The Dare Collection March 2019. Rachael Stewart
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in a world of prey, and he apparently liked to hide right there in plain sight.
He was big, entirely too dangerous, and now he was towering over her in the dim hotel lobby.
And Lucinda had never been so aware of her own pulse in her life. It throbbed in her wrists, her neck, her breasts, and seemed to glow to the same rhythm in her pussy.
She stopped pretending there was any possibility that she was going to breathe normally.
His gaze was still on her and she felt...frozen, but not in any kind of ice. If a bright, white-hot flame was immobilizing, that was what caught her. Held her.
Had her tipping up her chin to stare him straight in the eye while her imagination went wild. What if he reached down and pulled her to him with one of those outsized hands? What if he took both of those big, capable hands and put them on her body? What if he—
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.”
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