Dragon's Eden (11 page)

“No.” She watched him suck the liquid off
his finger and cleared her throat before going on about her
business. “A cocorico is a bird, a rufous-vented chachalaca.”

He picked up his coffee and took a sip,
holding the nearly finished braid in his other hand. “This is good,
really good.”

“I’m glad you like it. Sometimes I put
chocolate in, too, but I’m out of chocolate right now.”

“When will you get more?” He brought the cup
back to his mouth.

“In a few weeks.” She’d been about to say,
Not until after you leave, but she’d caught herself in time. She
didn’t want to remind him of one more thing he didn’t have control
over in his life.

“Are you telling me that I’m trapped here
without chocolate?”

The dismay in his voice brought a reluctant
smile to her lips. “If I can survive it, you can.”

“I don’t know, Sugar. You don’t know me and
chocolate. We’re real close.”

He was trying so hard to be casual and
friendly, she thought, it was making her feel like a charity case.
Kissing each other would have been a terrible mistake, but he could
at least have the decency not to be cheerful.

“You can’t love it any more than I do,” she
said, “and I always make it between shipments. Though I usually
don’t run out this quickly.”

“What happened this time? Did you go on a
chocolate-eating marathon?” Using a piece of string she’d given
him, he tied off the end of his braid and tossed it over his
shoulder.

She’d never known a man to have such
wonderful hair. It made her own short locks seem particularly
inadequate. With a self-conscious gesture, she ran her fingers
through one side of her hair, trying to fluff up the curls.

“No,” she said, stifling a sigh. It was
hopeless. A person couldn’t possibly fluff up a few inches of blond
hair to look like a silken veil. “Henry happened this time. He
usually only comes twice a month, but I think he’s fallen in love
with Carolina, so all the time she was here, he kept showing up.
And every time he showed up, I was out a little more
chocolate.”

“Who is Carolina?” he asked, and Sugar could
have kicked herself.

“A friend,” she said in a tone to discourage
further questions.

He either missed her warning inflection or
chose to ignore it.

“Henry says she’s beautiful and cruel.”

The description was so outlandish it made
her laugh, that and the relief she felt that he’d already known
about Carolina. She’d still made a mistake, but she hadn’t given
him any new information.

“Cruel? Carolina? Lord, Henry must have it
bad.” She leaned back in her chair and took a sip of her
coffee.

“What are his chances with her?” Jackson
asked.

She shook her head. “Not good. Carolina
already had one rummy for a husband. Fortunately, as so often
happens, he ran off with another woman who thought he was worth all
the trouble he caused. Carolina prays for her every night out of
gratitude, and she isn’t likely to take to another drunk.”

When he didn’t immediately ask another
question, she allowed herself to relax her guard and tried not to
settle back into moroseness.

She understood his need for answers. He was
trying to piece his new world together, but she was afraid of those
damn slipups of hers, of giving him more information than was safe.
His freedom was less than a hundred yards from the cottage, on the
other side of the cliffs. If he ever discovered the pirate’s door,
he could literally walk away, get on her boat, and disappear.

And he would do just that. She didn’t have a
doubt. Cocorico wasn’t big enough to hold him. Lord, some days, and
lately some nights, it barely held her.

A hummingbird zipped up to the bougainvillea
shrub growing at the side of the cottage, hovered for a few seconds
above the flowers, and zipped away. Another one soon took its
place. The nightly chorus of tree frogs began up by the cliffs,
adding a syncopated backbeat to the pounding of the surf. And so
went the cycle of her island life. The only difference tonight was
the man sharing her table.

She sneaked a glance at him and found him
staring at her with an intensity that caused her to flush. She
quickly looked away, but the image of his eyes, green with the
reflected fire of the sunset, remained in her consciousness and
kept her heart from slowing down to normal.

“Is that what happened to you?” he asked,
all traces of friendliness burned away by the edge in his voice.
“Did your husband run off with Baolian, and she wanted the ex-wife
out of the way?”

“No.” Her hands tightened on her coffee cup.
She should have been able to laugh at the outrageous question, but
his harsh tone made laughter impossible.

“Did one of Baolian’s lovers leave her for
you?” There was a hesitation in his words, as if he found the
question particularly distasteful.

She didn’t answer him. The day was going to
end with tension and angry words. She wasn’t going to wait around
for the complete deterioration. She was leaving, but before she
could make more than a tentative move, he captured her arm with his
hand.

“Did one of Baolian’s lovers leave her for
you?” he repeated.

He wasn’t hurting her, but the strength of
his grip told her she wasn’t going anywhere.

“No,” she said, forcing herself not to
flinch. In the days he’d been there, she’d forgotten what he was in
the real world—a man who hunted the scum of the earth and either
took them down or brought them in for money. A man like that wasn’t
to be pitied or taken lightly, or sighed over in her sleep.

His hold on her relaxed the barest of
degrees.

“Tell me what your connection to Baolian
is,” he said, “and don’t bother to lie. I’ll know. The people I
usually deal with are the best liars in the world.”

Despite the true danger he represented, she
shot him a resentful glance. “I am not one of the people you
usually deal with. Now let me go.”

“When you tell me why you’re here.”

“It doesn’t concern you.”

She was wrong, Jackson thought, and he
didn’t like it any better than she did.

“Everything about you concerns me,” he said,
leaning forward across the table, his patience coming to an
unexpected end. Baolian was a viper, and she had this woman in her
grasp. He wanted to know why. He wasn’t going to let her go until
he found out.

“I’ll scream for Jen.”

The threat was real and formidable, but
Jackson wasn’t taking delivery. “Leave Jen out of this. This is
between you and me.”

Her lashes lowered in a gesture of defeat—or
so he thought. He should have known better. Women had their own
weapons, and hers cut him to the quick.

“Shulan wouldn’t have brought you here if
she had thought you would hurt me, and I trusted her judgment.”
Gray eyes lifted to meet his. “I’m supposed to be safe here,
Jackson. Don’t take that away from me too.”

She spoke quietly and with absolute
conviction, putting him to shame, something he would have thought
impossible before he’d dropped out of the sky and onto her island.
He’d actually hurt people and felt less guilt than he did just for
holding her wrist.

He released her and slumped back into his
chair, watching her leave and wondering what in the hell else he’d
taken from her. He couldn’t think of a damn thing, certainly
nothing that counted. Not her kiss, not the feel of her in his
arms, not the sweetness of his name on her lips.

For hours after she’d left him, he sat
alone, his thoughts as dark as the night closing in around him.

He wanted to howl at the moon. He threw
rocks instead, skimming jagged chunks of limestone over the tops of
the waves. He’d seen her light come on after the sun had dropped
into the western sea. He didn’t know how she survived this damn
place. It was making him stir-crazy. There were no amenities, no
communications, no distractions—except for her.

Sugar
. He threw
another rock as far out into the ocean as he could. The cargo boat
was out there again, plying the waters on its rounds, just out of
his reach.

The night had been endless after she’d left.
He’d sunk so low as to hike up to Jen’s icehouse for company.
Surprisingly, he’d found some. But the man was old, and the
conversation had run out about the same time as the tea.

So now he was alone again, on the beach,
throwing rocks and still feeling like a jerk. The hell of it was,
he hadn’t done anything. Most of the time when he asked a question
of a criminal—and that’s what she was in this instance—he got an
answer, one way or another.

Growing up a half-caste hadn’t been easy in
Hong Kong, not even with the protection of the money and
respectability provided by his mother’s family. Without Cooper, or
the threat of Cooper, he would have lost more fights than he’d won
in the back halls of the private schools he’d attended. Once he’d
gotten out of short pants, the odds had started changing in his
favor, and before Cooper had left Hong Kong to make his own
fortune, he’d made damn sure his little brother could take down
anybody he might run up against in school or in a Hong Kong
alley.

He never referred to himself as a “lean,
mean fighting machine,” but Cooper did, usually when he was on top,
holding Jackson down in some god-awful body lock.

Cooper would have gotten answers out of
Sugar. He wouldn’t have backed down just because she’d looked up at
him with big gray eyes. The woman was making him soft.

Right
. Jackson
swore and let out a harsh laugh. She wasn’t making him soft. She
was making him hard, and that was his biggest problem.

He threw his last rock, knowing he had a
choice to make. He could either stand there and slowly go out of
his mind, or he could do something.

He decided to do something, beginning with
stripping off his shirt. Then he went for his pants, pulling on the
drawstring to loosen the material around his hips.

Sugar straightened from where she’d been
leaning against the bungalow’s doorjamb, watching Jackson and the
Mary Sue
. For a moment she wondered what
he was doing. By the time she’d crossed the verandah and his pants
had fallen into the sand, she knew.

Her heart skipped a beat. She’d been
expecting him to come up with something ever since she and Jen had
destroyed his raft. But not this.

“No,” she gasped, racing for the beach
stairs.

Halfway down, she shouted his name and saw
him turn from where he was in the water with the waves breaking
against his waist.

Jackson looked up the beach, thinking he’d
heard her call his name and wondering just how much wishful
thinking it took to make a fantasy a reality. Then he saw her,
running across the sand in the moonlight.

The night breeze and the surf kept her words
from carrying to him, but he heard distress in her voice and
responded, lunging out of the water.

He caught her to him while still knee-deep
in the sea. She put her hands on his forearms and pulled,
breathlessly swearing at him.

“Dammit, Jackson . . . You can’t . . . I
told you.”

The receding water pushed her up against him
and nearly knocked her over. To save them both a dunking, he swung
her up into his arms and strode out of the surf. On the short walk
from the ocean to where he’d left his pants, it crossed his mind no
fewer than a hundred times that he was naked and she was lying up
against him.

“Jackson.” She held on to him as he set her
on her feet. “You . . . you—” Words failed her as she gulped for
breath.

“Are you okay?” he asked, cutting right to
the chase, his hands gripping her as tightly as she was gripping
him.

“Yes.” She nodded. “Couldn’t sleep . . . saw
you in the water . . . sharks.”

That’s what this was about? he thought.
Sharks? The adrenaline rush she’d given him dissipated, leaving him
with an awareness of other things, like the feel of her silk shirt
beneath his palms. He’d slept in silk a few times. Silk sheets.

“I know about the sharks, Sugar,” he assured
her. “They don’t come into this stretch of water, this close to the
shoreline. The rockslides on both ends of the beach act as a
reef.”

He was right, but Sugar was surprised he’d
figured it out.

“At low tide,” he continued, “you can even
see rocks sticking up about fifteen yards out. Nothing too big is
going to want to get trapped in this little bay. If it did, we
would have it for supper.”

“Then you knew not to go any farther.” She’d
caught her breath, but her heart was still pounding, and she still
had a good grip on his arms, in case he had any more crazy ideas.
“You weren’t trying to swim out to the boat? To get away?”

When he shook his head, she felt the first
inklings of vexation seep into her mind. She’d practically killed
herself in her mad dash down the beach to keep him from throwing
his life away in an unkind ocean, and apparently all for
nothing.

“I’ve been swimming every night, but not
away,” he said.

“You’ve been swimming every night?” She
didn’t want to believe it. He’d been swimming every night and she
hadn’t known. Whatever in the hell was he going to do next? “Don’t
you—don’t you know there are things other than sharks in these
waters!” She gave him a shake, or as much of one as she could,
considering their size difference. “Anything could have gotten you.
Anything! You could have been bitten, stung, poisoned, sliced to
ribbons—”

“Sugar.” He spoke her name quietly, but she
refused to be calmed down.

“Portuguese man-of-war, moray eels, coral,
sea urchin. You name it, it’s out there. And we haven’t even gotten
to the fog. It is not polite stuff, Jackson. When it rolls in, it
comes like the tsunami from hell. Three yards from the beach, and
you’d never make it back. You are my responsibility, and as long as
you’re here, I forbid you to swim at night.”