The Dare Collection March 2019. Rachael Stewart
needed to put all of that behind her. Now.
Lucinda took a certain grim pleasure in her usual routine. The attention to her hair, her makeup. The heels she wore because practicality had its place, but sleek, stylish, wearable weapons were a woman’s best friend.
And then, telling herself that she was perfectly fine and suffered no ill effects or emotional residue at all, she headed back into work.
She was so busy congratulating herself on her escape from paradise and the terrifying lure of the most astoundingly beautiful man she’d ever met that it took her entirely too long to notice the way everyone in the office was staring at her.
“Is there something on my face?” she asked her harried assistant after she’d run the gauntlet of the executive floor. A little more sharply than necessary, perhaps.
“You’re quite tanned, actually. That’s surprising.” Her usually reliable and practical assistant shook herself, as if she hadn’t meant to say that. “But you’re a legend, Lucinda. That’s the main thing. You did it. You really did it.”
Lucinda blinked. “What did I do?”
“You know.” Pandora shook her head, admiringly, as if Lucinda was being coy. And then made it all worse by nudging her with her shoulder, as if they were friends. “They should have known better, shouldn’t they? Lucinda Graves always gets what she wants.”
Lucinda had the faintest inkling then—but surely not. Surely there was no way. Still, she was too taken back by the possibility to lecture her assistant on proper office decorum.
Especially when the phone rang and her presence was requested in the executive boardroom. Immediately.
“Congratulations,” Pandora whispered after she put the phone down.
Lucinda turned and headed for the boardroom, done in achingly posh wood with gold accents and featuring a priceless view over London. She’d always loved that view. She liked to walk the long way through the office so she could look at it, always visible behind the clear glass walls that invited everyone in the office to see what it looked like when important meetings happened. Who attended and who dominated.
She had studied that room, and she’d vowed that one day, she would look out to see London at her feet and all of upper management gazing at her as if she was the star.
And she could see it happening as she walked toward the room. She saw all the men in their suits turn to watch her approach. She lengthened her stride, aware that she looked bulletproof and flawless, just the way she liked it.
She might not understand this moment, but it was hers, and she’d take it.
But then the sea of business suits parted, and everything changed.
Because Jason was here.
In London. In her office.
His back to that glorious view of London as if she was the only thing worth looking at.
And worse, he wasn’t standing in the middle of the executive boardroom with his miraculous chest out and all those acres and acres of brown skin and perfect tattoos on display. Lucinda felt that keenly, like one more betrayal.
Because Jason was wearing a black, obviously bespoke suit that hugged that big, athletic form of his in a way that made her blood turn molten in her veins. He’d scraped his hair back and fastened it, and that was terrible, too. It made him look like some kind of elegant marauder, and she couldn’t bear the heat of it.
Much less the way his gaze caught hers through the glass.
As if he knew all the things she wanted so badly to hide. The anticipation in her belly that was easing its way lower still and changing into fire. The catch in her breath. That damnable weakness in her knees, just because he was near.
Every single lie she’d told herself over the past few days about how happy she was to get away from him.
She wanted to run, screaming. She wanted to keep on going, past the boardroom and back out into the gray morning. She wanted to pretend none of this was happening.
But that was the coward’s way out. And Lucinda was no coward, no matter how much she wished otherwise this morning.
She lifted her chin to a properly belligerent angle. Then she shoved open the glass door and stepped inside.
Instantly, it was like the two of them were alone. As if there weren’t all those other faceless executives in between them, judging them. Jason’s gaze slammed into her the way his cock had, over and over, and she knew that he could see an answering heat all over her face.
She knew that he could see everything.
Especially all the lies she’d told herself—and him—to get her away from that island in the first place.
Someone said something, but she didn’t know what. Or care.
Because even on a dreary, wet Thursday, surrounded by suits and wearing one himself—to blend in—there was nothing but wildness in the man who stood at that window and dared her to come at him. Sheer, untamed wildness, and what was wrong with her that every single thing in her thrilled to it?
As if she’d been carrying the same kind of wild around inside her, all this time.
And he knew that, too.
She could see that he did. She could feel it.
“Good morning, Lucinda,” Jason said, those dark eyes glinting at her. Challenge and temper and what she very much feared was retribution. “Congratulations. You convinced me to build a resort on my island after all.”
“YOU SHOULD LOOK HAPPIER, Scotland,” Jason drawled after he cleared the room. He was standing by the windows in this stuffy, confining office, his dark gaze fastened to Lucinda’s like he could see straight through her. It almost frightened him how much he wanted to believe he could. “You won. You get what you wanted all along. Surely that calls for, if not a celebration, a smile?”
And her familiar scowl made his heart beat a little faster.
“This isn’t about winning. This is a highhanded bit of strategy. The best defense is a good offense or whatever you Americans are always ranting on about.” She stood straighter, as if she was seconds away from taking a swing at him. Which he would have welcomed, because he knew how it would end. “When you and I both knew you flew all the way to England because you didn’t like the fact that I left you without your express permission.”
After the executives had swarmed around Lucinda like ants on a picnic lunch, offering her all kinds of congratulations that didn’t make it to the envy in their eyes, Jason had demanded some privacy. Not that there was much of it in this glass box of a room that might as well have been a fishbowl. The men in their suits all filed out, baring their teeth and murmuring their grudging appreciation Lucinda’s way as they went. Some tried to glad-hand Jason, too, but he stared at them until they slunk away.
Now it was only the two of them and too much glass. And all he wanted to do was strip those dour clothes right off her. All that relentless, ruthless black. The angrily slicked-back red hair when his mouth watered for her glorious curls. He could see that the shoes she’d worn on the island had been a concession because here, the shoes she wore were skyscraper high, with red on their soles and killer points as heels. She looked mean and sharp, and he loved every inch of it.
He ached, everywhere, that he didn’t have his hands on her already.
Especially when she was glaring at him as if his presence here was some kind of betrayal.
But Jason was holding on to the advice Charlie had given him. Hard. If he didn’t want to be like their father, he didn’t have to be. It was that simple and that complicated.