Untamed

by Caitlin Crews

  “My heart, Scotland.” His dark eyes blazed down at her. “I’m talking about my heart. I’ve loved one woman in my entire life, and she’s the one who told me to get my shit together and stop acting like a man who broke her heart and mine before I was even born. You think I’m not scared? You think I expected you to come wandering onto my island? Here’s a fun fact, Lucinda. You don’t go and hide out there on the edge of the end of the world if you’re expecting company.”

  Her mouth was dry and her eyes were suspiciously damp. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  “I know exactly what I’m asking,” he threw at her, and his voice was harder then. Bigger, like it was leaving marks on him, too. “I know all the things you had to swallow down to survive. All the times you had to smile when you wanted to rip someone’s throat out. All those soft, pampered little rich kids who didn’t know how good they had it, telling you how to live. Believe me, I know. You want to fight everything you see because it’s the only thing you know how to do. The only thing you’re any good at. My God, baby, you have to know that I’m right there with you.”

  “Then why are you fighting?” And Lucinda felt an odd weightlessness, a shuddering, and understood on some dim level that she’d lost control. Of this interaction, certainly. But worse, of herself. She’d lost any sense of where they were or who might be watching. Worse, she didn’t care. And all the while her heart kicked at her, so hard she was sure it was already in pieces. “If you know, why are you saying all these crazy, impossible things?”

  “Because I don’t believe we’re broken,” he roared, or maybe it was only Lucinda who shook. Not the glass walls. Not London. “I don’t believe that all the things we had to shove aside to get where we wanted to go are lost forever. I believe they’re right here.” And he slammed one big hand on his chest then. “Right fucking here.”

  She thought she said something, but her head was making too much noise. Her heart was like thunder.

  “You humbled me, Lucinda,” Jason said, and she could hear him perfectly. As if he was inside her, inside that thunder. “You made me feel like a god and you made me want to cry like a child, and the only way I could think to convince you to give this a shot was to make it one more fucking transaction, because that’s what you understand best.”

  “It’s who I am,” she whispered.

  “I don’t believe that all you are is ambition.” Jason’s growl dared her to defy him. “Just like I don’t believe the only thing I’ll ever be good at is throwing a football. I think there’s more. I want more. And Lucinda, I want you to want more with me.”

  There was no reason that she should be crying. Fat, wet tears tracking down her cheeks and wrecking her. There was no reason that she should be shaking as if she was cold, her teeth chattering, one more earthquake working its way out from inside her.

  There was no reason that sex with this man should have felt like a sacrament, or that leaving him should have felt like chopping off a limb, and how was she supposed to go on with all these feelings bursting out of her?

  “I decided a long time ago that I had to make a choice,” she told him, her lips nearly numb with the effort it took to keep from screaming. “Other girls had the luxury of their emotions, but not me. I made a plan, then I executed it. I didn’t waste time worrying about others people’s feelings, and I had no time at all for mine. There was only the plan. And my life was absolutely fine. It is absolutely fine. I don’t need...this.”

  You.

  “But what if you don’t have to hide?” he threw right back at her. “What if you don’t have to build your dream for other people to live in it? What if you can live your own?”

  “Shut up,” she tried to shout at him, but it was barely a whisper.

  “What if,” Jason said, very quietly, though each word felt etched in stone, “you didn’t have to work so hard to make other people happy? What if you got to just...be happy?”

  She didn’t know when his hands had come up to grip her upper arms. She didn’t know when he’d dropped his face to hers, so close that she was sure she could taste him already.

  And she was aware that her whole company was right there on the other side of that glass, no doubt staring at this display—but for once in her life, Lucinda didn’t care what anyone else thought of her.

  What if...?

  Two little words with too much weight, careening around inside her.

  “Some people don’t get to be happy,” she managed to say, though her voice caught. “The best they can hope for is to be focused. Driven. And if you achieve what you want, in the end, it feels like the same thing.”

  “Bullshit, baby,” Jason retorted, dark and sure. “I don’t know what ‘driven’ tastes like. But I have a pretty good idea that happiness tastes like this.”

  His lips touched hers, and it wasn’t the mad passion of the island. It wasn’t that drugging, intoxicating jolt of electricity.

  Or it was that, but it was so much more, too.

  He tasted like promises. Like dreams come true.

  Like happily-ever-afters and a whole wide world of yes.

  She found her hands on the lapels of that beautiful suit and she pushed herself back from him, her eyes too full with feelings she didn’t have the slightest clue how to name.

  “Jason.” And his voice was hardly a prayer, though it felt like one. “Don’t you understand? The only thing I know how to do, the only thing I can do, is fight.”

  “Then fight,” he dared her, a light she couldn’t let herself believe in shining there in his eyes. “Fight like hell, Scotland. I can handle your fight. Are you kidding? It turns me on.”

  “Everything turns you on.” But she shook her head, afraid to give in to that odd urge to laugh her way through this. “I just don’t think—”

  “Don’t.” His hands moved to cup her face, brushing the dampness aside with his thumbs. “Don’t think. Fight. But Lucinda, stop fighting me. Fight for me. Fight with me. And who knows? Maybe we’ll build a whole lot more than a resort.”

  And she thought about surfing. About climbing up on that board and finding her balance on the shifting waves beneath her. No plan in the world had helped her then. There had only been learning to lean, to balance, to shift her weight and find her way.

  And once she had, she’d flown. She’d catapulted into all that blue, fast and free.

  Kind of how she felt right now, with Jason’s hands on her face and his dark gaze on hers, all that expectation and hope and that swelling thing, that ache, that joy, she was too scared to name.

  But she didn’t have to name it. All she had to do was stand up, find her feet and commit herself to the ride—knowing that Jason was right there beside her, all the way from here to forever, if she’d let him.

  If she’d just let him.

  She stopped shuddering. She took a deep breath.

  She tipped back her head, she let a smile crack her whole face open, and for the first time in her life, Lucinda Graves...let go.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A LITTLE MORE than two years later, Lucinda woke in the middle of the night. She knew it was the middle of the night because the clock on her bedside table told her so, but the insistent light outside the windows told different tale.

  Because this far north in an Icelandic summer, there was nothing but daylight no matter what time of day it was.

  Lucinda had been here two days so far and she wasn’t sure she could ever get used to it the way the locals seemed to.

  She swung out of the huge, imposing bed and padded over to the window. Outside and far below, the surging sea hurled itself against a spit of volcanic rock that jutted out from the rocky coast. She thought, not for the first time, that it looked as if it could belong to the island she now thought of as hers—well, hers and Jason’s—though it was much, much colder here. Even though it was supposedly summer.
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  She wasn’t surprised when she felt Jason come up behind her. She hadn’t heard him move, but she was used to that now—the fact that such a big man could move so quietly. And she could feel him these days, as if they were connected.

  He pulled her back against his chest, so she could feel all that sweet, drugging heat of his. He was like her own personal furnace.

  “Come back to bed,” he rumbled in her ear.

  “Maybe I don’t want to come back to bed,” she said, though she was smiling. It had taken her a long time to get used to smiling so much. Her cheeks had ached so much the first few months that she’d secretly worried there was something wrong with her. When she’d finally confessed her fears to Jason, he’d roared with laughter. And then made her ache in a whole different way. “Isn’t this supposed to be a famous sex hotel? Maybe I want to check out the dungeon.”

  His response was instant and unmistakable. “Just say the word, baby.”

  Lucinda’s body shivered into instant, red-hot awareness, the way it always did. It didn’t matter how recently she’d had him—in this case, in a glorious, screaming rush on the very bed that waited for them across the room—she always wanted more.

  More, and then more still.

  The past two years had been one dream coming true after the next. Lucinda had built her resort with painstaking care. And had quit her company—and their snide remarks about her relationship with Jason—the moment it was done, the better to branch out on her own. Pandora had come with her, and together they’d gone even further than Lucinda could have imagined on her own. She’d gotten everything she’d ever wanted, and so much more, and she’d gotten Jason, too—the thing she hadn’t known she wanted. The thing that made all the rest of it matter.

  Which wasn’t to say it had always been smooth or easy.

  The funny thing about armor was that prying it off proved just as hard as putting it on in the first place had been. Meaning, one painful moment after the next. Together and apart. Neither one of them was good at backing down, and sometimes they fought because that was what they knew how to do.

  But Jason demanded intimacy. And Lucinda found that the more she gave, the deeper it went, and the more it turned out she had to give, after all. Which made her crave the very intimacy she feared.

  It was a circle, maybe. But at the center of the circle, there was Jason, and he was worth it.

  God, was he worth it.

  “Come to bed,” Jason said again, with more of an order in his voice this time. “Maybe you forgot we have a fancy wedding in the morning.”

  “A fancy commitment ceremony, I think you mean. Isn’t that what it said on the invitation?”

  “I don’t know.” Jason was tired of waiting, clearly, because he leaned down and hauled Lucinda up, tossing her over his shoulder as he turned back to the bed. “Blah, blah, blah, the professor likes her lectures. I don’t really care what they call it as long as they’re happy.”

  “You’re a romantic caveman,” Lucinda said, laughing. And enjoying the view of her man’s perfect ass as he walked. “That’s what I love about you the most.”

  He tossed her down on the high mattress, coming down after her. And he wasted no time pressing her down against it with every inch of that hard, sculpted body.

  They fit together like puzzle pieces. Flush and true.

  “Say that again,” he rumbled at her.

  Because it had taken her a long time. A very long time, and then a little bit longer still.

  I love you, she had said, purely by accident one day. The resort had been well under way and entering its final phase. All Jason had done was appear on the worksite with a special cup of coffee he’d made just for her. She looked up, accepted the cup and lost her mind.

  I love you, she had said, and it was as if the sun rose all over again. That was the look he’d given her.

  Right before he showed her exactly how he felt about those words, without even locking the door to the construction trailer she’d used as an office.

  She still wasn’t over it.

  “I love you,” she said now, hushed and awed, the way she always was.

  Because he wasn’t simply beautiful outside—though he was that all right, in spades.

  Jason was the kind of beautiful that left marks. That encouraged her to better herself, particularly when she least wanted to do it.

  He’d taught her to let go. And in return, she loved him the way his father hadn’t, or couldn’t. With every single part of herself. Every dream, every wish.

  Everything she had, she gave to him. And he gave it right back.

  She felt the thick head of his cock against her entrance, and she was already—always—hot and wet and ready for him. White night, tropical storms and everything in between. All she really needed was this. Him.

  “I love you,” she said again, like a vow.

  “Damn right you do,” Jason growled.

  Then thrust his way inside her, bringing them both home.

  * * *

  The wedding—or ceremony, or whatever it was—was surprisingly sweet, Jason thought the next day.

  Thor and his professor, Margot, exchanged vows, though not the kind of traditional vows that Jason was used to. Very little honoring and possessing, and a whole lot of promising and hoping.

  Jason realized, as he stood in the small group before the altar they’d made out there on the rocks with the sea as fierce witness behind them, that he’d never seen Thor smile like that before. Not once in all those video calls.

  It made him smile, too.

  “Is the Viking actually a marshmallow?” Angelique murmured from beside him, one hand toying idly with the choker at her throat. “Can a Viking be a marshmallow?”

  “A Viking perhaps,” her prince, Zain, said from her other side, a faint smile on his mouth. “But not, I think, a prince.”

  The two of them exchanged a heated look, and Jason smiled a little wider.

  On Zain’s other side, Charlie was shaking his head.

  “Nobody wants to be a marshmallow,” he drawled, all kinds of Texas in his voice. “Especially a Viking.”

  But Jason saw the way Charlie gazed at his wife, Maya, who jiggled their toddler on her hip, murmuring something to him as the little boy’s lower lip trembled. And his smile got even bigger.

  “I don’t need a marshmallow, thank you,” his own woman said from beside him, prim and faintly disapproving. “I like a little fight.”

  And Jason turned the full force of his smile on Lucinda, because he knew that a knockdown, drag-out firefight always led to the hottest makeup sex. But he also knew that when he got sweet, she cried.

  So she could pretend she didn’t like a little marshmallow goodness if it made her feel tough. He knew better.

  Up on the stone altar, Thor and his woman made their union, whatever they called it, real. They kissed, their friends and family applauded, and Jason decided that he might not know his brothers and sister as well as some people knew their siblings, but he liked them all the same.

  And as the crowd moved to the tent set out on a bluff next to the hotel, up above the sea, Thor and his brand-new wife came to stand with this little knot of people whom Daniel St. George had brought together.

  Hell, Jason thought. Maybe the old man wasn’t much of a father in his lifetime. But he’d done all right after his death.

  “To weddings that aren’t weddings,” Charlie’s wife, Maya, said, grinning at Margot in her pale red dress.

  “Because there’s so much more to marriage than the ceremony that starts it,” Margot replied, but she was grinning so wide it made all her blue and purple hair bounce a little.

  “To ohana,” Jason said, grinning at them all. “To all of you, my brothers and sister. And to our dearly departed father, who made all of this happen.”

  “Fuck that guy,�
�� Charlie said lazily.

  They all laughed and lifted their glasses, and Jason felt a different kind of peace settle in on him then. When he looked down, it was Lucinda, with her arm around him and her curls everywhere, just the way he liked it. She was pressed up close to his side, her arm around his waist, because she knew.

  That his feelings about his father were layered. And he could laugh about it sometimes, but other times it ate at him. He’d shown her all of him, the ugly and the sweet, and she’d smiled at him and asked for more.

  And he thought that there would probably be no more perfect moment in his life. Than this. Real ohana. His siblings who were more like friends every day.

  And the love of his life, freckles across her nose and her hair like fire.

  “I’m going to marry you,” he told Lucinda then. “And soon, Scotland. So you might want to get your head around it now.”

  Everyone around them laughed, but his gaze was on his woman. There was a time she would have turned bright red. When talking about private things in public would have made her want to keel over where she stood.

  But they weren’t the same people they’d been when they’d met for the first time in that falling-down hotel.

  They’d knocked the old building down, and with it, all those outdated and unnecessary parts of themselves they’d been forced to build into this fortress or that weapon to scrape their way through this life in the first place.

  But now they had each other. They didn’t need all those walls and sharp edges.

  Though they’d kept a chunk of that building, to remind them. It sat like a sculpture in one of their gardens.

  Lucinda smiled at him now, big and bright on this strange, cold island, while the rest of his family cheered.

  “I’ll marry you,” she threw back at him, her voice rich and Scottish all the way through. “But you’ll bloody well ask.”

  He heard his brothers roar with laughter. He could hear his sister do the same.