10 Days in Paradise (Tropical Nights)

by Haymore, J.

  “Celeste, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing!”

  The fingers relentlessly alternated between stroking and thrusting.

  “You don’t sound right.”

  “I’m okay…I…”

  “Are you sick? You know, Dave got a staph infection in Hawaii that had him in and out of hospitals for a year.”

  “No. Not sick.” The phone started slipping from my hand. I couldn’t hold my head up, so I tilted it back to rest on Kanoe’s shoulder. He thrust into me mercilessly, running his fingertips over that sensitive spot inside me.

  I bit back a full-bodied moan. My muscles shook, turned watery. My skin burned. My nerves sizzled. My vision blurred. I’d never felt anything like it before. He stroked the spot again, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. But Mike was on the phone, saying something. I pressed it to my ear.

  “Please…stop…” One of them had to stop, because I was going to come, and I didn’t want to be listening to Mike when it happened.

  Kanoe released me, his fingers eased out of me, and he strode out of the bathroom, leaving me alone. Mike’s voice whined at me, but I couldn’t decipher his words, or didn’t care to. They were all the same. I slumped over the counter and tried to stop my heart from pounding its way out of my body.

  Kanoe’s shadow disappeared behind the door of the hotel room before it swung shut with a loud click. I swallowed down a strange panicky feeling.

  He was gone. Would he come back?

  “Celeste, I don’t know what’s going on, but you’re really freaking me out here.”

  “I’m fine,” I snapped.

  I kicked the bedspread aside and sank onto the bathroom floor. The cool marble pressed against my tailbone, traveling between my legs, dousing the torch Kanoe had lit there. Need still coursed through me, though, like an angry hive of bees flooding my veins.

  “Mike,” I bit out, “listen to me. We’ve broken up, remember?” I mean, seriously, what part of “this isn’t working out” did he not understand? I continued, “There is no me and you. I will see you at work, but not socially, okay? I’m on vacation. You knew this, so why are you calling me?”

  “I miss you, C.”

  God, he totally disregarded whatever I said when it was something he didn’t want to hear.

  I ground my teeth. I didn’t miss him. I wanted Kanoe, could only think of Kanoe. “Listen, I have to—”

  “I thought, when you get home, you might want to go somewhere to celebrate the occasion.”

  I blanked. “I’m sorry…what occasion?”

  A short pause on the other end of the line. “Me and you. Our anniversary. Four months together.”

  I rolled my head back, resting it against the bathroom wall. This was getting creepy. There was no occasion to celebrate, considering we were no longer a couple.

  I should have known better than to get caught up with a guy like Mike. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I’d made a stupid, unprofessional choice, and now I had to suffer the consequences.

  “I’m going to be extremely busy when I get back. I’m going to have a ton of work. I won’t have time to see you or anyone else.”

  Mike’s voice sounded tense. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, should I, Celeste? Work first, huh? Well, someday you’re going to realize that work isn’t the end-all be-all. You’re going to wake up one morning and see what you’re missing.”

  I gritted my teeth. “Maybe,” I shot back. “But for now, LBG is number one. You know that. Work, clients, success. Being the best at what I do—that’s what I live for.” I’d always been driven. Always aimed for the top. I’d been raised to believe that second place was never good enough. “Nothing can change that.”

  Mike made a scoffing noise. “Nothing?”

  “No, Mike. Sorry.”

  “Then why are you suddenly in Hawaii?” he challenged. “Why aren’t you here right now?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  He sighed, and his tone turned apologetic. “We can work through this together. You can’t just drop a four-month-long relationship that easily.”

  I already had. I’d realized pretty quickly that Mike would get in the way of my ultimate goals. He was too time-consuming and way too needy. Before I could call it back, I released an audible sigh.

  “How can you be so indifferent?” He sounded like he was about to cry.

  That was it. The last straw. “I have to go,” I snapped.

  Silence. Then, “I’ll call you. Every day.”

  I banged the back of my head lightly against the wall. “Please don’t.”

  “Right.” He chuckled, adding fuel to the flush of annoyance in my chest. “Okay, then. Bye. Love—”

  I held the phone away from my head, pressed the End button, and leaned back. As soon as I did, all thoughts of Mike-turned-creepy-stalker fled my mind.

  Where was Kanoe? Had he left?

  I should be thankful he lived on an island thousands of miles away from my career. I couldn’t deal with another man who wanted more than I was willing to give—not that Kanoe seemed like he’d be the kind of guy who’d ever try.

  He was just what I needed—and that was the beauty of this relationship. We both knew how limited our time was, and neither cared. I’d always been so goal-oriented, always looking toward the future and the next goal to conquer. I’d never lived so much in the present as I had in the past twenty-four hours.

  I glanced out the bathroom door, wishing he’d come back. When he didn’t, I rose wearily and stepped into the shower.

  He might not come back. He had every right to be angry. I’d left bed to answer a call, first of all. Anyone who knew me well would know that was just how I rolled—work always came first. And of course I’d assumed the call would be from work.

  But Kanoe didn’t know me that well. Scratch that—he already knew my body better than anyone. But he’d hardly had a chance to see how I functioned in my day-to-day life. He hardly knew anything about my past or my plans for my future.

  Then I’d lied about Mike. No, not lied, really. I’d said he was a colleague. A true statement. But I had withheld the information that we’d once been together. Kanoe had figured it out. The word “anniversary” probably hadn’t helped.

  I turned off the shower. I had no transportation back to Hilo if he’d left. A strange lump formed in my throat. Had it come to that? Would I never see him again? The thought made me feel…scared. Upset. Terrible.

  Emotions I wasn’t used to. Feelings I generally avoided. I tried to swallow them back down, but it didn’t work. The thought of spending the next week here without Kanoe was devastating.

  I opened the shower door to grab a towel. And screamed.

  The biggest, most disgusting bug I had ever seen stood in the middle of the room, in the exact spot my butt had been moments ago.

  Surely it was too large to be a cockroach. It simply couldn’t be. But I knew it was.

  It stared at me with angry, beady eyes, its antennae quivering.

  “Go away,” I whispered. “Shoo.”

  It didn’t listen. I held its gaze for a long time. Seconds? Minutes? Hours? The thing would not give up in our staring contest. It looked at me like it wanted to fly into my face and eat me alive.

  Finally, with shaking hands, I built up my courage and flung the towel at it. It scurried through a narrow crack in the cabinet door beneath the sink. I leaped out of the shower and ran from the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. I grabbed two pillows and stuffed them into the bottom of the door so the monster couldn’t crawl under the crack.

  I was safe. Trembling and sweating despite having just taken a shower, but safe.

  Yet the irrational image of the bug pushing aside the pillows and coming after me would not leave my mind. I sat at the edge of the bed. Unable to tear my gaze away, to move, to get dressed, I stared at the bathroom door in rising panic. What if it came out? What if it came to get me? What would I do then?

  Behind me, the door to
the hotel room opened.

  “Kanoe!” I lunged across the bed and flung myself into his arms.

  Kanoe

  Being attacked by a naked woman as soon as I walked through the door did little for my resolution to distance myself from said woman. When I’d left the room, I’d gone on a walk along the hotel’s beachfront, berating myself over and over for becoming attached to her so quickly.

  She was using me for sex. I knew it. And it pissed me the hell off.

  I’d gone into the weekend knowing this meant nothing beyond a few days of fun. But last night had been so intense, the stupid though had entered my mind: what if this could become more.

  But she was using me. There was no way around it. She had a life in the mainland—a boyfriend, a job she was obsessed with.

  I was using her too, though every bone in my body denied it. But it was true, it had to be. She was only here for ten days—how could this possibly mean anything else to either of us?

  This wasn’t me. I’d always viewed sex as something special between a man and a woman who cared for each other. This casual-sex, vacation-fling thing didn’t sit well with me.

  But I’d already gotten myself into a weekend in Kona with her. I couldn’t walk away now.

  The best thing to do was be honest. I’d explain that I wasn’t the kind of guy who did this type of thing. I’d give her some ideas for things to do in Kona, give her access to my truck, then I’d go stay at my cousin’s house and pick her up on Monday morning to return her to Aunty Nanette’s house.

  I bent my head to hers. Her wet hair smelled of coconuts, and her soft, supple limbs molded to me. After what had happened while she was on the phone, could she possibly be this happy I’d come back?

  No. Tremors racked her body, and her skin was even paler than usual. The high spots of color on her cheeks had completely disappeared, giving her a wan, ashen look. It wasn’t happiness that made her cling to me. It was fear.

  Alarm rose up from my gut. “What happened? Someone come in here? You all right?”

  “A bug. In the bathroom.” She clutched me tighter.

  “A bug?” I glanced at the closed bathroom door, buffered by pillows. Why would someone tap our room?

  “It’s in there.” She pointed at the bathroom door. “It’s huge. I think it’s a genetically mutated cockroach…or something. It…it has terrible wings.”

  Understanding dawned. She had to be kidding. “A bug? As in an insect?”

  “Yes.”

  I shook my head and closed my eyes. Anyone else and I would have burst out laughing. “Okay. I’ll go look. Stay here.”

  After moving aside the pillows blocking the door, I went into the bathroom. Roaches liked to hide in cabinets, and when I threw open the doors, there it was—one of the big flying ones. I chased it around the interior of the cabinet and smashed it flat with my shoe.

  After cleaning up, I went out and sat beside her on the bed. She seemed to have forgotten she was still naked.

  “It’s dead,” I said.

  She leaned on my shoulder, and I put my arms around her, drawing her close. Crazy that someone could be so affected by a cockroach.

  “I hate those things. I mean—I really, really hate them. We had them in our apartment in New York when I was growing up.”

  I stayed silent and held her tighter, sensing she needed to talk.

  “Once—I think I was about eight years old—” She broke off. “I don’t know if I should tell you this.”

  “Go ahead.” I smoothed a stray wet strand of hair behind her ear.

  “I—well, I woke up, and a cockroach had crawled into my mouth.”

  She released a full-body shudder, and I shifted her into my lap. She slipped her arms around my waist and squeezed tightly. “It was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever experienced. That was when we were still pretty poor, and we lived in this tiny, dingy apartment on the ground floor. It was enough for my mother to get us out of that vermin-infested place, though.”

  “I’m sorry, ipo.”

  She looked up at me, green eyes flashing. “What kind of six-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-night hotel room has a bug like that in its bathroom? I should complain.”

  I shrugged. “Up to you. But they’re everywhere here. They’d have to spray poison in the rooms every day to keep them away.” I slid my hand down her silky back and cupped her ass. It was hard to think about anything but the sexy little body pressed against me.

  “Thank you for killing it.” Her fingers trailed along the hairline at my nape. “I’m glad you’re back. I was worried.”

  “I wouldn’t leave you stranded in Kona.”

  “I’m sorry about Mike.”

  I tensed despite myself. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “No, I shouldn’t have answered the phone. It was stupid.” She pulled back and looked me in the eye. “I wasn’t lying. He is an associate at my firm. He isn’t my boyfriend. He was, though. I broke up with him a month ago.”

  The incongruity of her naked and in my arms—on a bed, no less—and talking about her ex-boyfriend, a man she’d fucked more than me, made me want to punch something.

  Why should I care whether I was the rebound guy? Wasn’t she worth it? How she felt about me didn’t matter. She’d be gone in less than a week.

  I gently moved her onto the bed, then stood and turned away. “You should get dressed.”

  She sat there, frozen.

  “I’ll take you to breakfast,” I continued, pretending to look out the window. “There’s a café that overlooks the beach.”

  For some reason, even though the mention of this Mike asshole should have been like cold water pouring over my cock, a rock-hard erection tented my shorts. Must have something to do with her relentless nakedness, the smooth satin of her white skin, the dark pink of her nipples matching the pink of her lips, the amber curls between her legs…

  She sidled between me and the window. Slipping her arms around my waist, she pressed her bare chest against me and rested her forehead on my shoulder. “I’m doing this all wrong,” she said. “I don’t want to think about Mike or about cockroaches.”

  I found it gratifying that she said the asshole’s name with the same disgusted tone in her voice as when she said “cockroaches.” There was no doubt how she felt about the roaches, anyway.

  She continued. “I hate him for disrupting our time together.”

  I didn’t move or speak. Her voice softened to a whisper. “I want to forget him, I want you to forget him, but I don’t know how to do it right. Help me.”

  Her hands meandered up my back. I shuddered.

  “Please, Kanoe.”

  When I siphoned away the anger, the crazy-ass possessiveness, and the jealousy threatening to overwhelm me, lust took over greedily. My cock hardened even more, ready to burst from the top of my shorts.

  I stepped back so I could see her, and drank in her luscious body with my eyes. “You were close earlier, weren’t you? You want to finish it, ku’u ’ono huapala?”

  She smiled and murmured, “I like it when you go all Hawaiian on me. What does that mean?”

  I grinned. “It means you taste good, like a juicy ripe fruit, ready to be picked and eaten.” And it means you’re mine. Not some mainland asshole’s.

  Dropping my voice, I lowered my lips to her ear. “You want it, don’t you, ipo? You want me to suck you.”

  I curled my tongue over the top of her ear. “Lick you.”

  I took her ear between my teeth, then pulled slowly away, grazing her lobe. “Bite you. You want it all.”

  Reaching down, I stroked her mound with my thumb. “Most of all, you want to come.”

  A deep pink flush traveled from the tips of her ears down her chest. “I don’t know… I…”

  So it was like that. She’d practically begged me to have sex with her a minute ago, but now she wouldn’t tell me she wanted to come. She had issues talking about what she wanted, what she needed. It was clearly a line she’d never cr
ossed.

  I’d change that.

  “Say it,” I whispered, turning her and backing her up to the bed, then putting enough pressure on her shoulders to make her sit on its edge.

  She didn’t say it. Instead she grabbed the waistband of my shorts and pulled it down over my cock. Before I had a chance to react, the flat of her tongue passed from the base of my shaft to its head in a hot, smooth swipe.

  Her green eyes danced wickedly as she looked up at me. Tease. Hadn’t she just been blushing and shy? Her lips tickled the sensitive fold under the head, and then she spoke, sending shock waves down my cock. “You say it.”

  I braced my knees against the edge of the bed. I’d say it, hell, I’d say anything right now to get her to do that again.

  “Okay…” I racked my brain. “Uh…it.”

  She giggled. I put a hand on her head to coax her mouth over me, and she obliged with feather-light kisses over the tip of my cock, holding the base in one hand.

  I’d lose it if she kept this up. Already I could feel the tightening, the warmth building at the bottom of my spine. Way too fast.

  Without letting go, she guided me to the bed. I stepped out of my shorts, pulled off my shirt, and stretched out over the sheets. She gazed at me with what appeared to be wonder, much as she had when she’d stripped off my shorts last night.

  “Tell me what you want,” she said softly, caressing my cock with her fingers.

  Easy enough. “I want your mouth on me.”

  She knelt between my legs and bent over me. One strand of hair fell, covering her face, tickling my hip. Puffs of her hot breath coated the moisture she’d left on me.

  I loved seeing her like this, damp and on her knees, her posture and expression so submissive, it brought all my primal instincts to the forefront. Possess and conquer, protect and cherish. I wanted it all with her.

  “Now,” I ordered softly. Her mouth caught me and drove down, taking just about all of me in. She moved up then down again in a slow, agonizing rhythm, matched by one hand stroking below her mouth, the other cupping my balls. Every moist, swirling movement of her tongue and lips brought me closer to the edge.

  Sensation gathered, grew, prepared to burst. I clutched the sheet in one fist and groaned. All the muscles in my body tightened of their own accord as she sucked deeper and harder…