The Penny Drops (Sea the Depths Book 1) by Karmon Kuhn (warren buffett book recommendations TXT) 📕

She slid her fingers from my face to my neck to my collar bone and hesitated. My eyes begged her to keep going.

Then she laid beside me and kissed me again, harder, fusing our lips together. The pads of her fingers pressed into my thigh just below my pubic bone. This was not the clinical act that I’d learned in school. There was something animal about it. And something human. It was a desire unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

Her fingers spread over the button of my jeans, and their tips just slightly fluttered over the edge and onto my bare midriff. I sat up on my elbows and kissed her, hard.

I craved the feeling of her skin on me, my body called out for it in a way that I didn’t understand. I reached my hands out and pulled at the edge of her shirt, sliding it up, and she alternated one arm and then the next out of the holes where they’d protruded. She followed suit helping me remove mine.

For a moment, we just looked at each other, our bare shoulders and waists in full view. She wore a delicate triangle of fabric over each breast with thin straps and a lacey, white overlay. My bralette was the tone of my skin, plain in comparison, but I didn’t mind. They would be out of sight soon.

Penny trailed the fingers of her right hand from my temple to my cheek and onto my neck. Her thumb caressed my collar bone, and then she pressed her palm and fingers lightly against my breast before moving down to my stomach and waist. I ached and wriggled, willing for her to keep touching me.

We were suspended in time, feeling each other, and when it was finished, when we’d had each other, it was fully night outside. We could barely see each other’s naked bodies in the blackness of the room. Even so, I was in awe of her: her tenderness, her calm, her caring, her vitality. The quality of life in her touch was intoxicating, and I would not be the same from that moment forward.

Chapter 15

A

fter some time of lying on the bed with her head placed lightly on my chest and my arms around her shoulders, a boom from downstairs jolted us away from our escape. Penny jumped up and pulled on her clothing.

“Stay here!” she whispered at me in a tense tone.

“You can’t go alone, Penny!”

“If it’s a bad guy, why would they knock on the door? It’s probably just family or the people who live in the cabin over there. They don’t know that I’m . . . well they wouldn’t understand why you’re here. They wouldn’t understand any of the reasons you’re here. Just stay up here and be quiet.”

“Be careful, Penny,” I whispered and kissed her hard before she left the room. I unplugged the lamp from beside the bed and pulled the weapon close to me. Then, I planted my ear to the door. At first, the only sound was the muffled padding of her feet.

Then, there was a creaking sound from the door followed by a voice. But, what were they saying? Neither the stranger’s voice nor Penny’s had any quality of concern, so I relaxed. The foreign voice continued, but it softened as the conversation progressed. Outside the house? Still no indication of a problem.

And then, there was nothing. No movement, no voices, no creaking. Nothing. The silence terrified me. I charged out of the room just in time to see Penny’s shoeless feet drag out of the doorway. I lurched forward as I tripped on the carpet under the sofa again. I caught myself just before my face hit the floor. My hands scraped against the hardwood revealed by the scrunched carpet.

As the car pulled away, I reached the front door and ran after it shouting her name. My feet stung as the coarse road cut into them. And before I could determine who was driving or where the car was going, they were out of sight.

Down on my knees in the road, panic welled up in my chest and my shoulders rose and fell to a quick rhythm until I was dizzy. I hadn’t witnessed Penny being dragged into the car. What if they left her somewhere at the house?

My bloody feet pounded the ground as I raced back. When I reached the house, I circled it, searching in the landscaping, the shed outside, and in each room of the house. I even checked underneath her car and in the trees in the front yard. Without my clothes, I shivered and fell to my knees again.

A pathetic, screeching cry rattled through the air. I barely recognized the sound of my own pain. I didn’t know where Penny was, I didn’t know where I was, and I didn’t know how to get out of here. The fear in my chest grew like the sea monsters from childhood stories and squeezed the breath from me.

It felt like ages that I kneeled in front of the house and pleaded with myself, with the earth, with the sea, with anything listening to give me answers, to help me, to spare Penny. I heard the washing ripple of the waves on the beach, and my mind cleared slightly. Part of me could develop a solution. Just not the human part of me.

Despite the pain of my ripped flesh and the cold on my bare skin, I plodded into the house. I grabbed the map and some of the jerky to put in my satchel. Then, I picked up the book that Penny and I had read. It laid prone on the floor, and I ran my hands over the cover of Needful Things before I placed it in one of the waterproofing bags in my pack.

It was a risk to change so far from the water and the journey to the sea would be difficult if the