Emily stared at his profile. He could have been carved out of stone. There was no doubt her speeding had rankled him. She did not know why, but she had a penchant for speed. There was a time when she owned a motorcycle—a Harley-Davidson. She had ridden up to her parents’ house on the bike to share a Sunday dinner with them, and they had refused to let her come in.
She returned to her apartment with tears streaming down her face, and when she called her mother, Vanessa Kirkland refused to come to the phone. Michael had delivered the message that Mom and Dad would not talk to her or welcome her into their home again until she got rid of the bike. The impasse lasted two weeks before she sold the Harley for a fraction of its value. She could not accept the alienation—especially from her family.
Chris drank in the sensual beauty of Jamaica’s topography behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses. Its verdant lushness was breathtaking, and he realized why the elder Kirklands returned to visit the Caribbean island several times each year.
Slowing the sports car around a sharp curve, he glanced down at a valley dotted with what appeared to be thousands of tiny trees. “What’s down there?”
Emily looked out her window. “That’s a coffee plantation. They’re growing an arabica blend known as San Ramon.”
He gave her a quick glance. “It’s enormous. I didn’t know they grew that much coffee in Jamaica.”
“There are quite a few coffee plantations here. Jamaica Blue Mountain happens to be the most expensive coffee in the world.”
“Why? Is the taste that much superior to Brazilian or Colombian blends?”
“All coffee growers admit it’s one of the very best coffees available, but the price doesn’t reflect the better flavor as much as the premium that some people are prepared to pay to secure supplies of it. To enjoy its full flavor you have to use more beans per cup than for other coffees. If you don’t, then the flavor can seem a little hollow. So, the real cost of the flavor is the difference between it and the next most expensive coffee, plus ten or fifteen percent for the extra beans needed.”
He glanced at her again. “How do you know so much about coffee?”
It was her turn to stare at him. “My family owns that plantation,” she said in a quiet voice. “And a few others near Maggotty, Mandeville and Wallenford.”
“Your family?”
“ColeDiz International Limited.”
“I thought they only had coffee plantations in Belize and Puerto Rico.”
There was a time when the Coles owned and operated coffee and banana plantations in at least half a dozen countries and islands throughout Central America and the Caribbean, but the company had begun selling them off to consortiums twenty years earlier.
“Daddy and Uncle Martin own resorts in Montego Bay, Port Antonio, Ocho Rios and—”
“The restaurant we went to last night is your father’s?” Chris asked, interrupting her. Emily had not permitted him to pay for their dinner, but had signed a chit for their food and beverages.
She flashed a smug grin. “Yes. My father owns the house, all of the surrounding land, and holds private rights to the beach.”
“How long has he owned the house?”
“He purchased it before I was born. Daddy came to Jamaica for a vacation about thirty-five years ago and loved it so much that he decided he wanted to buy property here. Someone told him about the house and surrounding property. He took one look at the house and made up his mind on the spot.
“The house was built in 1836 as a honeymoon retreat for the members of a well-to-do British family. However, every woman who married into the family and spent her honeymoon at the retreat died within the first year of her wedding.”
Chris gave her an incredulous look. “You’re kidding.”
Emily shook her head. “No, I’m not. There were rumors floating around that they were poisoned.”
“By whom?”
“No one really knows. When Daddy told me about the superstition I decided to research the property’s history. I went through microfiche of thousands of old newspapers, scanning the obituaries. I managed to come up with the names of at least three women. Afterward, I interviewed a few of the locals whose families have inhabited the region for several centuries.”
“What did they say?”
“They alleged that the original owner’s eldest son had taken a beautiful mulatto slave girl as his mistress, and she bore him several children. He freed their children, even though he never offered her her freedom because he feared losing her to another man. A hurricane hit the island that summer, ruining the sugarcane crop, so the son was forced to take a wife from a wealthy family to offset his family’s losses.
“His mistress was devastated when a pale woman from across the ocean supplanted her as her lover’s favorite. The rumor was that she went to a woman who had been a voodoo queen in her native Africa before she was sold into servitude in the Americas, and paid the old woman a generous sum to help her get her lover back.”
Chris saw the sign pointing the way to Shrewsbury. “Are you saying the old woman placed a spell on the house?”
“I believe the word curse would be more appropriate. The planter’s wife became pregnant and within months she began craving a particular fruit indigenous to the island. Unfortunately, the fruit contained properties that are toxic only to pregnant women, and within days of eating the fruit the young bride died.”
“Did he remarry?”
“No. He lived out the rest of his life as a widower, but his relationship with his former mistress was never the same. The curse had rendered him impotent.”
Throwing back his head, Chris let out a great peal of laughter. “I don’t believe it.”
“Neither did I, until someone else told me that around the turn of the century a distant cousin used the house for his honeymoon retreat, and his bride also died from eating the fruit.”
Sobering quickly, he gave Emily a questioning look. “You’re saying that the curse was still in effect seventy years later?”
She nodded. “It happened a third time in the late nineteen-fifties. Rumors of the curse had spread throughout the island, and the property was abandoned. It went into receivership for back taxes and Daddy bought it with most of its original furnishings still in it. The curse finally ended once the name on the deed changed from Abington to Kirkland.”
Chris shook his head. “It sounds too absurd to be true.”
“Fact is always stranger than fiction.” There was a soft gentleness in her voice that indicated that she believed in the curse.
He knew Emily was right about fact being stranger than fiction. The circumstances surrounding his own abduction and subsequent rescue were bizarre enough to provide a conceivable plot for a big-budget action film.
Reaching over, he placed a hand on her thigh. The touch of his fingers through the light fabric of her dress added to the heat of her flesh from the warm rays of the sun coming through the windshield. Her blood heated, rushing through her system like a sirocco, leaving a film of moisture glistening on her face and between her breasts. The gesture was both innocent and erotic.
Emily closed her eyes and breathed through parted lips. She reveled in his touch, wondering how it would be if he touched her—without the barrier of fabric separating flesh from flesh.
I will not touch you unless you want me to. That choice will have to be yours, not mine. His words came rushing back with crystal clarity. She knew he wanted to sleep with her, and she wanted to lie with him. At that very moment!
Opening her eyes, she turned her head and stared at Chris; then she saw it. The tall, white steeple of the church came into view. It was too late to tell him to turn around and drive back to the house.
Placing her left hand over the one resting on her thigh, she held his hand un
til he maneuvered into the parking lot at the back of the simply constructed wooden structure. He removed his hand, shifted into park, and, despite the tropical heat, Emily felt a chill. It was as if some sixth sense had told her that she had kept every man out of her bed because she had been waiting for the man sitting beside her. That he would be the one to bear witness as to why she had been born female.
She sat motionless until Chris stepped out of the car, came around and opened the door for her. She blinked once, placed her hand in his and permitted him to assist her from the automobile. Looping her arm through his, they made their way to the entrance of the church.
All of the windows in the church were open to avail the interior of an occasional breeze flowing through the valley. It was late morning, but nearly every pew was filled with parishioners in lightweight clothing. Emily placed the straw hat on her head, dipped her fingers in the holy water in a small dish near the entrance and crossed herself. Chris duplicated her motions as he made the sign of the cross over his chest. He looked around the small church for a pew that would provide enough space for them to sit next to each other. A beautiful young Jamaican woman who looked barely out of her teens smiled at Chris. She patted the empty space beside her.
“You can sit here,” she crooned to Chris.
Lowering his head, Chris whispered to Emily, “Take it.” She shifted her eyebrows and he nodded. She slipped onto the pew beside the flirtatious woman, whose expression had turned from a leer to a frown within seconds.
He sat in a pew behind Emily, staring at the back of her head until everyone stood up to acknowledge the entrance of the priest.
A slight smile tilted his slanting eyes upward as he reached for a hymnal. Emily Kirkland affected him in a way no other woman ever had. Unlike her, he wasn’t a regular churchgoer, but whenever they met for Sunday brunch it was usually preceded by their attending mass. And this Sunday’s service would prove to be a special one because he had a lot to be thankful for—thankful that another one of his prayers has been answered.
Bowing his head, he thanked God for the gift of love—and that the gift was the woman with whom he had promised to live for the next five days.
Chapter 8
Chris rolled over on his flat belly and smiled at Emily. She lay on the blanket beside him, her head cradled on folded arms. “Hi,” he crooned.
She returned his smile, wrinkling her delicate nose. “Hi, yourself.”
Moving closer, he dropped a kiss on the tip of her nose. “How are you feeling?”
She closed her eyes. “Lazy. Very, very lazy.”
They’d returned from church, changed into swimwear and shared a quickly prepared lunch of mixed salad greens with grilled chicken, freshly baked bread from the dough Emily had put up the day before and glasses of iced herbal tea while picnicking on the beach.
A soothing chuckle rumbled in his chest. “This has to be a first.”
She opened her eyes. “What?”
“Emily Kirkland doing absolutely nothing.”
“Bite your tongue, Chris. I’m not the only workaholic.”
“The taxpayers of New Mexico are entitled to no less from me.” He combed his fingers through her hair, rubbing the curling ends between his fingertips. His gaze caressed her face as lovingly as a gentle kiss.
Emily placed a slender leg over his, snuggling against his bare chest. She inhaled the hypnotic scent of the lime-based cologne clinging to the coarse black hair starting below his throat, spreading over his breasts and ending with a narrow line at the waistband of his swim trunks.
“There are forty-one other senators and seventy members of the house and none of them work as hard as you do,” she chided softly. “The legislature meets for either a sixty- or thirty-day session every other year, yet you work pro bono, defending youthful offenders and mentoring high school students. Why must you try to fill up every hour of the day with work?”
He kissed her nose again. “Why, Emelia? Because I didn’t have someone as wonderfully distracting as you in my life.”
She flashed a saucy smile. “I’m a distraction? Should I be flattered?”
“Yes, you should, because you happen to be a very beautiful, sexy distraction.” He punctuated each word.
Angling his head, Chris pressed his mouth to hers, increasing the pressure until her lips parted. Moist breaths mingled, fused, cemented. Without warning, his kiss changed, becoming more demanding.
Emily’s respiration speeded up, her nerve endings short-circuiting. She gasped, her lips parting, and his tongue sampled the purity she had withheld from him. Everything she had dreamed of feeling, all of the love she had had for Christopher Delgado was manifested when she curved her arms around his neck, releasing the passions she had repressed for more than half her life.
Chris shifted her slight body effortlessly until she lay over his chest, her legs cradled between his. He inhaled her—her feminine scent, the soft, fragrant curls covering her well-shaped head, the velvety texture of her skin and the honeyed sweetness of her lush mouth. The searing heat at the apex of her thighs burned his groin through the spandex of his swim briefs, increasing the inferno scorching and searing his sex.
He wanted her—he wanted her so much that he feared exploding into tiny cinders of erotic ecstasy before he was given the opportunity to enter her body. His hands gripped her shoulders, making her his prisoner as he plundered her mouth, throat and ears before he returned to recapture the well of moist confection of her lush lips. He had spent so many years craving her, so many years when he had fantasized kissing Emily passionately, making love to her.
Like a sculptor reveling in the texture of his greatest creation, Chris closed his eyes and traced his fingertips down the column of her neck, over the bones of her clavicle, down and around the outline of her breasts, his thumbs sweeping over the distended nipples straining under the top of her bathing suit. His fingers continued their journey, outlining the indentation where her waist curved inward before flaring out to her hips. He registered the soft sounds of her quickened breathing in his ear when he reached between their bodies and cupped the expanse between her legs.
Emily felt the heat, the increasing pressure and a rising passion she was helpless to control. Men had kissed her, touched her before, but they had never been able to excite her. Now she lay on a private beach in Ocho Rios, atop a man she had loved all her life, savoring his caress and kiss. Desire awoke, stirring like hot, slow-moving lava from a volcano that had lain dormant for years.
The heat from the sun overhead competed with the fire spreading through the hidden space between her thighs. She writhed sensuously against the solid bulge throbbing against her belly. She wanted Chris Delgado—more than anything she had ever wanted in her life.
Cradling his lean face between her hands, she opened her eyes and stared at the carnality gripping his sensual features, unaware of the control it took for him not to strip her naked and take her on the beach in full view of nature and all its wondrous majesty.
Roles reversed, she became the sculptress, a forefinger tracing the outline of his sweeping black eyebrows, the elegant ridge of cheekbones, the length of his nose, the outline of the masculine mouth with its full, passionate lower lip and down to linger at the slight indentation in his strong chin.
Lowering her head, she pressed her nose to his shoulder, inhaling the distinctive scent of his skin. He shuddered, gasping audibly, when her tongue left a trace of moisture on the taut brown skin covering muscle and sinew. Her tongue moved lower—over the crisp, curling hair on his chest, drawing tiny circles around one nipple, then the other.
How could she have known? How did she know where to touch him to send him into a quivering mass of trembling lust? The questions penetrated the fog of rushing arousal that would not allow Chris to move or speak. The very air around them se
emed electrified, vibrating with a repressed passion that threatened to swallow them alive, whole.
His fingers, curled into tight fists, were anchored in the sand. He feared touching her, because for the first time in his life he was close to losing complete control of himself and everything around him. He wanted his first time with her, their first time together, to be one of gentle passion, not unbridled lust. And it was lust—a straining, tumultuous and frenzied lust that threatened to escape and erupt without regard to anything or anyone except his own sexual gratification.
He uncurled his fingers, and his hands moved with blinding speed to manacle her wrists. Emily went completely still, her eyes widening in surprise. “No,” he whispered in a shaking voice. Lowering his gaze, he stared at the erratically beating pulse in her throat. There was no mistaking the uncertainty in her luminous eyes. He forced a smile. “I don’t want our first time together to be here on the beach.”
Even though Emily was not as sexually experienced as Chris, she had been with enough men to know that he was close to going over the edge where he would not be able to stop himself from making love to her. She had noted the change in his breathing when she kissed his breasts, the contraction of his stomach muscles, the throbbing hardness of his sex straining against the constricting fabric of his swim trunks and pulsing against her belly.
His touch and kisses had aroused her, but she had also aroused him. A mysterious light darkened her eyes to an emerald green when she smiled down at him.
“You’re right. I don’t want my first time to be on a beach.” Her voice was soft and soothing as wisps of cotton.
Vertical lines formed between his eyes, his sharp mind quickly analyzing her statement. “What did you say?”
She shifted an eyebrow. “About what?”
Chris released her wrists and curved an arm around her waist, reversing their positions. Supporting his greater weight on his elbows, he stared down at her deeply tanned face. “About it being your first time.” She averted her gaze, silently answering his query. He cradled her closer. “Oh, baby,” he crooned softly near her ear.
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