Dragon's Eden (15 page)

A grin broke across his face as he regained
his balance. She was already surfacing in the protected cove not
ten feet below where he stood, a fair-skinned mermaid in a pool of
cerulean blue frothed to white on the edges. He should have known
she wasn’t the type to take a swan dive. Hell, he hadn’t been that
much trouble. Not yet, anyway.

Without fear to sidetrack him, his thoughts
returned to the more pleasant subject of her nudity and what he was
going to do about it.
Take advantage
were
the only words that came to mind.

He stripped off his shirt and pulled the
drawstring on his pants.

Sugar swam a couple of yards and rolled onto
her back to float in the sunshine, but any thoughts she’d had of
relaxing in that position were shot to hell when she looked up and
saw Jackson. He was poised to dive into the pool, primeval man
incarnate, standing tall and strong on the edge of the cliff, a
dragon gracing one side of his chest, his long black braid the
other. His arms were outstretched, his legs straight, his body as
naked as the day he was born.

While a part of her was breathlessly
mesmerized, another part of her didn’t know how he survived in
polite society, or even impolite society.

She did know the only way he could have
gotten into her pool, and that made her grin. The bounty hunter’s
heart was probably still pounding from the wild ride through the
sinkhole. Served him right for playing possum, she thought. When
she’d passed him in the grass, she could have sworn he was sound
asleep.

He pushed off the rocks into a dive, giving
her no more time to contemplate either his body or his motives. Her
fight-or-flight instincts kicked into high gear. She chose flight,
beating a hasty retreat to the stretch of sand carved out of the
thick, overhanging forest that made up most of her hideaway.

When Jackson surfaced, he was alone in the
water. Damn. The woman was like quicksilver, impossible to hold. He
scanned the cove and finally caught a glimpse of her making her way
through the trees. A path led from the southern shore of the pool,
winding up the cliff to the opening in the rock wall.

This was the real wild paradise on her
island, a deep jungle of green life tied together by miles of
lianas and nearly enclosed by the surrounding limestone. Tree roots
grew like writhing snakes down the cliff wall, while vines climbed
to the arch above. All the flora was heavy with fruit and flowers,
filling the cove with splashes of color.

A flock of scarlet macaws with an albino
leading the way flew across the pool and swooped up into the trees,
squawking noisily. He’d never seen an albino macaw. He doubted if
anyone had, except for God, and Sugar, and now him.

Behind him, the ocean waves broke against
the reef, sending only a ripple of their strength into the pool. He
lowered his head and filled his mouth with water, then spat it back
out. The cove was half-fresh, half-salt, a mixture of two great
sources of life made out of the same element. Sun, moon; light,
dark; yang, yin; man, woman. His woman, and he could not hold on to
her.

He saw her hand reach out from behind a
small tree and grab for her clothes. The shirt and shorts were a
brilliant shade of yellow, and what with all the fluttering around
she did to maintain her modesty behind the tree, she looked like a
monarch butterfly.

“Are you decent?” he hollered, still
treading water in the middle of the pool.

“Unlike some people I know, I’m always
decent,” she yelled back from her hiding place, making him
smile.

When Jackson didn’t respond to her gibe,
Sugar stepped closer to the soursop tree and moved aside a leafy
branch, only to find he’d disappeared. She watched the water for a
long time, her curiosity losing ground to worry with each passing
second. The man had said he was a good swimmer. Lord, if he
couldn’t even manage the cove, how had he expected to catch the
Mary Sue
?

Concern made her careless, and she pressed
too closely into the tree, scratching herself on its spiny fruit.
She quickly stuck her hand into her mouth and sucked. The faint
taste of blood registered on her senses as she again searched the
pool.

Her patience and her caution came to an end
at the same time. She readied herself to dive in after him, ducking
under the tree’s lowest branch and stepping to the edge. What
stopped her was the sight of him climbing up the cliff wall at her
feet, hand over fist, using a thick liana as a rope and tree roots
for footholds.

He moved with the agility of an animal in
its prime, scaling the cliff with purposeful ease. Water and
sunlight glistened over his tawny skin and down the free-falling
corded braid of his hair. When he reached the top, he looked up at
her with a mischievous gleam in his eye.

“Me Jackson. You Sugar,” he said, sounding
innocent and looking dangerously sensual, his smile guileless but
not harmless.

For an instant she was sucked into the
fantasy he offered—one man, one woman, no rules—but only for an
instant.

“Me going. You nuts,” she said, backing away
from the edge.

“Give me a hand up?” he asked, and she
stopped in midstep. He raised one hand toward her, and she couldn’t
help but notice what that did to the muscles in the arm holding on
to the vine. They tightened, becoming even more well defined.

He couldn’t possibly need help, not with
arms like his, but she stepped forward out of a sense of duty. She
offered him her hand, and immediately regretted it.

He took hold of her hand and pulled at the
same time as he pushed off from the rock wall, sending them both
out over the water. Sugar instinctively stretched her body into a
dive position, and he did the same, but he didn’t let go of her.
When they surfaced, she spluttering and he grinning, he still had
hold of her.

“You—you got me wet.” She would have called
him something awful, but he defied description.

“You were already wet,” he said, his smile
broadening in a flash of white teeth.

“I was halfway dry.” It was a bit of a
stretch, but close enough. “And I could have been hurt with you
dragging me off the cliff like that.”

He laughed. “Halfway dry is about as good as
it gets on Cocorico, and I held on to you so you wouldn’t get
hurt.” He clearly wasn’t taking the blame for anything. He began
swimming toward the shore, pulling her beside him.

“You can . . . uh, let go of me now,”

“No, I can’t,” he said, cutting through the
blue-green water, his movements sending tiny waves lapping against
her throat and chest.

“Why not?”

“Because the only reason I pulled you off
the cliff was so I could hold you.” He found his footing on the
bottom and drew her into his embrace within the shadows of the
overhanging palms. “After going to that much trouble, it would be a
shame not to take full advantage of the opportunity.”

She wanted to disagree, despite what her
heart felt was the truth. Yes, it would be a shame to waste such a
golden opportunity for holding each other, but being that close to
him in broad daylight made speech impossible. Her pulse was beating
too quickly, and her thoughts were moving too slowly.

His mouth was so beautiful, wide set with
lips softer than they looked, and teeth so white they fairly shone
against the darker color of his skin. A woman would give up a lot
to explore a mouth like his, especially when the woman already knew
what sensory magic he could conjure with his kiss.

“Sugar?” He spoke her name softly, his voice
husky with the changing tension in the air.

She lifted her gaze to meet his and felt an
ache build inside her chest. His mouth was no more beautiful than
his eyes. Or his hair. Or his body.

Or his warrior’s heart with its tenderness
and easy laughter. She couldn’t resist him forever. She could only
give him fair warning of the truth.

Nervously wetting her lips, she forced
herself not to falter under the weight of her words.

“If you kiss me again, Jackson, I swear I’ll
never let you go.” Her lashes lowered before the last word was out,
a minor concession considering what she’d just confessed.

He was quiet for a long time, holding her
against him, the gentle rise and fall of his chest the only
movement she could perceive.

“Do you mean that?” he finally asked, his
voice full of the hundred other questions he hadn’t asked.

She nodded, afraid to say more.

“You’re thinking about letting me go?” He
didn’t sound as if he believed it, but she wasn’t going to reassure
him with even a gesture. She’d already given away too much.

“But not if I kiss you,” he repeated, then
swore roundly, his hands tightening on her waist. “Somebody should
have taught you when to cut your losses. I can’t—”

Whatever he was going to say next was lost
in the drone of a low-flying seaplane banking into the point,
headed for the beach below her home.

He swore again, a word much nastier than her
own vehement damn.

“Looks like somebody has saved you again,”
he said, not sounding any too happy about it.

“What do you mean?” She didn’t feel saved,
she felt invaded. No one was scheduled to come. Shulan had told her
three weeks.

“What I mean”—he captured her chin and
turned her face up to meet his glowering gaze—“is that you have
greatly
underestimated how much you mean
to me.”

His mouth came down on hers hard and
forceful, demanding a response she was incapable of hiding.

Jackson cursed himself again and again, even
as he sank deeper into the kiss, into the taste and feel of Sugar
Caine, the woman who would be his doom.

He was lost, more lost than he’d been in
Shulan’s gilded Hong Kong prison. There, it had only been his body
in a strange place. On Cocorico, with Sugar in his arms, he was
racing down uncharted paths of the heart.

He lifted his head to place another kiss on
her lips, loving the luxury of being able to leave and come back
for more. There were no tears this time. She was as fascinated as
he was with the sweet melding of their mouths.

When next he lifted his head and looked, her
wide gray eyes were dazed with passion, her cheeks flushed with
color. Relief and satisfaction filled his breast. Sometimes she
tried too hard to be indifferent to him, coolly in control, and he
didn’t want her cool where he was concerned. He couldn’t have borne
her manufactured indifference, not when he was drowning in a
whirlpool of emotion.

Holding her face in his hands, he kissed her
again, simply pressing his lips to hers and breathing in the same
air. She was his woman, like no other woman, made for him to be
hers.

The sound of the plane engine ended
abruptly, warning him it had landed on the other side of the arch.
If they’d come to take him, they were going to be disappointed. He
wasn’t going anywhere.

“Stay with me,” he said roughly, kissing her
ear, her temple, her brow.

“I can’t stay here, Jackson, and neither can
you.” She tilted her head back, away from his roaming mouth. Her
expression was serious despite the flush still suffusing her cheeks
and the lambent light in her eyes. “They may not have seen us, but
they know about this cove. They’ll search every inch of the island
until they find you, unless I throw them off your track.”

“Do they know about the caves?”

“No, but the seaplane will give them access
to this place. You can’t stay here.”

A hint of desperation shaded her voice,
taking away its soft lilt and impressing upon him the depth of her
feelings for him. Either she’d been telling the truth and she
wasn’t going to let him go—or let anyone take him —because he’d
kissed her, or her concern for him had suddenly won out over any
loyalty she felt she owed Shulan. He considered the change good
joss, regardless of her motives.

“What will you tell them?” he asked,
deliberately not using Shulan’s name. She had just committed
herself to a breach of faith with her friend, choosing him over the
pirate princess. He didn’t want to press the point.

“That I took you to another island.”

“Why?” He spoke with the obvious inflection
of an interrogator, giving her a chance to get her story
straight.

“Because I didn’t feel you were safe here
any longer.”

He shot another question at her. “Why?”

“Because the security of the island was
breached.”

“How?”

“An unauthorized boat landing.”

“When?”

“Two nights ago.”

“Who was it?”

“I’m not sure. They . . . uh, said they
were—had gotten blown off course,” she said, struggling to keep up
the lie. “But they didn’t look like run-of-the-mill windjamming
tourists.”

“Why not? What was different about
them?”

“I don’t know,” she said, throwing her hands
up, exasperated. “They were just different, that’s all.”

“You’re not a very good liar, Sugar,” he
said straight out.

“That’s not what you thought a few days
ago.” Her smile was faintly wry.

He answered her with a smile of his own. “A
few days ago I didn’t know I was in love.”

It was a hell of a bombshell to drop, and
she wasn’t any more surprised than he was by the declaration. He
hadn’t meant to say it, he hadn’t thought to say it. He’d just said
it.

“That’s impossible,” she whispered, her eyes
growing wide. It wasn’t exactly the response he would have put at
the top of his most wanted list.

“Yeah, well, a lot of impossible things seem
to happen here.” He felt color rise in his cheeks, at least that’s
what he thought he felt. He couldn’t remember ever blushing
before.

“You’re blushing,” she confirmed, her smile
teasing him to the point that he lowered his gaze—for all of a
second and a half. He liked being teased by her too much to miss a
moment of it.