by Ann Major
"You should meet her on neutral territory. This could be a setup of some sort."
Tad's icy blue stare went over the slim, golden woman in the top photograph one last time. He remembered the way her body had fitted his. Rage flamed in his heart, but he could not stop the memories of her. He could almost feel her rosebud nipples pressed into his chest. Despite those immense breasts, she had been slender, lovely, instilling in him a hot, pulsating urgency and then fulfilling him beyond all his wildest expectations. She had been so good, so sweet—that once. Afterward he’d felt such inexplicable tenderness. Taking her had been so easy. Forgetting her so impossible.
Because he’d felt more for her that night than he had ever felt for Deirdre during their marriage.
He'd been looking for Jess that night. She had said she was looking for him. Only when she’d found him, she deliberately pretended to be her twin, Deirdre.
Her twin, Deirdre, whom he'd married because of that one night of ecstasy and heartfelt emotion.
His wife, Deirdre, who had been frigid, at least in his bed, for ten years.
His spoiled, selfish wife, who had married him only for his money, who had taken his child and run out on him at the first sign of trouble. He flinched as though his chest had been stabbed by a knife of ice.
Ten years ago his relationship with Deirdre had been over until Jess had deliberately seduced him, pretending she was Deirdre, and then Jess passed him back to her sister as though he had meant nothing.
Tad smiled grimly as he pocketed the pictures.
Oh, it was a setup all right.
Only this time...
Two
The scent of mimosas and oleander and hibiscus mingled with the perfume of the sea.
Everyone else on the island was relaxing.
Everyone except Dr. Jessica Bancroft Kent.
Everyone except the aboriginal child with the matted gold hair who was watching her from the rain forest canopy of giant bloodwoods and ironbarks.
The hordes of tourists from the resort hotel at the other end of the rocky island were either swimming, snorkeling, windsurfing or viewing the wonders of the Great Barrier Reef from glass-bottom boats. But Jess had not come to this thickly wooded paradise of dappled sunlight, with its flitting blue butterflies and magnificent beaches, as a tourist. She was a woman with a mission.
And the word relax was not in her vocabulary.
She almost wished it were. Her heart was pounding violently from her exertions, and she was so hot she felt she might explode.
Then the child peeped out of the jungle. Their eyes met— the woman's and the boy's. Jess smiled, and as always whenever Jess made any attempt to communicate, he became frightened and ran away. Sturdy brown legs flew past her down the trail of white coral.
Alone once more, Jess felt like she was in a steam bath. It had just rained. The fierce summer sun beat down on the tropical island with deadly intensity. Even in the dense shade of the rain forest—the Australians called it scrub—that skirted the rocky road where she stood huffing and puffing as she leaned against the mower she'd been pushing uphill, the heat was stifling. The narrow path was made narrower because some untidy individual, no doubt male, had parked a bulldozer square in the middle of it.
Jess's hair had come loose from its pins, and great globs of it were glued to her neck and forehead. Her khaki shorts and blouse were as wet as if she'd showered in them, and the blouse clung disgustingly across her too-ample bosom.
Even now, all these many years since school, her play-mate-of-the-month figure remained a secret embarrassment. It was something to be hidden beneath high-necked blouses or baggy clothes. It galled her that her breasts were the first thing men noticed about her, her brains the last.
"I've got brains of my own, honey," had been one boyfriend's crude gem.
She tugged at the clinging, sticky-wet fabric and then gave up the attempt to loosen it from her skin and fanned herself with her fingers. She had lost all enthusiasm for the prospect of mowing the overgrown lawn surrounding Deirdre's cottage. Jess could have gladly turned around and pushed the mower back down the hill except she was too stubborn to face Wally's boyish smirk of male triumph.
He had warned her, hadn't he? And like all men, even a green chauvinistic pup like himself, he would take great delight in being right.
She cringed as she remembered their conversation once she had lured him away from the contractors involved in the hotel's expansion.
"The motor mower's too heavy for a woman to push over that hill."
"For a woman..." How she detested superior, limiting, masculine phrases of that variety.
His eyes had fallen from her stern face to those two protruding, softer parts of her anatomy that always drew male eyes the way magnets attract iron filings.
"If you'll just wait till Hasiri comes back—" he said.
"Nonsense," she had replied crisply. "If I wasted my time waiting for all the Hasiris of the world to come back, I would have gotten very little done. High grass invites snakes. I have a child to think about."
The handlebars of the mower had slid so easily from Wally's grasp into-hers. He had managed to bring his gaze back to her face and keep it there.
Wally was a gentle soul. She almost wished now that he'd fought her a little harder. Not that it would have done either of them a particle of good. It was never difficult for a woman with even a bit of backbone to best the Wallys of this world, and Jessica had much more than a bit.
Not that she was a man-hater, despite the innuendos of more than one member of that sex over the years. She had found, however, starting with her handsome and dynamic father, that few persons of the male sex were to be trusted. Later experiences had merely confirmed her opinion.
She smeared the back of her arm across her damp brow. The rain forest was abuzz with insects—some of them huge, voracious, exotic-looking creatures that made her think she should carry a rolled newspaper at all times, especially when lifting toilet lids. Something horrendous flew past the tip of her nose, and she swatted at it. Suddenly she longed for a cool drink and a shower; she longed to be back at the cottage with Meeta, her assistant, [JO2]and Lizzie.
Nearby in the dense tangle of bloodwoods and gum trees, a twig snapped. Every muscle in her body went rigid. For the first time it occurred to her how remote her end of the island was, how lonely this particular part of the trail was, how dark the shadows of the jungle had become.
She'd come to this island and asked a lot of questions, perhaps too many, about her sister who'd vanished.
Jess's stomach felt hollowed out, that overpowering indication of fear, of the hunted realizing she was hunted. She instinctively knew it wasn't the child. The boy crept stealthily through the jungle without making a sound. This was something bigger, something clumsier.
Jess swallowed. Normally she wasn't the shrinking, terrified sort of female her father had taught her to despise. Hadn't she fearlessly braved the slums of Calcutta for the past two years? But those garbage-strewn alleyways had been familiar territory. And those teeming slums, for all their filth, weren't nearly as dangerous as most downtown American streets after dark.
A brooding atmosphere hovered in the dark rain forest. The green-breasted parrots had stopped their raucous squawking. She was a stranger to this country, to this island, to jungles and their dangers. Obviously, she was not nearly so talented at playing detective as she'd naturally assumed she'd be. She peered warily into the darkness and listened to the eerie quiet.
An explosion of white burst from the jungle.
Jess screamed, jumping back as feathers brushed her cheek.
"Silly goose!" She chided herself shakily as she watched a cockatoo, its crest sulfur yellow, flutter gracefully down from the branches of a firewheel. "It was just a bird."
She had let go of the mower, and it began to roll backward toward the edge of a six-foot cliff.
"Be careful with it, love," Wally had said. "Believe it or not, this is the only worki
ng motor mower on the island."
"I always take excellent care of every item I borrow," she had promised faithfully.
She lunged after the borrowed item that she was taking such excellent care of, catching it just as it tilted precariously over the edge. Once her pulse had calmed, she began to tug on the mower with all her strength, but its wheel was jammed in the crevice between two rocks.
It was then that the unmistakable sound of a human sneeze issued forcefully from the jungle.
"Achoo!"
She nearly jumped out of her skin, and the mower lurched even more dangerously.
"Achoo!"
This second sneeze was followed by a man's quick, snarled curse. "Damn."
A ripple of fear raced up her spine.
There was someone! Someone, who was deliberately hiding in the trees.
Paralyzed, she clung to the mower. "Who's—"
A dark cloud came out of nowhere and obliterated the sun.
She yanked at the mower but it wouldn't budge.
If she let go, it would fall. If she didn't...
More than once in the span of her twenty-nine years, her audacity had carried the day. "Come out of there, whoever you are," she called softly in what she had intended to be her I'm-not-afraid-of-anything tone, "and help me with this blasted mower."
No answer. Not even a sneeze. There was only the thudding of her heart. Only the silence—thick and cloying like the heat, like her fear. Only the one motor mower on the island, heavy as lead, its wheel sliding out of the crevice and rolling downward over a large, slippery rock, pulling her with it toward that shadowy ravine.
She screamed as she felt a wheel go over the edge.
Something heavy jumped out of the rain forest behind her. Before she could turn around, an arm went around her waist like a steel band, pinning her arms to her side. She felt his fingers settle beneath her breasts.
That was the one place she didn't like men touching.
She let go of the mower with a yelp and watched in a horrified daze as it hurtled in slow motion past a strong brown hand over the edge of the cliff and smashed itself on the rocks below. Before she could scream, that same callused hand clamped firmly over her mouth.
Her body was arched against a solid wall of muscle and bone. Hard male fingers burned into her breasts.
"Stop fighting me[JO3]. I'm not going to hurt you," a deep, vaguely familiar masculine tone growled.
She forced her panic to subside, and when it did she stopped struggling so frantically.
Her attacker gallantly relaxed his grip, and that was his mistake. Jessica was a student of the martial arts. From then on it was pure, delicious instinct.
Teeth into brown fingers. A deft twist. A knee in his groin. A sharp blow with her heel in his solar plexus.
He doubled over in a spasm of agony. She kicked at his shin. He lost his footing, and the great, bearded giant was tumbling over the rocky edge after the mower.
He bellowed like an injured bull all the way down.
Till he hit bottom with a sickening thump.
Though she hadn't heard Tad Jackson's voice in over four years—she'd thrown him out of her house on that last memorable occasion for a barrage of chauvinistic insults about busybody females galloping about the world like a herd of misguided mares, pretending to help others when all they were really doing was running away from their own personal problems—no other human alive could make that particular howl of frustration and fury except him.
There was an awful silence.
Then a parrot squawked. In the distance a lone windsurfer streaked past on the glittering ocean.
She was shaking, but the pure horror of what had happened did not strike her until she stepped out onto the ledge and peered down at him.
In spite of his beard, she recognized him instantly.
Jackson!
Dear God!
His great, muscled body lay sprawled as still as death across the bleached coral beside the mower. A faint breeze blew the bright mass of gold back from his tanned brow, and she saw the blood. He’d only fallen six feet, but if he’d fallen wrong, he could be badly injured. Or dead.
Terror gripped her.
What had he growled into her ear? "Stop fighting me. I'm not going to hurt you." And she knew that despite all her brother-in-law's character defects—and they were too numerous to catalogue, not that she hadn't made the attempt on more than one occasion—he would never have physically hurt any woman. Not Deidre. Not even her.
For four days she'd waited for him. He needed her help— desperately—but he was so stubborn it was the last thing he would ever willingly seek. For that matter, it was the last thing she would ever have willingly given him. For four days she'd expected him to barge into the cottage like a great giant, roaring to the rooftops in one of his high rages, demanding his daughter, demanding to know how she’d come to be in possession of her, and demanding Jess's own departure from his life.
Instead, like most men, he had taken the most unexpected, the most foolhardy and the most calamitous course of action. Having forgotten she was a student of the martial arts, he had snuck up on her in an idiotic macho attempt to bully her. And she had bested him in physical combat.
If he lived, he would add this to his lengthy list of unforgivable things she had done to him.
If he lived...
She scrambled down the cliff after him.
Three
Tad lay on the rocks in a blur of agony. Vaguely he was aware of his surroundings. The resort was expanding. Bulldozers had gouged great chunks out of the jungle, but they'd left the cliff with its famous Aboriginal rock art intact. Crudely painted crocodiles and kangaroos and other unknown animals that recalled the Aboriginal creation myth of the Dreamtime loomed above him. But he was not admiring this splendid example of rock art; he was concentrating on her.
Pain splintered through his battered body. He had hit his head when he fell, and it was a struggle to focus on the she-devil. He watched, though, as she climbed as nimbly as a goat down the rocks—no doubt, to finish him off.
He'd been following her all day, trying to figure out her game plan, trying to figure out when and where to confront her, how best to seize the advantage. Then he'd gotten soaked in that shower which hadn't helped his cold, and he'd sneezed and given himself away.
He'd only jumped her because she was so stubbornly determined to save that rattletrap mower—he'd been afraid she was going to let it drag her over the cliff. Instead, she'd shoved him off it.
Jess-of-the-jungle grabbed a spidery vine and with an agile jump made her final descent. She landed light as a feather. Was there nothing that woman couldn't do?
Through half shuttered eyes, he watched her sink to her knees beside him. Her ample breasts heaved beneath her damp shirt. He could make out the outline of taut nipples thrusting against wet cotton. He knew better than to watch those, so he gritted his teeth, fighting to concentrate on the danger of her proximity, fighting to ignore the fiery, pulsating pain in his leg and lower hip.
It would be so easy to grab her by the throat, to pull her down, to scare her witless and thereby make her pay for what she had done. Thinking about how she’d kept Lizzie from him and lied about it, he almost succumbed to this nearly irresistible temptation, but some part of him was curious as to what she planned to do next. Besides, to lie still was the easiest and least painful thing to do.
To his surprise, instead of picking up a rock or a stick to pound him with, she gently lifted his hand, her practiced finger searching his wrist for a pulse. She mashed her magnificent breasts against his chest.
Her own hand felt as cool as spring water against his blazing skin. How could anything alive feel so cool and nice in this heat? Her cotton blouse was as wet as his own soaked shirt, her breasts soft and deliciously warm.
How could Jess...feel so nice?
Jess, whom he hated even more than he'd hated Deirdre.
Jess, who had betrayed him, who had tricked
him into marrying Deirdre.
Jess, whom he had loved as he'd never loved Deirdre.
Jess, who had kept his child and had just pushed him over this damn cliff.
What the hell was Jess doing here anyway—besides trying to kill him?
The she-devil lowered her head to his chest and listened for his heart, and he was forced to endure the lustrous tangle of her soft, blond curls tickling his chin and nose.
When he thought he couldn't hold back the sneeze that threatened a second longer, she lifted her head and brought her face closer to his. He was aware of her lips hovering, half opened, a scant inch above his. He could smell her, and her nearness stirred old, long-forgotten memories. No...
Not forgotten. Never forgotten; just repressed because they had hurt too much to remember. He could almost taste her. He wanted to, and he loathed himself for that weakness.
She licked her lips, and he watched the curl of her pink darting tongue follow the lush curves of her perfectly shaped mouth. A fingertip dubiously touched his beard and then withdrew.
He caught the scent of something sweet, like orange blossoms. Her scent, enveloping him.
"Jackson," she whispered. The sound was ragged with fear. Through the dampness of their clothes, the points of her breasts shuddered delicately against his hard chest muscles. Her warm breath caressed his throat.
The jungle was a beastly sauna.
He could hear her labored breathing. Or was it his?
"Jackson, can you hear me?"
No use to answer. They'd quarrel, and he felt weak, too exhausted for one of their battles.
When he clung stubbornly to his silence, he heard her muted cry of remorse. "Dear God!" Her fingertips stroked his cheek. "You big, impossible lug, I never meant to hurt you."
She—who'd been the cause of all his hurt—had never meant to hurt him.
He studied her through the thick veil of his almost closed lashes, and he felt twisted with conflicting emotions. The sunlight was in her hair. Her wet blouse outlined her lush female shape. Even in a state of dishevelment, she was golden, lovely.
He didn't want his thoughts journeying down that fatal path, but a man's thoughts are not so easily whipped onto the path of his choice when the woman he doesn't want to think about is right there, pressing her breasts into him. So he kept looking at her, thinking about her.