My Ex-Husband’s Sister Wants Me — Bonus Chapter

Sea Trial
by Blair Lennox

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus scene takes place three months after the epilogue of My Ex-Husband’s Sister Wants Me. Read the novel first. It is explicit, graphic, and hotter than the book.

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Sea Trial

October. The last night before haul-out, one empty cove, and a hank of soft rope Donna bought herself. Too hot for the retailers.

KERRY

The last charter of the season went out on Columbus Day. By Thursday I had Nothing Borrowed to myself for the first time since May, and a haul-out booked for Monday.

“One more night,” Donna said. “The two of us. No bride, no photographer, no bottle of something.”

“It’s October. It’ll be forty degrees on the water.”

“You fitted a stove in September. I signed the invoice.”

So I took her out. We ran six miles down the bay on a hard northwest breeze, with Donna in a wool hat and two of my sweaters, holding a thermos and giving opinions on my sail trim. At four I put the anchor down in the cove on the north side of the quarry island. Her island. She has a wedding booked on it for June, which everybody told her was impossible. There’s a granite wharf, and spruce down to the tide line, and that afternoon there wasn’t another boat in sight.

I let out chain and backed down on it until it stood up bar-tight.

“Is that necessary?” she called from the companionway.

“I like to know what’s holding me.”

“Hm,” said Donna. She’s started doing that. She got it from her mother.

Below, the stove was ticking and the cabin was gold. She took her earrings out before she took her hat off, and put them in the winch-handle locker on her way down. A year and a half, and I still watch them go in.

Then she set a paper bag on the cabin table.

“I’ve been shopping,” she said.

It was a hank of line. Cotton, three-eighths, cream-colored, soft as a dish towel.

“The chandlery in Rockland. I told the boy I wanted something that wouldn’t leave a mark. He asked what I was tying up.” She pulled off the hat. “I said, a managing partner. He’s going to need a minute.”

I picked it up. I ran it through my hands, the way I would any line somebody gave me. It was good stuff.

“The first month I knew you properly, you did up my dress with a square knot,” she said. “You told me everything you tie holds. I’ve never once tested it.”

“You want me to tie you.”

“I run two companies and both our mothers. I decide where a hundred and forty people sit down. I’d like one night where I don’t decide a single thing.” Her color was up, and her chin with it. “And I’d like it to be you, because you’re the only person I’ve ever met who would check the knots twice.”

“So this is a sea trial.”

“The boat’s had hers. I want to find out what I do under load.”

“That’s a boat metaphor.”

“I’m allowed one. I co-sign for the boat.”

I didn’t laugh. I wanted to. My mouth had gone dry.

“Pick a word,” I said. “Something you’d never say in bed.”

She thought about it. “Tolland.”

“Jesus, Donna.”

“You asked.”

“Say it and you’re loose in two seconds.” I took the rigging knife off my belt, opened it, and laid it on the table where she could see it. “That’s what that’s for. I’ve never needed one. It’s there anyway.”

She looked at the knife. She looked at me. Something in her shoulders came down.

“That,” she said, “is exactly why it’s you.”

Undressing her took a while. She was wearing most of my dresser.

I did it standing in the middle of the cabin, with the stove at her back. Both sweaters. A thermal shirt. Wool socks, one at a time, with her hand on my shoulder. When she was bare, I stood her under the starboard grab rail. It’s teak, an inch and a quarter, and it runs the length of the cabin overhead. I through-bolted it myself. It would hold a grown man going over the side.

“Wrists.”

She held them out together, palms up. The crescent scar was there below her fingers.

I made four flat turns around both wrists and two between, to keep the cuff from closing. I ran the tail up over the rail and finished it with a bowline. A bowline can’t slip and it can’t jam. I got two fingers under every turn. Then I did it again, because she’d said I would.

Her arms were up over her head, a little bent, and her hands could close around the teak. It lifted her breasts and drew her whole body long. She was breathing through her mouth.

“Pull,” I said.

She pulled. She put her weight on it. The rail didn’t so much as creak.

“Oh,” Donna said, very quietly. “It really does.”

I stepped back and sat down on the settee, and I looked at her.

I’ve looked at that woman across a table for fourteen years and across a pillow for one and a half. I had never seen her with nothing to do. No pencil. No clipboard. No hand free to fix my collar or turn my face. Just Donna Hale, forty-one years old, naked in the stove light with her hands tied over her head, waiting to find out what I’d decide.

She went wet while I watched. I could see it start to shine.

“Kerry.”

“You don’t get a vote. That was the order.”

“I wasn’t voting. I was complaining.”

“Noted.”

I got up. I started at the top. I put my mouth on the inside of her upper arm, where the skin is thin, and worked down. The hollow under her arm. The side of her breast. She twisted toward my mouth, and I went the other way, down her ribs to her hip. I used my hands everywhere I wasn’t kissing. I’m told they’re rough. I let them be. I dragged my palms down her back and over her ass and up the insides of her thighs, and stopped an inch short, and did it again.

“That’s cruel.”

“It’s thorough.”

I took her left nipple in my teeth, because it’s the one, and pulled until she rose onto her toes. Her wrists strained at the cotton. The bowline sat there and did its job.

Then I went down on my knees on the cabin sole and put her leg over my shoulder.

She was soaked. She was swollen and hot and running, and I licked all of it up, flat and greedy, and listened to her come apart over my head. She can’t hold my hair when she’s tied. She can’t steer. All she could do was hang from my rail and take my mouth where I chose to put it. She told me so. She told me in language I didn’t know she had.

I felt her thigh start to shake against my ear. I stopped.

“No. Kerry. No, no, I was right there—”

“I know where you were.”

I waited. I kissed her hip bone. When her breathing came down, I started again. Two fingers this time, deep, and my tongue flicking at her. I took her up faster. She was loud. There was nobody for three miles but seals.

I stopped again.

She called me a name I won’t write down.

“I’m the captain,” I said. “It’s a legal distinction.”

“You’re a tyrant with a license.”

“Ask me properly.”

She hung there, flushed to the navel, with her hair in her face and her thighs wet to the knee. I watched her fight it. She has said that word to me a handful of times, and every time it was her idea.

“Please,” Donna said. Her voice broke on it. “Please, Captain.”

It went through me like a struck bell.

“There’s something else in the bag,” she said. “Before you get any ideas about being merciful.”

It was silver, and about the size of my thumb.

“Different shop,” she said.

“What does it do?”

“It has one button, Kerry. I read the box.”

I pressed the button. It jumped in my palm like something alive. I’m thirty-seven. I’ve been with women since I was nineteen, and I had never once brought anything with a battery to bed. I’d thought of it as cheating. I do the work.

I touched it to the inside of her knee. She jerked. I drew it up her thigh, in no hurry at all, and laid it against her clit.

Donna screamed.

It wasn’t a word. Her whole body bowed out from the rail, and her knees went, and the line took her. I got an arm around her waist and held it there and counted. One. Two. Three. Her eyes had rolled back. Four.

I took it away.

“I’m going to kill you. I’m going to dissolve the partnership. I’m going to—”

“You’re going to stand on your feet,” I said. “And spread them.”

She stood. She spread them. She was shaking all over.

I’d brought the harness. I would like to say I hadn’t planned on it. It lives in the hanging locker now, behind the foul-weather gear, and she has it on the charter inventory as safety equipment. I stripped, and buckled it on, and slicked it. I did that part where she could see, and she watched my fist move with her mouth open.

Then I went around behind her.

I laid one hand on the small of her back, and she bent for me as far as the line would give. I fitted the head against her. She was so wet and so open that I didn’t have to push. I held still, and the boat lifted on the swell, and she slid back onto me by herself, inch after inch, until my hips were against her ass.

“Oh, fuck. Oh, that’s all of it.”

“That’s all of it. You took it without being asked.”

I got my left arm around her waist. I reached around with my right, and I put the silver thing back where she wanted it, and I began to move.

I’m not going to pretend I was gentle. She hadn’t asked for gentle. I fucked her from behind with her wrists tied to a rail I’d built, long hard strokes, all the way out and all the way home, and the cabin filled up with the sound of it. Wet, and skin, and the stove ticking, and Donna. The base ground against me with every stroke. The buzzing came up through her body and into mine.

“Feel that,” I said in her ear. “That’s my cock in your cunt and your hands over your head, and you can’t do one thing about it. You can’t fix it. You can’t plan it. You can’t even hold on to me.”

“Don’t stop—”

“I’ll stop when I decide. You gave me that. Whose boat is this?”

“Ours—oh—”

“Whose are you?”

“My own.” She gasped it. Even then. Even hanging off a rope. “My own, and I’m giving it to you, you impossible woman, harder—”

I gave it to her harder. I pressed that little silver thing tight against her and drove up into her, and she came.

It tore out of her. She clamped down so hard on the cock that I couldn’t draw back, and a rush of wet heat ran down the insides of her thighs and mine and spattered on the cabin sole. She was sobbing my name. I didn’t let up. I kept the vibrator where it was and worked her in short, deep strokes right through it, and the second one came up out of the first before she had got her breath. That one was bigger. She screamed at the deck beams. Out on the granite wharf, a seal lifted its head.

When her legs quit, I was already holding her.

“Tolland?” I said.

“Don’t you dare.” She was laughing. There were tears running into her ears. “No. God. No.”

I slid out of her. I reached up and broke the bowline with my thumb, the way you can, and the turns fell off her wrists. No marks. A little pink, gone inside a minute. I kissed the insides of both of them anyway, where the pulse was still hammering.

“It holds,” Donna said, into my neck.

“I told you.”

“I like to see the paperwork.”

She gave herself about ninety seconds. Then she put her hand flat on my breastbone and sat me down on the settee.

“Your turn.”

“I had my sea trial. Fifteen months ago. There’s a surveyor’s page.”

“That was the boat.” She had the line in her hands. “You’ve never been tied to anything in your life, Kerry Webb. You leave before anyone gets the chance.”

I didn’t have an answer. I held out my wrists.

She put my arms up to the rail over the settee. She made four flat turns, exactly as I had, because she watches everything. Two between. Then she ran the tail over the teak and finished it.

I looked up.

“That’s a bow.”

“It’s what I know how to tie.”

“It won’t hold. One good pull and it’s gone.”

“I’m aware,” Donna said. “That’s the test.”

It took me a second. Then it landed, low in my stomach. Anybody can stay put in a knot that holds. She’d tied me with something I could walk out of.

“Then I won’t pull,” I said.

“We’ll see.”

She took the harness off me, buckle by buckle. She folded one of my sweaters and knelt on it between my knees, and pushed them wide, and looked. I’ve quit turning my head when she does that. I let her see how wet I was from what I’d done to her. It was down my thighs.

Her mouth was hot, and patient, and she knows me now. She took her time over every part of it but the one that mattered. I pressed my heels into the cabin sole. My hands closed on the rail. Over my head the bow shivered.

“Careful,” she said against me.

“Donna. Please.”

“That’s better than last year. You used to say whatever you like.”

She slid two fingers into me. Then she picked the silver thing up off the cushion and pressed the button.

I’d felt it through her. That was nothing. She set it right alongside her tongue, and my whole spine lit up, hips to skull. I shouted. My arms jerked. I felt the cotton give a quarter inch, and I stopped them. I held my own wrists up against that rail by nothing but wanting to, with every muscle I’ve got telling me to grab her head and run.

“Stay,” she said. Her fingers curled. “Stay there. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t even have to be tied.”

I stayed.

I came so hard I saw the cabin go white. It went on and on, her mouth and her fingers and that merciless little buzz, and I yelled her whole name at the deck I’d laid, and my hands never came down.

When I could see again, I looked up. The bow was still there. Two loops, a little crooked, like a child’s shoe.

“Passed,” Donna said, and wiped her chin with the back of her wrist.

She pulled one end. It fell open.

We ate Lenora’s chowder out of the pot, in the forward berth, under every blanket aboard. My father’s pencil was on the beam over our heads. The plank’s still off.

“I brought my notes,” Donna said.

I went still.

She reached down into the paper bag one more time and came up with an envelope. There was one sheet in it. She’d had it typed.

1. Marry me.

2. I keep Hale. You keep Webb. It’s on a sign.

3. Nothing in this agreement depends on the operating agreement, or the reverse.

4. Earrings.

“I meant to ask in the summer,” she said. She was watching my face, and her own wasn’t steady. “Your mother kept asking for me. I refuse to be scheduled by Judith.”

I couldn’t talk. I do the other thing.

I got up on one elbow and reached past her, to the shelf under my father’s handwriting, and took down a tobacco tin.

There were two rings in it. Bronze. Plain.

“I turned them in August,” I said. “From the offcut of the stem band. The piece Mom broke the bottle on.” My voice was all over the place. “You said I’d have to knock. I’ve stood outside your door with that tin four times. You were always on the phone with the quarry.”

Donna looked at the rings. She looked at clause one. She started to laugh, and then she was crying, and she held out her left hand with the fingers spread.

It fit. I’d measured her in July with a strip of masking tape while she slept.

“That’s a yes,” I said. “In case it needs saying. Donna Hale. Yes.”

“Initial it.”

I initialed it. She put the other ring on me herself and turned my hand over to look at it in the lamplight.

“Nothing borrowed,” she said.

“Not one thing.”

She was asleep inside of a minute, with her hand flat on my stomach and bronze on it. I lay awake a while and listened to the chain. It was holding.

In the morning she asked me what you call the test that comes after a sea trial.

I told her there isn’t one. After that, you just sail her.

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