Dragon's Eden (16 page)

“Let that be our first secret,” he said.
“Cooper will never let me live it down, if he ever finds out.”

“I’ve never been any good at keeping
secrets, but I promise to keep yours.” Her voice softened along
with the look in her eyes, reminding him again of the fierceness of
her convictions. The few things she had to hold on to, she held on
to with a tenacious and sincere loyalty.

“Our secret,” he corrected her, running his
thumb across her bottom lip. He’d been right to follow her, though
the freedom she was leading him to was far different from what he’d
expected. “So what are you going to tell them?”

“The truth,” she said. “Or as close to the
truth as I can get. That you were driving me absolutely crazy and I
had to get rid of you. That you wouldn’t keep your clothes on and
you wouldn’t stay out of the water. That you upset my schedule and
unearthed snakes in the garden. That I couldn’t think a coherent
thought when you were near me.”

“Are you in love too?” It was the hardest
question he’d ever asked, and her answer wasn’t nearly what he’d
hoped it would be.

“I don’t know, Jackson,” she said, being
painfully honest. “I want you so much, I can’t see beyond the
wanting. You’re more than I ever expected to get.”

“More what?”

“More life, more of a chance.”

Her answer hurt him worse than her doubts
about love. She was too young to have settled for so little.

“There must have been a time when your
dreams were bigger, Sugar.”

“Maybe,” she said, her lashes lowering for a
moment. Then she turned away from him. “I’m sorry. We have to go
now, before they come looking.”

He stopped her from leaving by laying his
hand on her arm, but she didn’t look at him. “You can’t hide from
me forever.”

When she didn’t answer, he let her go. He
couldn’t hold her with force, and he wasn’t going to get answers by
asking questions, not yet, though he was damned determined to get
some answers. His love gave him a right to know everything about
her, an obligation.

Patience would bring him her trust, he told
himself, and only trust would give him the secrets of her past or a
chance at her future. Patience.

He followed her up the narrow trail leading
to the opening of the cavern. The path was sandy, easy on bare
feet, when it should have been rocky. With little effort, he could
imagine her spending days hauling sand up from the beach to pack
the trail, making her walled paradise more amenable, adding a small
luxury to her life.

Her island was beautiful, lush, and giving,
but it was still a prison. If not his love, he wondered what it
would take to lure her from her Eden. And if she didn’t love him in
return, did he have any right to ask her to leave?

At the top of the path, she waited with her
back to him while he put on his clothes.

“We don’t have to go back the way we came
in, do we?” he asked, pulling his pants on before reaching for his
T-shirt.

“You don’t, but I would rather go back the
way I came in,” she said.

Her meaning wasn’t lost on him.

“I knew you didn’t come through that
sinkhole.” He was relieved he’d been right, more for her sake than
his own. He was big enough to take a little knocking around.

“I did the first time,” she said,
effectively dispelling his relief. “As I remember, it was quite a
ride.”

He stopped with his shirt halfway on. The
vision he had of her being taken by surprise and sucked down into
the watery darkness chilled him to the core. With a deft move, he
pulled the shirt over his head. Anything could happen to her at any
time, and no one would know, maybe not forever.

“Yeah, it was quite a ride,” he agreed,
making up his mind. He was leaving, and when he left, she was going
with him. If Cooper hadn’t already neutralized Baolian, he would,
doing whatever it took to get the Dragon Whore off Sugar’s
back.

* * *

“Sinkhole on your left,” Sugar warned,
leading Jackson through a wide tunnel. They’d already passed her
storage tank and replaced the sluice gates at the top. He’d been
impressed with her ingenuity. Sugar barely noticed. She was still
stunned by his declaration of love.

He wasn’t in love, of course. Lust, maybe,
but not love. Love took time, and they’d had none to speak of, nor
were they likely to get any. He deserved to have control of his
life without any more interference from Shulan, and she was going
to make sure he got it. After Shulan left, she would take him to
Kingstown and set him free. If he’d truly been injured and in need
of rest and care, what Shulan had asked of her wouldn’t have been
as difficult or as distasteful. Under the circumstances, though,
she’d held him longer than she should have. It was time to let him
go.

She stiffened her resolve to keep from
feeling horrible. It was the damn “love” thing. He never should
have said those words. They made her guilt unbearable. The thought
of being alone again was even worse.

He’d ruined her peace of mind, and her peace
of body. She didn’t know about love, but she knew she felt lust.
She had felt it from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him, so
gloriously naked, stretched out on her bed.

She also knew better than to confuse a
sexual response with love, and under normal circumstances, he
probably did too. She’d heard there was often an attraction between
a captive and his captor, a hostage syndrome. She didn’t doubt that
what he was experiencing was a mixture of lust and hostage
syndrome.

The realization made her feel completely
pathetic.

“I don’t know how you ever got through these
caves the first time without getting killed,” he said. “Or what in
the hell you were doing in here to begin with.”

“I was careful,” she said, “and I didn’t
have a choice about being in here. Once I fell through the first
sinkhole behind the waterfall and ended up at the cove, I had to
find a way out.” She shot the beam of her flashlight on a jagged
protrusion of limestone. “Watch yourself on the wall here. It’s
like a razor.”

The flashlight was one that never left the
caves. She kept it in a waterproof box at the entrance to the
tunnel that led from the waterfall to the cavern that emptied out
into the cove. At the cove end of the tunnel was another plastic
box to store it in before she went for her swim. A spare set of
batteries was always taped to the flashlight. She’d mapped the
caves and tunnels and sinkholes, but without a light to guide her,
she would be as lost and in danger as she’d been the first time—and
she’d vowed never to be caught that unprepared again. She heard him
swear behind her.

“What?” she asked, swinging the light around
on him.

“I think I jigged when I should have
jagged.” His voice was tight. The flashlight showed him inspecting
a diagonal line of blood on his biceps.

She rushed back to him. “Dammit. I’m sorry”
She touched him, running her fingers down the smooth skin of his
arm, checking him over. “I don’t think it’s very deep.”

“It’s not,” he said through clenched
teeth.

“More of a scratch than a cut.” She tried to
reassure him, but sensed her failure in the tension radiating off
him.

“Yeah, just a scratch.” He bent his head
over hers, trapping her within an invisible cocoon of strained
intimacy. He started to speak, then caught himself.

“What’s the matter, Jackson? Are you in
pain?” She let her concern show in the tenderness of her touch and
the softness of her voice.

“No, I—Do you do that a lot, Sugar?” he
blurted out. “Walk around falling into sinkholes and getting
‘maytagged’ in underwater tunnels?”

“No,” she said, relieved he was only worried
about her and not hurt worse than she’d thought.

“How long did it take you to find your way
out of here?” His tone didn’t leave much room for a lie, though
considering his mood, a lie would have been preferable to the
truth.

“Two days,” she confessed, then added, “give
or take a few hours.”

She should have lied.

“Two days?” he repeated, sounding both angry
and incredulous. “Two damn days down here? You must have been
scared senseless.”

She gave a short laugh. “I’ve only been
scared senseless once, and believe me, Jackson, that wasn’t
it.”

Her offhand statement proved to be another
tactical error.

“Having experienced both,” he said, his
voice lowering to a ragged whisper, “the only thing I can imagine
that would be worse than being trapped down here and not knowing
where I was, would be standing in front of Fang Baolian without a
gun in my hand.”

The man was uncanny.

“I had a knife,” she admitted, feeling she
owed him something, an explanation or part of the truth. He already
knew more about her than was safe. A little more information
wouldn’t make any difference—except possibly in the way he
remembered her.

Regardless, the instant the words were out
of her mouth, she regretted them. Even in the poor illumination of
the flashlight she saw his face harden.

“A knife?” The words hung in the air,
disbelieving. “What the hell kind of knife were you carrying?
Balisong? Tanto? Kriss? Buck?”

“Steak.”

“A steak knife?”

“I took it off the buffet. It was a New
Year’s Eve party. Things got out of hand.”

Jackson had wanted to know. He’d practically
forced her into telling him, only to find out she’d tangled with
the Dragon Whore
mano a mano
?

He wanted to strip her down and look for the
scars. Nobody got that close to Baolian, not with deadly intent,
without feeling the sting of her scorpion’s nails, the razor-edged
blades that tipped each of her fingers.

“How in the ever-lovin’ hell did you end up
at a New Year’s Eve party with the likes of Fang Baolian?” He
stared at her, dumbfounded.

“I went with some friends.”

“Where?” he asked incredulously. “Some opium
den in Manila? A flophouse in Jakarta? A gutter in Hong Kong?”

“A mansion on Mustique.”

He’d heard of the Caribbean island, a
high-priced sanctuary for millionaires and rock-and-roll stars, and
apparently at least one international crime queen.

“Did you cut her?” he asked, then waved the
question away. “Forget it. You must have cut her or you wouldn’t
have ended up in exile here for—How long, Sugar?”

“Three years.”

Jackson felt as if someone had punched him
in the solar plexus. Three years? She’d been there for three years?
In a flash, he thought back to all he’d done in the last three
years, the places he’d been, the people he’d met, the things he’d
done—the things he shouldn’t have done.

“No,” he said, shaking his head and
disbelieving every word she’d told him. “I’ve seen the woman, most
if not all of her, and there wasn’t a mark on her worth three years
of your life.”

“She thought differently at the time,” Sugar
said, fighting an unwelcome surge of jealousy. “I’m sure she still
does.” She remembered how Baolian had looked three years ago,
sinfully seductive, beautiful and powerful, her skin flawless, like
the finest porcelain—and he had seen the woman practically
naked.

“What friends were you with?” He lifted both
of his hands in a gesture of confusion. “Baolian has no friends.
Not one. She is not a party-type girl. She does business, that’s
all. Business to make money.”

“Is that what she was doing with you? Making
money?” The question came out snooty and accusing, and just reeking
with the old green-eyed monster.

A long silence drew out between them and
ended with a quirk of his eyebrow. “If you believe Shulan’s story,
yes. Personally, I think she was after my body.”

He was so cool, so matter-of-fact, she
wanted to shake him. Of course the woman had been after his body.
What woman in her right mind wouldn’t be after his body?

“These friends of yours, Sugar,” he said,
getting back to the subject at hand. “What happened to them? Why
are you the only one here?” He wasn’t asking nicely, far from it.
He sounded like he wanted to take names for future reference.

“They were just friends, casual friends,”
she said to disarm him. Not that she was going to give him names.
Their names meant nothing. “They were in the islands for the
Christmas holiday, most of them richer and all of them wilder than
me. Somebody knew somebody on Mustique, and they got us an
invitation. I thought the party would be fun. I was wrong, and I
got into trouble.” The pained look he was giving her put her on the
defensive. “These things do happen, you know, especially when
you’re young and you’re so damn sure that living for the moment is
the only sensible thing to do.”

Jackson silently agreed. Having spent a good
portion of his life getting into trouble, he knew exactly how those
things happened, how easy trouble was to find. Most times it was
just lying there in the middle of whatever road he was on, waiting
for him to step into the snare.

“You’re still young,” he said, squelching
the urge to lecture her about the dangers of moving with a fast
crowd. She was already paying the price. “And you’re still too damn
sure of everything.”

“Not like I was.” He heard no regret in her
voice. She said it like a person who had learned something the hard
way.

He watched her through the steamy mist
filling the air and dampening their bodies. He had enough regrets
for both of them, for the years she’d lost. He was beginning to
understand why she was such a fascinating, frustrating blend of
woman and child. She’d been alone far longer than he would have
believed possible, missing all the opportunities given youth to
make the transition to full adulthood.

The noise of running water echoed through
the tunnels, sounding like a thousand rivers under the earth. The
flashlight beam caught in the mists, reflecting off the vapor and
casting shadows on the floor, the whole adding a haze of unreality
to everything around them. Her pale hair and yellow clothes gave
her even less substance, made her seem more of an angel than a
woman, and he wanted her to be a woman. He didn’t want her to slip
away from him again.