Читать книгу The Dare Collection March 2019 - Rachael Stewart - Страница 19

LUCINDA WOKE UP the way she always did, in a sudden, panicked rush. As if, should she be expected to fight in the next instant, she would be ready—

Except she’d already fought and lost.

That unpleasant truth slapped at her, making her usual panic rise high and hard inside her.

She sat up straight in Jason’s wide bed, blinking around the mess of it—sheets strewn about, the pillows thrown here and there—and tried her best not to recall every last smoking-hot second that had led to each damning bit of evidence. Each pointing to exactly where and when and how she’d lost control of herself and this situation completely.

Jason was stretched out beside her, commanding even as he slept. And it took her a distressingly long moment to understand that the silvery light playing over all those perfect, brown muscles and powerful limbs came from the moon up above, pouring in through a skylight she hadn’t realized was there.

Because all she’d seen was him.

It was time to leave. Now, something in her urged her, before it’s too late.

Lucinda didn’t want to know what too late meant, not when her body didn’t feel like hers anymore. Not when her hair bounced all around her in a horrifying red tangle and she could still feel Jason as if he’d left fingerprints all over her. Worse, there was a not-insignificant part of her that hoped he had.

And none of this was how Lucinda usually behaved. She knew how to handle herself in business and in bedrooms with equal focus and reserve. She’d never been tested, really. She moved forward, eyes forever on the prize. The next hotel. The next orgasm.

And she never, ever looked back.

Lucinda didn’t know how to handle the part of her that wanted nothing more than to lie back down and snuggle up against Jason’s sculpted side. The part that wanted to breathe in his scent a little longer. Maybe feel the weight of his heavy arm again.

And best of all, be there when he woke up.

But that was something Lucinda never, ever did. Not even on a private island across the planet from everything she knew and all the rules she’d made to survive that cold, gray life. She didn’t do morning-afters. She didn’t do cozy wake-ups or cuddles or lazy breakfasts, much less the kind of sex that went along with those things, so syrupy and intimate and no bloody way.

Of all the things Jason had done to her, from that bikini to surfing to his deliciously dirty imagination in bed, she thought this was the worst. The most unacceptable and unforgivable.

He had made her into just another dreamy-eyed idiot, like all the rest. All the women who came and went from her company because they lost their focus. All the girls who had let boyfriends turn their heads at university. Not to mention her own mother, who had complained endlessly about Lucinda’s father but had never dreamed of leaving him and his drunken rampages.

That Lucinda had managed to claw her way out had been treated like a betrayal. It had taken only a few disastrous trips back home from university for Lucinda to understand that her mother would have preferred her only child died rather than better herself in any way—because that was much too confronting.

So for all intents and purposes, Lucinda had gone ahead and died. The hapless, bullied Lucinda who had lived with her always-rowing parents might as well have been dead, because the Lucinda who had taken her place was nothing like her.

She wasn’t soft. She wasn’t malleable. She was a creature of goals and focus who allowed herself only brief, strictly controlled releases in the form of sex she controlled and the orgasms she produced with very little assistance.

Jason had ruined everything. Or would, if she didn’t take back what little control she could.

She rolled out of the bed, her heart kicking at her as if she was running a race. Or as if she’d found a terrible truth about herself in the wide bed with its carved koa headboard—one that was moments away from being shared with the world. It was that panicky, laced through with shame.

But there was nothing she could do but what she was doing. She retraced the steps she’d taken in what seemed like a different life, all those hours ago. Out of the master bedroom without a backward glance, straight out onto the terrace, letting the moon dance all over her body as she moved through the soft night. She didn’t like it. It felt too much like another trespass. The seduction of the air itself that had made her far too susceptible to the man.

And she could still feel him. Still. She was afraid to look down at her own flesh in the moonlight, because she was more certain with every step that he hadn’t left handprints or mouth prints. Those would fade. She was far more afraid that he’d tattooed himself deep into her. That he’d marked her permanently.

You are changed forever, something intoned inside her, as if from on high.

Her pussy liked that idea entirely too much, blooming with a new heat even as Lucinda made it back to the fire pit and found the sarong she’d discarded there hours ago. When Jason had hooked an arm around her and hauled her over his lap and altered the shape of things.

You are changed, that voice said again, and she scowled, because she didn’t want any changes, thank you. She liked herself just as she was: ambitious, determined and immune to the emotional highs and lows other people seemed to feel with such alarming regularity. Lucinda had experienced enough emotional turmoil as a child to last her a lifetime.

She wanted her life smooth and tailored. She wanted her hair and her clothes the same way. The current state of her hair, with her curls an exuberant disaster all around, appalled her. As did her state of undress.

When she picked up the sarong from the ground and wrapped it around her torso, her fingers felt clumsy and shaky. It took her several tries to knot it into place, each one a separate indictment of this pit she’d fallen into. And yet, when she was as dressed as she was going to get and ready to march herself back to her cottage and sort herself out, she just stood there.

As if the moonlight was a confessional.

Everything that had happened since she’d woken up from that unexpected and highly unprofessional eight-hour nap flooded through her then. She hardly knew which thing to take out and examine first when they all crashed over her together. The fact that she had actually told Jason Kaoki—a property owner she wanted to bring on board, not her bloody therapist—the reason why she did what she did? A secret so deeply lodged inside her that she had never said it out loud to another living soul? He didn’t need to know why she liked hotels. No one needed to know that.

How was she supposed to go on trying to get him to develop this island now? What was she supposed to do now that she’d exposed herself so completely?

And that was all before they’d had sex.

Though maybe she needed a new word to describe what had happened between them. Because she understood the mechanics, and she’d thought she’d understood her own body’s reactions, but she had never experienced anything like what had transpired between her and Jason tonight.

It had about as much to do with what she thought sex was as a unicorn did with a tiny plastic toy shaped like one.

Lucinda shuddered, standing there in the dangerous tropical moonlight with only the embers of the fire that had blazed in that pit remaining. Glowing at her like the sparks of all the things she’d done with Jason, daring her to pretend it had all been bog standard. Easily dismissed.

And not the most overwhelming, raw and intimate experience of her life.

She squeezed her eyes shut, curling her hands into fists and blowing out a long breath. But that didn’t change the fact that inside, she felt as if she’d survived an earthquake. Or lived through one, anyway. All that remained of her was rubble and ash, crushed down into smithereens.

With aftershocks racing through her when she least expected it, since every time she thought about the things they had done, her pussy throbbed. With greed.

And she didn’t need to walk back over to the master bedroom and peer inside again, because the sight of Jason sprawled out across the bed with moonlight all over him would be burned in her head forever.

Even asleep, he commanded attention.

Hell, even asleep and nowhere near her, he was all she could think about.

Lucinda had no choice but to accept what she’d already known—what she’d thought distinctly after the first time Jason had turned her inside out on that bed. Which hadn’t even been the first time he’d turned her inside out.

She had made a mistake. A big one.

Lucinda had assumed that she could come here and convince Jason to build her the resort she’d always wanted. She’d dismissed the men who’d assured her that Jason Kaoki was impossible to persuade. She’d hand-waved away all the lectures she’d received on the topic, because she’d been sure she could do things all those men couldn’t. 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?”