“But I don’t think you can.”
She told herself the sun and the heat were getting to her, that was all. She was Scottish and she lived in London. She was built for gray skies and buckets of rain, not white-sand beaches and glaringly blue skies without a stray cloud in sight. There had been entirely too much sunshine on her walk from the dock to this sad old hotel, and she was much too pale to handle it. She was experiencing some kind of prickly heat reaction to the weather, nothing more.
He happened to be here, but he wasn’t the cause of it.
It was crazy to imagine otherwise.
“I don’t do business meetings,” Jason told her, and that same insanity swept through her again when his mouth curved, prickly and too hot and clearly not the weather at all. “I’m not into presentations in boardrooms. I hate bankers and proposals and sober contract negotiations. Ad men make me want to break things. I don’t like suits—” and he nodded at her, indicating that he didn’t like hers either “—and I don’t trust anyone who would wear one or sign up to sell snake oil in that kind of place in the first place.”
There was absolutely no reason Lucinda should feel the sting of that as if he’d slapped her. Who cared what he thought about her outfit or her job? What did overly rich men know about anything besides themselves and their net worth?
She forced a smile, though she was afraid it wasn’t nearly as bland as it ought to have been. “This kind of input is helpful. Tell me what kind of meeting you like, where you’d like it to take place and how you’d like everyone involved to dress, and I’ll make it happen. No snake oil allowed.”
Jason’s dark gaze gleamed with a molten gold that was much more dangerous than the breeze or the relentless sun outside. And his grin reminded her of a pirate’s, wide and filled with entirely too much dark intent.
She couldn’t quite breathe.
“You might not like my suggestions,” he pointed out in that lazy way of his, layered with sex and sin.
“I don’t have to like your suggestions,” Lucinda replied tartly. “This is about you. What I like or don’t like is immaterial.”
“If you say so.”
And Lucinda had always prided herself on being able to read people. It had been a necessary component of her climb out of the hole of her poverty-stricken childhood. She could read people like a book, and she’d always read them at lightning speed, because that was the only way to avoid her drunken father’s fist or her perpetually bitter mother’s tongue. She’d learned how to avoid the unsavory characters who lurked in the tower blocks, and how to tell the difference between a bored kid and a dangerous criminal when they often looked alike. She’d honed these kinds of skills when she was young and they’d served her well ever after.
The more she could read her superiors and her clients, the better she could anticipate their needs. The more she did that, the more indispensable she made herself, and that was how a girl from nothing made herself a vice president at a multinational corporation when most of the people she’d grown up with had never made it out of the same housing estate where they’d been raised.
Lucinda considered her street smarts an essential tool in her kit.
But she understood it was useless here. With him.
Jason Kaoki was a mystery. A deliberate one, if she didn’t miss her guess, but a mystery all the same. Because he was lounging around wearing nothing but those low-slung water shorts of his, showing off acres and acres of brown skin and a selection of artistic tattoos. His dark hair was much too long for conventional sensibilities, he grinned far too wide and often, he laughed uproariously at the slightest provocation, and everything about him gave off the impression that he was wide open. Easy and amiable and approachable.
But the five men he’d already ejected from this island proved that none of that was true. He might laugh loud and long, but it would be a very great fool indeed who imagined he was easy. In any way.
Against her will, Lucinda found herself wondering why a man who had everything—who had been blessed with all that undeniable athleticism to win himself a place outside his own humble beginnings, instead of having to fight for a way out with a mix of cleverness and desperation as she had—needed to hide in plain sight.
But that wasn’t her business. The resort she wanted to build here was.
And this wasn’t the first time in her life Lucinda had been forced to sit with a smile on her face, fighting to remain calm while other people decided her future at their whim.
As God was her witness, if she could make this work, this would be the last.
“Okay,” he said, after a lifetime or two. With that same dark gaze heavy on her, like a foot on her neck.
That was hardly a helpful image, she chided herself. Especially when her body responded to it as if it was something sexual.
And worse, delicious.
Lucinda eyed him. “Okay?” she echoed.
“Okay,” Jason said again. That impossible mouth of his curved and the gleam in his gaze turned considering. Or challenging. “Get changed. We’re going surfing.”
“Surfing?”
“I don’t think I stuttered, darlin’.”
Lucinda battled to keep her feelings off her face. Her palms ached, and she had to glance down to see that she was digging her own nails into her palms. She uncurled her hands. Painfully.
“You didn’t stutter. But I don’t surf.”
“Then it’s time to learn,” he told her, all drawl, heat and challenge and something she was very much afraid was anticipation all over him. “Because I don’t trust anyone who can’t ride a wave. And I certainly won’t negotiate with them.”
Obviously, the last thing Lucinda wanted to do was get in the water.
She hardly swam at all. She’d learned as a matter of course when she was a teenager, because she’d been born on an island and thought it was ridiculous not to know how to swim if the opportunity presented itself. It had been a practical decision. A matter of survival, like most things involving her childhood and her path out.
Surfing was something else entirely. The word itself made her bristle at the image of lanky blond men drooping over California beaches, all abs and lazy accents.
“I didn’t come here to swim,” she told Jason as crisply as possible. “I’m afraid I brought a very limited wardrobe with me, none of it appropriate for water sports.”
Jason was still lounging there on that couch, like some kind of deity surveying his universe in comfort. Lucinda scolded herself for the thought—but scolding herself didn’t change the fact that was how he looked.
“No worries.” His easy drawl made her think of heat. Light. The thick, sweet seduction of the tropical air—
Settle yourself, madam, she ordered herself, aware the voice in her head sounded a great deal like her mother’s.
“I certainly hope you’re not suggesting I simply toss off all my clothes and
