going to conquer you if you don’t respect it a little more.”
She scowled over her pale shoulder, gleaming with a new spray of golden freckles. “I thought the entire point of surfing was conquering the bloody water.”
“We already covered this. Stop looking for the point. Start looking for balance. And because I can tell you’re not going to get this, balance isn’t about conquering anything. It’s about letting yourself become a part of it and taking what you need.”
This time, Lucinda sighed. “Nothing in your portfolio suggested you were a new-age hippie.”
She sounded appalled.
Jason laughed again, and had the distinct pleasure of feeling the way she shivered in response, right there against him. He could see the goose bumps that rose on her neck and snaked down her arms. He was fascinated and more than a little hot himself, but somehow kept himself from licking them up with his tongue.
“I’m not a hippie, darlin’. I’m Hawaiian.”
He moved then, setting her farther in front of him on the board, liking how easy it was to lift her and move her where he wanted her. Then he jackknifed himself up, bringing his feet out of the water and onto the board, then standing in a single swift movement that he’d practiced so many times it didn’t require thought. And before she could comment on it or jerk around on the board, he reached down and picked her up, too.
“What are you doing?”
And Jason knew that she had no idea how panicked she sounded, or she would probably have bitten off her own tongue.
He kept hold of her. “Relax.”
“Right. Because, first of all, everyone relaxes on command. The best thing to say to someone when they’re not relaxed, in fact, is relax in exactly that tone. That does the trick, every time.”
“Stop talking, Lucinda.”
He pulled her close to him again, with one big hand on that soft, sweet belly of hers. And he wanted nothing more than to eat up the way she shuddered, then flushed red. Everywhere.
But he didn’t put his mouth on her the way he wanted to do. Instead, he held her there, keeping the board balanced beneath them as they floated.
“You don’t fight the waves. Fighting them is a quick way to end up face down in the water. You feel them. Every one of them.”
He could feel her tense. Every sweet little curve of that lush body of hers, wound up and ready to fight no matter what he said. But instead of hurling something back at him, she only shuddered again, holding her arms out from her sides.
Like she’d seen surfing on television once.
“Good girl,” he murmured approvingly, and then grinned at the little noise she made in response to that. “Balance,” he said again. “You’re never going to beat a wave into submission. But you can ride it.”
And for a while, all they did was stand there like the surfboard was a paddleboard and let the ocean do its thing. One wave after another lifted them up, then brought them down again. Over and over, without end.
It was the rhythm of his life. It was his own heartbeat, there in his chest.
It was what brought him back to himself and it was why he’d come here, where no one was around to snap pictures of him or get in his face about his father or football or both, so he could find that heartbeat again.
But helping Lucinda find that same rhythm charmed him, somehow. And made his actual beat a little faster.
Eventually, Jason let go of her and let her find her feet on her own. Once she got the hang of that, he jumped off the board, leaving her to do it on her own. When she had that down, he unclipped the boards and pulled himself onto the other one so he could watch her.
“Now what?” she demanded, her body in the correct position, if far too rigid. And the frown on her face a clue that she wasn’t anywhere close to relaxed or balanced.
But he gave her points for trying.
He pointed at the water. “Now you jump in and climb up on your own.”
It took her a few tries to get in the water and pull herself out, then stand up on the board, finding her feet beneath her.
“Good job,” he said. “Now you catch a wave.”
“‘Catch a wave,’” she muttered, as if he’d said catch a star, or something. “Right. I’ll just catch one, shall I?”
But he knew she would, because for all the muttering and the scowling, she kept trying. She never flipped out. She simply fell down and got up again. Over and over and over.
It was impossible not to admire her.
Or want to get his hands on her again, with more desperation than he was comfortable admitting, even out here where there no witnesses to his foolishness but the waves and the sky.
“You’re going to start paddling,” he told her. And realized when he heard the intensity in his own voice that he was entirely too invested in this woman doing the very thing he’d wanted her to fail at before. He wanted her to get up. He wanted her to ride the wave. He wanted her, and he didn’t know how to handle that. So he ignored it. “When you feel the wave pick you up, you get up and you ride. Got it?”
“It’s that simple, is it?”
Though her voice was skeptical, they had been out in the water too long. No matter how grumpy she sounded, she obeyed him.
Jason liked that a whole lot more than he should have.
“It’s that simple,” he promised her. Gruffly.
And when the next wave came, he put his hand on the back of her board and threw her into it.
Then watched with an intoxicating mix of pride and greed as his tight-assed little redhead pulled herself up, balanced herself beautifully and rode her first wave all the way into shore.
LUCINDA HAD EXPECTED surfing to be a grim, brutal exercise.
Like anything else she had done to claw her way and her current position, she’d assumed it would be unpleasant and if she was lucky, she could look back on it with a certain smugness born of having survived it. There was always some or other feat to perform, so she could prove herself to whoever it was who held the thing she wanted and thereby convince them to give it to her.
There was always a test. Always a series of hoops to leap through.
She’d expected surfing, of all things, and in a micro-bikini, to be no different.
It had never even crossed her mind that she might enjoy doing something she’d always viewed as remarkably, even laughably, pointless.
But the
