“Did he spend a lot of time at his various properties alone?”
This time, Jason’s laugh had an edge. “He wasn’t much for alone time when there were so many women eager to keep him company.”
“Let me make sure I’m following this. You hated your father. You hated everything he stood for, and everything he was.”
“Dear old dad,” Jason drawled in agreement. “The dick.”
“So you’re hiding out here, ten thousand miles away from anywhere, to make yourself feel bad. This entire island is a beach-laden hair shirt bristling with palm trees to you.”
“I barely wear a shirt as it is. Certainly not a hair shirt.”
“You must know that hotels were the only thing that Daniel St. George was any good at. And he was very, very good at hotels. Why shouldn’t you reap the benefits of that?” Lucinda kept her gaze trained on him, pretending she didn’t notice the temper that lurked there. The warning that she had already gone too far. “Especially when it’s not as if you’re saving this place as a tender, emotional monument to anything.”
“Lucinda.” And the way he said her name was its own shudder running through her, lighting her up. Reminding her that whatever else this man was, he wasn’t entirely tame. And a smart woman would do well to remember that. “Why the fuck does this mean so much to you?”
CHAPTER NINE
“I’M SO GLAD you asked,” Lucinda replied in the same slick way she’d said everything since she’d eaten, when Jason preferred her ruffled. Messy. Real. “You’re a man who enjoys elite status. You must know that distinctive properties such as this one cater to—”
“No.”
She stopped talking, blinking. Jason shook his head at her, ordering himself to calm down. Now.
It didn’t matter that she’d wandered out here dressed for the islands at last, instead of some stuffy boardroom. Her flowing sarong reminded him how sweet her curves were, and how they felt beneath his hands, so lush and feminine. And her hair. He could see all the curl in it, a bright riot on top of her head, and he was this close to just putting his hands in it here and now the way he’d wanted to from the start.
She looked wild and delicious and he liked everything from the freckles all over her shoulders to the dazed way she’d looked at him when she’d walked out on this terrace. It all seemed to hum in him, then settle in his cock like a fist.
But none of it mattered if she was going to mouth all the same bullshit.
“I don’t want a sales pitch,” he said when he was reasonably sure that he was going to keep his hands to himself. For the moment. “I could get that anywhere, and believe me, I have. You hauled your ass all the way here, and you stayed. You surfed. That’s more than all the rest of them can say.”
“I bet they didn’t look as cute in that bikini.”
Jason filed away the fact that when her hair wasn’t scraped back into a headache, Lucinda was funny. But he didn’t laugh. He waited. And when she cleared her throat, he pressed his advantage.
“Tell me why you care,” he said again, with even more intensity. “You’re talking about building a hotel, not a refuge for some endangered species. There’s an old hotel falling down on this island already. Why build something new? Why pretend it matters so much?”
“Because it does matter.”
Maybe she surprised herself with that, because she instantly sat up that little bit straighter. Her blue eyes were guarded, but she kept them trained on his. He expected her to back right off. To say something else to defuse the tension, or try to shove them back toward something professional.
Good luck with that. He’d never felt less professional in his life.
When she stood up in a rush, he thought she was going to take it even further and just walk away. It was possible he’d read her wrong, and she was truly nothing more than shiny brochures and boardroom presentations.
But she didn’t run. Instead, she clasped her hands in front of her and faced him.
“I grew up in a housing estate in Glasgow,” she said, and her accent changed again, blurring the vowels and shading the consonants. He liked it. “I think you call them projects in the States, but it’s all the same. Depressed and often desperate people crammed into small spaces together.”
“I’m familiar with the phenomenon.”
Lucinda inclined her head. “The tower block of flats where my family lived is notorious to this day. Filled with crime, poverty and every other social ill you care to mention, we had it in spades. They’ve knocked those towers down now, and good riddance. But that was my home. I was born there, raised there and had every expectation of living out my life there.”
She looked away and unclenched her hands, as if she’d been holding them so tightly that she’d hurt herself. Which made Jason want to do things that didn’t make sense to him, like simply...hold her. Until she felt better.
He shook that off. And she was talking again, staring into the fire.
“I can’t express to you how grim it all was. What it was like to grow up in all that gray concrete, never knowing that there was so much better out there. Shows on television didn’t seem real, not when we lived in such a prison. It was just the telly, beaming in something someone made up so we’d forget where we were. But when I was seven, I happened upon a travel magazine at school one day. I think one of the teachers must have left it behind. And oh, wasn’t that something?”
She shook her head, but Jason was caught by the way her eyes lit up. They reminded him of his beloved sea, out here in the dark. They were that fathomless. That beautiful and changeable, all at once.
“The places in the magazine were real. Not something made up for a television show. They were real and they were beautiful, and that changed the way I thought about everything. When I was a little older, I sneaked down to the grand old railway hotel in Glasgow to see if a hotel could make me feel the way the travel magazines did. And this was before it got a face-lift, but I was in awe just the same.”
Jason felt a little too close to awe himself as he watched the fire move over that wistful expression on her face.
“And from that point on, I knew that hotels were the only kind of fairy tales that mattered,” Lucinda said, turning back to him, her eyes grave. “Because people could live in them. They could come from whatever life they had, whether it was a stately home somewhere or a grotty little bedsit, and they could live a different life for a time.”
“If they could afford it,” Jason said, with maybe too much derision in his voice. Because he wasn’t sure if he was determined to slap reality on her—or himself, for getting caught up in the story she was telling.
“I can’t think of many things I’d rather spend my money on than a dream come true,” she replied softly. “That’s what a hotel is. The better the hotel, the better the happily-ever-after. It should be made clear in every small detail. The softness of the sheets. The beauty of the view. The excellence of the staff. Each and every part of the fairy tale builds the story as a whole.”
She waved a hand toward the house, the last Daniel St. George property. The one his sycophants claimed meant the most to him. Why did that notion make Jason want to burn it to the ground?
“I look at a place like this and I think this is the kind of paradise that normal people want to remember for the rest of their lives. And wanting memories like this becomes the kind of dreams that make normal life worth living. I would happily scrimp and save for a week in a dream come true. I have. Would you?”
Jason felt as if he’d been waiting years for her. All the hours she’d been asleep, for sure, leaving him prowling around this place with all his rough edges driving him crazy. His mouth was dry. He was practically beside himself, if he was honest, but he could still control that. Or pretend well enough.
What he couldn’t seem to wrestle into submission was the sensation blowing up his chest, making him
want nothing more than to take every dream this woman had ever had and make it come true. Right here, right now.
And that made him feel ripped in half. Dumb and blindly stupid with all these feelings he didn’t like and didn’t want.
But he wanted her more.
“I never would’ve pegged you for starry-eyed optimist,” he managed to say without betraying his own distinct lack of chill.
Her mouth curved slightly, and the light in those blue eyes didn’t dim. “That’s funny. I’d call myself a realist.”
“A realist who arranged her life around happily-ever-afters and dreams coming true. Because that’s real practical.”
“I know you know what it’s like to grow up with nothing,” she said softly. “Lucky to find shoes to put on your feet. Much less ones that fit.”
“That’s the cool thing about growing up in Hawaii. Shoes are optional.”
“Everything you have, Jason, you built for yourself. With your brain. With your body. With every shrewd decision and every stellar athletic performance. I didn’t play football. But I did educate myself into a university degree. Just as I’ve performed my way into every position I’ve held. No matter how I got it.”
His heart was doing weird flips. He rubbed at it, like that could shut it up.
“I hope that means you have flexible morals and no compunction whatsoever about sleeping your way around.” Jason grinned, wide and maybe a little desperate. He hoped she couldn’t see that part. “Just like me.”
“I use whatever tools I have at my disposal,” she replied, a faint line appearing between her brows. “And that’s all I’m asking you to do in return.”
“Fuck a lot?” He leaned back in his seat, despite all the roaring insanity inside him, like he could lounge there forever. Like he was on the verge of terminal boredom. “I can do that.”
Lucinda started pacing then, back and forth in front of the fire pit. Jason should have found her agitating. Instead, the only word that seemed to dance around inside him was adorable.
As far as he could tell, it was one more way to make sure he knew he was boned.
“I’m talking about this island,” she said. “The opportunity to create something truly special.”
“But again, only for the kind of people who can afford it. And I’m betting every single one of them will remind me a little too much of the giant douche who built this place. Why would I want that?”
She shot a look at him with Why are you here? written all over it.
But that wasn’t what she said. “When you create destination fantasies, you might be surprised to discover what sort of people think it’s in their best interests to get there. One way or another.”
He told himself all that carrying on in his chest was irritation. Not even temper. “Oh yeah? How many luxury properties do you stay at every year?”
“As it happens, I’m not great at taking all my allotted holiday time. I’m sure you’ve experienced that kind of pressure before. The people I work with are obsessed with status. Which means I have to be, too.”
She kept making connections between them and Jason didn’t want any part of that. There was only one part of him that liked connecting, and his dick didn’t talk.
“But you’re not into that, of course. You’re above that kind of thing. Like every other woman who’s chased after me since I got that football scholarship.”
She did another lap.
“What interests me about high-status properties are what can be done with them,” she said, as if he was having a serious conversation with her. Instead of acting like a sulky teenager. “And how much of an immersive experience they provide. Because the sad truth about many high-status operations is that they rest on their laurels and don’t offer the paying clients much of anything besides the bill. I prefer experiences. I want clients to forget about the outside world entirely. I want leaving one of my properties to feel like leaving home, and I want it to haunt them once they’re gone.”
“I told you my position on ghosts.”
Her gaze met his again, and he was sure she could feel the sizzle. So sure, in fact, that he found himself paying more attention to the way she was walking back and forth in front of him. More quickly each time. And her breath getting more and more shallow with each pass.
Making it clear to him that he wasn’t the only one feeling crushed in the grip of the tension between them.
What did it make him that he was actually relieved? When he couldn’t actually recall the last time the faintest sexual urge he’d had wasn’t heartily and enthusiastically requited?
“I know that you’re a man who likes to do good, Jason.”
“That’s nothing but a nasty rumor.”
“I know it’s not only a rumor. The truth is that the kind of conscious luxury experience that I’m talking about will preserve this island. And allow all kinds of people to experience what makes all the Pacific Islands so special in the first place. Of course, tourism can cause its own problems. I don’t deny that. But how can people realize what they ought to help save if they can’t experience it in as close to an unspoiled state as possible?”
Her face changed when she was truly animated. When she wasn’t buttoning herself up in funeral clothes or beating her hair into submission. She was flushed with this passion of hers, her eyes bright and her voice intent, and he wanted to be inside her with such ferocity that it might have scared him.
If he wasn’t so sure that it was only a matter of time.
“I might not be a natural beach person,” she said, sounding fully Scottish and wholly alive as she wedged herself farther beneath his skin with every word. “I might personally prefer the shade of a tree to the glaring heat of white sand midday, I grant you. But this place is seductive. It’s magical. It’s not only that people will never want to leave here. It will make them happy to stay here. I don’t know much about your father, or not much more than anyone else, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that whatever else he was, he certainly wasn’t a happy man. And it seems to me that creating a space for happiness in a place he built to be more of the same empty life he already led is the greatest revenge you could possibly have on him.”
That caught at him.
Lucinda warmed to her topic, and her hands got into the act as she started talking about all those blueprints and building codes he’d already told her didn’t interest him. And it was true. He didn’t care. But he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her.
And the fact she’d unerringly narrowed in on the one thing he wanted that he couldn’t have.
Revenge.
“Maybe we can dig him up, animate him and kill him all over again,” his half sister, Angelique Masterson, had suggested a few hours ago on one of the weekly calls the heirs of Daniel St. George—Jason’s half siblings—were obligated to have.
Angelique had been sitting somewhere in one of the beautiful rooms of the hotel she ran in the desert kingdom of Sadat, where she’d charmed a prince and met all the extra terms Daniel St. George had thrown in her path, simply because she was a girl. She’d been toying with the choker necklace she wore all the time now, its elegance somehow working with her full sleeves of tattoos. Only Angelique.
Revenge on their late and unlamented father was a topic they returned to often, as it happened.
“That makes me feel warm all over,” his half brother Charlie Teller had said from Italy, kicked back on a terrace with pastel houses falling down the cliff behind him and the sound of a woman’s voice in the background—his wife, presumably, doing her lawyer thing just out of range. Charlie had smirked. “Almost like we’re a real family, after all.”
“My understanding is that this is the way of all families,” the oldest of the half brothers had said. Thor Ragnarsson looked every inch the modern Viking he was, standing near a window in one of those suits he loved, a
nd Iceland’s endless snow swirling around behind him. And no sign of his forbiddingly smart, purple-haired professor. “Endless grudges, revenge fantasies and petty squabbling. I suspect that makes us real already.”
“That sounds a whole lot like white people problems,” Jason had rumbled, letting out one of his trademark belly laughs. Mostly because he knew his half siblings found him both baffling and confronting. “In Hawaii we call it ohana. It’s a way of life, motherfuckers. We don’t squabble like little bitches. We eat. It’s hard to get fired up about some petty bullshit when your belly’s nice and full of a good kalua pork and there’s nothing to do but sit around talking story.”
But for all his protestations to his half siblings, who had all gotten a hell of a lot happier since they’d first started these online meetings thanks to finding themselves some steady loving in one place or another, that wasn’t quite how he felt about Daniel St. George. Or himself.
Or about the things his mother had said to him when she’d called him out.
Or, hell, even this island.
He hadn’t put it in the stark terms Lucinda had. But now he couldn’t think of it in any other way.
Was he finding himself here? Or was he squatting in this house, deliberately not using the island the way his father would have? Like that could somehow stick it to the old man beyond the grave?
He focused back in on Lucinda, who was still pacing around in front of him, warming to whatever point she was making.
The importance of fragrance to help create the feeling of effortless hospitality, if he wasn’t mistaken.
And just like that, Jason was done.
The next time she paced too close, he reached out and snagged her. She made a satisfying, high-pitched sort of squeaking sound as he hauled her into his lap, and he was just animal enough to delight in it.
Then she was right there. Right where he wanted her, her chest heaving and her eyes so wide he was sure he could see forever in them.
“Scotland,” he growled. “Shut up.”
Untamed Page 9
