Reckless in Paradise (13 page)

Skin slick with sweat, she glowed in the moonlight as she writhed under him, her breathing erratic, her increasingly desperate cries torn from her as he plunged again and again into her depths.

‘Daniel!' she cried, reaching for him blindly, teetering on the edge of the precipice they both shared. He drew one perfect breast into his mouth and sucked on it hard, ramming himself home and exploding inside her with what felt like fireworks.

She came all around him, a vivid starburst of colour and passion, a wild release that blew his mind and took him shuddering over the edge with her.

 

Later, when the silvery moon had tracked higher in the night sky and Sophie lay sleeping, he stood outside on the deck in a pair of shorts, his hands palm-down on the railing, his restless thoughts a dark hole in a world of such moonlit perfection.

Electric—it was the only way he could describe how she'd felt, like a switch had been thrown and she'd turned from woman into electrical storm, sparking, pulsing with energy, crashing like lightning about him.

But how many nights would they have? How many opportunities to sink himself into her exquisite depths and feel her body come apart around him?

He turned and looked through the windows of his room, to where he could make out her shape on his bed, her face
turned away, one arm hanging over the side of the bed and a glorious curve of flesh from waist to hip illuminated by the pale moonlight.

How many nights?

Or was this thing to end before it began?

He walked barefoot along the deck, the rustle of leaves and the occasional rustle in the undergrowth the only sounds as he put off the inevitable, refusing to open the phone he'd heard beep—the reason he'd come outside.

Damn. He wanted Fletcher gone. He wanted this farce of a wedding to be proved the lie it was. But once it was, once Fletcher had his money, she'd be gone too, eager for her cut.

And by now Jo would already have made him an offer. Fletcher might already have said yes and be on his way back to collect it, setting Monica free.

He wanted Monica free.

But then Sophie would leave.

He rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. There was only one way to find out. He slid the phone open and clicked through to ‘messages'.

It was from Jo.

With a tight gut he clicked it open, read the words—
Fletcher said no
—and released a lungful of air he hadn't realised he'd been holding.

He slid the phone shut and turned back to the shadowed view of diamond-crusted velvet sea and the clusters of lights along the coast. Jo would be waiting for his instruction to up the offer, but for the moment Jo could wait. Which meant that, for the moment, Sophie was his to enjoy.

Besides, she seemed to enjoy making her wedding plans—in fact, she'd seemed so full of it tonight that anyone would think
she
believed it was real.

Who was he to deprive her of her fun?

‘Daniel?' She was standing half-behind the sliding door, wearing only the moonlight and a tumble of golden hair. Instantly he stirred to life. ‘Is something wrong?'

He held out a hand to her. ‘I couldn't sleep.' And sheepishly, like a shy virgin instead of a woman with the body and responsiveness of a goddess, she moved silently to join him, the sway of her breasts like a call to action.

She took his hand and allowed herself to be drawn into the circle of his arms at the railing. ‘Is there anything I can do?' she asked as he nuzzled her neck from behind, breathing in woman spiced with the heady scent of their love-making; his hands traversed from breast to thigh in one delicious, sensual exploration that had her arching her back on a sigh.

Was there anything she could do?

Oh, sweet Jesus, yes.

She moaned as he parted her, sliding his fingers between her slick folds while he patted his pockets with his other hand; he wanted to howl at the moon when he found what he needed. ‘Maybe there is something,' he groaned as he ripped open the packet with his teeth. He dropped his shorts and kicked them away as he donned protection, thankful when he had two hands free again to stroke her, two hands to both give and find pleasure.

‘Daniel!' she cried, already panting, her nipples tight and hard between his fingers. The curve of her behind fitted his hand perfectly as he soothed her legs apart, entering her in one delicious thrust that had them both gasping.

The lights of the coastal towns winked on the distant shore, the sea glittered where kissed by the moon, and the warm breeze carried the perfume of a thousand exotic flowers. When they came, the lights, sea and moon stayed the same, but the warm, perfumed breeze carried with it the cry of both their names.

‘N
O RUSH,'
Daniel said from behind his office desk. ‘Let him sweat a little. We don't have to look too eager.'

Jo squirmed noticeably in his chair. ‘I thought you were in a hurry.'

Daniel picked up a paperweight from his desk, testing its weight in his hands, thinking abstractly that Sophie's breasts must weigh about the same—only they filled his hands so much more satisfactorily.

‘You
were
in a hurry, you said.'

‘I hear patience is a virtue.'

Jo wiped his brow with a handkerchief. ‘I think you should make him another offer. Ramp up the pressure. It's obviously what he's waiting for.'

‘And I think you should listen when I say I'm happy to sit tight.'

‘So you're not worried about your sister—with him—any more, then? After what happened to that other girl?'

Daniel dropped the paperweight back on the desk, swivelling his chair around to directly face the big man down. ‘That
other girl's
name was Emma.'

‘Yeah. Her. You wouldn't want the same thing to happen to Monica.'

Daniel was caught between a bloodlust for retribution for what had happened so many years ago, and an anger for what he stood to lose now. Who did Jo think he was, telling Daniel what was important?

But Monica was his sister.

And if anything happened to her, he would never forgive himself.

Whereas Sophie was a passing lust—entertaining; sexually satisfying; mind-blowing, even. But ultimately disposable.

They all were.

Unlike Monica. What right did he have to indulge his own primal urges before ensuring the safety of his own sister? ‘All right,' he said through gritted teeth, seeing the sense in Jo's argument, glad he had someone who knew enough history to keep him honest. ‘Double the offer. Make it two million.'

 

If Millie noticed or disapproved of the change in sleeping arrangements, she didn't say anything. And she must have noticed. Sophie's bed had been untouched whereas Daniel's bed was a total shambles with wet clothes trailing from the shower to the bed, even though she'd tried to minimise the damage. There was no way Daniel's housekeeper could miss the carnage or fail to extrapolate from it the facts.

Yet Millie's smile appeared genuine when she brought Sophie a cup of lemon-scented tea halfway through the morning. ‘How's it going, lovey?' she asked, peering over Sophie's shoulder at pictures of wedding cakes she had pulled from the Internet. ‘Ooh, aren't they lovely? I used to dabble with wedding cakes—nothing like these modern ones, of course—before I got work in the café.'

Sophie nodded absently. It was the full and pitiful extent of her work this morning, she reflected, this thin pile of pictures. She'd convinced herself it was work, even though she'd found nothing that nearly approximated the traditional and simple
tiered cake Monica had hinted at—like the cake her parents had had at their wedding—even though her mind had been miles away.

Or, rather, hours ago.

If last night had blown away her every inhibition, this morning's efforts had blown her mind. Daniel was the kind of lover you only read about in books. Nobody could make love that many times in one night, she'd been convinced. Nobody.

But Daniel had. And every time had been different, every time better, in some undefined way.

No wonder she hadn't been able to focus on her work. She was still trying to count up the different ways he'd made love to her, the number of orgasms he'd brought her to in just one night.

‘Hmm?' she murmured vaguely; some hint of a message had been in Millie's words that was struggling to strike a chord.

‘I could never do these fancy mudcake or cream-puff things,' Millie continued, pointing to a picture of a
croquembouche
. ‘Mine were more the old-fashioned type. But these are pretty.'

Finally her words worked their way through the fog that had been Sophie's morning. She swung her chair around. ‘You make wedding cakes?'

Millie looked abashed. ‘Well, I used to. I once won a bake-off competition with my fruit-cake recipe. I'm not so good at learning fancy new stuff—like all this Vietnamese and Thai cuisine I know Mr Caruana would like, for instance—but I do a pretty mean classic wedding cake.'

Sophie couldn't believe what she was hearing. ‘Monica wants a traditional cake. Something like—' She scrabbled through the papers on her desk for a copy of the old photograph, diving on it when she found it. ‘Something like this.'

‘Oh!' Millie took the copy and gave a wistful sigh. ‘So that's her parents, then. I never met them, you know. But doesn't Monica resemble her mother so?'

Sophie agreed. The likeness was uncanny, whereas Daniel seemed more of a blend, the strength of his father's nose and jawline coupled with the high cheek-bones and generosity of his mother's lips.

‘Oh, and that cake,' Millie continued. ‘I made one just like it for Sybil Martin's wedding, only we had fresh roses rather than orchids.' She shook her head and clucked. ‘Hard work, keeping those roses fresh-looking in this climate, I tell you. We had them in the cooler until the last moment.'

‘You made a cake like this?'

‘A piece of cake!' the older woman said before laughing at her own joke.

‘Millie, do you think you could you make one for Monica and Jake? In return, maybe I could teach you how to cook Thai. It's dead easy, really. Much easier than producing a wedding cake.'

The woman's smile vanished, though there was just the tiniest glimmer of interest mixed with the disbelief in her eyes. ‘You really want me to have a go at a wedding cake, then?'

‘I'm serious. I'd pay you, of course. I wouldn't expect you to do all that work for nothing. And we'll have a Thai cooking-class first chance we get.'

 

Daniel let himself into the house, weary, hot and disgruntled. His day had been a waste. The fallout from the aborted Townsville conference had consumed most of the day's overt efforts, while secretly he'd been waiting for his phone to beep, waiting for the message that would spell the end to his affair with Sophie. Because there was no way Fletcher would turn down two million in cold, hard cash, surely?

Something good wafted from the direction of the kitchen, spicy, aromatic and flavoured with garlic, ginger and fresh herbs; his stomach growled so appreciatively he had to investigate for himself, if only to grab a beer and find out how long it would be before he could eat.

The last thing he expected to find was both his women in the kitchen, Millie and Sophie wearing matching pinnies and engrossed in cooking up a storm. Millie noticed him first.

‘Mr Caruana, I didn't hear you come in.'

He wasn't surprised, there were so many pans and woks simmering on the hotplates the extractor could hardly keep up. But it was Sophie's reaction he was more taken by. She looked up from whatever she was chopping, her eyes shadowed by her long lashes, and he could swear she was doing that blushing thing again.

Millie pressed a cold beer into his hands. ‘Sophie's giving me a lesson on how to cook Thai. I hope you're hungry. We've got a veritable feast in store for you.'

He levered the cap off his beer and pulled out one of the bar stools along the wide kitchen bench, uncharacteristically plonking himself down; usually he'd head straight to his office. ‘You didn't tell me you could cook, Sophie.'

She looked sideways at him, the knife in her hands suddenly stilled. ‘I can do lots of things.'

Oh, now that he
did
know. Already he was looking forward to finding out more. He raised the open bottle to her. ‘Here's to discovering your other hidden talents.' And he smiled when her blush deepened. How could she be so shy on the one hand, when she was so explosive in bed? But then he remembered the woman last night standing half-hidden by the doors, as if embarrassed by her nakedness, and he wondered again at how inexperienced she seemed. She hadn't been a virgin, but
she couldn't have had too many men, that was for certain. One of them would surely have whisked her off the market by now.

He was pondering the significance of that thought when the phone in his pocket beeped, souring both the taste of his beer and his lighter mood-change since walking in the door.

Sophie, on the other hand, seemed suddenly brighter. ‘Oh, but you'll never guess what—Millie used to make wedding cakes. She's agreed to make Monica and Jake's. Isn't that great?'

Suddenly his beer wasn't just sour; now it tasted like crap.

He pushed himself from the chair, leaving the half-empty bottle on the bench. ‘I have a call to make.'

‘Don't take too long,' Millie called behind him. ‘Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes.'

He slammed his office door with unnecessary force, making the windows rattle. How could Sophie do that? How could she pretend the wedding was going ahead when she knew damned well it wasn't? He paced the wall of his office, end to end and back again, finding no answers, no reason.

And how could she drag Millie into it, getting her hopes up about making some bloody wedding cake for a wedding that was destined to be a non-event from the start?

Why did she persist with this whole wedding-planner fantasy, anyway? Was she so desperate to convince him that it was real that she needed to involve his personal staff? Did she really believe Millie's involvement would sway him? Now she was only going to let Millie down when it all came unstuck.

None of it made sense, least of all whatever it was gnawing at the recesses of his mind. She was a good actress. She had to be, to pretend the wedding was real and to suck everyone into her plan.

Yet what kind of actress could blush on demand? What kind of actress could turn shyness into an art?

Was Jo wrong about her motives? Did Sophie actually believe the wedding was real? Nothing he'd witnessed so far gave any hint that her efforts to get this wedding underway were half-hearted.

And nothing she'd done gave any hint that she'd got wind of his million-dollar offer to her brother. Sure, it would pay her to keep quiet until the deal was done if she was getting the cut Jo suggested, but wouldn't he have noticed just a glimmer of interest once the game was on?

Was she cleverer than that, too clever and too interested in a hefty-dollar payout to give herself away?

Or was her brother playing her for a fool, using her as his blind while he sucked the bride's brother dry?

The idea appealed, made a sick kind of sense. Fletcher had no loyalty to his sister; they'd only known each other a few short years, after all. She and her wedding-planner business was just a cover, her business's need for capital a mere coincidence. He refused to believe she was part of Fletcher's plan.

He sat down on the edge of his desk, the pieces reassembling themselves in his mind. Sophie's brother was playing her for a fool. She and her wedding-planning business validated his story, that was all.

And, once Fletcher had the money, he'd run, leaving both Monica and Sophie high and dry, and leaving Daniel to pick up the pieces.

Someone like Fletcher would do that.

The phone in his pocket beeped again, reminding him he had messages waiting—reminding him that whatever he thought or hoped probably wasn't the issue. He had to deal in facts.

So he checked his messages, found the one from Jo he'd been expecting and opened it:
Fletcher and Co on three day cruise. Offer made. Awaiting response on return.

He snorted, letting go some of the angst he'd felt building from the first time his phone had beeped. So Fletcher was making the most of Hawaii's attractions while he was there, and no doubt Monica too. He knew he should feel angrier. He knew his gut should be rebelling at the prospect of his sister with that man.

Only it didn't, and it wasn't, and it was all because of one thing:
he had Fletcher's sister.

No news was definitely good news. Three days would be more than enough. Fletcher would have to accept defeat this time and more than likely Daniel would have had his fill of Sophie. They all paled after a while, no matter how tempting they'd been in the beginning. Sophie was good, he granted her that, but three days surely had to be enough for this crazy fire to burn out?

More than enough.

There was a tap at the door and it slowly opened. ‘Daniel?' the subject of his thoughts said tentatively. ‘Dinner's ready if you are.'

He was at her side in a heartbeat, determined to make the most of the next three days. He curled his hand around her neck and hauled her into his kiss. ‘Oh,' he said after she'd been thoroughly and deeply kissed so that her taste and scent filled his senses, stoking the flames of that fire once more. ‘Believe me, I'm ready.'

 

They made love in the plunge-pool afterwards, a slow, delicious tangling of bodies, tongues and limbs, an exquisite pleasure-filled torture where delay heightened desire and where postponing the inevitable increased the need. Until
finally, their eyes driven dark with desperation, they came together in a writhing, heaving conflagration that churned the water until it was white with foam.

Later, when both the water and their heartbeats had calmed and she lay like a sleepy cat against his body, he wondered about those three days being enough. He'd just had the best sex of his life; the way this woman felt under his hand, the way his body reacted to that touch, there was plenty more to come.

She stirred in his arms and stretched deliciously against him, her eyes fluttering to wakefulness—but it was the smile she gave him, a heady mix of innocence and temptation that made him feel that the bottom had just dropped out of the pool. ‘Thank you,' she said, her hand lazily stroking his chest.

He picked it up, took it to his mouth and kissed it before softly dropping it down again. ‘For what?'