on him.”
That caught at him.
Lucinda warmed to her topic, and her hands got into the act as she started talking about all those blueprints and building codes he’d already told her didn’t interest him. And it was true. He didn’t care. But he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her.
And the fact she’d unerringly narrowed in on the one thing he wanted that he couldn’t have.
Revenge.
“Maybe we can dig him up, animate him and kill him all over again,” his half sister, Angelique Masterson, had suggested a few hours ago on one of the weekly calls the heirs of Daniel St. George—Jason’s half siblings—were obligated to have.
Angelique had been sitting somewhere in one of the beautiful rooms of the hotel she ran in the desert kingdom of Sadat, where she’d charmed a prince and met all the extra terms Daniel St. George had thrown in her path, simply because she was a girl. She’d been toying with the choker necklace she wore all the time now, its elegance somehow working with her full sleeves of tattoos. Only Angelique.
Revenge on their late and unlamented father was a topic they returned to often, as it happened.
“That makes me feel warm all over,” his half brother Charlie Teller had said from Italy, kicked back on a terrace with pastel houses falling down the cliff behind him and the sound of a woman’s voice in the background—his wife, presumably, doing her lawyer thing just out of range. Charlie had smirked. “Almost like we’re a real family, after all.”
“My understanding is that this is the way of all families,” the oldest of the half brothers had said. Thor Ragnarsson looked every inch the modern Viking he was, standing near a window in one of those suits he loved, and Iceland’s endless snow swirling around behind him. And no sign of his forbiddingly smart, purple-haired professor. “Endless grudges, revenge fantasies and petty squabbling. I suspect that makes us real already.”
“That sounds a whole lot like white people problems,” Jason had rumbled, letting out one of his trademark belly laughs. Mostly because he knew his half siblings found him both baffling and confronting. “In Hawaii we call it ohana. It’s a way of life, motherfuckers. We don’t squabble like little bitches. We eat. It’s hard to get fired up about some petty bullshit when your belly’s nice and full of a good kalua pork and there’s nothing to do but sit around talking story.”
But for all his protestations to his half siblings, who had all gotten a hell of a lot happier since they’d first started these online meetings thanks to finding themselves some steady loving in one place or another, that wasn’t quite how he felt about Daniel St. George. Or himself.
Or about the things his mother had said to him when she’d called him out.
Or, hell, even this island.
He hadn’t put it in the stark terms Lucinda had. But now he couldn’t think of it in any other way.
Was he finding himself here? Or was he squatting in this house, deliberately not using the island the way his father would have? Like that could somehow stick it to the old man beyond the grave?
He focused back in on Lucinda, who was still pacing around in front of him, warming to whatever point she was making.
The importance of fragrance to help create the feeling of effortless hospitality, if he wasn’t mistaken.
And just like that, Jason was done.
The next time she paced too close, he reached out and snagged her. She made a satisfying, high-pitched sort of squeaking sound as he hauled her into his lap, and he was just animal enough to delight in it.
Then she was right there. Right where he wanted her, her chest heaving and her eyes so wide he was sure he could see forever in them.
“Scotland,” he growled. “Shut up.”
And then, fucking finally, he got his mouth on hers.
THE ENTIRE WORLD burst into flame, as if the long-dormant volcano that had made this island roared back to life and took Lucinda first.
There was no easing in. No getting her bearings. Jason picked her up and threw her into a wall of a wave the way he had out on the water, head over heels in a mad hurtle that tasted like whiskey and aroused, impossible male, and she had no choice but to swim or drown.
Lucinda chose to swim.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, held on to all that brawn and muscle like he was hers, and opened her mouth beneath his.
And the way he licked into her mouth was better than plain old fire or his clever hands slicked with lotion. It was deeper, hotter and indescribably dirty.
Lucinda got the distinct impression that he wasn’t playing around.
He had her in his lap, and within moments his hand was streaking up her leg beneath the soft fabric she’d wrapped around her. And the only thing she could think to do with all that sensation and heat was shift herself so he had better access. So she did. And he took it.
She knew his touch already and she thrilled to it, making a greedy sound in the back of her throat that should have humiliated her as he found his way between her thighs. But there was no room in her for humiliation. Not when he finally found his way beneath her panties and into the slick heat of her pussy.
At last, she thought fiercely, with a deep, full greed. At last.
If she thought that he would toy with her a little now, play with her and drag this out because he could, she was mistaken.
He kept his mouth on hers, kissing her deep and hard and so intensely it made her feel hollow with longing. Then he shifted her on his lap until she was kneeling astride him, her pussy against his cock with only his jeans and the scrap of her panties keeping her from taking him deep inside her.
It was like falling. Flying. Tumbling end over end, and Lucinda couldn’t tell if she wanted to go on forever or she thought it might kill her. But she knew that really, she didn’t care which. Or what happened to her.
Just so long as it never ended.
Jason reached between them. His rough fingers yanked at her panties until they gave way, and she knew she should care that he’d ripped them off her. And she did, but only because it somehow made his tongue in her mouth taste that much wilder.
He pulled his jeans open, making a dirty, gritty kind of sound as he dragged out that hard, heavy cock of his that had been haunting her for what already felt like her whole life.
She felt the blunt head of it, tracing over her pussy and hitting her clit, then moving through all that molten heat while she saw stars. Once, then again, like he wanted her to get a feel of him.
Or wanted her to get dizzy.
And this time she had no intention of holding herself back, she thought as he pulled out a condom and sheathed himself. She wasn’t sure she could have if she tried.
