Scotland,” he drawled, almost enjoying himself again. Almost. “I’ve given that speech so many times myself that I know you’re full of shit. Because I was there last night. I know exactly how I turned you out. And now I know way too much about how your body works to believe a single thing you’re saying to me.”
This time she rolled her eyes where he could see it.
“I sense this is going to come as a big shock to you, but despite what you might have been taught your whole life, women are just as able to compartmentalize as men. And I know this may well be a surprise, but an orgasm isn’t the same as an emotion. Even for girls.”
Jason didn’t need lessons on orgasms from a woman he’d given so many to, but he only grinned at that. Maybe a little dangerously.
“We’re not talking about girls, plural. We’re talking about you. Maybe you’re used to orgasms that aren’t emotional, but that’s not what happened. Not with me.”
And the admittedly very small part of him that might have wondered if he was wrong about that eased when he saw that storm darken her eyes again.
“I can see it’s important for you to believe that, but that doesn’t make it true.”
“You cried, Lucinda. Sobbed, I think is the term. Over and over again.”
“I’m going to chalk that up to jet lag.”
“Exhaustion is a killer. But you’d just had an eight-hour nap.”
She shoved at his arm, and he let her dislodge him again. Then he watched her step back, every part of her bristling, yet under control.
He had a perfect memory of when she’d tried to shove him down backward on the bed, then take over. And somehow he knew that had been the moment when everything had changed for her. Where she’d surrendered to something he wasn’t sure she understood, but clearly had to do with the same control she was exerting now.
The overly tamed hair, no hint of curl.
He hated the sleekness of it. The artificial smoothness. He felt it like an assault.
“My plane should be here in an hour or so,” she said, her voice clipped and cool, no matter what he could see in her eyes. “I’d appreciate it if you could drive me back down to the water.”
“You’d appreciate it.” Jason shook his head. “What you think running away is going to solve?”
“I don’t have a problem that needs solving,” Lucinda retorted. Then shook her head sadly, as if she felt sorry for him. “But I’m beginning to think that you do.”
He wasn’t going to argue that. He wasn’t going to argue, at all.
Jason wheeled around and stalked back to his bedroom. He threw his jeans on over the boxer briefs he’d been wearing on their own, found the keys to his Jeep where he’d left them and headed back out to the main part of the house. As if she’d anticipated his every move—something he couldn’t say he liked, at all—she was waiting for him, her little roller bag beside her and a certain smug look on her face.
Jason told himself to breathe. Let it go, no matter how tight his chest felt or the insane things that kept running through his head.
Because maybe he’d had this coming, after all. Maybe she really hadn’t felt the whole damned world move the way he had, and maybe that was something he was just going to have to deal with.
Maybe his mama had been right and he’d become his father, and this was his wake-up call.
“It’s all right if you need to sulk,” Lucinda told him as she climbed into the Jeep, her voice as sharp and smooth as her hair in that hateful bun. “I won’t think less of you for it.”
“I’m not sulking,” Jason told her, and he kept his hands to himself. No one ever had to know it almost killed him. “I’m grateful.”
And he let her stew on that as he drove her back down to the beach. He waited with her on the dock, in a brooding kind of silence that seemed unstable and flammable, until his buddy flew in.
Then he loaded her up onto the little hopper plane, watched it fly away and told himself good riddance.
Over and over again, in the hope it might stick.
JASON SET ABOUT living his best life, the way he’d been doing since he’d arrived on this island.
Today was no different. What did it matter that the night had ruined him and there were now blue eyes he couldn’t seem to banish from his head?
Maybe he deserved to be ruined.
“A man isn’t made by the things he collects,” his mother had told him after the will had been read and all the bequests made, as if a hotel mattered from a man who could have been a father but hadn’t bothered to try. Right after she’d compared Jason to Daniel, to really stick that knife in and twist it as only she could. “But by the content of his heart and what he carries there.”
“I don’t know what that means,” he’d replied grumpily, though he’d tried to keep the temper out of his voice because it was his mama talking and she deserved his respect.
“I know you don’t.”
“I don’t have a single thing in common with that—”
“Jason.” That was all it took. Just his name. He’d cut himself off and his mother had shrugged, her dark eyes on his like he was still a kid. Maybe he always would be, as far as she was concerned. “Pa’a ka waha.”
He knew the phrase, Hawaiian for observe, be silent and learn. “If words are exiting your mouth, wisdom cannot come in,” the saying went.
Sometimes it also just meant: shut your mouth.
He’d taken it on board then, and he did now, too. He surfed like it was his job. When he’d done his best to exhaust himself he came in, dried off and drove himself back up to the silent house, where he put in another few, vicious hours in his gym.
Until he sweated the mean out of him. Or tried his best.
And when his phone rang, indicating another one of those damned video calls he’d used to have to suffer through only with his PR people and now had to deal with at least once a week, and with his shiny new family to boot, he took it.
Even though it wasn’t the right time or place for their strained family discussions, mandated by their father’s will and trust.
“I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen you without palm trees in the background and a shit-eating grin on your face,” his half brother Charlie drawled, all his usual Texas in his voice and a sunny balcony behind him with a different sea entirely in the distance. “I don’t how to process that, brother.”
Jason wiped his face with the nearest T-shirt and produced a grin. “Aloha, dick.”
“Oh, good. There’s that island charm I hear so much about.”
“I’m thinking about burning this house down,” Jason said, conversationally. “The lawyer said Dear Old Dad spent years building it. Almost like he planned to live in it one day, though I know that can’t be true. He wasn’t one to settle down, and particularly not this far out of the limelight. How would he get all that attention he was always jonesing for?”
Charlie’s head tilted slightly to one side, the blue eyes everyone but Jason had shared with Daniel St. George going canny. “I was calling to tell you some deeply boring shit about the hotel industry that Angelique passed on because Thor’s on a plane and I’m nothing if not obedient. But if you’re burning down houses, I’m suddenly way more interested.”
Charlie