Eventually, she’d come to realize that her friendships would wax and wane according to her success. In the beginning, those on the rungs above her hadn’t noticed her existence, while others who’d been struggling along with her during those early days had drifted away as her star had begun to rise.
After one particularly unsavory public incident, which had been edited out of
Beauty
, Lani had realized how badly her life had slipped out of control. Which was when she’d jumped off that glittery hamster wheel and returned to Orchid Island, reuniting with her old friends, and picking up relationships as if she’d never been away.
“I’m choosy about my friends, as well,” he said mildly, breaking into her thoughts about how the smartest thing she’d ever done was to return home. “In my business, I have to be.”
With that point silently acknowledged, Lani decided to change the subject. “You don’t have to keep the painting,” she said. “That was a dirty trick.”
“Giving it to me as a welcome-to-Orchid-Island gift?” He surprised her with a boyish grin that showed off amazing dimples and had her wanting to jump him on the spot. An impulse she resisted. “I thought it was inspired.”
She laughed, enjoying the moment. Enjoying him. “It was the only thing I could think of. The minute I saw it, I knew I’d simply die if I had to hang it on my wall.” She shook her head. “I do wish my father would get over his Picasso period. At least in the old days, his subjects bore some slight resemblance to reality.”
“I’ve also no idea what it’s supposed to be,” Donovan admitted. Since it was too large to carry, they’d left the brilliant orange-and-red abstract oil painting at the Breslin house. Thomas had promised to have it delivered to the cottage the following day.
“It’s supposed to depict the legend of Kealehai.”
“I’m still lost.”
“It’s one of our island’s most popular stories,” she said. “One day, Kealehai, an ancient goddess of fire who lives in Mt. Waipanukai’s volcano, decided to take on a human form and walk among the people. When she reached a beach on the far side of the island, a great ceremony was taking place to honor the eighteenth birthday of Taranga, who was not only a prince of the royal family but had been given the gifts of male beauty and charm by the goddesses who’d attended his birth. As Kealehai watched the festivities, she became captivated by him. Not only was he a stunningly beautiful young man, Taranga was the best dancer she’d ever seen.”
“Love at first sight.”
“Or at least lust at first sight,” Lani agreed dryly. “Especially since, according to legend, she’d gone a century without a human mate.”
“Talk about your dry spells.”
“I suppose time’s not the same when you’re in spirit form,” Lani suggested. “At any rate, being a very passionate spirit—”
“Which would be expected for a goddess of fire.”
“Exactly. Kealehai decided that she had to have him, but there was a slight glitch.”
The lazy breeze coming off the water fanned her hair, allowing him to breathe in the fragrant gardenia scent of her shampoo. Hit with a sudden jolt of desire, Donovan slipped his hand into his front pocket to keep from touching her. “A glitch?”
When she stopped to look up at him, moonlight gleaming in her eyes, he wondered if she’d heard the raw need in his voice. “Donovan?”
He knew that if he responded to the soft invitation in her voice, he’d be toast. He’d built his life on a solid foundation of self-control and wasn’t about to allow this woman, as enticing as she was, to undermine it in a single day.
“You were telling me about Kealehai,” he reminded her, rigidly reining in the impulse to drag her down onto the warm sand and reenact
From Here to Eternity
’s iconic beach lovemaking scene.
“Right.” Lani blew out a deep breath, suggesting he wasn’t alone in his feelings. “Since she derived her spirit power from the volcano, if they made love on his village’s beach, so far away from her own fire pit, her youthful human facade could crumble away and the handsome young man would realize how old she actually was.”
“Mature women have their appeal, but it sounds as if she might have been pushing that envelope.”
“She was several centuries older than your average cougar,” Lani agreed. “So, she put a trance on him long enough to get away. Then, once she got back to the volcano, she sent her younger sister, Marua, to bring him back.”
“Did Marua share her sister’s heated charms?”
“Actually, she was like the soft moon to Kealehai’s blazing sun. Having always lived in her older sister’s much brighter shadow, she’d never had an opportunity to know love. Until they were returning from Taranga’s village, when suddenly, on impulse, the young prince grabbed her and planted a deep, hot kiss on her. From the way it’s described in the various versions of the legend, he would have kissed the socks right off her. If she’d been wearing any at the time.”
Donovan so didn’t need to be talking about impulsive kissing right now. Especially since Lani was also barefoot. Although he was totally a leg guy, he’d never been into women’s feet. Until this moment. “And thus the eternal love triangle,” he said.
“It didn’t happen right away,” Lani said. “And it wasn’t as if she invited the kiss. Marua was not only sweet, and a virgin, she was truly loyal to her sister.”
“And undoubtedly afraid of her sister’s temper,” Donovan suggested, having seen more than a few romantic triangles turn deadly.
“Probably so,” Lani conceded. “At any rate, Marua insisted that they both remember that he’d already pledged himself to Kealehai. And that should have been that.”
“Yet there wouldn’t be a legend if the plot hadn’t thickened.” Donovan didn’t need his detective skills to tell that this story was going to end badly.
“You’re getting ahead of me,” Lani complained. “Having been tempted by her first kiss, Marua hesitantly allowed another. And, as the story goes, being cast under the spell of the prince’s magical charm, she even initiated a few kisses herself as they traveled from the beach through the valley.
“Unfortunately, Kealehai had been watching out for the couple from her peak on Mt. Waipanukai high over the island. She became more and more enraged with each kiss she witnessed and literally blew her top just as poor, bewitched Marua arrived back with Taranga.
“When he saw the fiery display of passion, the man-whore of a prince forgot all about poor sweet Marua, swept Kealehai into his arms, and made mad, passionate love to her on the edge of the erupting volcano. Unfortunately, instead of enjoying a lovely afterglow of postcoital bliss, Taranga was incinerated by the flames… And that’s the painting you’re going to have gracing your wall.”
“That’s fine with me.”
Lani stopped again to stare up at him. “You’ve got to be kidding. It’s one of the ugliest things Daddy’s ever done.”
Unable to resist touching, he ran his knuckles down her cheek. “Ah, but whenever I look at it, I’ll think of you.”
In turn, Lani dropped her sandals on the beach and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Are you accusing me of having a temper?”
“No,” he murmured, tracing the exquisite planes and hollows of her face with his fingertips, “I’m accusing you of making things very, very warm around here.”
“Is that a complaint?” she asked in a soft, breathless voice.
“I don’t know.”
They stared at each other, both searching for answers as the soft rain continued to fall. Finally, Donovan lifted a few heavy strands of wet hair off her face, bent his head, and brushed her cheek with his lips.
“You taste like rain.”
“Liquid sunshine,” she said, closing her eyes as his mouth skimmed over her face. “It never rains in paradise, Donovan. Didn’t Nate tell you that when he was sending you down here to seduce me?”
“I didn’t come here to seduce you.”
“Newsflash, Detective.” Eyes wide open now, she trailed a fingernail down the front of his T-shirt. “You really wouldn’t have to.”
“Now who’s seducing whom?”
“Does it matter?”
“I think it does.” He was drowning here. Drowning in her huge mermaid eyes and warm silky lips he knew he’d be tasting in his sleep. The breeze from the sea was pressing the flowered silk against her body in a way that left very little to his imagination. An imagination that kicked into overdrive as he fantasized about those mile-long legs wrapped around his hips.
“Anyone ever tell you that perhaps, just maybe, you think too much?” she asked. “Not everything has to be so complicated.”
She wasn’t the first person to tell him that. Most recently her brother and Tess. “It’s late,” he said quietly as he dropped his hand and took a step back. Literally and figuratively. “And you’re getting wet.”
“So are you.”
He glanced down, surprised to find his own clothing soaked. “It looks better on you.”
Her laugh was as silvery as the moonlight streaming over them. Then she flashed him an unaffected smile that jolted him to the core. “We have a saying around here, Donovan: The faster you go, the more you miss along the way.”
Rising up on her bare toes, she brushed her lips lightly, tantalizingly against his. “You wouldn’t want to miss anything, would you?”
Bending down, she scooped up the sandals she’d dropped and went running up the beach toward her cottage. As the Pacific trade winds carried her laughter to his ears, Donovan picked up his wet shoes and resumed walking toward Nate’s beach house, fighting the urge to follow Lani and continue where they’d left off.
But that would be giving in to impulse, and it had been a very long time since anyone had accused Donovan Quinn of being an impulsive man.
The phone, which he’d left on the bedside table, jolted Donovan from a blazing-hot dream of making love to Lani on the edge of a volcano. He fumbled for the receiver without opening his eyes.
“What?”
“So much for Orchid Island filling you with the old aloha spirit,” the deep male voice said with a laugh.
“Aloha spirit be damned,” Donovan muttered as he sat up in bed. “What the hell did you have in mind, anyway?”
“Concerning what?”
Donovan’s scowling gaze circled the room. “Your redecorating, for one thing.”
“How did it turn out?” Nate inquired interestedly.
“Like something out of an old movie: me Tarzan, you Jane. For God’s sake, Nate, haven’t you ever heard of overkill?”
“Sounds like Lani followed my instructions to a T.”
Donovan could hear the smile in his best friend’s voice. “Speaking of your sister,” he began, not bothering to hide his belief that Lani had been right about one thing: Nate had definitely set them up.
Nate’s next words confirmed his suspicions. “Isn’t she something? Face like a Botticelli angel, figure as sleek as a Thoroughbred, and a spirit to match.”
“She told your parents that you sent me down here to seduce her.”
“Actually, I sent you down to the island to reboot your personal life, which has pretty much been in the toilet lately. And okay, maybe I hoped Lani might be able to help you lighten up and relax, because that’s pretty much what she’s always done. Even when she was working on that reality show, she was more about taking emotional care of the contestants than creating on-screen drama.
“As for throwing you guys together, I did have the good sense to run the idea by Tess first, and she agreed it couldn’t hurt. So, what are you going to do? Arrest me for wanting to help out a pal?”
“And if I seduce your sister?”
“Believe me, I’ve seen many guys try and fail. If she does decide to give you a shot, it’ll be because she wants to. Not because of any rain shower I had her install… Hold on a second.”
Although he partly covered the phone, Donovan could hear Tess’s voice in the background.
“Tess says that if you two decide on vacation fling sex, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But she’d rather go shopping for a wedding gift. Which also works for me and would probably make Mom and Dad really happy. Dad especially because it’d give him a chance to throw a big bash. He loves getting everyone together. When Lani and I were kids, he held a blue moon theme party. He even got Sha Na Na to come to the island and perform the song.”
“You’re making that up.”
“I kid you not. The backup guys showed up in gold lamé, which wasn’t exactly beach attire, and Bowzer had even shaved his armpits, which was kind of weird. But the show was retro-cool and everyone loved it.”
“I’ve already gotten invited to the Christmas luau.”
“Best party of the year,” Nate said. “It even tops Dad’s New Year’s fireworks extravaganza. Once you see Lani dance, you’ll probably propose on the spot.”
“I’m not in the market for a wife,” Donovan reminded him. “I’m down here recharging for the Academy.”
“So you’ve actually decided to become a Feeb?”
Donovan thought he detected a hint of disapproval in Nate’s voice. “Probably. Either that or making chief has been my goal from the beginning.”
“Not exactly the beginning,” Nate was quick to point out. “I seem to remember spending hours in a patrol car with an idealistic, wet-behind-the-ears rookie who kept spouting off about helping the people, making the world a better place to live in, yada, yada, yada. I often wondered if you didn’t get all caught up in climbing that ladder of success to show Kendall she’d made a mistake when she walked out on your marriage.”
“Kendall had nothing to do with it,” Donovan countered irritably. One thing he didn’t need was a lecture about his former wife.
“Didn’t she?”
“Not at all,” Donovan said. He’d become concerned they’d be a bad fit before the wedding, but both Kendall—whose family had known his forever—and his parents had assured him that pre-wedding doubts were normal. “Besides, what makes you think I won’t be in a better position to help people as a special agent?”
“In the first place, those guys seem to live in their own worlds and don’t spend all that much personal time mixing with ordinary citizens. You’d be even more socially isolated than you are now.”
“I’m not socially isolated.” Hadn’t he gone out to dinner tonight?
“So you say. There’s also the point that Lani would hate the gypsy lifestyle of following you around from field office to field office as you climbed that federal bureaucratic ladder.”