Buttons are made to be undone

One wicked touch at a time...

Self-made businesswoman Lucinda Graves is determined to add a tropical hotel to her company’s empire. Devastatingly handsome owner Jason Kaoki is willing to negotiate—but only if Lucinda rises to the challenges he sets! Lucinda passes every test, but as each dare grows hotter and wilder than the last, will she be able to keep her eyes on the prize?

USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Programme, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature that she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

If you liked Untamed, why not try

the other books in

Caitlin Crews’s Hotel Temptation trilogy?

Undone

Unleashed

You could also try

On His Knees by Cathryn Fox

Mr. One-Night Stand by Rachael Stewart

Decadent by Alexx Andria

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk

Untamed

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08685-1

UNTAMED

© 2019 Caitlin Crews

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Version: 2020-03-02

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Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

FIVE SEPARATE EMISSARIES had already been sent from competing hotel conglomerates to convince the notably impossible Jason Kaoki to develop the unspoiled private island in the Pacific he’d inherited from his late father, international playboy and real estate tycoon Daniel St. George. All five had failed.

Miserably. And quickly.

Lucinda Graves had no intention of making herself the sixth.

It had taken her forty hours of brutal long-haul travel to make it across the planet. Forty miserable hours from the gray bustle of London in what passed for its rainy spring to this tiny, shockingly bright island sunning itself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. She was thousands of miles from anywhere, surrounded by nothing but salt and sea stretching out toward the horizon in all directions—a state of affairs that might have made her anxious had she possessed the wherewithal to consider it in any depth.

Because she was tired. More than tired. Somewhere over North America, Lucinda had gone past “tired” entirely and had found herself in the realm of a pure, bone-deep exhaustion the likes of which she wasn’t certain she’d ever felt before in her twenty-eight years.

But she was not to be deterred.

She would be the one to land this deal. She knew it.

The simple truth was that she would accept no other outcome.

When failure wasn’t an option, she liked to tell herself, the only remaining possibility was success.

The tiny little hopper plane, barely large enough to hold the pilot—much less an uneasy passenger who preferred her jets sized to carry hundreds, the better to imagine it wasn’t a plane at all—landed rather too bouncily for her taste over what she assumed had to be some kind of lagoon, the water blue and turquoise and gleaming.

She was too bleary-eyed and hollowed out from too many time zones to care.

When she stepped out of the plane onto the little dock that stretched out over the water—a dock, of all things, instead of any kind of proper tarmac, or climate-controlled, civilized airport—the humidity walloped her. It was like a fist, wet and hot. It was an instant, relentless assault and it nearly took her to her knees, right there beneath some rattling palm trees and the careless, blinding sunshine.

Lucinda had assumed she was duly prepared. She’d known she was heading to a tropical island, obviously. And she’d been to beaches before, like the last corporate retreat her company had taken to sun-drenched Spain—where she’d been expected to conduct business while sitting beside a pool, brandishing drinks festooned with foliage and pretending to be relaxed and carefree in a bloody sarong. She’d assumed this would be more of the same, if farther away than a quick hop to Spain. A beach was a beach, she’d assured herself as she’d set off what seemed like a lifetime ago.

But it turned out she wasn’t prepared for this remote Pacific island that didn’t appear on most maps and had no official name. Maybe it was impossible to be prepared for this much tropical heat all at once, heavy and intense.

Her hands went to her hair at once. Bright red and embarrassing, its mission in life was to curl dramatically and unprofessionally at the slightest provocation. Lucinda went to great lengths to keep it neat and sleek. She kept it ruthlessly straight and swept back into a severe bun on the back of her head, which kept it under control but couldn’t minimize its upsetting color. Lucinda had often considered dying her hair a more appropriate brown, the better to blend in, but the idea of all the upkeep struck her as wasteful. She’d concentrated instead on ridding herself of her native Scottish accent, because the circles in which she aspired to move had no place for impenetrable working-class Glaswegian accents.

And Lucinda succeeded in all she did, because she didn’t allow for the possibility of failure. She never had, from her rough beginnings in one of Glasgow’s notorious housing estates to her current position as a vice president in her company’s London corporate office. Tropical heat on a Pacific island couldn’t change that.

Though it complicated things, certainly. It seemed to curl into her, sneaking beneath her clothes like some kind of insinuation.

Lucinda tried to shake it off as she took in her surroundings, frowning at the sweep of untouched white sand and the wild tangle of jungle beyond, climbing up the green, steep sides of the hills.

“Are you certain this is the right place?” she demanded of the pilot, who had climbed down to the dock ahead of her and insisted on grinning widely as if everything she said and did was vastly entertaining.

Lucinda was not entertaining, thank you very much. She was effective. She was capable. And she was used to being treated as exactly what she was and wanted to be. Stern. Uncompromising. A straight-edged ruler of a woman, one of her first bosses had called her. He’d meant it as an insult, but Lucinda had taken it as the greatest compliment and had tried her best to live up to it ever since.

“You said you wanted Jason Kaoki,” the pilot replied, still grinning. “This is where he lives. I couldn’t tell you if that makes it the right place or not.”

Lucinda forced a tight smile, wrestled her sensible and compact carry-on bag behind her and marched off the dock.

Onto the pristine, glaring white beach, which she found even less accommodating than the smirking pilot she’d hired in Fiji, since there were no commercial flights to this place, plunked down in the Pacific somewhere between Honolulu and Nadi. The sand was hot and shifted beneath her as she walked, in a manner she found deeply unnerving. She liked the comfort of concrete. The assurance that when she stepped on it, it would remain exactly where it was, rain or shine.

The beach had its own ideas. That and the humidity...got to her, she could admit.

Lucinda had worn sensible flats, of course, but was otherwise hardly dressed for a romp across the sands. Despite the forty hours she’d spent traveling—one long-haul flight after another, with too many overly bright airports in between—she had maintained her usual workplace uniform. She was convinced a coolheaded, professional approach was the key to landing this account.

Though at the moment, trying not to sink knee-deep into blindingly white sand, she wished she hadn’t, perhaps, dressed for her conservative London office all those hours ago in her flat. It might have been wiser to choose something more appropriate for islands much warmer and brighter than the United Kingdom.

Lucinda wasn’t one to concede without a fight—or at all, generally speaking—but it took only about ten steps before she was forced to admit defeat. It was too hot. She was a natural shade of Scottish pale that she was afraid might burst into flame at any moment in all this tropical sun and heat, and she was so uncomfortable that she’d stopped thinking about her goals and was caught up in thinking about how she felt. That was unacceptable. She stopped, sinking deep into the sand, to shrug off her black jacket and kick off her matching flats, and wore nothing but her wrinkle-resistant blouse and sleek pencil skirt as she stormed the rest of her way toward solid ground.

Once there, she paused by another picturesque palm tree to dump the beach out of her shoes and slip them back on. And also to catch her breath, accept the likelihood that she was already breaking out in blisters from the relentless sun beating down on her, and try to get her bearings.

If the map on her phone was any guide, and she’d done enough research to know it was, there was precious little on this island. It was almost entirely undeveloped, save the sprawling house Daniel St. George had built here and a single, ancient hotel that had been thrown together in the 1950s in service to an Australian oilman’s fantasies of world domination. The hotel had never opened and now sat as a monument to the perils of too much money with no good sense.

She shoved her inadequate sunglasses higher on her nose as she peered down the length of the beach, frowning until she saw the hotel in question, peeking around a picture-perfect curve dusted with palm trees as it reached out toward the blue horizon. The old hotel squatted there with its midtwentieth-century facade and squat, flat shape, reminding Lucinda far too much of the block of flats she’d lived in as a child. All of which should have been torn down before the dawn of the twenty-first century, as far as Lucinda was concerned.

If she had her way, the sad old hotel wouldn’t make it through the summer.

There was a kind of track—she wouldn’t call it a road, packed with red dirt and sprouting weeds in the center—that skirted along the edge of the beach and wasn’t yet overtaken by the encroaching jungle. Lucinda marched along it, her eyes on the hotel. It didn’t get any prettier as she moved. But with every overly warm step, she entertained herself with notions of what could be.

A private island resort, catering only to the wealthiest and most exclusive clientele. The kind of fantasy island retreat most people only dreamed about, made a reality right here. She drew up plans in her head, ignoring the blazing sun. The humidity. The unmistakable knowledge that her makeup, or what was left of it all these hours after she’d last applied it in a restroom in the bowels of LAX, was almost certainly melting off her face.

It was a deceptive ten minutes’ walk—when it looked as if it ought to be five—from the dock to the old hotel, and when she drew close the building was even worse than she’d imagined. Lucinda knew it was all the rage in places like Los Angeles to pretend that so-called 1950s “style” was exciting and hip. But all that self-consciously cheerful midcentury modernity was pointedly retro and depressingly functional, to her way of thinking. And had no place in this secluded, remote setting. No, thank you. The point of a private island like this was seduction. Mystery and possibility, not the depressingly plain and boxy building that rose up before her like an Eastern European prison.

The setting cried out for magic. Secluded bungalows and private coves, as if the world beyond no longer existed. Not a squat, ugly horror that was little better than a roadside motel.

Lucinda strode up what might once have been a driveway before the jungle had claimed it and pushed her way into the lobby. It was dark inside, and quiet, and she blinked as she waited for the glare of the sun outside to fade so she could see how bad it really was.

There were potted plants that she thought might be fake, a shame in a place where the hills all around burst with green and bright, fragrant blossoms. Heavy, dark furniture that matched the hotel’s dark walls and made her think of men with thick gold chains and too much chest hair—potbellies and ugly Hawaiian shirts to match. Not exactly the sort of luxury and elegance, wrapped up in a tropical package, that a place like this should offer.

When her eyes adjusted to light, she started—

Because she wasn’t alone.

There was a man sitting there on one of the old couches, his bare feet propped up on the sad wicker table in front of him and his back to the big, open space that led out toward the beach and let the sea in.

Two things occurred to Lucinda at once.

First, that she hadn’t laid eyes on another living soul since she’d stepped off the airplane and left the pilot grinning after her. She hadn’t heard a single sound that suggested there were people anywhere nearby. This really, truly was a deserted, private island.

And of all the possibilities Lucinda had gone over in her head approximately nine thousand times, she hadn’t really let herself think too much about the meaning of that word—deserted—or the fact that she’d gone ahead and marooned herself here with a stranger. A man.

Not just any man. This man.

Which led her to number two. The man she’d come to see was far more devastating in person than in all the pictures she’d studied of him—and she was fairly certain she’d scoured the internet and had found every existing image, because she was nothing if not thorough.

But thorough research had not prepared her for...this.

The man watching her, still lounging there on the old sofa, was...too much.

Her breath left her in a confusing rush she couldn’t control, as if the very sight of him was a swift punch to her gut.

Jason Kaoki lounged there before her, kicked back in what passed for a seating area in the hotel’s sad lobby as if he was as much a fixture as the shiny, fake plants. Except nothing about him was the least bit sad. Lucinda told herself it was the thrill of finally making it here into his presence—after all the calls and emails he’d ignored for months now—that shot through her when their eyes locked. Because what else could it be?

But her mouth was remarkably dry. And there was a shivering thing trapped there, just beneath her skin. Because it turned out the most reclusive of the St. George heirs was a big man.

A very big man, she amended, and more disturbing by far, all of him was...exposed.

Well. Not all of him. Just the entire expanse of his considerably well-muscled chest, with nary a sign of a potbelly, unfortunate chest hair or clanking gold chains. There was a dusting lower down that narrowed as it snuck beneath the band of the long shorts he wore, but his chest was otherwise astonishingly...smooth. Muscled, flat pectorals and a stunning display of ridged abdominals. And there was no reason Lucinda’s gaze should linger there, or lower still, on his clearly powerful thighs in the shorts he wore low on his narrow hips. Or anywhere else on the great and glorious sprawl of him, all of it rangy and muscled and accented with beautiful tattoos, like something out of one of those superhero movies Lucinda was far too busy to see.

Dangerous, something in her whispered, insistent and low. This man is dangerous and you’re a fool to get this close to him.

And 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.

CHAPTER TWO

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 it with that tone.

Because Jason never tried too hard to hide his rougher edges.

But if he expected this newest suit to look stricken, or apologetic, or even faintly nervous like all the rest, he was disappointed. She left her little wheeling bag—also black—near the lobby doors and marched across the tile floor to settle herself against the low-slung couch opposite him. She sat as if she owned the place and him, too, which was definitely a bold approach. Then she crossed one decidedly well-formed leg over the other in that ridiculously tight skirt that belonged in an anonymous corporate office somewhere far to the north of here. She even folded her pale, slender hands in her lap, pious and prissy, and regarded him as if she was the one doing him a favor.

It should have put his teeth on edge, like all the teachers and social workers and coaches who’d tried and failed to civilize him always had. But this one was different from the parade of doughy accountant-types, each more arrogant than the last, who had traipsed out here and thought they could talk down to him.

For one thing, he had the feeling that if he could peel away all those laughably inappropriate black layers and see the woman beneath, she’d be hot. Sweet. A perfect snack for a man with a voracious appetite. She had hair the color of fire, and Jason was an elemental kind of guy. He wanted to take her pretty hair out of that agonizing-looking bun she’d slicked it into and get his hands in it. He wanted to see how all that fire smelled now that the sun and the sea had gotten in there and tugged a few strands free. He wanted to bury his face in its thickness and see how hard that got him.

Just to pull up a few urges at random.

What he couldn’t tell from looking at her was if she knew she was hot or not. And if she did, was she hiding herself in the funeral garb on purpose? Did she think that would work?

It didn’t. Her breasts were plump and round and begged for a man’s palms through the almost-sheer fabric of the fussy blouse she wore. She was tall for a regular woman—meaning, she was tall, but not one of the models he usually gravitated toward because they had legs that went on forever and that looked good draped over his shoulders while they fucked. And despite the tight-assed expression on her face, there was no disguising the flush on her high, ivory cheeks—currently from the sun, he figured, but he knew he could do better—and the full, soft lips he’d greatly enjoy seeing wrapped around his dick.

Jason was entertained.

And he couldn’t recall the last time that had happened in the presence of a suit.

He admired whoever had thought to stop sending all those boring tools and uptight douche bags here to talk at him until he scared them away. He wanted to applaud whoever had finally figured they were better off sending a hot little package like this one instead. Because the only thing better than an obviously hot woman who appeared ready to go and easy to get was one a man got the pleasure of unwrapping himself.

The quiet had stretched out between them, with nothing but the sound of the waves on the beach outside to divert attention from the way they were staring at each other.

Jason grinned. A little social discomfort didn’t bother him at all. But he couldn’t say the same for all the mainlanders.

This one broke the way they all did, but she kept her cool, businessy smile in place.

“It’s nice to meet you at last, Mr. Kaoki,” she said, in an English accent with something richer beneath it. Like an extra kick. He liked the way it moved over him, then settled in his cock. He wished she’d follow suit. “I appreciate you seeing me without any kind of appointment. For the record, I did try to make one.”

Her voice was, if possible, even more prim and proper than she looked, if he overlooked that burr beneath.

Jason had always liked the wild ones. The feral creatures who could keep up with him. But the more he stared at this defiantly pale woman with her gorgeous hair ruthlessly wrestled into submission, the more he wondered if it was the ones who pretended to be civilized who were the wildest underneath.

Something in him—and not just his dick—wanted to rise to that challenge.

“‘Mr. Kaoki?’ Jesus Christ. Who the hell is that? Sounds like someone who needs his ass kicked. I’m Jason.”

Her polite smile didn’t dim, and against his will, he was impressed. Each and every one of the wussy little men who’d sweated at him in this very same lobby had looked nauseated and ill at ease by this point. Because douche bags always imagined they could manipulate a big, loud, dumb jock—and they were always surprised and disconcerted to discover that this particular dumb jock was a whole lot more difficult to handle in person.

Not his prissy little redhead, sitting rigid and sure on the old sofa like that painful-looking bun of hers was pulling her spine straight. “I’m Lucinda Graves.”

“Why am I not surprised your name is Graves?” When she frowned, Jason shrugged. Expansively. And noted, with interest, the way her gaze followed the play of muscles in his shoulders. “Maybe you’re too jet-lagged to notice you’re in the South Pacific. Here we dress in pretty flowers and aloha and not a whole lot else. But you came dressed for a funeral.”

She rustled up that smile again, twice as polite this time. He figured she considered it a weapon.

He thought that was cute.

“I’m sorry if my professionalism offends you,” she said coolly. “I’m only trying to treat you with the courtesy due your position.”

“You mean my money, not my position. I don’t think you’d give a rat’s ass about my position if it wasn’t directly in your way. Much less any courtesy.”

“On the contrary, Mr. Kaoki. Manners never go amiss. Especially in trying situations.”

Was she scolding him? Jason thought she was. And even stranger, he found it just as hot.

Which probably said some shit about him, but he had no intention of analyzing it.

He shifted where he lounged there across from her before his unruly cock announced itself. He rubbed absently at his side, and once again her gaze dropped to follow the movement. All over the tattoo he’d gotten when his football scholarship had come through, so he’d never forget where he came from.

And Jason didn’t think she was the type to find ink quite that fascinating.

“I have to be honest, Lucinda.” He made her name a meal and discovered that he was actually good and hungry. Bordering on straight-up starving. “I don’t really think you know how trying this situation could get. Let me know if you want that to change.”

She blinked, but didn’t touch that. Smart girl.

“I represent an international hotel concern,” she started again, but he thought that smile of hers was more strained than before. He interpreted that as progress. “We specialize in extraordinary properties aimed toward top-tier clientele who expect—and can afford—the best. I’m sure you already know the development potential of this island is astronomical. And I say that as someone not given to exaggeration.”

“The development potential of anything is astronomical if the person who owns it keeps saying hell no to slick offers and obsequious dickheads in ugly suits.” He studied her for a moment, lingering on the flush across her high cheekbones and the freckles that were coming out over her nose. “I’m pretty sure you already know I don’t want to develop shit. You look like the type who would know that kind of thing before you stepped on an airplane to force a meeting. What makes you think you can show up here and convince me when no one else could?”

She blinked again, and her eyes—entirely too blue for his peace of mind—got canny. And Jason might look like a barbarian. He’d cultivated that image, in fact. Wild and loud and nothing but noise, because it suited him to be underestimated. The truth was, he’d always liked women with brains. It made life a hell of a lot more complicated, sure. But complicated was often a whole lot more interesting.

“I’m hoping that I can change your mind.” Her gaze was steady on his. “Why don’t you tell me what you think that would take.”

Jason laughed. It was a big laugh, just like him, and it filled the lobby. One of his more poetic exes had once told him it was like a volcano. As an island boy, born and bred to be respectful of Madame Pele and her works, Jason was more than okay with that comparison.

Especially when it seemed to bother the shit out of the tight-assed corporate creature perched across from him, who stiffened at the sound.

“I’m not going to talk contracts and deals, sweetheart,” he said when his laughter died away. “Fun fact. People don’t move to private islands without names in the middle of the Pacific Ocean if they want to be tracked down. And yet you people are like ants, one after the next, rolling up to ruin my picnic.”

“I don’t want to ruin your picnic,” she said, and he was almost impressed that she managed to get that out through her pursed lips and that attempt at the same polite smile. “I just want to make you a rich man.”

“I’m already a rich man.”

“You can always be richer.”

He laughed at that, too. Because she had hair like fire and skin so pale and resolutely sunless she glowed. And she was dressed in those stiff, dark clothes that looked as sad and dreary as whatever dark, rainy place she came from.

“White people always want to get richer,” he observed. “It’s just money, Lucinda.”

“Spoken like someone who has too much of it, Jason,” she fired back.

And he saw her, then. The real woman tucked away behind the prim and the proper, and she was bright. Sharp and wild. All teeth and snarl, and Jason wanted to tangle himself up in her and see if she left marks.

Something in him uncurled, then heated.

“If you don’t want money,” Lucinda said after a moment, her tone too precise, as if she was wrestling herself into submission—which Jason wanted to do himself, “what do you want?”

“I don’t want anything. And if I did, I’d go get it. I don’t need help from corporate assholes.”

She looked impatient for a second, but wiped it away in the next. “Everybody wants something, Mr. Kaoki. All you have to do is admit it.”

He let the things he wanted settle into him, hot and greedy, and made no particular attempt to hide the burn of it as he regarded her. His reward was a splash of deeper color in her telltale cheeks.

“I don’t need to see your tedious fucking blueprints or pay attention while you yammer at me about secluded coves, lanais for days and forests of tiki torches,” he drawled, aware he was landing hits every time her flush deepened. She was an open book and he was almost positive she didn’t know it. That only made this more fun. “Building some snooty resort here isn’t going to make me happier. So what’s the point? Why would I bother? Hawaii is already occupied. Your fancy clients can go ruin it some more whenever they get the hankering to play colonizer.”

She didn’t miss a beat. Her eyes were a cool, fathomless blue, like the ocean he loved on a tempestuous day—and there was something about that comparison that rubbed him the wrong way. Like it was settling into him. He tried to shake it off, concentrating on what she was saying instead.

“Maybe it’s not your happiness we should be concerned with. Think about all the good you could do if you brought jobs and investment to the area.”

“Baby, I don’t know what you read about me, but my happiness is the only thing I’m concerned with.”

“You give away more money to local charities than most people in the Pacific Islands will ever make.”

“That’s a rumor,” Jason replied lightly. “An unproven rumor because people like to think the best about other people. The truth makes them itchy.”

“People think the best of others? When?” Her laugh made him restless. “I think you’ll find they really don’t.”

“Whatever. I’m a selfish man, darlin’. I amuse myself and that’s about it. And nothing about ruining this island with another bullshit resort that pollutes the place strikes me as all that amusing.”

“I had no idea you were such an environmentalist.”

“I’m not. I’m selfish. I like my beach empty, my jungle wild and my roads clear. The point of a private island is that no one else is on it.”

“Right.” She seemed to take that on board. Her eyes narrowed as she looked him over, like she was trying to find his weaknesses. He gazed back at her, boneless and unconcerned. “But even selfish men want something.”

“There’s nothing I want I can’t get, Lucinda. I don’t need to make bargains with strange women. I don’t even need to have this conversation, but that’s the kind of guy I am. Nice to a fucking fault.”

He grinned at her, letting his edges show again, and he wasn’t entirely surprised when she didn’t look away. She was a lot tougher than the men who’d come here. Or more determined, anyway.

One more thing that shouldn’t have appealed to him. But Jason had always been a sucker for a little grit.

“Oh, yes,” she murmured. “You’re very nice. That’s the word I’d choose to describe you.”

“Feel free to pick a better one.”

But she didn’t take him up on his invitation. Instead, her body language changed, right there in front of him.

Jason watched, fascinated, because she didn’t melt. She didn’t go boneless and seductive, or start fiddling with the buttons on that shirt of hers to start flashing him those perfect breasts. The straight edge of her spine didn’t curve in the slightest.

And yet there was no doubt that something changed.

He could feel it between them, a thick, humming kind of tension. He told himself he was amused by this latest attempt to get at him, but his cock wasn’t laughing. It was fascinated, too.

More than fascinated.

And he was getting hungrier by the moment.

“Are you offering me something?” he asked.

Her gaze had turned speculative. And she was tilting her head to one side in a manner designed to make him rock hard and ready. “My understanding is that in the past, you’ve kicked everyone who came here off this island within hours.”

“Now my buddy just waits at the dock,” Jason agreed, genially enough. “So he can take you right back to Fiji. You can go now, if you want.”

Her smile was a thing to behold. It wasn’t that polite one she’d been bludgeoning him with since she’d walked in, professional and distant. This one took over her whole face. It was like the sun coming out from behind clouds, the sudden shock of heat and brightness making his chest feel tight.

All he could think about was tasting that fire. Drowning himself in it. Making her burn hot until she screamed.

But she thought she was playing him, so Jason didn’t move. He waited.

“What I want is for you to let me stay,” she told him.

So very prettily.

Jason grinned. He’d been hit on by so many beautiful women he’d lost count before he left for college. And he was Hawaiian—technically half-Hawaiian, but he’d never bothered to recognize the haole douche bag tourist who had seduced his mother and left her high and dry—which meant his standards for beauty were pretty damn high. He rarely bothered with corporate types. Sticks up the ass didn’t get him off.

But everything in him was encouraging him to make an exception in Lucinda’s case.

“Now, why would I do something like that?” he asked. He let his grin hint at his greed. “What’s in it for me?”

And then surprised himself by settling back and waiting for her to convince him.

CHAPTER THREE

LUCINDA DIDN’T KNOW what the hell she was doing.

She had always been about a plan. Making a plan, following a plan and sticking to a plan come hell or high water. She researched, she got herself ready and then she executed said plan without ever straying into too much dangerous spontaneity. That strategy had served her well her whole life—but something about this island made her feel outside herself. Inside out, stretched thin, too hot and too exposed, all at once.

It’s the jet lag, she told herself. But there was the distinct possibility it had more to do with the man lounging there across from her, watching her with lethal intent, than the island or what it had taken to get here.

The truth was that while she wasn’t averse to using whatever inducements she could throw at Jason Kaoki, she wasn’t entirely sure she’d be the one getting what she wanted out of the bargain if she did.

He wasn’t like other men.

He wasn’t like anyone she’d ever met.

He was too big, in every sense of the term. He was built on a grand scale, sure, but there was also his laugh. His wicked, challenging grin. That steady dark gaze of his that told her in no uncertain terms that he truly didn’t need or want a damned thing from anyone...

But that he might take it anyway, if it was offered.

There’s no reason you can’t make him an offer—that offer—right here and now, she told herself stoutly, still holding that simmering gaze of his. The notion made a deep shiver wind its way through her, making her hold herself even more still for fear he’d see exactly what she wanted to give him. What she was willing to trade.

She didn’t know what she was doing, but she needed to figure it out. And fast.

Because she needed this. She needed to win. She needed to prove herself, once and for all, in a way that no one could claim was theirs or take away from her or dismiss. Lucinda was so tired of fighting for every last scrap. She didn’t like to admit it to herself, but she knew it was true. After a lifetime of hustling, she was tired. She wanted to be done with the dustups, once and for all. She’d been swinging and scrabbling all her life, and she wanted the big prize this time.

She wanted to rest on her laurels for a change. She wanted to see what the world looked like when she was sure of her place in it. At last.

And there was no doubt that landing Jason Kaoki and this jewel of an island would do the trick. It would be the making of her. She could leave her firm in a blaze of glory and go out on her own. Maybe stay in one of the exclusive properties she worked so hard to build, for a start.

No one back in London thought she could do it.

“You’re wasting your time,” her direct superior had told her, sighing loudly to make certain Lucinda knew she was bothering him when she’d dutifully told him her plans. He named the much-celebrated president of a rival boutique hotel corporate body, who had only the week before sneered at Lucinda in a trendy gastropub as he’d assured her the Kaoki property was lost to developers. “If he can’t make it happen, no one can.”

“I can do it,” Lucinda had said with tremendous certainty and confidence.

It had only been partially feigned.

Because she’d studied Jason Kaoki. And she hadn’t concentrated only on his investment portfolio like everyone else, all those cold numbers and figures. Lucinda had immersed herself in all his social media accounts. She’d watched old interviews and read articles on his early prowess on the football field.

She’d convinced herself she knew him.

“If you can, you’ll be a legend,” her boss had replied, with a laugh. Indicating how unlikely a prospect he thought that was. Because he might like how hard Lucinda worked, but he certainly didn’t think she had it in her to become a legend.

And it turned out that the scrappy little nobody from that grotty flat in one of Glasgow’s most notorious tower blocks wanted to be a legend. Very badly, in fact. She didn’t want to work for anyone else. She didn’t want to report to her boss, who was decent enough as these things went, but still liked to take credit for her best and brightest ideas like they were owed to him.

Then laughed at her when she showed her belly by clearly indicating she wanted more.

Goddamn it, but she wanted this win.

That was why she’d taken her annual leave and spent her own money to haul herself here to make her own legend, her own way.

Only to discover that not only was Jason Kaoki as difficult as advertised, he was difficult in a completely different way than she’d anticipated. And more worryingly, she seemed to be someone else when she was in his presence.

She told herself, once again, that it was the heat. The tropics, bearing down on her relentlessly. The lobby was open to the weather and the breeze that wound its way in one side and out the other did very little to cool her off. Instead, it danced over her, making her feel electric and strange. And aware of too many things she’d prefer to ignore altogether.

The press of her thighs against each other. The heat her own body generated. The touch of the breeze itself, soft and warm all over her, like a caress.

“Tell me what it would take,” she said now. Again. She focused on Jason. On the task at hand. “Tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you.”

He looked...sinful and dangerous. Deeply, inarguably dangerous. Alarms went off inside her, one after the next, and she had to fight to repress a shiver of unease. Or whatever that feeling was that nipped at her and made her wonder if a person could spontaneously combust, after all. Right here and now in an ugly, forgotten hotel.

“I appreciate the offer,” Jason said, in that drawling, suggestive voice of his that danced all over her like a terrible fire. Far worse than any tropical breeze. “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 leap into the surf like some kind of demented mermaid,” she said tartly.

And instantly regretted the impulse. It was...not wise to talk about taking off clothes in the presence of a man like this. She understood the magnitude of her mistake instantly. She thought the air was already seductive, but suddenly it seemed to burn. 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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