“I don’t give a shit about the island, darlin’,” Jason said quietly. “If I wake up one morning filled with regret that I developed this one, guess what? I can buy myself another one. As you pointed out, the place itself has no sentimental value to me. But it does to you.”
“Wrong again.” She quirked her lips into that frozen, polite smile that she probably didn’t realize just made him hard. “I’m not a sentimental person. It’s not in my nature.”
“Maybe not in the past. But you didn’t know me then.”
This time her laugh was straight-up patronizing. “This conversation is becoming deeply embarrassing.”
She didn’t say, for you. She didn’t have to say it.
“I don’t embarrass easily,” Jason replied. He smoothed his hand down the front of his monkey suit, amused when her gaze tracked the movement. And even more entertained when her eyes snapped back to his, her cheeks flushing when she saw he was watching her do it. “You can have my island. And develop it anyway you want, tiki torches and private coves out the ass for all I care. We can sign all these contracts and all the lawyers can wet themselves with this clause and that clause. Whatever. But you and I are going to come to different kind of agreement.”
She regarded him coolly. “I’m listening.”
So stuffy. So clipped, like she was the Queen talking down to a dirty peasant. But she should know better. Because she and Jason weren’t that different, underneath it all. He knew all about her now. And he knew that trash like the two of them loved it when they were underestimated. Hell, it gave them life.
“You already gave me your body once,” he said, low and lazy, like this was a bar instead of a boardroom. “All I want is more.”
Color stained her cheeks, but Lucinda didn’t flinch. Her cool expression didn’t change at all. “Define ‘more.’”
“You,” he said, very distinctly and directly. So there could be no mistake. “In my bed. As long as it takes.”
“As long as it takes to have sex? I think we both know that’s no time at all. Did you really fly all the way here to ask for a quick shag?”
“For as long as it takes to build your resort,” he said, patient now as he waited for that to sink in.
The color all over her cheeks deepened. Her eyes narrowed. And at her sides, those adorable little fists grew so tight her knuckles whitened.
“You understand, of course, that you’re not talking about another night. Or even a week. It will take years.”
“I understand.”
Her throat worked. “You can’t possibly want that. You don’t.”
“I’m pretty sure I asked for it. Explicitly and directly.”
“Right. You mean you want me in one of your beds. When and if you have the urge. Like your own, personal call girl. Is that it?”
Jason laughed. “If that’s what you want to call yourself, I’m all for it. I like a little role play.”
She shuddered, then clearly tried to hide it. “So whenever I’m in the vicinity—”
“You’re going to spend a lot of time in the vicinity,” Jason interrupted her smoothly. Because this was the key point. “It’s a remote island, Scotland. You’re going to spend so much time there, making it what you want it to be, that really, it doesn’t make sense for you to do anything but move in.”
Her lovely, lush mouth dropped open. Her blue eyes clouded over with confusion.
And everything in Jason pulled tight.
“Move in,” she echoed faintly. “With you.”
“I can’t think of a better way to get you in my bed every night, can you? Much as I love flying around the planet, it’s kind of a long commute from my island to London.”
“This is ridiculous. You’re just...taking the piss.”
He loved it when her accent slipped. When her eyes flashed. When she used expressions he was quite certain weren’t considered strictly appropriate in a business setting. Something she was normally so concerned with.
Jason was perfectly happy to be the reason she lost her cool.
“I told you what I want, Lucinda. It’s the only way for you to get your hands on my island. So really, the choice is yours.”
“What kind of choice is that?” As if she heard her own voice echoing back at her from the glass wall, she cleared her throat. And he watched her pull herself together. He watched her pull that smooth, cool mask into place again. “I imagine you think this is something else I’m likely to balk at. Well, guess again. I can’t say my ambitions have ever extended to becoming some man’s live-in fuck toy, but if that’s what it takes.” She lifted her shoulder, then dropped it, her gaze defiant on his. “I’ll do it.”
“Then it sounds like we have a deal.”
“That cottage would be a perfect place to make my base of operations,” Lucinda said, musingly. “When you feel the need to go fishing around in the international model pool, as you tend to do so often, that’s fine. There will be beds aplenty and no need to overlap in any of them. And I’m sure there are hotel bars aplenty in all those resorts on Fiji should I need to scratch an itch.”
Jason opted not to think too hard on how she’d go about scratching that itch, because if he did he was likely to shatter all that glass that hemmed them in. He considered shattering it anyway, but restrained himself.
Barely.
And who knew he had all that greedy possessiveness in him?
“That’s not how this is going to work, baby,” Jason said instead, his gaze so intent on her that he was surprised she didn’t bow beneath the pressure. “I’m not going to share. Neither are you.”
Lucinda stared back at him for what felt like a small eternity. Maybe two. He watched that pulse in her throat go nuts. He watched those knuckles get even whiter.
“Jason. You do realize that what you’re suggesting sounds an awful lot like...”
She didn’t finish.
“A relationship?” He laughed. “It does sound like that, doesn’t it? But don’t worry, Lucinda. You don’t have to call it that if it scares you.”
He expected her to jump on that word and insist that nothing scared her, but she didn’t. Her gaze wheeled around the room and yet he knew, somehow, that she wasn’t seeing a thing.
“I can’t possibly imagine why you would want such a thing,” she said, sounding something like panicked. “I don’t believe you do.”
“Believe it.”
Her mouth actually fell open again, her eyes coming back to his and fixing there in confusion. She started to say something but stopped, almost as if the words weren’t forming the way she wanted them to.
And all of these were victories, Jason knew. But not the one he wanted.
“But...” She shook her head. “You don’t do relationships. Ever.”
“And look where that got me. I might as well be following the Daniel St. George playbook, step by asshole step. It all led to the same place. That’s not the life I want.”
“If what you want is a relationship, I’m quite sure you can find any number of women to oblige you. All you need do is swan out into the street and stand still a moment. You don’t need me to facilitate any of it.”
“I want you.”
Lucinda blew out a breath, and suddenly she didn’t look like a fighter. She looked shaky and uncertain, and that made his chest hurt even more. “No. You can’t. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Jason moved toward her then. And he considered himself a martyr of the highest order when he didn’t simply put his hands on her and throw her on the table that took up most of the space in this fishbowl. He stopped when he was close—close enough to cause a little comment out there on the other side of the glass, maybe.
Let them stare, he thought.
“It’s like this, Scotland,” he rumbled at her, trying to keep his hold on himself intact. Trying to ignore the hun
dreds of ways he could feel it fraying. “I know why you ran off the way you did. Feelings are messy. That’s why I spent my whole life avoiding them, but guess what? They caught up to me anyway when you sauntered into my crumbling-ass hotel. And I could have come here, and made pretty speeches, but that’s not the way to your heart.”
“My heart?” she echoed, looking appalled. She looked around as if she wanted to back up, but the table was behind her. She frowned at him. “This is about business, Jason. It’s all very unorthodox, I grant you, but still business.”
“Call it business if you want,” he said, easily enough. “I don’t really care. If an island is what it takes to buy some time with you? I’m going to call it cheap. Because I think what really scares you is that you can’t maintain this business bullshit. You could do it after one night, sure. You could crawl out of my bed, run away in the dark and put your armor back on. But you won’t be able to do that month after month. Year after year. Then what?”
Her lips trembled. “You’re insane.”
“That’s not the word I’d use. But the one that fits would freak you out, so sure, I’m insane. The question is, are you willing to put yourself on the line or are you too afraid? It’s a simple choice, Lucinda.”
“There’s nothing simple about this!”
“You know that I can make you come,” Jason said, calmly. “Over and over again. So what’s the harm? You get to live in a beautiful house, come so hard it makes you cry regularly, and work on building the resort of your dreams. It seems to me the only reason you wouldn’t jump at the chance is if, deep down, you know that the reason you left in the first place is that you can’t have that kind of sex, with me, without getting your heart involved after all.”
And he reached over and pressed two fingers over her heart, as punctuation.
This time, she flinched. She swatted at his hand, but ended up hooking his fingers with her palm.
And he was almost surprised that she didn’t take a swing at him, the way she was looking up at him then, like she wanted to kill him with her own hands. But he could see that there was something almost desolate behind the flash of fury.
If he could, he’d let her kill him if that would take the desolation away.
“The joke’s on you, Jason,” she threw at him, fury and despair in her voice and all over her face, and he got it then. She’d already killed him. The man he’d been before she showed up on his island was good and dead, and here he was instead. Ready and willing to do whatever it took to make her happy instead of...whatever this was. “Because I don’t have a heart. And I could live with you for the rest of my life, and that’s not going to change.”
He wanted to grab her up in his arms and kiss her until that darkness lifted. But he knew his way around armor, so he grinned instead.
“Great,” he said, and even shrugged lazily. “Then you have nothing to lose.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
LUCINDA DIDN’T KNOW how many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions could go off inside her and leave her still in one piece. She was surprised that her bones hadn’t shaken their way out of her limbs, so deeply did she feel that trembling. She felt ripped open. Hunted.
And the damned man was grinning at her. Grinning.
“You don’t want this,” she said, possibly not for the first time. “You only think you do because I didn’t let you do the leaving.”
And abruptly, Jason stopped grinning. Reminding her—in a way that made her head spin—that he was no lazier than she was. That he could put it on the way she did a good business suit.
“I do want this,” he told her, and that light in his gaze looked like temper then. Something that made her shiver for a completely different reason, because she could practically still taste the last time he’d lost control, so deep inside her. She couldn’t breathe. “I want to get to know you in every possible way, Lucinda. I want to taste you on my mouth. I want to feel you, deep beneath my skin. I want long, lazy mornings, and impossibly dangerous nights. Another and another and another. Don’t tell me what I have an appetite for, because that only makes me hungrier.”
“The only reason you think you want me is because you can’t have me.”
“I’ve already had you and it wasn’t enough.” His gaze was narrow, black and setting off explosions inside her. “Do you think I chase around after every woman I touch who sneaks out before dawn? Here’s a newsflash. I don’t.”
“You don’t like the fact I walked away from you.” She’d grabbed on to that and she was going to run with it. Because Jason was a very particular kind of man. All rangy and predatory and practically bursting with confidence and this is what they were like. “That’s all this is. And I don’t see why I should have to uproot my life for some adolescent fantasy—”
“Baby. I can assure you, not one of my fantasies is adolescent.”
And Lucinda felt that like a new fire, all over her body. Inside. Outside. In and out of all the earthquakes and eruptions until she was lit up like Guy Fawkes Day or New Year’s Eve.
Until she didn’t know what part of her was fireworks and blinding light, and what was left of her, safe and quiet.
“They’ll all say I slept my way to the top,” she said, switching tactics.
But he laughed at that, too, lifting his chin toward the rest of the office. The office Lucinda had completely forgotten about. “Like they don’t already.”
She frowned at him, not sure what shook her more. That he could shrug off something like that. Or that she clearly could, too, since she hadn’t given a thought to what her superiors might be thinking about her or this situation since she’d walked in the room and locked eyes with Jason. And besides, she knew he was right.
What was happening to her?
And she hated that this was so easy for him. That everything was so easy for him. He could inherit an island from a father he’d never had to hide from and live on it as some kind of stunt. He could buy himself a new island if the first one didn’t suit. He could beat her back to England, just to march into her office—her sanctuary—to make a point.
To make demands.
And worst of all, he could offer her things she was afraid to dream. Because she knew better.
If she lived with him, slept with him and woke with him, melded her life with his—Touched him and tasted him and settled into him, even if she knew that it had an end date and that it wasn’t reality—
Lucinda simply couldn’t risk it.
She had spent all of this time doing her very best to make sure no one ever got a look beneath her icy exterior. Not so much as a glimpse. She’d never abandoned her armor, ever. Not in all the years she’d fought to rise to her current position.
Not until she’d found herself on a tropical island with Jason Kaoki.
And now she was terribly afraid that deep down inside her she wasn’t even remotely as hard as she pretended to be.
She forced herself to concentrate on the latest outrageous thing that Jason had said instead. Because it’s easier, something in her whispered.
“They do not think I’ve slept my way to the top and they won’t. You have no idea how hard I’ve fought for every single thing I have.” She hurled the words at him, aware as she did that she meant them. That this wasn’t as simple as a new tactic. The words...hurt. “You have no idea the hills I’ve climbed or what it’s cost me.”
“You’re wrong.” His voice was as intense as hers. His gaze was fierce. “I know every single inch of those hills, baby. And believe me, I know the price.”
“Don’t make me laugh.” But she did, and that hurt, too. “Some of us weren’t blessed with athletic prowess and matinee idol good looks. Some of us can’t smile our way into a better future, we have to claw for it. One broken fingernail at a time.”
And she had never seen that expression on his face before. No grinning, no glinting gold in his
dark eyes. His beautiful face was like stone, and something inside her turned over.
As if this, at last, was the true Jason Kaoki.
No mask. No bullshit.
And something foreboding shivered to life inside her again. Or maybe it was yearning, thick and deep.
If she didn’t stop him, she could never go back.
Lucinda understood that deep into her bones.
If she didn’t keep him from taking this conversation where it was headed now, she would never be the same person who’d walked into this office. Never.
She knew that as well as she knew her own name.
But the truth of the matter was, she hadn’t come back to England the same Lucinda who’d left. She’d already changed. The woman who’d set foot on that island wasn’t the one who’d run away from it.
And she remembered something he’d said during those perfect, endlessly sweet hours on the water. That there was no beating a wave into submission. There was no making it jump through hoops or do her bidding.
There was only enjoying the ride.
Let go, something in her whispered. All you need to do is let go.
But Lucinda didn’t know how.
“There’s not one thing you can tell me about fighting your way out of nothing that I didn’t live through myself,” Jason told her then, a kind of ferocity making him simultaneously more lethal and more beautiful. And making her skin feel so tight she thought she might crack wide open. “I’m not crazy, Lucinda. I know we only had one night together. But what a fucking night. I’m willing to put everything I have on the line to see if what I think is there is really there.”
“Everything you have.” She made a scoffing noise, but the fact her voice was shaking rather took away from the effect. “An island you don’t give a toss about, that’s all.”
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