And when he was done, he moved his hands back to her cheeks and held her face there.
And everything in Lucinda...throbbed. She could feel it in her breasts, her clit and everything in between. She could feel that shuddering inside her, tipping her toward that edge again, sweeping over her and through her in a trembling rush.
Bright and hot and like some kind of madness, caught up in the light and the breeze and the tumbling waves behind her.
So close—So close—
And she knew full well it wasn’t the scenery that made her shiver, it was the man kneeling before her.
Jason studied her, his dark gaze frank and carnal, and the heat of his palms made her ache. Her breasts were too full, her belly quivered uncontrollably, and her pussy was soaking wet with molten heat.
And her clit was a breath away from taking her over.
She wanted him. All of him, so huge and hard and outside her experience in a thousand different ways. Lucinda had no time for seduction. She preferred to throw back a few drinks, then find a likely lad in an upscale bar. Back to his to get off, then out the door.
This felt nothing like any of those half-drunk encounters, with Lucinda always on top and in control, then gone.
This felt like melting. This felt wrong, somehow, but delicious all the same, a part of the bright sun and the palm trees overhead and the insistent caress of the air all around her.
Thousands upon thousands of miles away from everything she knew.
Lucinda felt electric and helpless all at once and told herself she hated the sensation.
But that was another lie.
The truth was that scalding, insistent heat between her legs.
She was so close—
But she refused.
She refused to come like this, from suntan lotion and his hands on her skin. She refused to allow herself to lose the game like that, before she’d even begun to play it. She refused to hand over control.
She refused.
Her gaze locked to his, she made herself breathe. She found the rising crest of that tide and somehow, someway, pushed it back.
Before it could sweep her away where she stood.
And for a moment there was nothing but the little bit of space between them and the fact she hadn’t come. Because she, by God, was in control of something here. Not the heat. Not what she was wearing. Not whether or not he’d let her build her hotel.
But Lucinda would come when she wanted to come, thank you.
“Let’s go, darlin’,” Jason said, low and dark, with too much knowing heat in his gaze and in the curve of his beautiful mouth. Especially when she stared back at him in challenge, daring him to call her on what she’d done. “It’s time to get you out in the water.”
THE WAVES USUALLY brought him nothing but peace.
No matter what else might have been going on in his life—whether it was football, or simply existing on the mainland that always seemed so far removed from anything he knew—Jason had always found his place in the water. Give him a board and a free hour and he’d find a wave. And with it, a way to get back to what mattered.
But he’d miscalculated with Lucinda.
He kept thinking she would back down. But she didn’t.
He never expected her to put on that bikini and come back out of the office. And once she had, and he’d predictably lost his shit, he’d figured she’d draw the line at his putting his hands all over that tight, curvy little body of hers.
Instead, she’d refused to give in to the wild heat that was still blazing between them. And she’d come out of it a little bit flushed with SPF 50 all over her, while he felt like a sixteen-year-old kid with a boner in gym class.
It would have been funny if it was happening to someone else.
“I don’t know how to surf,” she announced.
He’d hauled two surfboards down to the water’s edge, pretending the whole time that he wasn’t going out of his way to make himself busy with this most minor form of manual labor just to see if he could calm the fuck down. Newsflash: he wasn’t calm.
Jason shot her a glance. She was standing there with the Pacific licking at her toes. There was nothing but a string separating her ass cheeks, and her breasts in the bikini top were valiantly fighting gravity. And still she was talking down to him like she was the queen of fucking England.
“I know how to swim. But I’ve never surfed.” Her blue eyes glinted, a lot like the sunlight on the Pacific all around her, and filled with the same intense challenge. “I’ve never quite seen the point, if I’m honest.”
“You don’t look for the point in surfing, you just surf. The point finds you when you’re ready.”
“That almost sounds philosophical.”
“If you need me to write you a poem about the communion between the waves and the rush, the sea and the sky, you’re never going to get it. And if you’re never going to get it, you might as well get the fuck off my island, Lucinda. Now.”
Once again, he expected her to look a little bit cowed at that. So of course she didn’t. “I don’t need poetry. But some basic instruction might not go amiss.”
He was getting wound up, and that wasn’t him. And it wasn’t smart, either.
Jason had never let his emotions get the best of him. Emotions were fuel, nothing more, and this was no time to change that. Because this woman might look like a sweet dollop of cream slapped down in the middle of the Pacific for no other purpose than to get him hard—to look him in the eye and refuse to come for him—but that wasn’t why she was here. She wasn’t a wet dream come to life. She was one more shark dressed up in business clothes, looking to make him a developer dickhead, just like the old man who was nothing to Jason but a sperm donor.
Fuck Daniel St. George, and fuck Lucinda Graves, too.
For some reason, he didn’t just up and say that.
“Surfing is like most things in life,” he growled instead, scowling at her. “It’s as simple or as complicated as you make it. All you have to do is balance on the board, then stand up and keep balancing. Once you do that, you ride the waves. That’s it. That’s the secret. But how well or how badly you do that entirely depends on you.”
That chin of hers, entirely too aggressive for a tiny slip of a woman who was likely only as dangerous as that red hair of hers was real, lifted. Suggesting to him that maybe the hair really was natural.
“I
