’s reinforcements arrived. He and JP, still holding the screaming kid, dove for cover. A firestorm escalated into a fucking tsunami. Lot covered his six as they crawled and fought their way out of there. During the retreat, one of the SEALs was knocked out by the explosion. JP hefted him onto his shoulder while keeping the clinging Manuel under his arm. It wasn’t until they all got out of there that he realized he’d taken three bullets.

  Unfortunately, a fourth had caught the kid. It turned his tiny gut into a swa
mp of internal bleeding and ruptured organs. Nothing they could do.

  Sloshing out onto shore, JP dropped to his hands and knees, breathing hard. The speed and exertion of his swim had left his arms and legs shaking, but better to be shaking from that than from that fucking dream. The only thing worse than that kid’s empty eyes and slack face were the moments before he’d died. Ever since Bambi, the unanswered cry of a kid for his dead mother was the most heart-shredding sound in the universe.

  It was as he was staring at the ground he saw the shadow. Medusa was above him. One wing was only half articulated, but the silhouette of the other revealed barbed hooks on the top and bottom joints, as he suspected. Her body was a graceful, elongated shape printed against the sand, her trailing feet crossing and uncrossing like cloth fluttering in the wind as her hovering shifted her up and down.

  His gaze moved up the wet packed ground to the silhouette of her head. Long locks of hair flowed in the wind. Several things weren’t hair, but snakes. They bobbed and weaved in upraised positions around her, reminding him of a picture Olivia’s daughter had drawn of the sun, with squiggles of bright yellow representing the sunbeams.

  His lady as the sun. He liked that idea.

  The shadow disappeared from his view as she dropped down behind him, so close her feet straddled his calves. It was the closest she’d been to him for more than a blink, and he stayed where he was, heart in his throat as he rested on his elbows. A claw trailed over his shoulder blade, along his spine, to the rise of his buttock. Her touch shifted, pulling the claw away so he felt the brush of fingertips instead against his lower back.

  “You are acting...” The word she used didn’t translate, which Maddock had warned him might happen on occasion if the derivation or meaning was vastly different in their two languages.

  “Sorry. I didn’t get that. I’m acting what?”

  She found another word that matched, one that hit him in the solar plexus. “Haunted,” she said. “You are…well?”

  “Yeah. Just a bad dream. I get them sometimes.”

  “So do I. It is hard to wake alone when they happen. You have a fine form, John Pierce. It is a pleasure to look upon. I’ve left you some breakfast.”

  After that remarkable amalgamation of sentences, she was aloft, winging away. He took the foolish chance, lifting his gaze to watch her wings pump and carry her up over the trees, back toward her home or other places on the island currently beyond his reach. She was gone so fast he couldn’t internalize many details beyond the fluttering of her short tunic over tantalizing curves of flesh, and one outstretched arm, a snake coiling around it from biceps to elbow.

  “A fine form.” If he’d been looking for a way to dispel the lingering effects of the dream, that had helped. He was half-hard merely from the light stroke of her fingertips. He sighed, dropping his face into his hands.

  “You know, the Greeks found a small penis aesthetically pleasing,” Lot had said, a couple weeks before he came here.

  “Probably the Greek men, who had to take them up the ass, so they preferred them smaller,” JP retorted. “They weren’t known for being that interested in their women, except for dowries and heirs.”

  “A misconception, like much of history, which gets rewritten with every new political perspective,” Maddock tossed in absently. “Pederasty was an accepted practice, but sex between adult males was more problematic. I’m sure there were just as many men who loved their wives as we see now.”

  “Well, all that aside, if the women liked small penises, JP’s going to be out of luck.” Lot scoffed. “She’ll run screaming at the sight of that beast.”

  Apparently not. He managed a grin. While she had flown off pretty quick, he didn’t think that was the reason. Maybe she’d liked touching him as much as he’d liked her touch. Regardless, it was better than coffee to kick him in the ass and get him going.

  After eating a quick breakfast of her goat cheese and a tasty crusty bread, he went back at the ladder idea full force. By midday, he had two sizeable lengths of rope made out of natural materials. He’d fashioned stirrup loops every two feet. Figuring it was sound enough to test it, he followed one of the goat paths to a cliff face similar to the one that held her home to try out his invention.

  It took some tweaking, a series of curses, a couple of short falls and a lot of sweat, but once he got it working, he then worked out how he’d draw it up and down like a blind to conceal it, whether he was at the bottom or top of the ladder.

  Pleased with the day’s work, he took a swig of water from his canteen while he sat on the top edge of the cliff, his feet dangling. When a black snake slithered up to him, he glanced down, canteen frozen at his lips as the creature unconcernedly did its smooth zigzag movement across his thighs and continued on its way, as if he was no more an impediment than the rock itself. It was the eighth snake he’d encountered while working along the vertical or horizontal surfaces of these rocks, so apparently it was a favored sunning area for them.

  One had bitten his shoe, but only when he’d inadvertently stepped on it. Otherwise, they were uniformly nonaggressive. Some were more curious about him than others, but for the most part, he was ignored. Maybe they were channeling their mistress.

  He suppressed the wry thought, the mild irritation. She’d been watching him for the past hour now. Ever since he’d sensed her arrival, he’d been talking about what he was doing as he did it, a one-sided conversation. Now, though, he stretched out on his back, his feet still dangling, and closed his eyes to enjoy the sun and quiet.

  As a place to end up for the rest of one’s life, this one didn’t suck.

  Something small bounced off his head, and he opened his eyes as it hit his lap. Straightening, he saw a small crimson berry. It was followed by a small shower of them, too targeted to be caused by a stray wind loosening fruit from a tree or an animal randomly doing the same. He caught the suppressed laugh he was beginning to anticipate.

  “You are teasing me, snake-girl,” he declared. “I’ve spoken to you for the past hour, and not a word in return. Now, you’re pelting me with fruit.”

  A long silence, as if the nickname had given her pause. She didn’t comment on it, but he thought he detected a rattled quality to her tone, despite her casual words. “Not at all. I am merely offering you a snack. Taste.”

  He estimated she was about twenty feet up, screened in the forest behind him.

  He put one of the berries in his mouth and sampled. It was tart, juicy. Good.

  “Sure you’re not trying poison to get rid of me?” he asked.

  “It has crossed my mind. You are my most persistent visitor. In a few hours, you will have been here the longest of any of my visitors. Or rather, the one who lived the longest while here.” She went silent, as if she hadn’t meant to take it in that dark direction. Not wanting her to talk herself into flying away, he changed it.

  “Did you find the wheelbarrow I left near your garden?”

  “Yes. It moves fairly well. The back left wheel is somewhat stiff. I adjusted it and it is fine now. A useful thing.”

  It had been on the tip of his tongue to say he’d fix it, but she’d anticipated him. “You’ve had to figure out how to do a lot of things yourself here.”

  “We had to know how to repair many things at the temple, though there were men who came in and did some of the things it was considered more appropriate for men to do. Things they thought we weren’t strong or clever enough to be taught to do for ourselves.”

  “If only they could see you now. You’d teach them a thing or two.”

  “I had no quarrel with men doing certain things and women doing certain things, if both sides respected those skills. It is being treated as if…I was not capable, that is now annoying, when I think back on it.”

  “It wasn’t then?”

  “I was different then. A child who saw the world a different way and did not see the offense in others’ assumptions. Did not see the harm it could do until it was…harmful.
I do not understand why you are here, John Pierce.”

  They kept coming back to that. It was obviously the puzzle that troubled her the most. And he couldn’t blame her. He’d said she was shrewd. He was telling her portions of the truth and she was seeing the holes, not the whole.

  He frowned, because he’d promised her honesty. But he couldn’t give her an answer he couldn’t quite explain to himself. Right?

  “You did tell me your stated purpose,” she continued, before he had to repeat it. “But if you seduce me and leave after that, you meant only to seduce, not to claim.”

  “That is not my intent, my lady, and to imply it insults me as much as it does you. While lying with you would be a wondrous experience, it’s a long way to come just for that.”

  “Indeed,” she said dryly. “But if you truly meant the second part of your goal, to claim my heart, to what end? You are a capable man, a soldier. You wish to languish on an island for the rest of your life in the company of one other human being? I am here because my options are limited. Yours are not.”

  “If this is where you desire to stay for the rest of your life, my lady, yes, this is where I wish to be. If you don’t, I’ll follow you where you want to go, and pledge my life to protect and serve you. Perhaps, in time, you’d want to follow me through a portal, to a different world, where things are different.”

  “So that is your end goal,” she said, with a note of grim triumph. “To take me somewhere unfamiliar, where I do not have the advantages of known terrain and resources.”

  “My lady,” he said patiently. “You can keep trying to discover plots against you behind every word I speak. I understand why you’re doing it and, in your position, I would do exactly the same. But I will make you a promise. Should I ever break it, I will stand in one spot and willingly meet your gaze so you may end me.”