Читать книгу The Dare Collection March 2019 - Rachael Stewart - Страница 11

LUCINDA DIDN’T KNOW what the hell she was doing.

She had always been about a plan. Making a plan, following a plan and sticking to a plan come hell or high water. She researched, she got herself ready and then she executed said plan without ever straying into too much dangerous spontaneity. That strategy had served her well her whole life—but something about this island made her feel outside herself. Inside out, stretched thin, too hot and too exposed, all at once.

It’s the jet lag, she told herself. But there was the distinct possibility it had more to do with the man lounging there across from her, watching her with lethal intent, than the island or what it had taken to get here.

The truth was that while she wasn’t averse to using whatever inducements she could throw at Jason Kaoki, she wasn’t entirely sure she’d be the one getting what she wanted out of the bargain if she did.

He wasn’t like other men.

He wasn’t like anyone she’d ever met.

He was too big, in every sense of the term. He was built on a grand scale, sure, but there was also his laugh. His wicked, challenging grin. That steady dark gaze of his that told her in no uncertain terms that he truly didn’t need or want a damned thing from anyone...

But that he might take it anyway, if it was offered.

There’s no reason you can’t make him an offer—that offer—right here and now, she told herself stoutly, still holding that simmering gaze of his. The notion made a deep shiver wind its way through her, making her hold herself even more still for fear he’d see exactly what she wanted to give him. What she was willing to trade.

She didn’t know what she was doing, but she needed to figure it out. And fast.

Because she needed this. She needed to win. She needed to prove herself, once and for all, in a way that no one could claim was theirs or take away from her or dismiss. Lucinda was so tired of fighting for every last scrap. She didn’t like to admit it to herself, but she knew it was true. After a lifetime of hustling, she was tired. She wanted to be done with the dustups, once and for all. She’d been swinging and scrabbling all her life, and she wanted the big prize this time.

She wanted to rest on her laurels for a change. She wanted to see what the world looked like when she was sure of her place in it. At last.

And there was no doubt that landing Jason Kaoki and this jewel of an island would do the trick. It would be the making of her. She could leave her firm in a blaze of glory and go out on her own. Maybe stay in one of the exclusive properties she worked so hard to build, for a start.

No one back in London thought she could do it.

“You’re wasting your time,” her direct superior had told her, sighing loudly to make certain Lucinda knew she was bothering him when she’d dutifully told him her plans. He named the much-celebrated president of a rival boutique hotel corporate body, who had only the week before sneered at Lucinda in a trendy gastropub as he’d assured her the Kaoki property was lost to developers. “If he can’t make it happen, no one can.”

“I can do it,” Lucinda had said with tremendous certainty and confidence.

It had only been partially feigned.

Because she’d studied Jason Kaoki. And she hadn’t concentrated only on his investment portfolio like everyone else, all those cold numbers and figures. Lucinda had immersed herself in all his social media accounts. She’d watched old interviews and read articles on his early prowess on the football field.

She’d convinced herself she knew him.

“If you can, you’ll be a legend,” her boss had replied, with a laugh. Indicating how unlikely a prospect he thought that was. Because he might like how hard Lucinda worked, but he certainly didn’t think she had it in her to become a legend.

And it turned out that the scrappy little nobody from that grotty flat in one of Glasgow’s most notorious tower blocks wanted to be a legend. Very badly, in fact. She didn’t want to work for anyone else. She didn’t want to report to her boss, who was decent enough as these things went, but still liked to take credit for her best and brightest ideas like they were owed to him.

Then laughed at her when she showed her belly by clearly indicating she wanted more.

Goddamn it, but she wanted this win.

That was why she’d taken her annual leave and spent her own money to haul herself here to make her own legend, her own way.

Only to discover that not only was Jason Kaoki as difficult as advertised, he was difficult in a completely different way than she’d anticipated. And more worryingly, she seemed to be someone else when she was in his presence.

She told herself, once again, that it was the heat. The tropics, bearing down on her relentlessly. The lobby was open to the weather and the breeze that wound its way in one side and out the other did very little to cool her off. Instead, it danced over her, making her feel electric and strange. And aware of too many things she’d prefer to ignore altogether.

The press of her thighs against each other. The heat her own body generated. The touch of the breeze itself, soft and warm all over her, like a caress.

“Tell me what it would take,” she said now. Again. She focused on Jason. On the task at hand. “Tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you.”

He looked...sinful and dangerous. Deeply, inarguably dangerous. Alarms went off inside her, one after the next, and she had to fight to repress a shiver of unease. Or whatever that feeling was that nipped at her and made her wonder if a person could spontaneously combust, after all. Right here and now in an ugly, forgotten hotel.

“I appreciate the offer,” Jason said, in that drawling, suggestive voice of his that danced all over her like a terrible fire. Far worse than any tropical breeze. “But I don’t think you can.”

She told herself the sun and the heat were getting to her, that was all. She was Scottish and she lived in London. She was built for gray skies and buckets of rain, not white-sand beaches and glaringly blue skies without a stray cloud in sight. There had been entirely too much sunshine on her walk from the dock to this sad old hotel, and she was much too pale to handle it. She was experiencing some kind of prickly heat reaction to the weather, nothing more.

He happened to be here, but he wasn’t the cause of it.

It was crazy to imagine otherwise.

“I don’t do business meetings,” Jason told her, and that same insanity swept through her again when his mouth curved, prickly and too hot and clearly not the weather at all. “I’m not into presentations in boardrooms. I hate bankers and proposals and sober contract negotiations. Ad men make me want to break things. I don’t like suits—” and he nodded at her, indicating that he didn’t like hers either “—and I don’t trust anyone who would wear one or sign up to sell snake oil in that kind of place in the first place.”

There was absolutely no reason Lucinda should feel the sting of that as if he’d slapped her. Who cared what he thought about her outfit or her job? What did overly rich men know about anything besides themselves and their net worth?

She forced a smile, though she was afraid it wasn’t nearly as bland as it ought to have been. “This kind of input is helpful. Tell me what kind of meeting you like, where you’d like it to take place and how you’d like everyone involved to dress, and I’ll make it happen. No snake oil allowed.”

Jason’s dark gaze gleamed with a molten gold that was much more dangerous than the breeze or the relentless sun outside. And his grin reminded her of a pirate’s, wide and filled with entirely too much dark intent.

She couldn’t quite breathe.

“You might not like my suggestions,” he pointed out in that lazy way of his, layered with sex and sin.

“I don’t have to like your suggestions,” Lucinda replied tartly. “This is about you. What I like or don’t like is immaterial.”

“If you say so.”

And Lucinda had always prided herself on being able to read people. It had been a necessary component of her climb out of the hole of her poverty-stricken childhood. She could read people like a book, and she’d always read them at lightning speed, because that was the only way to avoid her drunken father’s fist or her perpetually bitter mother’s tongue. She’d learned how to avoid the unsavory characters who lurked in the tower blocks, and how to tell the difference between a bored kid and a dangerous criminal when they often looked alike. She’d honed these kinds of skills when she was young and they’d served her well ever after.

The more she could read her superiors and her clients, the better she could anticipate their needs. The more she did that, the more indispensable she made herself, and that was how a girl from nothing made herself a vice president at a multinational corporation when most of the people she’d grown up with had never made it out of the same housing estate where they’d been raised.

Lucinda considered her street smarts an essential tool in her kit.

But she understood it was useless here. With him.

Jason Kaoki was a mystery. A deliberate one, if she didn’t miss her guess, but a mystery all the same. Because he was lounging around wearing nothing but those low-slung water shorts of his, showing off acres and acres of brown skin and a selection of artistic tattoos. His dark hair was much too long for conventional sensibilities, he grinned far too wide and often, he laughed uproariously at the slightest provocation, and everything about him gave off the impression that he was wide open. Easy and amiable and approachable.

But the five men he’d already ejected from this island proved that none of that was true. He might laugh loud and long, but it would be a very great fool indeed who imagined he was easy. In any way.

Against her will, Lucinda found herself wondering why a man who had everything—who had been blessed with all that undeniable athleticism to win himself a place outside his own humble beginnings, instead of having to fight for a way out with a mix of cleverness and desperation as she had—needed to hide in plain sight.

But that wasn’t her business. The resort she wanted to build here was.

And this wasn’t the first time in her life Lucinda had been forced to sit with a smile on her face, fighting to remain calm while other people decided her future at their whim.

As God was her witness, if she could make this work, this would be the last.

“Okay,” he said, after a lifetime or two. With that same dark gaze heavy on her, like a foot on her neck.

That was hardly a helpful image, she chided herself. Especially when her body responded to it as if it was something sexual.

And worse, delicious.

Lucinda eyed him. “Okay?” she echoed.

“Okay,” Jason said again. That impossible mouth of his curved and the gleam in his gaze turned considering. Or challenging. “Get changed. We’re going surfing.”

“Surfing?”

“I don’t think I stuttered, darlin’.”

Lucinda battled to keep her feelings off her face. Her palms ached, and she had to glance down to see that she was digging her own nails into her palms. She uncurled her hands. Painfully.

“You didn’t stutter. But I don’t surf.”

“Then it’s time to learn,” he told her, all drawl, heat and challenge and something she was very much afraid was anticipation all over him. “Because I don’t trust anyone who can’t ride a wave. And I certainly won’t negotiate with them.”

Obviously, the last thing Lucinda wanted to do was get in the water.

She hardly swam at all. She’d learned as a matter of course when she was a teenager, because she’d been born on an island and thought it was ridiculous not to know how to swim if the opportunity presented itself. It had been a practical decision. A matter of survival, like most things involving her childhood and her path out.

Surfing was something else entirely. The word itself made her bristle at the image of lanky blond men drooping over California beaches, all abs and lazy accents.

“I didn’t come here to swim,” she told Jason as crisply as possible. “I’m afraid I brought a very limited wardrobe with me, none of it appropriate for water sports.”

Jason was still lounging there on that couch, like some kind of deity surveying his universe in comfort. Lucinda scolded herself for the thought—but scolding herself didn’t change the fact that was how he looked.

“No worries.” His easy drawl made her think of heat. Light. The thick, sweet seduction of the tropical air—

Settle yourself, madam, she ordered herself, aware the voice in her head sounded a great deal like her mother’s.

“I certainly hope you’re not suggesting I simply toss off all my clothes and leap into the surf like some kind of demented mermaid,” she said tartly.

And instantly regretted the impulse. It was...not wise to talk about taking off clothes in the presence of a man like this. She understood the magnitude of her mistake instantly. She thought the air was already seductive, but suddenly it seemed to burn. As if there was a clenched hand around the both of them and it started to squeeze tight.

Lucinda couldn’t breathe. Her eyes felt wet, as if the tension was making her tear up. She felt much too hot to keep lying to herself about prickly heat or sun when she was sitting inside and the only source of heat anywhere around her was Jason.

Something changed on his face, making him look even more wicked and wild than before. And it didn’t help that there was so much of him. Naked and gleaming and right there—

She was afraid the fire in her was visible. She had to find a way to freeze or she didn’t know what would become of her.

“Nudity is always encouraged.” Jason’s voice was a low drawl, as wicked as his expression. “But no need to make yourself sick about it, darlin’. I got you covered.”

He rose then, shifting from that lounging, lazy posture to his feet in a smooth, athletic shift that made something deep in Lucinda’s belly turn over. And hum.

She understood something then, in a flash. That this was all an act. That there was nothing about him that was lazy in the least. The lounging, the grinning, the darlin’ and the drawl—these were all masks he wore. To conceal the truth of him that she should have known already. He was a world-renowned athlete.

A predator, not to put too fine a point on it, 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.”