Dragon's Eden (7 page)

He was miserable. She knew it, but she
didn’t know what to do about it. He’d spent his first day on
Cocorico unconscious, and his first night prowling the beach alone,
looking for a way off that wasn’t there. She knew what it felt like
to be trapped. But freedom had been her trap and Cocorico her
sanctuary.

“You won’t be here very long,” she said,
hoping to encourage him. “Three weeks on the outside.”

“Then what?” He quirked one eyebrow in an
expression she found uniquely his, a combination of irony and
ingenuousness that made him seem both young and old.

“Then Shulan comes back,” she said, watching
the dawn light spill through the window behind him, revealing the
details of his face.

“I’d rather be gone before she gets
here.”

Sunshine gilded the line of his jaw and the
angle of his cheekbone. As light washed into his eyes, turning the
shadowy forest color into a vibrant emerald green, something in her
chest constricted.

Not her heart, she told herself even as she
covered the left side of her rib cage with her hand to ease the
strange sensation. The ache was probably nothing more than a
wayward emotion caused by having him at Cocorico. She couldn’t
remember the last time she had shared a sunrise. That novelty alone
was enough to drag up all sorts of baggage, whether he knew they
were sharing the moment or not.

He would be gone soon, and that was for the
best. He wasn’t very old. He had the rest of his life to live,
somewhere else.

“I can’t let you go.”

He gave her a reluctant nod, as if he
understood her position, and took a swallow of coffee. For a moment
she thought their conversation was over, but then he spoke.

“I have a brother, an older brother,” he
said. “His name is Cooper. He raised me, and I’m pretty sure he
thinks I’m dead. He was with me when I got shot, guarding my back
while I was guarding his. He’s got to be going through hell,
blaming himself for what happened.”

Guilt assailed her and forced her eyes to
shift away from his. She hadn’t thought about his family, other
than Shulan.

“You have to let me go, Sugar. You can’t
keep me here against my will.”

“What makes you think I’m not here against
mine?” she asked, making sure to give the question no betraying
inflection.

Despite her effort, his gaze sharpened and
hope lit the depths of his eyes. “Then you could leave with me,” he
said softly, urgently.

No, she couldn’t. She set her coffee cup
down on the counter and walked over to the kitchen cabana door. On
the threshold, she paused. She knew what else she had to say, yet
she hesitated, knowing her words would give away more of herself
than she wanted to reveal.

Still, she had to do it.

She looked in his direction, but couldn’t
quite meet his eyes. She didn’t want to watch his hopes dim, and
the words were hard enough to say without him looking inside her
and finding the truth of her loneliness.

“If I could leave the island and have a life
to live, I would,” she said. “But I can’t, ever, and for now,
neither can you.”

Two days later Sugar wasn’t sure she was
going to survive having Jackson Daniels dropped on her doorstep. He
was the ultimate invasion of privacy, an immovable wall and an
unstoppable force all rolled into one.

Sweating and swearing under the midday sun,
she laid another bead of caulk down the last glass window on the
place. She lived in an ever-changing, never-ending tableau of the
handyman’s dream. On Cocorico, if it was metal, it rusted; if it
was wood, it warped; if it was paint, it peeled; and if it was a
roof, it leaked.

The caulk stopped running, and she set her
jaw, squeezing harder on the trigger of the caulking gun. The
upkeep of the cottage and the bungalow was too much for one person,
especially if that person was more conversant with
Bactris gasipaes palmae
than a hammer and saw. Adding the
baby-sitting of other people’s long-lost, half-wild brothers didn’t
make her job any easier.

After
Jackson’s first night on the island, Jen had found a cache of
supplies in a hollow of limestone above the high-tide mark. Sugar
had put everything back in the pantry and had talked again with her
“guest” abut Shark Alley and the folly of leaving. The next day Jen
had discovered a partially completed raft hidden in the shrubs and
undergrowth at the base of the cliffs. The two of them had spent
most of the morning dismantling the rough craft. She hated to think
of what Jackson might come up with next.

She
finished the seam with the last dollop of caulk and lifted her head
to survey her work. It looked like hell. Fortunately, a certain
degree of shabbiness could be interpreted as tropical ambience.
People paid thousands of dollars for tropical ambience. She
probably ought to quit fooling with Cocorico’s before she wore
herself out. She reached for the glass of lemonade she’d put in the
window’s flower box, silently admitting that Henry wasn’t the only
person who’d gotten the gumption sucked out of him by the Caribbean
sun.

Proving her point again, Jackson Daniels chose that moment to
step onto the bungalow’s verandah. She took one look at him walking
over to gaze at the ocean, leaning with his hands on the porch
rail, and her heart sank.

“Damn it all,” she muttered under her
breath, setting her lemonade back in the geraniums. He’d found the
box of clothes she’d put in his room, a box he should have had the
sense to go through before giving him carte blanche.

On the front of the T-shirt he’d chosen to
wear, the words
I get my Sugar Caine in the
British Windwards
were silk-screened in letters two inches
high. She couldn’t read it at that distance, but she didn’t need to
be able to read it. The white shirt was distinctive, with both
sleeves ripped out, the bottom cut off, and the letters painted in
bright aqua over a map of the islands. The darn thing was supposed
to have ended up in the ragbag years ago, when her father had run
off the boy who’d had the gall to make it.

“Ah, hell.” She wasn’t cut out for
subterfuge. Shulan should have known better than to bring him to
her. All her hemming and hawing about his location had been a waste
of breath, because he was standing there with the information
plastered across his chest.

And he knew it. He had to know it.

She lifted her hand to shade her eyes,
watching him from across the courtyard. The striped shadows of the
verandah’s thatched roof veiled his face and hid his expression,
but she thought she detected an easiness in his stance that hadn’t
been there before. She’d left him in a fit of temper—again—when
she’d gotten up a few hours before dawn to check on, and if
necessary curtail, his nighttime activities. If his mood had
improved at all, it had to be because he’d read the T-shirt and
realized its significance.

He slowly straightened from the rail, and
just as slowly, her gaze shifted from his face, drifting down the
silky length of his hair, past the bare strip of his abdomen, and
over his hips, where the drawstring pants hung only by the grace of
God.

Lord, he was beautiful—barefoot and
alluring, this son of a pirate. His movements were fluid and
controlled, like Jen’s, but with the added strength of youth and
the added distraction of lean, hard muscle layered over a
quintessentially masculine body.

Beautiful men were not a rare commodity in
the Caribbean. In years gone by, Sugar had seen her share of hard,
bronzed chests, rock-solid abs, and rakish smiles, but Jackson
Daniels was different. He had an aura of power about him,
purposeful, inherently regal, and magnetic, like a lodestone. It
was what made him dangerous. It was also what made him
fascinating.

She lowered her hand and unconsciously
balled it into a fist. Shulan had asked for too much by bringing
him here. Someone had to be looking for him, some woman who missed
him in the night. Some woman who ached for wondering what had
become of him. He must have been loved—and with that face, probably
too many times for his own good.

Her expression turning grim, she picked up
the lemonade glass and headed toward the cabana. A woman
was
looking for him, she reminded herself, a woman
with murder, not love, on her mind. Her job was to protect him from
Baolian, care for him, and let him go. Nothing more.

* * *

Leaning against the verandah railing,
Jackson looked out to sea, following a wave in from open water
until it broke upon the shore. He followed the next, and the next,
and the next, discerning the tide, the currents, and the undertow.
He watched the last wave turn to foam and froth before it sank into
the sand.

The Windward Islands. He was in the
Caribbean. The realization had shocked him. Whatever Shulan was up
to, she sure as hell was going out of her way to get it. There were
a thousand islands in the South China Sea and the South Pacific.
She could have had her pick of them rather than come so far from
her home territory. Unless that had been the point, to get away,
far away from Fang Baolian and her army of cutthroats and
spies.

He had a lot of questions, and there wasn’t
anyone to stop him from getting the answers out of the island
woman. Except Jen.

He gingerly touched the healing cut on the
side of his neck. The Chinaman was a problem, but not an
insurmountable one if Sugar became Jackson’s ally instead of the
old man’s. Shulan wouldn’t have miscalculated Sugar’s appeal to
him. She would have expected it, used it, depended on it to keep
him where she wanted him to be. Sugar might be too naive to believe
anyone bartered sex, but he didn’t have a doubt, and he’d seen the
way she looked at him. Shulan would have betted on that too. It was
time for him to work a little harder at attracting Miss Sugar
Caine, instead of being so damn good at arguing with her and
scaring her off.

A self-deprecating smile curved his lips.
That’s what had gotten him into this mess in the first place,
trying to lure a woman into a trap. Baolian had been intrigued by
the bait, but when he hadn’t delivered the goods, namely himself,
she’d gotten nasty.

He didn’t think that was going to be a
problem with Sugar. If his life depended on it, he would gladly
sacrifice whatever was left of his virtue in Sugar’s bed, on her
rickety kitchen table, on her beach. She could pick the place, and
the time, and the position.

Once again, though, given the way his luck
had been running, he doubted if anything as desirable as sex with
Sugar was going to get him off the island.

He looked up from the ocean and over his
shoulder at the limestone cliffs towering at his back. In daylight
he’d seen the beauty of her home, and the absoluteness of its
isolation. They were in a rock bowl resting on its side, facing
north, offered up to the sun and the sea with the arch as its
handle. Inside the bowl was a lush paradise of greenery and trees
fed by a stream that fell in four tiers from openings in the cliff
wall. The rock was slick with vegetation and moisture in some
places, friable in others. Climbing out to find whatever was on the
other side of the cliffs would have to be a last resort, one step
above swimming through the sharks and the riptide.

The Caribbean hideaway was a true Garden of
Eden, untouched, full of life’s ripeness, and the wildest creature
in the garden was Sugar Caine. He lowered his gaze to the
sun-drenched courtyard, looking for his prey, a woman with the face
of a young angel and eyes the color of a dove’s wings.

* * *

Sugar stepped out of the cabana, carrying a
basket over one arm. The polite thing to do would be to go over and
say good morning to her guest and let him know she would have his
breakfast ready in a few minutes. Instead, she was heading toward
her melon patch and her fruit trees, determined to avoid the polite
thing and Jackson Daniels for as long as possible.

She was halfway to the orchard when her
common sense sent her a news flash: ignoring- Jackson wasn’t the
best way to control him. She’d been going about every thing all
wrong. What she needed to do was damnably clear—spend more time
trying to entertain him and keep him busy so that he’d have less
time for his doomed escape plans. So that he’d be less likely to
get himself killed while under her care.

With a muttered curse, she pivoted on her
heel. She continued cursing all the way across the courtyard,
stopping only when she was close enough that he might hear.

“Good morning,” she hollered out, stepping
up onto the verandah, a brightly false smile plastered to her
face.

“Good morning,” he said, his voice gravelly
from sleep and impossibly seductive. He turned to face her, running
a hand back through his hair, and the bottom fell out of Sugar’s
heart.

The shirt was an unmitigated disaster,
revealing not only his location in the Windwards, but enough bared
abdomen to spark a riot of memories. Dragon’s wings unfurled from
beneath the ragged edge of the T-shirt, blue and green on tawny
skin, the creature’s musculature rippling with the movement of the
man.

Her gaze followed the curve of the dragon’s
tail to Jackson’s navel and the line of soft dark hair arrowing
beneath his pants. The first time she’d seen so much of him there
had been no pants, no small black bow of a drawstring underneath
his navel, as if he were a gift of erotica from the gods.

He’d already been unwrapped.

A blush heated up her cheeks. She would
never forgive Shulan for bringing him here. The pirate princess
must have known he wasn’t in need of her limited nursing skills.
She must have known Sugar was going to have to deal with him all
day long, every day, and into the night, and . . .