The Dare Collection March 2019. Rachael Stewart
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She’d been prepared to use all her usual weapons of persuasion. Even her body, if necessary.
Looking at all the pictures of him splashed all over the internet, she hadn’t imagined she’d mind the sacrifice.
But it had never crossed her mind that he could actually touch her in any way. That he could somehow disarm her, sneak in through her heavily armored defenses and turn what she’d thought were her weapons into weaknesses.
Because now Lucinda was hungry, too. She felt desperate. Vulnerable and bruised with longing. There were tears pricking at the back of her eyes and that scraped-up sensation in the back of her throat.
She felt.
And that was unacceptable.
Lucinda could accept defeat. Or she thought she could, in theory—having never had that much exposure to it before. But there was no way in hell that she could function like this. Cracked wide open, a stranger to herself, quaked by all that intimacy.
Worst of all, exposed.
Because every crack in what she’d assumed was her unassailable foundation proved that she was no different from her mother after all.
She didn’t look back when she finally wheeled around and headed for her cottage. She walked fast, her gaze steady and ahead of her, already calculating how to get the hell off this island and away from the man who, it turned out, was the most dangerous opponent she’d ever faced.
A war she hadn’t seen coming and had lost without firing a single shot.
* * *
Lucinda was gone when Jason woke up.
Sunlight streamed into his room from all the windows that doubled as sliding doors, just the way he liked it. Light danced over him while the breeze washed him awake, trailing over his skin until he remembered where he was and who had been there when he’d finally exhausted the first, bright wave of his lust for Lucinda, who wasn’t quite the stuffy suit when she wasn’t wearing one.
He reached out to find her before he opened his eyes, but the bed was empty. And more telling by far, cool to the touch.
As if she hadn’t been there in a long while.
He didn’t like that. It was downright disturbing how much he didn’t like that. His heart was doing those weird flips again, his ribs felt tight and the sensation that he was well and truly boned pressed down on him. Everywhere.
Jason had no choice but to laugh at himself.
Since when had he been possessive? And when had he ever woken up alone and been pissed about it because he wanted more, instead of being grateful that the woman had cleared out without having to go through a tedious scene?
He jackknifed up to sit where he could see the view. Palm trees dancing in the breeze and the blue sky indistinguishable from the sea where they met. A sweep of pure, untouched glory that some men might kill for.
And all he could see was Lucinda and the way she flushed red when she came.
He laughed at himself again, then took himself off to a very hot shower that did absolutely nothing to set him straight. It was like Lucinda was imprinted on him, and what was really freaking him out was that, when he stopped wondering how she’d managed to sneak up and sucker punch him, he didn’t hate it.
And not only because the fact that a woman could get to him meant he wasn’t Daniel St. George.
When he finally made his way out of his bedroom, he was clean, but definitely not okay with the fact she’d run off while he was sleeping. And he was still laughing at that as he made his way through the open, graceful rooms of this house he’d never wanted. This house his father had built but never lived in, as if he’d imagined that one day he might actually turn into the sort of person who would want the things this house offered. The view and the privacy, sure—but also the quiet contemplation that went with it.
Jason had never met the man, but that didn’t sound like Daniel St. George’s style.
He made his way to the lanai off the kitchen where he usually sank into his morning routine of a whole lot of excellent Hawaiian coffee and his laptop before his workout—except today, Lucinda was sitting there.
Right there on the white sofa with the unimpeded view of the mountainside sloping off into the surf.
And the wild-haired woman wearing nothing but a sarong, pretty much every wet dream he’d ever had, was gone.
In her place was the woman who had first appeared in the old hotel lobby yesterday. It was the hair he noticed first and with the biggest kick to the gut, slick and straight and hauled back from her face so hard it made his temples ache. Like she was daring it to attempt to curl. And as if that wasn’t enough, she wore a blouse of black silk, another severe skirt and an impassive expression on her pretty face that almost blanked out those gorgeous freckles.
“Another funeral?” he asked, sounding all kinds of lazy when he wanted to fight something. Her, for example. “So soon?”
LUCINDA’S BLUE EYES were frigid when they met his. A lot like the smile she aimed at him, which he knew she would probably tell him was professional.
When all Jason wanted was to taste her on his tongue again.
“I came here to talk to you about a resort, Mr. Kaoki,” she said, with no trace of Scotland in her voice. It was all BBC vowels and that excruciating politeness, as if he didn’t know how she begged for more. “Yesterday got off track, and I apologize. I shouldn’t have allowed you to bait me.”
“Is bait a fancy British word for fuck, Scotland?”
He could feel the temper and heat kicking around in him, and he was pretty sure they were obvious in his voice. Maybe all over his face, too. But she only smiled, winter straight through.
“Today instead of cavorting about in and out of the surf, I thought we could revisit the key points of my proposal.”
Something kicked at him with that, another unpleasant gut punch if ever there was one. He told himself to ignore it, but the sensation of the kick lingered, making him...edgy. “I told you already. I don’t give a shit about proposals.”
“If what you want is sex, I regret to inform you that’s not why I came here. I understand if yesterday blurred the lines. Nevertheless, I think we really must get ourselves back on the right path.”
“Are you sure?” Because he knew how to make her scream. And he wanted to peel her out of all that unrelenting black and make her bright red again. All over him. “It seems to me like you were more than happy to use your body if it got you where you wanted to go. What if that’s the only path I know?”
But he didn’t want to be the guy who loomed over a woman while he said something like that, so he settled himself in the chair at an angle to hers and made a quiet little show out of lounging there, bonelessly, like he was this close to falling back asleep.
Rather than hot and hard and ready. Which, right at this moment, he didn’t feel she deserved to know.
“Where I want to go is a luxury resort with world-class amenities and personal butler service,” she told him, sounding faintly apologetic. He knew perfectly well it was a tactic. A strategy. There wasn’t a shred of apology anywhere on her. “Not another tour of your bedroom.”
Jason was prepared to manfully let that go, because his possessiveness was his problem and she certainly didn’t owe him anything and blah, blah, blah, but she smirked. She didn’t even pretend to hide it.
As if this was her letting him down easy. Him. As if he was some puppy who didn’t know the difference between a run-of-the-mill one-nighter and what had exploded