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But it turned out she wasn’t prepared for this remote Pacific island that didn’t appear on most maps and had no official name. Maybe it was impossible to be prepared for this much tropical heat all at once, heavy and intense.
Her hands went to her hair at once. Bright red and embarrassing, its mission in life was to curl dramatically and unprofessionally at the slightest provocation. Lucinda went to great lengths to keep it neat and sleek. She kept it ruthlessly straight and swept back into a severe bun on the back of her head, which kept it under control but couldn’t minimize its upsetting color. Lucinda had often considered dying her hair a more appropriate brown, the better to blend in, but the idea of all the upkeep struck her as wasteful. She’d concentrated instead on ridding herself of her native Scottish accent, because the circles in which she aspired to move had no place for impenetrable working-class Glaswegian accents.
And Lucinda succeeded in all she did, because she didn’t allow for the possibility of failure. She never had, from her rough beginnings in one of Glasgow’s notorious housing estates to her current position as a vice president in her company’s London corporate office. Tropical heat on a Pacific island couldn’t change that.
Though it complicated things, certainly. It seemed to curl into her, sneaking beneath her clothes like some kind of insinuation.
Lucinda tried to shake it off as she took in her surroundings, frowning at the sweep of untouched white sand and the wild tangle of jungle beyond, climbing up the green, steep sides of the hills.
“Are you certain this is the right place?” she demanded of the pilot, who had climbed down to the dock ahead of her and insisted on grinning widely as if everything she said and did was vastly entertaining.
Lucinda was not entertaining, thank you very much. She was effective. She was capable. And she was used to being treated as exactly what she was and wanted to be. Stern. Uncompromising. A straight-edged ruler of a woman, one of her first bosses had called her. He’d meant it as an insult, but Lucinda had taken it as the greatest compliment and had tried her best to live up to it ever since.
“You said you wanted Jason Kaoki,” the pilot replied, still grinning. “This is where he lives. I couldn’t tell you if that makes it the right place or not.”
Lucinda forced a tight smile, wrestled her sensible and compact carry-on bag behind her and marched off the dock.
Onto the pristine, glaring white beach, which she found even less accommodating than the smirking pilot she’d hired in Fiji, since there were no commercial flights to this place, plunked down in the Pacific somewhere between Honolulu and Nadi. The sand was hot and shifted beneath her as she walked, in a manner she found deeply unnerving. She liked the comfort of concrete. The assurance that when she stepped on it, it would remain exactly where it was, rain or shine.
The beach had its own ideas. That and the humidity...got to her, she could admit.
Lucinda had worn sensible flats, of course, but was otherwise hardly dressed for a romp across the sands. Despite the forty hours she’d spent traveling—one long-haul flight after another, with too many overly bright airports in between—she had maintained her usual workplace uniform. She was convinced a coolheaded, professional approach was the key to landing this account.
Though at the moment, trying not to sink knee-deep into blindingly white sand, she wished she hadn’t, perhaps, dressed for her conservative London office all those hours ago in her flat. It might have been wiser to choose something more appropriate for islands much warmer and brighter than the United Kingdom.
Lucinda wasn’t one to concede without a fight—or at all, generally speaking—but it took only about ten steps before she was forced to admit defeat. It was too hot. She was a natural shade of Scottish pale that she was afraid might burst into flame at any moment in all this tropical sun and heat, and she was so uncomfortable that she’d stopped thinking about her goals and was caught up in thinking about how she felt. That was unacceptable. She stopped, sinking deep into the sand, to shrug off her black jacket and kick off her matching flats, and wore nothing but her wrinkle-resistant blouse and sleek pencil skirt as she stormed the rest of her way toward solid ground.
Once there, she paused by another picturesque palm tree to dump the beach out of her shoes and slip them back on. And also to catch her breath, accept the likelihood that she was already breaking out in blisters from the relentless sun beating down on her, and try to get her bearings.
If the map on her phone was any guide, and she’d done enough research to know it was, there was precious little on this island. It was almost entirely undeveloped, save the sprawling house Daniel St. George had built here and a single, ancient hotel that had been thrown together in the 1950s in service to an Australian oilman’s fantasies of world domination. The hotel had never opened and now sat as a monument to the perils of too much money with no good sense.
She shoved her inadequate sunglasses higher on her nose as she peered down the length of the beach, frowning until she saw the hotel in question, peeking around a picture-perfect curve dusted with palm trees as it reached out toward the blue horizon. The old hotel squatted there with its midtwentieth-century facade and squat, flat shape, reminding Lucinda far too much of the block of flats she’d lived in as a child. All of which should have been torn down before the dawn of the twenty-first century, as far as Lucinda was concerned.
If she had her way, the sad old hotel wouldn’t make it through the summer.
There was a kind of track—she wouldn’t call it a road, packed with red dirt and sprouting weeds in the center—that skirted along the edge of the beach and wasn’t yet overtaken by the encroaching jungle. Lucinda marched along it, her eyes on the hotel. It didn’t get any prettier as she moved. But with every overly warm step, she entertained herself with notions of what could be.
A private island resort, catering only to the wealthiest and most exclusive clientele. The kind of fantasy island retreat most people only dreamed about, made a reality right here. She drew up plans in her head, ignoring the blazing sun. The humidity. The unmistakable knowledge that her makeup, or what was left of it all these hours after she’d last applied it in a restroom in the bowels of LAX, was almost certainly melting off her face.
It was a deceptive ten minutes’ walk—when it looked as if it ought to be five—from the dock to the old hotel, and when she drew close the building was even worse than she’d imagined. Lucinda knew it was all the rage in places like Los Angeles to pretend that so-called 1950s “style” was exciting and hip. But all that self-consciously cheerful midcentury modernity was pointedly retro and depressingly functional, to her way of thinking. And had no place in this secluded, remote setting. No, thank you. The point of a private island like this was seduction. Mystery and possibility, not the depressingly plain and boxy building that rose up before her like an Eastern European prison.
The setting cried out for magic. Secluded bungalows and private coves, as if the world beyond no longer existed. Not a squat, ugly horror that was little better than a roadside motel.
Lucinda strode up what might once have been a driveway before the jungle had claimed it and pushed her way into the lobby. It was dark inside, and quiet, and she blinked as she waited for the glare of the sun outside to fade so she could see how bad it really was.
There were potted plants that she thought might be fake, a shame in a place where the hills all around burst with green and bright, fragrant blossoms. Heavy, dark furniture that matched the hotel’s dark walls and made her think of men with thick gold chains and too much chest hair—potbellies and ugly Hawaiian shirts to match. Not exactly the sort of luxury and elegance, wrapped up in a tropical package, that a place like this should offer.
When her eyes adjusted to light, she started—
Because she wasn’t alone.
There was a man sitting there on one of the old couches, his bare feet propped up on the sad wick
er table in front of him and his back to the big, open space that led out toward the beach and let the sea in.
Two things occurred to Lucinda at once.
First, that she hadn’t laid eyes on another living soul since she’d stepped off the airplane and left the pilot grinning after her. She hadn’t heard a single sound that suggested there were people anywhere nearby. This really, truly was a deserted, private island.
And of all the possibilities Lucinda had gone over in her head approximately nine thousand times, she hadn’t really let herself think too much about the meaning of that word—deserted—or the fact that she’d gone ahead and marooned herself here with a stranger. A man.
Not just any man. This man.
Which led her to number two. The man she’d come to see was far more devastating in person than in all the pictures she’d studied of him—and she was fairly certain she’d scoured the internet and had found every existing image, because she was nothing if not thorough.
But thorough research had not prepared her for...this.
The man watching her, still lounging there on the old sofa, was...too much.
Her breath left her in a confusing rush she couldn’t control, as if the very sight of him was a swift punch to her gut.
Jason Kaoki lounged there before her, kicked back in what passed for a seating area in the hotel’s sad lobby as if he was as much a fixture as the shiny, fake plants. Except nothing about him was the least bit sad. Lucinda told herself it was the thrill of finally making it here into his presence—after all the calls and emails he’d ignored for months now—that shot through her when their eyes locked. Because what else could it be?
But her mouth was remarkably dry. And there was a shivering thing trapped there, just beneath her skin. Because it turned out the most reclusive of the St. George heirs was a big man.
