Free Alphas of Black Fortune Complete Series by Scarlett Rhone

gazed down at her.
    “I thought I’d be doing you a favor,” he muttered. “Since you seem incapable of choosing one of us on your own.”
    She hissed him and yanked her wrist free of his hand. “You’re a bastard.”
    He sighed and looked away. “Maybe I’d just rather have you any way I can get you, Cressida. Have you considered that? And maybe you have forgotten that I am a pirate , not a gentleman.”
    “You will have me in exactly no way,” she told him, fury flushing through her body like boiling oil. She didn’t wait for him to make a witty riposte, just turned and stormed out of the captain’s quarters, slamming the door soundly behind her. Instead of going to the deck, where all the crew would be working or dicing or lying in the sun, she went further down, and to the crew’s shared quarters. She needed a moment to think, to work through this anger, because she knew that she could not hold onto it. The ship was too small to allow for a grievance such as this between herself and Kelly.
    She had to get over it. Quickly. She might have his run through later, once they’d gotten to the island, gotten the jewel, and gotten her Fortune back. But now there was no use for such anger, or hurt. And though she was loath to admit it…it did hurt. She knew it had been foolish for her to assume that she’d meant more to him than a warm body between the sheets, but sometimes the way he looked at her…
    She stormed into the crew quarters, shoving beneath the spiderweb of hammocks filling the space, to make her way over to her own berth. It was just a corner of the room, which the pirates had been generous enough to give her instead of forcing her to sleep in their midst. It wasn’t exactly private, but she felt more secure simply by having a wall at her back. It was the only thing she actually did have , after all. Her clothes, her sword, all given to her by James. Her very life, arguably, he had given her on loan when he took her off the slave block.
    These long months, she’d thought more than once that perhaps she did love him.
    “Idiot,” she muttered to herself. “Fool.”
    “He’s the fool.” She jumped, turning at the voice, surprised to see Reza standing only a few feet away. As ever, she hadn’t even heard him walking towards her.
    “Perhaps we are all fools,” she sighed, looking away from him. To the floor, the wall, anything. “What do you know of it?”
    “I know that if I had you, I would never share you,” Reza murmured.
    Her heart skipped a beat, but she refused to look at him still. Because she believed him. They had never spoken of it, not over the course of months at sea; never had either one of them mentioned the passion of their first night together. It hadn’t needed to be said. She saw that he wanted her whenever she looked at him. It sat naked in his clever green-gold eyes. Along with a predatory kind of hunger, a fierce intellect, and a seemingly perpetual, if quiet, agony.
    It was the certainty of it that scared her, she thought. The same as Kelly’s ambiguity appealed to her, that Reza seemed so certain he wanted her was overwhelming in its turn. Being loved and loving, after all, could be the death of freedom. The demise of independence. For a woman, at least.
    She knew that he drew nearer, then, because she could feel the warmth of him at her back, but he didn’t touch her.
    “I wouldn’t lie to you, either,” he said softly.
    “No?” She stared at her own feet. “Then tell me what we’ll find when we get to the island.”
    “My people and the treasure whose shadow they’ve lived in for so long that none of them remember what it’s for.”
    “Kelly said there would be challenges.”
    She heard him sigh. “I’m not going to tell you how to get it.”
    She turned sharply to look at him at last. “Why not? Reza, it’s been months . You know me now. You know that I won’t hurt your people, or let Kelly hurt them. I need this.”
    He surged forward, his hands