Читать книгу The Dare Collection March 2019 - Rachael Stewart - Страница 14

THE WAVES USUALLY brought him nothing but peace.

No matter what else might have been going on in his life—whether it was football, or simply existing on the mainland that always seemed so far removed from anything he knew—Jason had always found his place in the water. Give him a board and a free hour and he’d find a wave. And with it, a way to get back to what mattered.

But he’d miscalculated with Lucinda.

He kept thinking she would back down. But she didn’t.

He never expected her to put on that bikini and come back out of the office. And once she had, and he’d predictably lost his shit, he’d figured she’d draw the line at his putting his hands all over that tight, curvy little body of hers.

Instead, she’d refused to give in to the wild heat that was still blazing between them. And she’d come out of it a little bit flushed with SPF 50 all over her, while he felt like a sixteen-year-old kid with a boner in gym class.

It would have been funny if it was happening to someone else.

“I don’t know how to surf,” she announced.

He’d hauled two surfboards down to the water’s edge, pretending the whole time that he wasn’t going out of his way to make himself busy with this most minor form of manual labor just to see if he could calm the fuck down. Newsflash: he wasn’t calm.

Jason shot her a glance. She was standing there with the Pacific licking at her toes. There was nothing but a string separating her ass cheeks, and her breasts in the bikini top were valiantly fighting gravity. And still she was talking down to him like she was the queen of fucking England.

“I know how to swim. But I’ve never surfed.” Her blue eyes glinted, a lot like the sunlight on the Pacific all around her, and filled with the same intense challenge. “I’ve never quite seen the point, if I’m honest.”

“You don’t look for the point in surfing, you just surf. The point finds you when you’re ready.”

“That almost sounds philosophical.”

“If you need me to write you a poem about the communion between the waves and the rush, the sea and the sky, you’re never going to get it. And if you’re never going to get it, you might as well get the fuck off my island, Lucinda. Now.”

Once again, he expected her to look a little bit cowed at that. So of course she didn’t. “I don’t need poetry. But some basic instruction might not go amiss.”

He was getting wound up, and that wasn’t him. And it wasn’t smart, either.

Jason had never let his emotions get the best of him. Emotions were fuel, nothing more, and this was no time to change that. Because this woman might look like a sweet dollop of cream slapped down in the middle of the Pacific for no other purpose than to get him hard—to look him in the eye and refuse to come for him—but that wasn’t why she was here. She wasn’t a wet dream come to life. She was one more shark dressed up in business clothes, looking to make him a developer dickhead, just like the old man who was nothing to Jason but a sperm donor.

Fuck Daniel St. George, and fuck Lucinda Graves, too.

For some reason, he didn’t just up and say that.

“Surfing is like most things in life,” he growled instead, scowling at her. “It’s as simple or as complicated as you make it. All you have to do is balance on the board, then stand up and keep balancing. Once you do that, you ride the waves. That’s it. That’s the secret. But how well or how badly you do that entirely depends on you.”

That chin of hers, entirely too aggressive for a tiny slip of a woman who was likely only as dangerous as that red hair of hers was real, lifted. Suggesting to him that maybe the hair really was natural.

“I have excellent balance, actually.”

He shouldn’t have found that at all entertaining. “Do you, now?”

“I come from a long line of ornery Scottish Highlanders, as a matter of fact. What that means is that I can drink wee drams of whiskey all night long and still walk a straight line.” She lifted one milky white shoulder, then dropped it. “Balancing on a bit of water should be nothing.”

He laughed at her. Loud and long, and he wasn’t even performing his laugh the way he often did around people who were interested less in him and more in the things he had—his celebrity, his money, his island. It was genuine this time, and like the hard-on that wouldn’t go away, it told him things about this woman and her effect on him that should have scared the crap out of him.

But he was too busy laughing. “I like your confidence.”

She smiled at that, which didn’t do anything for his self-control. “I would have thought it was pretty clear that any woman willing to travel forty hours to meet a man who was as likely to kick her off his island as say hello didn’t lack for confidence.”

There was some kind of foreboding kick in him at that, like an alarm. It went off, and there was no pretending otherwise, but Jason didn’t heed it.

He heeded a different urge entirely and reached over to smooth his hand over her sleek red hair, hot in the sunshine and still tied back so tightly to the back of her head, like the world would end if it ever tumbled down.

And he knew. One way or another, he was going to get his hands in all that hair and bring it down out of that tight-assed bun. He could picture it so clearly. Lucinda riding him, those perfect breasts right there to get his mouth on, that hair around him like a curtain, and his cock so deep inside her that he was half-blind with it.

He felt half-blind now. And he knew.

It was only a matter of time.

But that time wasn’t now. And he was going to have to find a way to cut down on all those complications he didn’t want to feel, but did, before they wrecked him. Because he had no intention of letting this woman—or any woman—wreck him.

That line of thought should have been sobering, but he was in it now. He wanted his hands all over her, and the truth was that Jason had grown accustomed to getting what he wanted.

Go big or go home, motherfucker, he told himself.

“Enough talking,” he drawled at her.

He nodded at the surfboard at her feet. Then stood there, making no particular attempt to hide his smirk as Lucinda eyed the board as if she expected it to rise from its slumber and turn into some kind of alligator. Jaws and all.

But, of course, she didn’t ask for any help. She didn’t argue with him. She set her jaw at a mutinous angle and then she awkwardly dragged the board into the water, hurling herself through the breakers with more ruthless determination than any kind of skill.

He was impressed despite himself, because hardheaded women hit him straight in his sweet spot. Whether he liked it or not.

Jason followed, throwing himself on his board and paddling out into the lagoon, keeping an eye on his redhead as she splashed around, making more noise than headway.

“Do you need me to tow you out?” he asked after watching her flail, his voice just silky enough to make her glare at him.

“Well, I don’t know how to answer that, do I?” she retorted, and he was delighted to hear more Scotland in her voice than before.

That told him two things about her, and fast. One, she had the exact simmering, redheaded temper he’d imagined she did, which made him that much more motivated to experiment with all that fire and fury in bed. And two, that just as he had been forced to ease up on his Hawaiian pidgin and so-called “surfer” accent when he’d headed to the mainland—because all those haole fuckers interpreted his way of talking as evidence of stupidity—Lucinda had clearly done something similar with her accent. He didn’t have to know the history of the United Kingdom to figure that anyone who could sound like that redheaded Disney princess in the cartoon one minute, then cover it up like she belonged on the BBC the next, had a lot of the same issues he did.

Of course, imagining that their issues matched—or should, if he looked hard enough—told him any number of things about himself he had zero interest in analyzing just then.

“Are you asking me for help, Scotland?” he asked lazily, ignoring the tightening sensation in his chest as he sat up on his board and relaxed into the roll of the waves beneath him. “Or are you just complaining?”

“It’s evidently quite important to you that I make a fool out of myself according to your preferred method. I wouldn’t wish to let you down.”

“I’m out in the water with a nearly naked woman. What letdown are you worried about? The worst thing that’s going to happen to you is that you fall off, and if there’s a God, lose that bikini. I’m here for it.”

She raised two fingers at him, but he somehow didn’t believe that she was making that particular V for victory.

And then he sat back and laughed himself silly as his angry, no longer dour or businesslike redhead tried to hurl herself up onto her surfboard.

He lost track of how many times she scrabbled up, then tried to get to her feet, only to lose her balance and have the board shoot out from under her.

She fell over and over, splashing into the waves and then paddling furiously to the surface, but she always tried again. She kept muttering out filthy curses in that increasingly more obvious accent of hers, one after the next. Sounding more and more Scottish as she went.

Jason sat back on his own surfboard, busting a gut laughing and watching the show. When she fell for approximately the nine millionth time, he reached out and caught the tip of her board with one hand as it shot away from her. And he studied her when she bobbed up to the surface, rising and falling with the swell of the water.

“You about ready to admit defeat?”

She bared her teeth at him. “Death first.”

But when she swam over to climb up onto her board again, he reached down and hooked her under one arm. Then hauled her out of the water, up and onto his board. He settled her between his legs, then he reached over and clipped her surfboard to his, countering the jerky little movements she made with his thighs.

“Are you trying to dump us both in the water?” he asked lazily enough, and snaked an arm around her waist, pulling her back against him. “I don’t think you understand balance. Maybe in a global sense.”

“Let me guess. You’re going to teach me. It’s my lucky day.”

Jason figured it was his lucky day, anyway. She was sleek and wet. The breeze had dried him off, which meant she was cool against his chest, and fit there between his thighs a little too perfectly. He wanted to settle his mouth in that place where her neck joined her shoulder. He wanted to push her forward onto her hands, lift that fine ass of hers and settle into her from behind—and who cared if they drifted all the way out to sea?

But he did none of those things, because he was a goddamn saint.

“Settle down, Scotland.” She wiggled a little, then stopped when he pressed his thighs tighter against her, and he liked that a whole lot more than was wise. “You need to stop thinking about all the ways you can conquer the surfboard, and more about the way the water’s going to conquer you if you don’t respect it a little more.”

She scowled over her pale shoulder, gleaming with a new spray of golden freckles. “I thought the entire point of surfing was conquering the bloody water.”

“We already covered this. Stop looking for the point. Start looking for balance. And because I can tell you’re not going to get this, balance isn’t about conquering anything. It’s about letting yourself become a part of it and taking what you need.”

This time, Lucinda sighed. “Nothing in your portfolio suggested you were a new-age hippie.”

She sounded appalled.

Jason laughed again, and had the distinct pleasure of feeling the way she shivered in response, right there against him. He could see the goose bumps that rose on her neck and snaked down her arms. He was fascinated and more than a little hot himself, but somehow kept himself from licking them up with his tongue.

“I’m not a hippie, darlin’. I’m Hawaiian.”

He moved then, setting her farther in front of him on the board, liking how easy it was to lift her and move her where he wanted her. Then he jackknifed himself up, bringing his feet out of the water and onto the board, then standing in a single swift movement that he’d practiced so many times it didn’t require thought. And before she could comment on it or jerk around on the board, he reached down and picked her up, too.

“What are you doing?”

And Jason knew that she had no idea how panicked she sounded, or she would probably have bitten off her own tongue.

He kept hold of her. “Relax.”

“Right. Because, first of all, everyone relaxes on command. The best thing to say to someone when they’re not relaxed, in fact, is relax in exactly that tone. That does the trick, every time.”

“Stop talking, Lucinda.”

He pulled her close to him again, with one big hand on that soft, sweet belly of hers. And he wanted nothing more than to eat up the way she shuddered, then flushed red. Everywhere.

But he didn’t put his mouth on her the way he wanted to do. Instead, he held her there, keeping the board balanced beneath them as they floated.

“You don’t fight the waves. Fighting them is a quick way to end up face down in the water. You feel them. Every one of them.”

He could feel her tense. Every sweet little curve of that lush body of hers, wound up and ready to fight no matter what he said. But instead of hurling something back at him, she only shuddered again, holding her arms out from her sides.

Like she’d seen surfing on television once.

“Good girl,” he murmured approvingly, and then grinned at the little noise she made in response to that. “Balance,” he said again. “You’re never going to beat a wave into submission. But you can ride it.”

And for a while, all they did was stand there like the surfboard was a paddleboard and let the ocean do its thing. One wave after another lifted them up, then brought them down again. Over and over, without end.

It was the rhythm of his life. It was his own heartbeat, there in his chest.

It was what brought him back to himself and it was why he’d come here, where no one was around to snap pictures of him or get in his face about his father or football or both, so he could find that heartbeat again.

But helping Lucinda find that same rhythm charmed him, somehow. And made his actual beat a little faster.

Eventually, Jason let go of her and let her find her feet on her own. Once she got the hang of that, he jumped off the board, leaving her to do it on her own. When she had that down, he unclipped the boards and pulled himself onto the other one so he could watch her.

“Now what?” she demanded, her body in the correct position, if far too rigid. And the frown on her face a clue that she wasn’t anywhere close to relaxed or balanced.

But he gave her points for trying.

He pointed at the water. “Now you jump in and climb up on your own.”

It took her a few tries to get in the water and pull herself out, then stand up on the board, finding her feet beneath her.

“Good job,” he said. “Now you catch a wave.”

“‘Catch a wave,’” she muttered, as if he’d said catch a star, or something. “Right. I’ll just catch one, shall I?”

But he knew she would, because for all the muttering and the scowling, she kept trying. She never flipped out. She simply fell down and got up again. Over and over and over.

It was impossible not to admire her.

Or want to get his hands on her again, with more desperation than he was comfortable admitting, even out here where there no witnesses to his foolishness but the waves and the sky.

“You’re going to start paddling,” he told her. And realized when he heard the intensity in his own voice that he was entirely too invested in this woman doing the very thing he’d wanted her to fail at before. He wanted her to get up. He wanted her to ride the wave. He wanted her, and he didn’t know how to handle that. So he ignored it. “When you feel the wave pick you up, you get up and you ride. Got it?”

“It’s that simple, is it?”

Though her voice was skeptical, they had been out in the water too long. No matter how grumpy she sounded, she obeyed him.

Jason liked that a whole lot more than he should have.

“It’s that simple,” he promised her. Gruffly.

And when the next wave came, he put his hand on the back of her board and threw her into it.

Then watched with an intoxicating mix of pride and greed as his tight-assed little redhead pulled herself up, balanced herself beautifully and rode her first wave all the way into shore.