Jason smirked, that mocking, knowing curve of his wicked mouth that told her she wasn’t the only person who could read others easily. Too easily.
He didn’t say a word, he simply padded across the hotel lobby. He disappeared behind the scratched, dark wood desk and into what she assumed was some kind of office.
And he took the storm with him, leaving Lucinda gasping for air in his wake.
Without him in the lobby, it was nothing but tired, old midcentury furnishings, questionable corporate art and the sound of waves crashing down on the beach outside.
And she couldn’t tell, for long moments, if it was the waves she heard or her own heartbeat.
Lucinda got to her feet, feeling as rickety on her flats as she would have if she was wearing impractical stiletto heels. And she hated that she wasn’t sure if her knees would hold her as she made her own way across the lobby floor.
But she pulled herself together—or near enough—by the time Jason emerged from the back office again. And she would die before she would confess such a thing out loud, but there was a part of her that was grateful he stayed on the other side of the desk when he came out. It wasn’t much, just that long, ambling counter of once-polished wood, but as far as Lucinda was concerned it might as well have been a fortress separating her from him.
She would take what she could get.
He tossed a scandalously small handful of brightly colored scraps across the desk and Lucinda found herself staring at them as the soft heap slid along the wood and came to a stop in front of her.
It took her longer than she cared to admit to understand that it was a bathing costume.
Part of one, anyway. It was all strings. What wasn’t an actual string was pink and bright and not something Lucinda would ever consider wearing in private. Much less while supposedly conducting business.
But when she lifted her gaze to his again, she could tell that this, too, was a challenge.
“It’s called a bikini,” Jason said, as if he was talking to a child. A very dimwitted child. “You put it on and then go in the water. It’s that simple.”
Lucinda felt something shake, deep inside her, that she was terribly afraid was fear. Panic, even, when she’d been so sure she’d knocked the panic right out of her years ago.
But there was no sign of any tremor in her hand when she reached out and placed it on the soft, small little pile this man seemed to expect she would put on her body. And then wear right out in the open, in and out of water, where he could see her—
Lucinda’s mind cartwheeled away from that.
“How fortunate that you have a selection at hand,” she said crisply, and was proud of her tone.
He grinned. “People leave the strangest things behind here. But don’t worry. It’s clean.”
It was an innocuous enough statement, so Lucinda had no idea why it licked through her as if he’d said something dirty. Very, very dirty.
She forced herself to smile. She hoped it looked cool and controlled, but at this point, she had to focus all her energy on keeping herself from shaking like a leaf. “I appreciate you providing me with some of your castoffs, I do. But I’m afraid that I have a terribly fair complexion. Perhaps you noticed. I came to this island to do a little business, not frolic on the beach. I’m quite certain that if I step outside, I’ll be sunburnt within an inch of my life. In minutes. So thank you, but I do think I had better decline this lovely offer.”
“Don’t worry, Lucinda.” Jason’s voice was a low rumble. Dark and stirring, and her name in his mouth made her pussy ache. “I have suntan lotion, too. And I’m more than capable of making sure I don’t miss a single spot.”
CHAPTER FOUR
HE DIDN’T THINK she would do it. He would have bet on it.
Jason found the skimpiest bikini he could in the leftovers from some party his father—not that he liked to think of Daniel St. George that way, or at all—must have thrown here while he was still alive. Jason told himself that he was doing it to force her to turn around and storm off, leaving him in peace, the way all the others had, because that was the only way he could see this going. No way was Lucinda Graves, Queen of the Tight-Assed Corporate Types, stripping off all her layers of stifling funeral clothes and catching a wave.
And he definitely wasn’t torturing himself imagining that body of hers, the one that he could barely glimpse there through all her dour swaddling clothes, in a few immodest strings and hopeful triangles.
A few strings and triangles and nothing else.
Just like he definitely wasn’t hot and hard and ready to go at the idea of smearing suntan lotion all over her lush little body.
This was a dare, that was all. To force a conclusion to this little drama so he could go back to his busy schedule of doing absolutely nothing where no one could see him, the better to get his head right. The bikini was a gauntlet, thrown down the hotel desk in bright pink Lycra, and he fully expected her to balk.
But he’d underestimated Lucinda.
A surprising fact that made him only that much harder and more interested in this, he could admit. He’d done little more than roll his eyes when his buddy had called him from Fiji to let him know another suit had booked a flight to his island.
“Another one incoming,” he’d said, laughing.
“It’s a private island, brother,” Jason had growled. “You could say no.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Apparently, part of the fun had been failing to mention that this time, it was a woman instead of the usual smarmy dudes. That had been a nice surprise for Jason when she’d walked into the old hotel, without the usual salesman swagger of the others. He’d taken one look at all that porcelain paleness and had wanted nothing more than to get his hands all over her. And leave some marks.
But then, Jason was well acquainted with his own animalistic urges. Some might say he reveled in them.
He would never be a monk. But he’d taken this time to sit on a pretty island the father he’d always hated had bought and built a pretty house on to ask himself why he always looked for oblivion. In a bottle. Between a pair of sweet thighs. Testing his adrenaline in high-risk adventures. His mother had called him out after the reading of his father’s will, and Jason wasn’t built to ignore the woman who’d raised him—on her own, because the rich haole who’d literally left her pregnant by the side of the road couldn’t be bothered.
“You’re so busy making sure you’re nothing like him that guess what?” His mother had shaken her head at him, as if Jason had disappointed her. He would rather she’d slapped him upside his head. It felt about the same. Worse, maybe. Then she’d twisted the knife. “So many women everywhere you go. Do you know their names? Or do you like the fact you’re carrying on his tradition of anonymous encounters everywhere you go? Seems to me you’re just like him, after all.”
That had sucked.
Jason had removed himself from all temptation the very next day.
But what was he supposed to do when temptation wandered onto his very own deserted island? With an agenda all its own?
He didn’t want to be a piece of shit like his father. But he was only a man.
He watched Lucinda’s struggle play out across her perfect oval of a face. Her blue eyes gleamed from temper or emotion, and she looked at him like she was considering taking a strip or two out of his hide—or trying—but her flush mouth pressed into a tight line instead. She had a tough little chin, he noticed when she lifted it, high and belligerent like she was ready to fight.
But she didn’t take a swing at him. She didn’t try to talk him down. Instead, she did the last thing he’d imagined she would do. She reached out and snatched up the tiny bikini from the front desk.
“You’d best find a bottle of sunscreen, then,” she said in her prissy voice that seemed to wind itself around his cock. He told himself it was
only because he’d restricted himself from women at present. That it was nothing personal. But he wasn’t sure his unruly dick got that message. “I won’t be a moment.”
Jason watched, fascinated and filled with something a little too much like that adrenaline he was supposed to be taking a break from, as she swept around the corner of the front desk and slammed the office door behind her.
And Jason had been through a lot of shit in his time. He’d been forced to sit and wait for things outside his control to play out when he was younger, and he couldn’t say he’d ever enjoyed the experience. Not when he’d been a young hothead determined to prove that he was worth the life his artistic mother had given up when she’d had to clean hotel rooms to support the both of them. Not when he’d been a member of a team, subject to the whims of his teammates and coaches.
Not now, either. In these later years, he had cultivated patience. Or the appearance of it, anyway. He’d learned how to breathe. How to relax. How to focus his aggression and attention when needed, and turn it off when it was nothing more than a hindrance. Or that was what he’d been working on here, in his hideaway from the world and the man he was becoming against his will.
Waiting for a woman to change into a bathing suit shouldn’t have registered at all. It shouldn’t have gotten his blood pumping. And there was absolutely no reason he should feel like a kid, randy and wild, as one moment stretched out into the next and he couldn’t seem to do anything but imagine her...arranging herself into that bikini.
Would it even cover her? Would she try to wear something over it?
And his heartbeat was like a drum as he pondered these questions, pounding out a rhythm that seemed to land heavy in his cock.
Something shifted in him as he waited, making him feel restless and on edge. It took him a minute to figure out that it was a pang of regret.
That he hadn’t gone with her into that office to help her out of those clothes. That he wasn’t even now treating himself to that first, lush view of all her pale, sweet skin. That he wasn’t the first hit of Pacific sunshine she would get today, his gaze bathing her in light and heat.
Maybe followed by his mouth.
He should have laughed at that, he knew. He was Jason Kaoki, for fuck’s sake. He could have any woman he wanted, and had—apparently to such an excess that his mother had felt the need to comment on his life choices.
“Everyone’s looking for the next Daniel St. George, son,” she’d said, pruning her plants on the lanai of the house he’d bought for her with his first million—though she’d refused to move into it, claiming it was too haole, until somewhere around his fifth or sixth million. “I guess you decided to rise to the challenge.”
Because Jason’s brand-new half siblings didn’t make half as much noise as he did in the tabloids. The oldest, Thor Ragnarsson, was some kind of Icelandic Viking. He ran a hotel way up there on the top of the world that catered to sexual pleasures among consenting adults, but he rarely made the covers of magazines. The next oldest, Charlie Teller, kept his past murky and his profile low enough to suggest there was a reason he avoided attention. Their half sister, Angelique Masterson, had gone off and gotten herself involved with an honest-to-God prince, which probably would have made more of a splash if the two of them hadn’t spent most of their time off in the prince’s kingdom with a far-better-behaved press corps.
That left only Jason and a world fascinated with his exploits whether he liked it or not.
He wanted to change that, sure. He was working on it. But in the meantime there was no reason he should be tied in knots over some prissy accountant-type who’d shown up on a tropical island in a business suit. A dark black business suit. He was taking a break, he wasn’t hard up.
It was ridiculous. She was ridiculous.
Which was when she threw open the office door and stepped out into the lobby again, and his head went blank.
He could feel every drop of blood in his body surge downward, pooling in his cock so fast and so swiftly it was almost painful.
Jason had received punches to the face and in the gut during his brawling years that hurt less, and had knocked him back less, than the sight of Lucinda standing there in a tiny string bikini he had clearly chosen for no other purpose than to torture himself.
It was possible he swallowed his own tongue.
He expected her to cower. To hunch her shoulders over in an attempt to hide herself from view in such a tiny excuse for a swimsuit.
But not Lucinda.
Instead of any hunching or cowering or other evidence of insecurity, her too-blue eyes clapped to his and held fast.
And if he wasn’t mistaken, the look she was leveling at him was a sheer, unmistakable challenge. As if she was taking his dare and making it worse by shoving it straight down his throat.
Because she didn’t lurk in the shadows. She didn’t try to cover herself. Prissy, prim, uptight Lucinda—because he was sure that was who she’d been when she’d walked into this lobby—sauntered out of the back office like a wet dream.
Her shoulders were back, giving him a perfect view of those plump, round breasts that should have been a little too much for the bikini top. His palms itched to explore the suit’s structural integrity, but he kept them to himself.
Barely.
The brightly striped triangles of the top strained over taut nipples he wanted to taste with his own tongue, and below, another triangle covered her pussy. It left nothing but a string between her ass cheeks while it also told him that she likely sported a Brazilian, because the good stuff was so neatly concealed from his view.
Everything else was Lucinda.
God help him.
When he got his brain out of his cock, all he could think was that she looked like a sculpture. Something carved in marble or ivory, by man’s loving, tender hands.
He only wished they had been his.
She was so starkly, distinctively pale, in defiance of all the sun and sand and bright blue sky that made this island what it was. And the spate of golden freckles, tossed here and there over her body, only seemed to draw attention to her ethereal, impossible beauty.
She’d left her hair slicked back in that killer bun that gave him a headache, but that was an argument for another time.
Because she came to a sultry kind of stop before him like the goddess of a religion he wanted to practice, suddenly, more than he wanted to breathe.
She held his gaze, hard and sure. And if he wasn’t mistaken, there was a light of triumph in those sea-colored eyes of hers.
“Are we surfing?” she asked, with a lilt in her voice that he knew was yet another challenge. “Or are we just going to stare?”
Jason knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that his monastic retreat from the world was over.
And temptation had won.
Hallelujah.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ONLY WAY out was through, Lucinda told herself stoutly.
She would brazen it out no matter what, she’d decided when she’d stepped into the office. She’d never yet backed down from a challenge and there was no way she’d come this far to allow this to be the first time.
She might have found the bikini distressingly skimpy, but that was all it was: a bathing costume.
It was only as awkward as she allowed it to be.
Sheer force of will kept her moving with her head high. She pretended she couldn’t feel the sleek caress of the cool tiles beneath her feet. Or all that thick tropical air, like an intimate caress.
All over her body.
Lucinda’s practical, survival-focused swimming lessons had taken place under controlled circumstances, in secure one-piece bathing costumes appropriate to the task at hand. That being learning how not to drown, not showing off her body.
She might as well have been naked in the ridiculous bikini Jason had given her. He’d clea
rly expected her to refuse to wear it on those grounds, but what the hell. She’d never been ashamed of her body and there was no reason to change that now.
Especially not with the way Jason was staring at her, looking nothing short of gobsmacked.
That would do quite nicely, thank you. A quick strut out of a dusty back office in a questionable string bikini shifted the power balance between them—Lucinda could feel it as easily as she could see it—and that felt a lot like a welcome victory.
If Jason wanted to stare, she was happy to give him something to stare at. It was nothing to her but another bargaining chip.
Though if she thought about it too much, she would feel foolish nonetheless—because her research had showed her the sorts of women this man preferred and none of them had skin the color of a dead fish’s underbelly, fetchingly covered in freckles and topped with flaming ginger hair—so she didn’t let herself.
She swayed toward him, letting one hand drift to the counter beside her, one hip jutting out.
And watched Jason Kaoki’s famously sultry eyes go black with heat.
If the price of this kind of power involved flinging herself into the waves and letting the surf dash her to pieces on the beach, Lucinda decided it was well worth it.
Because the more he stared back at her, fire all over him like a different kind of storm entirely, all she could think to do was burn.
“I need protection,” she said, and it wasn’t until that gaze of his burned hotter and his expression shifted to something far more male and knowing that it occurred to her that her words could be misinterpreted.
Or maybe she did know. Maybe, after all these years of practical, dependable choices and considered forward momentum, it turned out that really, all Lucinda wanted to do was light matches and play with fire.
It cost her to keep her voice cool, but she did it. “For the sun, Mr. Kaoki. I need SPF 50, at the very least. Don’t you think?”
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