Dragon's Eden (8 page)

“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” she said
abruptly, cutting off her thoughts before they got any worse. “I
was just going out to the gardens.” What she had to say next was
easily the worst idea she’d had in months, but she still thought it
was better than the alternative. “You could . . . uh, grab a cup
and come along if you like.”

The invitation was painfully forced and
insincere, but Jackson didn’t care. He was just grateful, and
surprised, to have gotten it at all.

“Sure. That sounds great.”

“Great,” she said, giving him another
patently false smile.

He almost laughed, but held it back. She
didn’t need to know he could see through her. Better to let her
play this new game her way.

He fell in step beside her, and between the
two of them, they managed enough awkward conversation to get them
to the kitchen.

“Pretty hot today.”

“It’s unusual for this time of year.”

“Does it rain every day?”

“Every afternoon,” she confirmed.

The conversation died its first death as
quickly as that. He should have known the weather wouldn’t get him
very far. Caribbean meteorology was blandly perfect, give or take a
hurricane or two. After a few yards in silence, he tried another
subject.

“Have you heard from Henry?”

The look she gave him was clearly the only
reply he was going to get.

“Thanks for the toothbrush and all the other
supplies,” he said, trying a new tack.

“You’re welcome.”

“And the clothes,” he added, glancing down
to catch her reaction.

It was worth the effort.

The color in her cheeks heightened, though
she stared doggedly ahead. “I should have looked through the
box.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s not that much
information.”

“Right,” she said dryly, leading the way up
the cottage steps. “It’s just a map, that’s all.”

“I was more interested in the message.”

“Oh.” Her blush deepened.

He followed her into the kitchen, his gaze
drifting down the length of her legs. Lord, she was sweet.

“So who got you?” he asked.

She literally tripped over the question,
catching herself with a hand on the table before she could fall.
“No one got me,” she said with acerbity, taking a cup out of the
tall cabinet next to the stove. She kept her eyes downcast while
she filled the cup with coffee.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “So who thinks he
got you?”

The coffeepot rattled as she set it back on
the stove. Sugar snatched her hand away and busied herself with the
totally unnecessary act of folding a kitchen towel. She’d known
this was a bad idea, a damn bad idea, and she’d be damned if she
entertained him with her deep dark secrets.

“You ask a lot of questions.” She put the
towel on the counter and picked up her basket to leave.

“And you tell me everything except what I
want to know,” he said. “What’s the problem, Sugar? Do you have
something to hide? What is it you’re so afraid of me finding
out?”

His accusation hit a nerve dead on and
stopped her in her tracks. She’d tried being nice, but they had
hardly managed five minutes of civility before they were at each
other.

She leveled her gaze at him. “What I’m
afraid of is you getting into more trouble than I can get you out
of and that’s got nothing to do with my personal life.” The barest
smile twitched his lips, and he arched one dark eyebrow, both
teasing and daring her at the same time. It was that look again,
and try as she might, she couldn’t make herself back down from
it.

“When I was sixteen I met a guy in
Barbados—he was older than me, twenty-one, twenty-two—and he
followed me home. He sailed into Kingstown one day, wearing that
shirt”—she gestured at the T-shirt—“and my dad all but ripped it
off his back. Believe me, he didn’t stick around long enough to get
anything except his hind end kicked.”

“What about while you were on Barbados?”

After a moment’s thought and assessment, she
decided there wasn’t any harm in answering. “In Barbados, I lived
on my grandparents’ sugarcane plantation, which was as close to a
convent as you could get without taking the veil. Satisfied?”

Of course he wasn’t.

“Is that how you got your name? Because your
grandparents own a sugarcane plantation?”

“Not hardly.” She gave a short laugh. “They
were appalled, still are, but my mom loved it. Sometimes I think
the only reason she married my dad, Dr. Thomas Caine, was so she
could have a little girl and name her Sugar. Lord knows, the
marriage didn’t last much longer than it took for me to be
born.”

“Your parents are divorced?”

“Is this Twenty Questions?”

He gave her a guileless smile that she
didn’t buy into for a minute. “I’m interested in you.” His smile
broadened like a wolf’s. “Real interested. Is that a crime?”

Warning signals went off up and down her
spine, and she answered his first question quickly and succinctly.
“Yes, my parents are divorced.” She gave herself a mental pat on
the back for safely negotiating the waters of her past, then he
went and ruined it ail.

“What happened to the guy from
Barbados?”

Damn him.

It didn’t matter, not anymore, she told
herself, not that part of it. And the rest of it would haunt her
every day for the remainder of her life whether she answered his
question or not.

“He went up-country and fell in love with my
mother instead.” She gave a slight shrug to mask the pain in her
heart, though it wasn’t pain from losing a boyfriend. That pain had
long since passed. “Don’t get anything wrong. My dad never knew,
and my mom never knew that I found out or that he’d liked me first.
She never would have hurt me like that, never.”

“But it hurt anyway.”

Her answer was a lift of her own eyebrow.
She fought for acceptance of the consequences of her actions, the
truly awful ones, the ones she’d done three years after the debacle
with the guy from Barbados, every day of her life. She wouldn’t let
Jackson steal what little peace she’d won. “When you were sixteen,
did you lose the girlfriend of your dreams to your much more
handsome and sophisticated father?”

He replied with a grin and a shrug of his
own, mimicking her. “I never knew my father. I was probably the
last thing he and my mother did together.” His grin broadened and a
mischievous light glinted in his eyes. “As far as losing
girlfriends, I don’t think it ever happened. I do remember taking a
few.”

Sugar thought about that for a minute, then
slowly nodded. “Yeah, I guess you would.”

She was out of her league, way out. Jackson
Daniels was the kind of man women shot when he rejected them. She
was the kind of woman men forgot.

Strangely, the comparison gave her comfort.
She didn’t need to worry about anything happening between her and
Shulan’s half brother. That first night, when he’d said all those
crazy things, about how she was the embodiment of all of his
fantasies, he’d just been coming down off a heavy dose of
narcotics. Lord knows what he’d thought he saw when he looked at
her. More than was there, that was for sure.

“Come on,” she said, grabbing an orange out
of one of the hanging baskets. “From now on, if you don’t work, you
don’t eat. We’ve got weeds to pull and flowers to pollinate.”

“I’m pretty good at pollinating.”

She didn’t look back to see his smile, but
she knew it was there, all over his face, cocky and wry at the same
time.

“I just bet you are.” She started peeling
the orange, dropping the peel in her basket.

He followed her into the cabana, sipping the
hot coffee. “You make the best coffee I’ve ever tasted.”

“It’s Jamaican Blue Mountain.” Finally, she
thought with a silent sigh, they’d reached a level of normalcy.
Being nice to him was going to pay off. He was already more
relaxed, and a relaxed prisoner was less likely to bolt than one
pacing on the edge. All she’d had to do was confess a few shaming
episodes from her youth, open up a few wounds. The debt she owed
Shulan was going to be well and truly paid by the time Jackson
Daniels left Cocorico.

“I’ve heard of Jamaican Blue, but I’ve never
had it before,” Jackson said, watching her deft, slender fingers
remove the last of the peel.

“Henry brings it for me, along with a few
treats like this.” She held up a section of the orange and smiled,
a sweet curve of white teeth and impish pleasure, then popped the
fruit in her mouth, closing her eyes to enjoy it.

He wasn’t sure, but Jackson thought he might
just have fallen in love, with her mouth if nothing else, though
the possibilities were high on there being something else. She
mystified him and fascinated him. Before he’d met her, he wouldn’t
have put the words innocent and sensual together, but she embodied
them both. In fact, her sensuality was probably the only innocent
thing about her. She was guilty as sin when it came to the part she
played in his captivity, and as a rule, the pure and the saintly
didn’t run afoul of people like Fang Baolian.

Still smiling, she opened her eyes. “These
are really the best he’s ever brought. I’ve got lime trees, but no
oranges.” She tore off a piece of the orange and raised it toward
her mouth, then seemed to notice him again. “Oh, I’m sorry. Would
you like some?” She held the small crescent of fruit out to
him.

He could have easily refused the orange, but
the woman was irresistible. Without another thought beyond the one
that he wanted to touch her with his mouth, steal a kiss however he
could, he bent his head and took the fruit from her hand, his teeth
grazing the tips of her fingers.

It could be love, he thought, watching the
myriad emotions crossing her face, the sudden darkening of her
eyes, hearing the small gasp she made when her lips parted in
surprise.

It could be love, and that could be the
death of him.

Sugar was frozen in place, hypnotized by the
warmth of his breath and the dampness of his mouth on her fingers.
His caress, for it was nothing less and maybe something more, had
lasted for mere seconds, but she had to hold herself back from
touching him in return, knowing that would be the ultimate
confession.

He lifted his head, and the fall of his hair
settled back on his chest. A faintly wicked smile curved his mouth
as he chewed.

“Tastes good,” he said when he was finished.
The lazy drift of his gaze partway down her body made her wonder if
he meant the orange or her.

When his eyes came back up and locked on
hers, the doubt was removed. He meant her. She’d been mistaken when
she’d thought the drugs had altered his perceptions. He was
stone-cold sober now, and he was looking at her as if she came with
whipped cream.

“Yes, well, Henry brought plenty, so help
yourself whenever you’d like one.” She took a step backward,
clutching her basket to her breasts. “An orange, I mean. Of
course.”

“Of course.” His grin broadened.

She turned around and grabbed a shovel off
her tool rack. “You’ll need this,” she said, thrusting it in his
direction. “And this.” She gave him a hoe.

“Isn’t there something in the Geneva
Convention about making prisoners do manual labor?”

“This island doesn’t belong to the Geneva
Convention.” She added a rake to his load. Good Lord, the man had
only kissed her fingertips, and she was trembling inside as if he’d
started making love to her. “You’ll stay in the vegetable garden
today. I’ll do all the pollina—all the work with the exotics.”

He laughed softly behind her. “What happened
to the bees? Isn’t pollination their job?”

“I’m a little short on bees right now, and
some of the plants need insects I don’t have. To be on the safe
side, I pollinate everything I can.” She picked up her pruning
shears, putting them in the basket with her gloves, and discreetly
sucked in what she hoped was a calming breath before glancing over
her shoulder at him. “We’ll start in the higher gardens and work
our way down.”

“What happened to the bees?” he asked,
shortening his stride to match hers as they left the cabana and
headed up the path.

“A natural disaster.” Out in the open air,
with plenty of room between them, she regained a measure of her
composure. “I went out to the hive one afternoon and found them all
dead, or mostly all of them. I think they got into some bad nectar
from one of the endangered species, something toxic to their
systems.”

“Toxic nectar? Sounds like a science-fiction
plot,” Jackson said. He watched the sun gild her, from the tangled
mass of blond curls on top of her head to the curve of her hips and
down the length of her legs. With her silvery-gray eyes,
peach-colored skin, and blond hair, she was like a beacon of
shimmering light drawing him forever onward.

“Oh, it’s science, all right. Chemistry.
You’re looking at chemical warfare on a very grand scale.” She
swept her hand through the air in front of her, the gesture
encompassing all the lush botanical wonders of her home, a place
where the plant kingdom had declared a decisive victory.

Houseplants running amok encroached on the
courtyard and cradled the trees. Lianas wound through branches and
down trunks, snaked their way through shrubs and along the ground,
tying all the shades and shapes of green into one photosynthesizing
web of life.

“Every plant manufactures compounds to
ensure its survival by any and all means available,” she continued.
“Chemicals to attract, repel, sometimes to kill, sometimes to heal.
Many of the species I cultivate are rich in alkaloids or essential
oils, the source of a lot of medicines.”

She was so lovely, so softly beautiful, that
just looking at her nearly broke his heart. “When I was a kid in
Hong Kong, our doctor used a lot of herbal treatments, sometimes
burning them over us, sometimes pouring them down our throats.”