Untamed. CAITLIN CREWS
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thousands of miles from anywhere, surrounded by nothing but salt and sea stretching out toward the horizon in all directions—a state of affairs that might have made her anxious had she possessed the wherewithal to consider it in any depth.
Because she was tired. More than tired. Somewhere over North America, Lucinda had gone past “tired” entirely and had found herself in the realm of a pure, bone-deep exhaustion the likes of which she wasn’t certain she’d ever felt before in her twenty-eight years.
But she was not to be deterred.
She would be the one to land this deal. She knew it.
The simple truth was that she would accept no other outcome.
When failure wasn’t an option, she liked to tell herself, the only remaining possibility was success.
The tiny little hopper plane, barely large enough to hold the pilot—much less an uneasy passenger who preferred her jets sized to carry hundreds, the better to imagine it wasn’t a plane at all—landed rather too bouncily for her taste over what she assumed had to be some kind of lagoon, the water blue and turquoise and gleaming.
She was too bleary-eyed and hollowed out from too many time zones to care.
When she stepped out of the plane onto the little dock that stretched out over the water—a dock, of all things, instead of any kind of proper tarmac, or climate-controlled, civilized airport—the humidity walloped her. It was like a fist, wet and hot. It was an instant, relentless assault and it nearly took her to her knees, right there beneath some rattling palm trees and the careless, blinding sunshine.
Lucinda had assumed she was duly prepared. She’d known she was heading to a tropical island, obviously. And she’d been to beaches before, like the last corporate retreat her company had taken to sun-drenched Spain—where she’d been expected to conduct business while sitting beside a pool, brandishing drinks festooned with foliage and pretending to be relaxed and carefree in a bloody sarong. She’d assumed this would be more of the same, if farther away than a quick hop to Spain. A beach was a beach, she’d assured herself as she’d set off what seemed like a lifetime ago.
But it turned out she wasn’t prepared for this remote Pacific island that didn’t appear on most maps and had no official name. Maybe it was impossible to be prepared for this much tropical heat all at once, heavy and intense.
Her hands went to her hair at once. Bright red and embarrassing, its mission in life was to curl dramatically and unprofessionally at the slightest provocation. Lucinda went to great lengths to keep it neat and sleek. She kept it ruthlessly straight and swept back into a severe bun on the back of her head, which kept it under control but couldn’t minimize its upsetting color. Lucinda had often considered dying her hair a more appropriate brown, the better to blend in, but the idea of all the upkeep struck her as wasteful. She’d concentrated instead on ridding herself of her native Scottish accent, because the circles in which she aspired to move had no place for impenetrable working-class Glaswegian accents.
And Lucinda succeeded in all she did, because she didn’t allow for the possibility of failure. She never had, from her rough beginnings in one of Glasgow’s notorious housing estates to her current position as a vice president in her company’s London corporate office. Tropical heat on a Pacific island couldn’t change that.
Though it complicated things, certainly. It seemed to curl into her, sneaking beneath her clothes like some kind of insinuation.
Lucinda tried to shake it off as she took in her surroundings, frowning at the sweep of untouched white sand and the wild tangle of jungle beyond, climbing up the green, steep sides of the hills.
“Are you certain this is the right place?” she demanded of the pilot, who had climbed down to the dock ahead of her and insisted on grinning widely as if everything she said and did was vastly entertaining.
Lucinda was not entertaining, thank you very much. She was effective. She was capable. And she was used to being treated as exactly what she was and wanted to be. Stern. Uncompromising. A straight-edged ruler of a woman, one of her first bosses had called her. He’d meant it as an insult, but Lucinda had taken it as the greatest compliment and had tried her best to live up to it ever since.
“You said you wanted Jason Kaoki,” the pilot replied, still grinning. “This is where he lives. I couldn’t tell you if that makes it the right place or not.”
Lucinda forced a tight smile, wrestled her sensible and compact carry-on bag behind her and marched off the dock.
Onto the pristine, glaring white beach, which she found even less accommodating than the smirking pilot she’d hired in Fiji, since there were no commercial flights to this place, plunked down in the Pacific somewhere between Honolulu and Nadi. The sand was hot and shifted beneath her as she walked, in a manner she found deeply unnerving. She liked the comfort of concrete. The assurance that when she stepped on it, it would remain exactly where it was, rain or shine.
The beach had its own ideas. That and the humidity...got to her, she could admit.
Lucinda had worn sensible flats, of course, but was otherwise hardly dressed for a romp across the sands. Despite the forty hours she’d spent traveling—one long-haul flight after another, with too many overly bright airports in between—she had maintained her usual workplace uniform. She was convinced a coolheaded, professional approach was the key to landing this account.
Though at the moment, trying not to sink knee-deep into blindingly white sand, she wished she hadn’t, perhaps, dressed for her conservative London office all those hours ago in her flat. It might have been wiser to choose something more appropriate for islands much warmer and brighter than the United Kingdom.
Lucinda wasn’t one to concede without a fight—or at all, generally speaking—but it took only about ten steps before she was forced to admit defeat. It was too hot. She was a natural shade of Scottish pale that she was afraid might burst into flame at any moment in all this tropical sun and heat, and she was so uncomfortable that she’d stopped thinking about her goals and was caught up in thinking about how she felt. That was unacceptable. She stopped, sinking deep into the sand, to shrug off her black jacket and kick off her matching flats, and wore nothing but her wrinkle-resistant blouse and sleek pencil skirt as she stormed the rest of her way toward solid ground.
Once there, she paused by another picturesque palm tree to dump the beach out of her shoes and slip them back on. And also to catch her breath, accept the likelihood that she was already breaking out in blisters from the relentless sun beating down on her, and try to get her bearings.
If the map on her phone was any guide, and she’d done enough research to know it was, there was precious little on this island. It was almost entirely undeveloped, save the sprawling house Daniel St. George had built here and a single, ancient hotel that had been thrown together in the 1950s in service to an Australian oilman’s fantasies of world domination. The hotel had never opened and now sat as a monument to the perils of too much money with no good sense.
She shoved her inadequate sunglasses higher on her nose as she peered down the length of the beach, frowning until she saw the hotel in question, peeking around a picture-perfect curve dusted with palm trees as it reached out toward the blue horizon. The old hotel squatted there with its midtwentieth-century facade and squat, flat shape, reminding Lucinda far too much of the block of flats she’d lived in as a child. All of which should have been torn down before the dawn of the twenty-first century, as far as Lucinda was concerned.
If she had her way, the sad old hotel wouldn’t make it through the summer.
There was a kind of track—she wouldn’t call it a road, packed with red dirt and sprouting weeds in the center—that skirted along the edge of the beach and wasn’t yet overtaken by the encroaching jungle. Lucinda marched along it, her eyes on the hotel. It didn’t get any prettier as she moved. But with every overly warm step, she entertained herself with notions of what could be.
A private island resort, catering only to the wealthiest and most exclusive clientele. The kind of fantasy island retreat most