Читать книгу The Dare Collection March 2019 - Rachael Stewart - Страница 12

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 go. Do you know their names? Or do you like the fact you’re carrying on his tradition of anonymous encounters everywhere you go? Seems to me you’re just like him, after all.”

That had sucked.

Jason had removed himself from all temptation the very next day.

But what was he supposed to do when temptation wandered onto his very own deserted island? With an agenda all its own?

He didn’t want to be a piece of shit like his father. But he was only a man.

He watched Lucinda’s struggle play out across her perfect oval of a face. Her blue eyes gleamed from temper or emotion, and she looked at him like she was considering taking a strip or two out of his hide—or trying—but her flush mouth pressed into a tight line instead. She had a tough little chin, he noticed when she lifted it, high and belligerent like she was ready to fight.

But she didn’t take a swing at him. She didn’t try to talk him down. Instead, she did the last thing he’d imagined she would do. She reached out and snatched up the tiny bikini from the front desk.

“You’d best find a bottle of sunscreen, then,” she said in her prissy voice that seemed to wind itself around his cock. He told himself it was only because he’d restricted himself from women at present. That it was nothing personal. But he wasn’t sure his unruly dick got that message. “I won’t be a moment.”

Jason watched, fascinated and filled with something a little too much like that adrenaline he was supposed to be taking a break from, as she swept around the corner of the front desk and slammed the office door behind her.

And Jason had been through a lot of shit in his time. He’d been forced to sit and wait for things outside his control to play out when he was younger, and he couldn’t say he’d ever enjoyed the experience. Not when he’d been a young hothead determined to prove that he was worth the life his artistic mother had given up when she’d had to clean hotel rooms to support the both of them. Not when he’d been a member of a team, subject to the whims of his teammates and coaches.

Not now, either. In these later years, he had cultivated patience. Or the appearance of it, anyway. He’d learned how to breathe. How to relax. How to focus his aggression and attention when needed, and turn it off when it was nothing more than a hindrance. Or that was what he’d been working on here, in his hideaway from the world and the man he was becoming against his will.

Waiting for a woman to change into a bathing suit shouldn’t have registered at all. It shouldn’t have gotten his blood pumping. And there was absolutely no reason he should feel like a kid, randy and wild, as one moment stretched out into the next and he couldn’t seem to do anything but imagine her...arranging herself into that bikini.

Would it even cover her? Would she try to wear something over it?

And his heartbeat was like a drum as he pondered these questions, pounding out a rhythm that seemed to land heavy in his cock.

Something shifted in him as he waited, making him feel restless and on edge. It took him a minute to figure out that it was a pang of regret.

That he hadn’t gone with her into that office to help her out of those clothes. That he wasn’t even now treating himself to that first, lush view of all her pale, sweet skin. That he wasn’t the first hit of Pacific sunshine she would get today, his gaze bathing her in light and heat.

Maybe followed by his mouth.

He should have laughed at that, he knew. He was Jason Kaoki, for fuck’s sake. He could have any woman he wanted, and had—apparently to such an excess that his mother had felt the need to comment on his life choices.

“Everyone’s looking for the next Daniel St. George, son,” she’d said, pruning her plants on the lanai of the house he’d bought for her with his first million—though she’d refused to move into it, claiming it was too haole, until somewhere around his fifth or sixth million. “I guess you decided to rise to the challenge.”

Because Jason’s brand-new half siblings didn’t make half as much noise as he did in the tabloids. The oldest, Thor Ragnarsson, was some kind of Icelandic Viking. He ran a hotel way up there on the top of the world that catered to sexual pleasures among consenting adults, but he rarely made the covers of magazines. The next oldest, Charlie Teller, kept his past murky and his profile low enough to suggest there was a reason he avoided attention. Their half sister, Angelique Masterson, had gone off and gotten herself involved with an honest-to-God prince, which probably would have made more of a splash if the two of them hadn’t spent most of their time off in the prince’s kingdom with a far-better-behaved press corps.

That left only Jason and a world fascinated with his exploits whether he liked it or not.

He wanted to change that, sure. He was working on it. But in the meantime there was no reason he should be tied in knots over some prissy accountant-type who’d shown up on a tropical island in a business suit. A dark black business suit. He was taking a break, he wasn’t hard up.

It was ridiculous. She was ridiculous.

Which was when she threw open the office door and stepped out into the lobby again, and his head went blank.

He could feel every drop of blood in his body surge downward, pooling in his cock so fast and so swiftly it was almost painful.

Jason had received punches to the face and in the gut during his brawling years that hurt less, and had knocked him back less, than the sight of Lucinda standing there in a tiny string bikini he had clearly chosen for no other purpose than to torture himself.

It was possible he swallowed his own tongue.

He expected her to cower. To hunch her shoulders over in an attempt to hide herself from view in such a tiny excuse for a swimsuit.

But not Lucinda.

Instead of any hunching or cowering or other evidence of insecurity, her too-blue eyes clapped to his and held fast.

And if he wasn’t mistaken, the look she was leveling at him was a sheer, unmistakable challenge. As if she was taking his dare and making it worse by shoving it straight down his throat.

Because she didn’t lurk in the shadows. She didn’t try to cover herself. Prissy, prim, uptight Lucinda—because he was sure that was who she’d been when she’d walked into this lobby—sauntered out of the back office like a wet dream.

Her shoulders were back, giving him a perfect view of those plump, round breasts that should have been a little too much for the bikini top. His palms itched to explore the suit’s structural integrity, but he kept them to himself.

Barely.

The brightly striped triangles of the top strained over taut nipples he wanted to taste with his own tongue, and below, another triangle covered her pussy. It left nothing but a string between her ass cheeks while it also told him that she likely sported a Brazilian, because the good stuff was so neatly concealed from his view.

Everything else was Lucinda.

God help him.

When he got his brain out of his cock, all he could think was that she looked like a sculpture. Something carved in marble or ivory, by man’s loving, tender hands.

He only wished they had been his.

She was so starkly, distinctively pale, in defiance of all the sun and sand and bright blue sky that made this island what it was. And the spate of golden freckles, tossed here and there over her body, only seemed to draw attention to her ethereal, impossible beauty.

She’d left her hair slicked back in that killer bun that gave him a headache, but that was an argument for another time.

Because she came to a sultry kind of stop before him like the goddess of a religion he wanted to practice, suddenly, more than he wanted to breathe.

She held his gaze, hard and sure. And if he wasn’t mistaken, there was a light of triumph in those sea-colored eyes of hers.

“Are we surfing?” she asked, with a lilt in her voice that he knew was yet another challenge. “Or are we just going to stare?”

Jason knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that his monastic retreat from the world was over.

And temptation had won.

Hallelujah.