She stopped talking, blinking. Jason shook his head at her, ordering himself to calm down. Now.
It didn’t matter that she’d wandered out here dressed for the islands at last, instead of some stuffy boardroom. Her flowing sarong reminded him how sweet her curves were, and how they felt beneath his hands, so lush and feminine. And her hair. He could see all the curl in it, a bright riot on top of her head, and he was this close to just putting his hands in it here and now the way he’d wanted to from the start.
She looked wild and delicious and he liked everything from the freckles all over her shoulders to the dazed way she’d looked at him when she’d walked out on this terrace. It all seemed to hum in him, then settle in his cock like a fist.
But none of it mattered if she was going to mouth all the same bullshit.
“I don’t want a sales pitch,” he said when he was reasonably sure that he was going to keep his hands to himself. For the moment. “I could get that anywhere, and believe me, I have. You hauled your ass all the way here, and you stayed. You surfed. That’s more than all the rest of them can say.”
“I bet they didn’t look as cute in that bikini.”
Jason filed away the fact that when her hair wasn’t scraped back into a headache, Lucinda was funny. But he didn’t laugh. He waited. And when she cleared her throat, he pressed his advantage.
“Tell me why you care,” he said again, with even more intensity. “You’re talking about building a hotel, not a refuge for some endangered species. There’s an old hotel falling down on this island already. Why build something new? Why pretend it matters so much?”
“Because it does matter.”
Maybe she surprised herself with that, because she instantly sat up that little bit straighter. Her blue eyes were guarded, but she kept them trained on his. He expected her to back right off. To say something else to defuse the tension, or try to shove them back toward something professional.
Good luck with that. He’d never felt less professional in his life.
When she stood up in a rush, he thought she was going to take it even further and just walk away. It was possible he’d read her wrong, and she was truly nothing more than shiny brochures and boardroom presentations.
But she didn’t run. Instead, she clasped her hands in front of her and faced him.
“I grew up in a housing estate in Glasgow,” she said, and her accent changed again, blurring the vowels and shading the consonants. He liked it. “I think you call them projects in the States, but it’s all the same. Depressed and often desperate people crammed into small spaces together.”
“I’m familiar with the phenomenon.”
Lucinda inclined her head. “The tower block of flats where my family lived is notorious to this day. Filled with crime, poverty and every other social ill you care to mention, we had it in spades. They’ve knocked those towers down now, and good riddance. But that was my home. I was born there, raised there and had every expectation of living out my life there.”
She looked away and unclenched her hands, as if she’d been holding them so tightly that she’d hurt herself. Which made Jason want to do things that didn’t make sense to him, like simply...hold her. Until she felt better.
He shook that off. And she was talking again, staring into the fire.
“I can’t express to you how grim it all was. What it was like to grow up in all that gray concrete, never knowing that there was so much better out there. Shows on television didn’t seem real, not when we lived in such a prison. It was just the telly, beaming in something someone made up so we’d forget where we were. But when I was seven, I happened upon a travel magazine at school one day. I think one of the teachers must have left it behind. And oh, wasn’t that something?”
She shook her head, but Jason was caught by the way her eyes lit up. They reminded him of his beloved sea, out here in the dark. They were that fathomless. That beautiful and changeable, all at once.
“The places in the magazine were real. Not something made up for a television show. They were real and they were beautiful, and that changed the way I thought about everything. When I was a little older, I sneaked down to the grand old railway hotel in Glasgow to see if a hotel could make me feel the way the travel magazines did. And this was before it got a face-lift, but I was in awe just the same.”
Jason felt a little too close to awe himself as he watched the fire move over that wistful expression on her face.
“And from that point on, I knew that hotels were the only kind of fairy tales that mattered,” Lucinda said, turning back to him, her eyes grave. “Because people could live in them. They could come from whatever life they had, whether it was a stately home somewhere or a grotty little bedsit, and they could live a different life for a time.”
“If they could afford it,” Jason said, with maybe too much derision in his voice. Because he wasn’t sure if he was determined to slap reality on her—or himself, for getting caught up in the story she was telling.
“I can’t think of many things I’d rather spend my money on than a dream come true,” she replied softly. “That’s what a hotel is. The better the hotel, the better the happily-ever-after. It should be made clear in every small detail. The softness of the sheets. The beauty of the view. The excellence of the staff. Each and every part of the fairy tale builds the story as a whole.”
She waved a hand toward the house, the last Daniel St. George property. The one his sycophants claimed meant the most to him. Why did that notion make Jason want to burn it to the ground?
“I look at a place like this and I think this is the kind of paradise that normal people want to remember for the rest of their lives. And wanting memories like this becomes the kind of dreams that make normal life worth living. I would happily scrimp and save for a week in a dream come true. I have. Would you?”
Jason felt as if he’d been waiting years for her. All the hours she’d been asleep, for sure, leaving him prowling around this place with all his rough edges driving him crazy. His mouth was dry. He was practically beside himself, if he was honest, but he could still control that. Or pretend well enough.
What he couldn’t seem to wrestle into submission was the sensation blowing up his chest, making him want nothing more than to take every dream this woman had ever had and make it come true. Right here, right now.
And that made him feel ripped in half. Dumb and blindly stupid with all these feelings he didn’t like and didn’t want.
But he wanted her more.
“I never would’ve pegged you for starry-eyed optimist,” he managed to say without betraying his own distinct lack of chill.
Her mouth curved slightly, and the light in those blue eyes didn’t dim. “That’s funny. I’d call myself a realist.”
“A realist who arranged her life around happily-ever-afters and dreams coming true. Because that’s real practical.”
“I know you know what it’s like to grow up with nothing,” she said softly. “Lucky to find shoes to put on your feet. Much less ones that fit.”
“That’s the cool thing about growing up in Hawaii. Shoes are optional.”
“Everything you have, Jason, you built for yourself. With your brain. With your body. With every shrewd decision and every stellar athletic performance. I didn’t play football. But I did educate myself into a university degree. Just as I’ve performed my way into every position I’ve held. No matter how I got it.”
His heart was doing weird flips. He rubbed at it, like that could shut it up.
“I hope that means you have flexible morals and no compunction whatsoever about sleeping your way around.” Jason grinned, wide and maybe a little desperate. He hoped she couldn’t see that part.