As if there was a clenched hand around the both of them and it started to squeeze tight.
Lucinda couldn’t breathe. Her eyes felt wet, as if the tension was making her tear up. She felt much too hot to keep lying to herself about prickly heat or sun when she was sitting inside and the only source of heat anywhere around her was Jason.
Something changed on his face, making him look even more wicked and wild than before. And it didn’t help that there was so much of him. Naked and gleaming and right there—
She was afraid the fire in her was visible. She had to find a way to freeze or she didn’t know what would become of her.
“Nudity is always encouraged.” Jason’s voice was a low drawl, as wicked as his expression. “But no need to make yourself sick about it, darlin’. I got you covered.”
He rose then, shifting from that lounging, lazy posture to his feet in a smooth, athletic shift that made something deep in Lucinda’s belly turn over. And hum.
She understood something then, in a flash. That this was all an act. That there was nothing about him that was lazy in the least. The lounging, the grinning, the darlin’ and the drawl—these were all masks he wore. To conceal the truth of him that she should have known already. He was a world-renowned athlete.
A predator, not to put too fine a point on it, in a world of prey, and he apparently liked to hide right there in plain sight.
He was big, entirely too dangerous, and now he was towering over her in the dim hotel lobby.
And Lucinda had never been so aware of her own pulse in her life. It throbbed in her wrists, her neck, her breasts, and seemed to glow to the same rhythm in her pussy.
She stopped pretending there was any possibility that she was going to breathe normally.
His gaze was still on her and she felt...frozen, but not in any kind of ice. If a bright, white-hot flame was immobilizing, that was what caught her. Held her.
Had her tipping up her chin to stare him straight in the eye while her imagination went wild. What if he reached down and pulled her to him with one of those outsized hands? What if he took both of those big, capable hands and put them on her body? What if he—
Jason smirked, that mocking, knowing curve of his wicked mouth that told her she wasn’t the only person who could read others easily. Too easily.
He didn’t say a word, he simply padded across the hotel lobby. He disappeared behind the scratched, dark wood desk and into what she assumed was some kind of office.
And he took the storm with him, leaving Lucinda gasping for air in his wake.
Without him in the lobby, it was nothing but tired, old midcentury furnishings, questionable corporate art and the sound of waves crashing down on the beach outside.
And she couldn’t tell, for long moments, if it was the waves she heard or her own heartbeat.
Lucinda got to her feet, feeling as rickety on her flats as she would have if she was wearing impractical stiletto heels. And she hated that she wasn’t sure if her knees would hold her as she made her own way across the lobby floor.
But she pulled herself together—or near enough—by the time Jason emerged from the back office again. And she would die before she would confess such a thing out loud, but there was a part of her that was grateful he stayed on the other side of the desk when he came out. It wasn’t much, just that long, ambling counter of once-polished wood, but as far as Lucinda was concerned it might as well have been a fortress separating her from him.
She would take what she could get.
He tossed a scandalously small handful of brightly colored scraps across the desk and Lucinda found herself staring at them as the soft heap slid along the wood and came to a stop in front of her.
It took her longer than she cared to admit to understand that it was a bathing costume.
Part of one, anyway. It was all strings. What wasn’t an actual string was pink and bright and not something Lucinda would ever consider wearing in private. Much less while supposedly conducting business.
But when she lifted her gaze to his again, she could tell that this, too, was a challenge.
“It’s called a bikini,” Jason said, as if he was talking to a child. A very dimwitted child. “You put it on and then go in the water. It’s that simple.”
Lucinda felt something shake, deep inside her, that she was terribly afraid was fear. Panic, even, when she’d been so sure she’d knocked the panic right out of her years ago.
But there was no sign of any tremor in her hand when she reached out and placed it on the soft, small little pile this man seemed to expect she would put on her body. And then wear right out in the open, in and out of water, where he could see her—
Lucinda’s mind cartwheeled away from that.
“How fortunate that you have a selection at hand,” she said crisply, and was proud of her tone.
He grinned. “People leave the strangest things behind here. But don’t worry. It’s clean.”
It was an innocuous enough statement, so Lucinda had no idea why it licked through her as if he’d said something dirty. Very, very dirty.
She forced herself to smile. She hoped it looked cool and controlled, but at this point, she had to focus all her energy on keeping herself from shaking like a leaf. “I appreciate you providing me with some of your castoffs, I do. But I’m afraid that I have a terribly fair complexion. Perhaps you noticed. I came to this island to do a little business, not frolic on the beach. I’m quite certain that if I step outside, I’ll be sunburnt within an inch of my life. In minutes. So thank you, but I do think I had better decline this lovely offer.”
“Don’t worry, Lucinda.” Jason’s voice was a low rumble. Dark and stirring, and her name in his mouth made her pussy ache. “I have suntan lotion, too. And I’m more than capable of making sure I don’t miss a single spot.”
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