goose bumps broke out all over her arms and neck in emphatic agreement.
Lucinda studied him intently, hoping he wouldn’t notice her intense reaction to him. She already knew his stats by heart. That he was six feet and four inches tall and had always possessed this same intense athleticism whether he was playing organized sports or alluring his legion of fans on social media as he surfed and climbed mountains and leaped out of planes. She’d expected him to be attractive in that sporty, relentlessly American way.
But nothing had prepared her for his sheer, overwhelming magnetism. There was something about him that filled the whole of the shabby lobby like a pulse. A flame. As if he was distinctly and inarguably more male than any man she’d ever encountered before.
She felt as if she was breathing him in, and worse, close to choking on it. The mad part was, she wasn’t sure she’d mind.
Meanwhile, he was also far more than merely attractive. No antiseptic word could describe him. His skin gleamed a nutty brown, as if he’d just this minute wandered in from cavorting about in the surf and wasn’t entirely dry. His hair was dark and black and raked back from his face as if he’d used one of his large hands, carelessly. And he had the face of a sinner. Or a very suggestible saint, all arched black brows and knowing dark eyes shot through with a hint of gold.
He looked like a dream lover another sort of woman might conjure straight from the sea in a place like this, made of old volcanoes and deep tropical rain forests. And then spend a lifetime or two trying to please with all that bright fire and heady green.
Lucinda was immediately appalled that she’d descended into such theatrics, even in the privacy of her own mind.
Especially when he smirked, as if he knew exactly where her head had gone.
“Let me guess,” he drawled, his voice deep and rich. Decidedly amused and lazy with it, as if part of him was still stretched out in a bed somewhere—stop it, she ordered herself fiercely. “You came all this way to sell me something. Sorry, darlin’, but I’m not buying.”
“You don’t know where I came from,” she said, almost by rote. Almost as if she had to prove to herself that she wasn’t under some kind of spell. “It could be from the next island over.”
“The next island over is hours away on a plane. And no one who lives there is as blindingly white as you.”
Lucinda might have wished that she had a little more time. To pull herself together. Or back into shape, anyway. To make sure her hair was under control and that she didn’t look as she suspected she did right now—a dripping-wet, likely bright red mess after her walk up from the dock. She could have used time to prepare herself the way she liked to do before big, important meetings.
But she already knew this man would be difficult. She’d expected that. She’d gathered all the information she could from her competitors, all of whom had been delighted to have a drink and assure her that she had no hope of succeeding where they had failed. The man looks for weakness, one of the previous five failures had brayed at her over his martini. Like a shark.
Accordingly, Lucinda didn’t stammer or excuse herself or attempt to ease into small talk. All she did was smile back at Jason Kaoki in all his astonishing flesh, there in the abandoned old lobby.
Cool and controlled, as if he didn’t get to her at all. As if it had taken forty seconds to get here to see him, not forty hours, and she was well rested and perfectly relaxed. And while she was at it, she quickly reviewed everything she knew about this most maddening and elusive of the St. George heirs—the three sons and one daughter who had been revealed to be the old playboy’s children by the same will that had accorded each of them one of his luxury properties.
Jason Kaoki had grown up in Hawaii, bouncing back and forth between the Big Island and Oahu with his mother and her extended family. He’d gone on to play college football on the mainland, had enjoyed a brief stint in the pros afterward, followed by a run of lucrative endorsement deals that continued to this day. He was rumored to spend most of his considerable fortune on philanthropic pursuits all over his beloved Pacific Islands, from schools to veterans charities, though the precise amount of any actual donations he made were always kept winkingly anonymous.
The man put on a good show on social media, but in truth, he liked his privacy. He was hard to find and even harder to pin down to any kind of meeting. When Daniel St. George’s will had been read and this island had come into play, corporate hotel consortiums like the one Lucinda had clawed her way into had taken notice. The others had tried their best to convince Jason to develop this island the way his father had clearly planned to do after he’d built a house here, and fold himself into their well-known brands, but he’d denied them all.
He didn’t need money. He already had a measure of fame. It was almost impossible to talk to him, her contacts had assured her, much less convince him of anything.
But then again, Lucinda had something none of them had.
She wasn’t here representing a tired old brand, for one thing. For another, she was a woman. And better still, she wasn’t the least bit afraid to use whatever feminine wiles she possessed to get what she wanted. What was the point of having wiles in the first place if not to use them at will? She’d never understood why so many people clutched at their pearls at the thought. She assumed they were the sort of people who had been born with a great many weapons at their disposal, so could pick and choose between them to decide which to use. Lucinda had never had that luxury.
And she didn’t need her research to tell her that Jason Kaoki was an extremely heterosexual male, though it had—in the form of a thousand pictures of him with pouting, female arm candy on three continents. Not to mention his often risqué commentary on his romantic pursuits for the benefit of the fawning paparazzi.
She could see it with her own two eyes, right here on this island in the middle of nowhere. She could feel it like another presence in the lobby, a raw lick of flame in her bones. And her flesh. She could see the flare of interest in his dark eyes and the way those black, arched brows rose. The way his almost disturbingly sensual mouth curved as he looked up at her.
She could use it.
So she smiled her best rendition of something seductive. She smoothed her hands down the sides of her skirt to emphasize her hips, and was suddenly glad her blouse edged toward sheer, with the suggestion of her breasts beneath. She had every intention of using the weapons she had when she sat down on the couch opposite him to negotiate.
With her entire body, if required. Because Lucinda was here to win.
By any means necessary.
JASON KAOKI STARED at the woman who’d appeared before him dressed in head-to-toe black like the goddamned Grim Reaper, right here on his island like the ghost of lives he didn’t want.
Lives he had outright rejected. Repeatedly.
“Are you going to stare at me all day?” he asked her, with the kind of lazy grin he liked to use on people who came at him in suits. “It’s an interesting sales pitch, I’ll give you that. Though I’m not sure it’s effective.”
His grin usually sent them running, alarm stamped all over their faces. Especially when he combined
