The Dare Collection March 2019. Rachael Stewart

      But Lucinda would come when she wanted to come, thank you.

      “Let’s go, darlin’,” Jason said, low and dark, with too much knowing heat in his gaze and in the curve of his beautiful mouth. Especially when she stared back at him in challenge, daring him to call her on what she’d done. “It’s time to get you out in the water.”

       CHAPTER SIX

      THE WAVES USUALLY brought him nothing but peace.

      No matter what else might have been going on in his life—whether it was football, or simply existing on the mainland that always seemed so far removed from anything he knew—Jason had always found his place in the water. Give him a board and a free hour and he’d find a wave. And with it, a way to get back to what mattered.

      But he’d miscalculated with Lucinda.

      He kept thinking she would back down. But she didn’t.

      He never expected her to put on that bikini and come back out of the office. And once she had, and he’d predictably lost his shit, he’d figured she’d draw the line at his putting his hands all over that tight, curvy little body of hers.

      Instead, she’d refused to give in to the wild heat that was still blazing between them. And she’d come out of it a little bit flushed with SPF 50 all over her, while he felt like a sixteen-year-old kid with a boner in gym class.

      It would have been funny if it was happening to someone else.

      “I don’t know how to surf,” she announced.

      He’d hauled two surfboards down to the water’s edge, pretending the whole time that he wasn’t going out of his way to make himself busy with this most minor form of manual labor just to see if he could calm the fuck down. Newsflash: he wasn’t calm.

      Jason shot her a glance. She was standing there with the Pacific licking at her toes. There was nothing but a string separating her ass cheeks, and her breasts in the bikini top were valiantly fighting gravity. And still she was talking down to him like she was the queen of fucking England.

      “I know how to swim. But I’ve never surfed.” Her blue eyes glinted, a lot like the sunlight on the Pacific all around her, and filled with the same intense challenge. “I’ve never quite seen the point, if I’m honest.”

      “You don’t look for the point in surfing, you just surf. The point finds you when you’re ready.”

      “That almost sounds philosophical.”

      “If you need me to write you a poem about the communion between the waves and the rush, the sea and the sky, you’re never going to get it. And if you’re never going to get it, you might as well get the fuck off my island, Lucinda. Now.”

      Once again, he expected her to look a little bit cowed at that. So of course she didn’t. “I don’t need poetry. But some basic instruction might not go amiss.”

      He was getting wound up, and that wasn’t him. And it wasn’t smart, either.

      Jason had never let his emotions get the best of him. Emotions were fuel, nothing more, and this was no time to change that. Because this woman might look like a sweet dollop of cream slapped down in the middle of the Pacific for no other purpose than to get him hard—to look him in the eye and refuse to come for him—but that wasn’t why she was here. She wasn’t a wet dream come to life. She was one more shark dressed up in business clothes, looking to make him a developer dickhead, just like the old man who was nothing to Jason but a sperm donor.

      Fuck Daniel St. George, and fuck Lucinda Graves, too.

      For some reason, he didn’t just up and say that.

      “Surfing is like most things in life,” he growled instead, scowling at her. “It’s as simple or as complicated as you make it. All you have to do is balance on the board, then stand up and keep balancing. Once you do that, you ride the waves. That’s it. That’s the secret. But how well or how badly you do that entirely depends on you.”

      That chin of hers, entirely too aggressive for a tiny slip of a woman who was likely only as dangerous as that red hair of hers was real, lifted. Suggesting to him that maybe the hair really was natural.

      “I have excellent balance, actually.”

      He shouldn’t have found that at all entertaining. “Do you, now?”

      “I come from a long line of ornery Scottish Highlanders, as a matter of fact. What that means is that I can drink wee drams of whiskey all night long and still walk a straight line.” She lifted one milky white shoulder, then dropped it. “Balancing on a bit of water should be nothing.”

      He laughed at her. Loud and long, and he wasn’t even performing his laugh the way he often did around people who were interested less in him and more in the things he had—his celebrity, his money, his island. It was genuine this time, and like the hard-on that wouldn’t go away, it told him things about this woman and her effect on him that should have scared the crap out of him.

      But he was too busy laughing. “I like your confidence.”

      She smiled at that, which didn’t do anything for his self-control. “I would have thought it was pretty clear that any woman willing to travel forty hours to meet a man who was as likely to kick her off his island as say hello didn’t lack for confidence.”

      There was some kind of foreboding kick in him at that, like an alarm. It went off, and there was no pretending otherwise, but Jason didn’t heed it.

      He heeded a different urge entirely and reached over to smooth his hand over her sleek red hair, hot in the sunshine and still tied back so tightly to the back of her head, like the world would end if it ever tumbled down.

      And he knew. One way or another, he was going to get his hands in all that hair and bring it down out of that tight-assed bun. He could picture it so clearly. Lucinda riding him, those perfect breasts right there to get his mouth on, that hair around him like a curtain, and his cock so deep inside her that he was half-blind with it.

      He felt half-blind now. And he knew.

      It was only a matter of time.

      But that time wasn’t now. And he was going to have to find a way to cut down on all those complications he didn’t want to feel, but did, before they wrecked him. Because he had no intention of letting this woman—or any woman—wreck him.

      That line of thought should have been sobering, but he was in it now. He wanted his hands all over her, and the truth was that Jason had grown accustomed to getting what he wanted.

      Go big or go home, motherfucker, he told himself.

      “Enough talking,” he drawled at her.

      He nodded at the surfboard at her feet. Then stood there, making no particular attempt to hide his smirk as Lucinda eyed the board as if she expected it to rise from its slumber and turn into some kind of alligator. Jaws and all.

      But, of course, she didn’t ask for any help. She didn’t argue with him. She set her jaw at a mutinous angle and then she awkwardly dragged the board into the water, hurling herself through the breakers with more ruthless determination than any kind of skill.

      He was impressed despite himself, because hardheaded women hit him straight in his sweet spot. Whether he liked it or not.

      Jason followed, throwing himself on his board and paddling out into the lagoon, keeping an eye on his redhead as she splashed around, making more noise than headway.

      “Do you need me to tow you out?” he asked after watching her flail, his voice just silky enough to make her glare at him.

      “Well, I don’t know how to answer that, do I?” she retorted, and he was delighted to hear more Scotland in her voice than before.