“Fuck a lot?” He leaned back in his seat, despite all the roaring insanity inside him, like he could lounge there forever. Like he was on the verge of terminal boredom. “I can do that.”
Lucinda started pacing then, back and forth in front of the fire pit. Jason should have found her agitating. Instead, the only word that seemed to dance around inside him was adorable.
As far as he could tell, it was one more way to make sure he knew he was boned.
“I’m talking about this island,” she said. “The opportunity to create something truly special.”
“But again, only for the kind of people who can afford it. And I’m betting every single one of them will remind me a little too much of the giant douche who built this place. Why would I want that?”
She shot a look at him with Why are you here? written all over it.
But that wasn’t what she said. “When you create destination fantasies, you might be surprised to discover what sort of people think it’s in their best interests to get there. One way or another.”
He told himself all that carrying on in his chest was irritation. Not even temper. “Oh yeah? How many luxury properties do you stay at every year?”
“As it happens, I’m not great at taking all my allotted holiday time. I’m sure you’ve experienced that kind of pressure before. The people I work with are obsessed with status. Which means I have to be, too.”
She kept making connections between them and Jason didn’t want any part of that. There was only one part of him that liked connecting, and his dick didn’t talk.
“But you’re not into that, of course. You’re above that kind of thing. Like every other woman who’s chased after me since I got that football scholarship.”
She did another lap.
“What interests me about high-status properties are what can be done with them,” she said, as if he was having a serious conversation with her. Instead of acting like a sulky teenager. “And how much of an immersive experience they provide. Because the sad truth about many high-status operations is that they rest on their laurels and don’t offer the paying clients much of anything besides the bill. I prefer experiences. I want clients to forget about the outside world entirely. I want leaving one of my properties to feel like leaving home, and I want it to haunt them once they’re gone.”
“I told you my position on ghosts.”
Her gaze met his again, and he was sure she could feel the sizzle. So sure, in fact, that he found himself paying more attention to the way she was walking back and forth in front of him. More quickly each time. And her breath getting more and more shallow with each pass.
Making it clear to him that he wasn’t the only one feeling crushed in the grip of the tension between them.
What did it make him that he was actually relieved? When he couldn’t actually recall the last time the faintest sexual urge he’d had wasn’t heartily and enthusiastically requited?
“I know that you’re a man who likes to do good, Jason.”
“That’s nothing but a nasty rumor.”
“I know it’s not only a rumor. The truth is that the kind of conscious luxury experience that I’m talking about will preserve this island. And allow all kinds of people to experience what makes all the Pacific Islands so special in the first place. Of course, tourism can cause its own problems. I don’t deny that. But how can people realize what they ought to help save if they can’t experience it in as close to an unspoiled state as possible?”
Her face changed when she was truly animated. When she wasn’t buttoning herself up in funeral clothes or beating her hair into submission. She was flushed with this passion of hers, her eyes bright and her voice intent, and he wanted to be inside her with such ferocity that it might have scared him.
If he wasn’t so sure that it was only a matter of time.
“I might not be a natural beach person,” she said, sounding fully Scottish and wholly alive as she wedged herself farther beneath his skin with every word. “I might personally prefer the shade of a tree to the glaring heat of white sand midday, I grant you. But this place is seductive. It’s magical. It’s not only that people will never want to leave here. It will make them happy to stay here. I don’t know much about your father, or not much more than anyone else, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that whatever else he was, he certainly wasn’t a happy man. And it seems to me that creating a space for happiness in a place he built to be more of the same empty life he already led is the greatest revenge you could possibly have on him.”
That caught at him.
Lucinda warmed to her topic, and her hands got into the act as she started talking about all those blueprints and building codes he’d already told her didn’t interest him. And it was true. He didn’t care. But he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her.
And the fact she’d unerringly narrowed in on the one thing he wanted that he couldn’t have.
Revenge.
“Maybe we can dig him up, animate him and kill him all over again,” his half sister, Angelique Masterson, had suggested a few hours ago on one of the weekly calls the heirs of Daniel St. George—Jason’s half siblings—were obligated to have.
Angelique had been sitting somewhere in one of the beautiful rooms of the hotel she ran in the desert kingdom of Sadat, where she’d charmed a prince and met all the extra terms Daniel St. George had thrown in her path, simply because she was a girl. She’d been toying with the choker necklace she wore all the time now, its elegance somehow working with her full sleeves of tattoos. Only Angelique.
Revenge on their late and unlamented father was a topic they returned to often, as it happened.
“That makes me feel warm all over,” his half brother Charlie Teller had said from Italy, kicked back on a terrace with pastel houses falling down the cliff behind him and the sound of a woman’s voice in the background—his wife, presumably, doing her lawyer thing just out of range. Charlie had smirked. “Almost like we’re a real family, after all.”
“My understanding is that this is the way of all families,” the oldest of the half brothers had said. Thor Ragnarsson looked every inch the modern Viking he was, standing near a window in one of those suits he loved, and Iceland’s endless snow swirling around behind him. And no sign of his forbiddingly smart, purple-haired professor. “Endless grudges, revenge fantasies and petty squabbling. I suspect that makes us real already.”
“That sounds a whole lot like white people problems,” Jason had rumbled, letting out one of his trademark belly laughs. Mostly because he knew his half siblings found him both baffling and confronting. “In Hawaii we call it ohana. It’s a way of life, motherfuckers. We don’t squabble like little bitches. We eat. It’s hard to get fired up about some petty bullshit when your belly’s nice and full of a good kalua pork and there’s nothing to do but sit around talking story.”
But for all his protestations to his half siblings, who had all gotten a hell of a lot happier since they’d first started these online meetings thanks to finding themselves some steady loving in one place or another, that wasn’t quite how he felt about Daniel St. George. Or himself.
Or about the things his mother had said to him when she’d called him out.
Or, hell, even this island.
He hadn’t put it in the stark terms Lucinda had. But now he couldn’t think of it in any other way.
Was he finding himself here? Or was he squatting in this house, deliberately not using the island the way his father would have? Like that could somehow stick it to the old man beyond the grave?
He focused back in on Lucinda, who was still pacing around in front of him, warming to whatever point