Blame It on Paradise (8 page)

“I was wondering when you’d get around to that.” Kiri bumped him with her hip, careful not to spill her dessert, and tipped her chin toward the mob of dancers. “J.T. loves to dance.”

Jack followed Kiri’s line of sight, trying to pick out the right man, but he was distracted by a woman. Once his eyes fixed themselves on her, he couldn’t tear them away. Lina, dressed in white, moved to the beat of an island song played by a live band. She wore a clingy T-shirt that exposed most of her torso and abdomen. One sleeve was short while the other was little more than a loop of fabric capping her shoulder. The asymmetrical hemline of her flounced miniskirt barely concealed the inviting rounds of her bottom. In some ways, she seemed more nude than if she’d actually been naked.

He forgot all about J.T. Marchand as he watched Lina. He forgot about Kiri and the food sliding from the plate gripped in his suddenly lax hand. He watched Lina move to the ancient rhythms of instruments that duplicated the sounds of rain, bird songs, bass vibrations and human voices. As he watched, he realized that it wasn’t completely accurate to call what she was doing dancing. Her upraised arms undulated like underwater plants. With her bare feet planted in the sand, her hips wrote slow and sinuous figure eights in an invitation addressed to Jack. He accepted, without hesitation, and went to her.

He wasn’t much of a dancer, but he knew how to shape his movements to music. Lina lowered her hands to his waist and welcomed him into her space. With a tiny smile she staggered her legs with his and let him lead. Hips to hips and belly to belly, their bodies fused as much as their clothing permitted. Jack closed his eyes, breathed the spicy scent of her hair, and he reveled in the softness of her body against his, nourishing himself on her warmth and the light touch of her hands at his back and hips.

Her loose chignon hadn’t withstood the rigors of her dancing, and Jack smoothed stray tendrils from her face as she gazed up at him. “I’m not usually a party crasher,” he murmured.

“I’m glad you decided to become one tonight. I was missing you.”

He tried to cough up the hard lump suddenly blocking his throat. No woman had ever looked at him the way Lina looked at him now. It would have been easy to blame it on the moonlight, the spell cast by the sensual, primitive music, or even the ambience created by the hot, fit bodies dancing around them. She gazed at him openly, her clear, bright eyes gleaming with a combination of desire and affection that sent heat searing through Jack’s veins. It wasn’t the moon, the music or the company that put such magical light in Lina’s eyes. He was seeing his own feelings mirrored in them.

The sight should have sent him running back to his homestay.

Lina had the same instinct, to flee the heat in Jack’s eyes before it consumed her. “I’d like to get something to drink, Jack. Will you come with me?”

She drew away and Jack followed, loosely holding her hand. She led him to the bar set up opposite the buffet, and she ordered a pink gin-and-lemon granita, which she sipped at as she guided Jack farther away from the main thrust of the party.

“Where are we going?” he asked, even as he spotted the bone-white cabin of the closed lifeguard tower well outside the circle of torchlight from the party.

“Someplace quiet.”

She skipped ahead of him and her skirt flipped up, giving him a tantalizing peek of her bottom and the tiny triangle of fabric forming the back of her thong underpants.

Jack caught up to her once she had climbed the two steep flights of creaky, weather-beaten stairs and had rested her beverage atop the sun-bleached wood railing edging the tower deck. She stood with her back to the tumbling sea, her elbows resting on the top beam, one of her feet propped on the lowest one.

Jack opened his mouth to comment on the vast carpet of velvet that was the night sky, to marvel at the pungent salt scent of the ocean. Instead, he took Lina’s face in his hands and lowered his lips to hers, capturing her mouth in a kiss that took both of them by surprise with its urgency and depth. Her lips were cool and had the sweet, tart taste of her slushy drink. He was an addict, she was his drug, and he didn’t even try to curb the intensity of his lust for her.

With a soft whimper of surrender, Lina melted around him. Her hands found their way beneath his shirt and into the waist of his loose-fitting trousers; she raised her right knee to run it along his outer thigh and hip. To bring her even closer, he gripped her buttocks and ground the cradle of her pelvis into his.

Their gasps and groans mingled with the crashes and sighs of the waves below. Jack’s lips never left Lina’s skin, even as she turned to face the ocean. He filled his hands with her breasts, his thumbs teasing their hard peaks through the whispery fabric of her top. She stroked him with her backside, her skirt rising with each downward motion. She blindly reached back and found one end of Jack’s drawstring, gave it a light tug, and the small bow unlooped, loosening his trousers enough to free him.

She arched her back and set one foot on the lowest beam, her thighs quivering as Jack hooked a finger around the white silk of her thong and slipped it aside. Lina took the meat of her lower lip between her teeth when Jack’s strong hands gripped her hips, and she gasped aloud when he steered himself into her. She fastened her hands on the top beam, her fingernails etching tiny crescents into the weathered wood, and she tossed her head back, giving Jack’s lips free access to her neck as she reached back and wrapped one arm around his head.

His fingers plucked and kneaded her breasts, which he had exposed to the sea breeze. Lina controlled the rhythm of their mating, almost matching it to the music they heard faintly in the distance. Jack squinted in torturous pleasure with each movement of her buttocks against his pelvis. Sure that such pleasure would kill him if endured for much longer, he slid a hand along her sweat-sheened abdomen. It traveled lower, and lower still, until his longest finger found the jewel set atop the place where they were joined. He stroked it with his finger, laving it with the nectar generated by their union. Not long after, her body shook, inside and out. Her darkness locked around him, imprisoning him, a short bark of rapture exploding from her. Her hand fastened in his hair and she turned her face to his, her mouth opening against his in a voracious kiss. She tried to choke out his name, but it was hard enough remembering her own with such keen pulses of satisfaction cycling through her.

Jack tore his mouth from hers, grunting his frustration at having to hold back his own eruption. “Lina,” he managed breathlessly, “let me go.”

She answered with a low growl and the resolute pumping of her backside against him.

Heavy droplets of cold sweat formed on Jack’s forehead. They ran into his eyes, stinging them. His arm and leg muscles ached from the effort it took to suppress his release. “Lina, I can’t…”

He started to move his hand from the dampness between her legs, but she clamped her hand around his wrist, holding his magical fingers in place.

“Sweetheart, I’m sorry.” He tore his hand and the rest of himself from her. He clumsily turned away, his shoulders hunching as he spent himself into a dense clump of bracken and gorse in the shadows beyond the tower.

Something with weight skittered deep in the darkness.

“Bullseye?” Lina laughed. She wrapped her arms around his waist and hugged his back to her chest.

Jack tidied himself before turning to properly take her into his arms. “You make me crazy, you know that?”

“That’s a compliment, I hope.”

Her chignon had come undone and her hair now hung loose about her shoulders in the way that Jack now decided was his favorite style. He cupped her face and aimed it at his with a slight shake of his head.

“What?” she smiled.

He stared at her in wonder. Wonder at why the ageless, guileless, island goddess in his arms had blessed him with her attention and generosity. He’d never been so carried away that he’d thrown caution to the wind and made love to a woman without the proper protection. He’d never been so out of his head that, for a fleeting moment, he hadn’t feared the possibility of making a baby with her. A permanent, unbreakable bond with her.

He mentally shook himself out of his preposterous reverie.

Lina stroked a fingertip along his cheek. “You seemed so far away for a minute there.”

“Yeah,” Jack sighed, staring beyond her and out at the water beating against the black rocks.
And one day soon I really will be far away,
he thought dismally as his arms went around her to press her close.

“Jack?” She shifted in his embrace.

“I’m sorry.” He focused his full attention on her. “I’m just…”
Falling in love?
“Losing my mind,” he finished with a sigh.

“Good. I thought it was just me.”

She blessed him with a smile that made him want her again so fiercely, he felt it from the ends of his hair to his toenails. He answered her smile with a kiss that left her panting for breath. Still kissing her, he walked her backward until she was pressed against the slatted side of the lifeguard cabin. As he slowly lowered himself to one knee, he eased her top up, again exposing her breasts to the night.

“I never imagined God made women like you, Lina.” He lowered his gaze, unable to look at her face with his heart so naked in his eyes.

A grin played at her lips as she lightly stroked his hair and silently enjoyed his particular beauty. Moonlight charged the sun-gold in his hair and softened his almost too masculine features. The cords and veins of his forearms stood out beneath a golden haze of hair as his hands palmed the twin weights of her breasts. She would not have guessed that such strong hands were capable of such tenderness, such mastery of her flesh as his fingers searched out her most sensitive places.

When he replaced his thumbs with his mouth, her knees would have buckled if not for the support of his hands at her hips.

“Good heavens,” she breathed, her head pressed into the wall of the cabin, her eyes drowsing shut in renewed pleasure.

His lips moved over the lower curve of her breast, along her ribcage and down to her navel. The tip of his tongue dipped into her belly button, sending an arrow of sensation directly to the moistness between her thighs. Jack used one hand to delve into it and she parted her legs, letting him prop one of them over his shoulder. He kissed the trembling flesh of her upper inner thigh, taunting her with his proximity to her most secret place.

She uttered a purr of satisfaction when his tongue breached the curls hiding the center of her pleasure. A sharp cry tore from her when he drew on it, gently scraping his teeth against it.

“Jack,” she gasped, his name both plea and promise. She gripped the meatiest part of his shoulders and moved her hips to meet each thrust of his tongue. “Jack,” trembled from her lips as he intensified his efforts. “Jack!”

She shoved away from him with the last cry of his name. He stood, alarmed.

“Lina, what—” He didn’t get to finish that either.

His head whipped around to follow her, and he saw her climb onto the lowest beam of the railing and reach for the frayed rope attached to the big bell mounted on a pole at the corner of the railing. She gave it three hard tugs before she bolted down the stairs and ran, full speed, toward the surf.

Jack raced after her, but stopped short of trailing her into the choppy waves battering the shore. “Lina!” He doubted that she heard him over the crash of the water as it struck the rocky shore.

The warning bell summoned a pair of medical vans, their yellow roof lights flashing, speeding along the shoreline to the vicinity of the tower. With relief Jack watched teams of lifeguards spill from the vans, and he ran with them as they splashed into the water.

“Stay back, mate,” one of them directed with a hand to Jack’s chest. “No one’s allowed in the water. The undertow’s a killer tonight.”

“I’m a strong swimmer,” Jack insisted. “I can handle myself. A woman went in there a minute ago and she hasn’t surfaced.” Saying the words aloud sent spikes of panic through his chest. “I should have stopped her. I didn’t realize…the undertow…” Fear trapped his breath in his lungs.

“We haven’t lost one yet, mate, and we won’t start tonight.” The lifeguard left Jack with that reassurance before zooming off after his companions.

The medical vans had outraced the crowd pursuing them, but those people now gathered around them as their spotlights scoured the water. They pointed at the water, craned their necks to see what was going on, their voices blending into a hushed murmur of concern.

Jack spotted it first, the spot of white bobbing on a wave that broke angrily against the rocks. “God no,” snagged in his throat as a swell of frothing water swallowed up the spot of white he knew was Lina.

Jack mindlessly ran along the shoreline, circling around the rocks, his eyes never leaving the dark sea as two questions swirled in his head.
Where are you, Lina? Why the hell did you run into the water?

The answer to both questions surfaced on the dark side of the rocks. Lina, one-arming a limp figure to her body, crested a wave that carried her and her companion to shore. The ocean bubbled at her ankles as she struggled to drag the still form from the waterline.

Jack rushed to her, his blood chilling at the sight of the blue figure whose weight carried Lina to the sand. “He’s not breathing,” she gasped before coughing violently. She scrambled to her hands and knees and hacked out salt water. “Jack, help him…he’s so heavy…”

Jack easily lifted the unconscious boy. The kid couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, and his water-logged T-shirt and shorts dampened Jack’s clothing. A frightening purple pallor tinted his brown skin, and unless the boy got medical attention fast, Jack feared that Lina’s valiant effort would be for nothing.

“Help!” Jack shouted as he ran the boy to one of the medical vans. “I don’t think he’s breathing!”

The van’s driver spotted Jack and began flashing the spotlight, calling in the lifeguards from the water. Two more medics pulled a gurney from the back of the van in time for Jack to place the boy upon it. In the light from the van’s interior, Jack noticed the blood streaking the side of the boy’s face.