© 2008
Nothing comes between Jackson DeVoy and his briefs—his legal briefs, that is—until the ace attorney goes to Darwin Island to secure the rights to a “miracle” weight-loss aid from the island’s enigmatic benefactor, J.T. Marchand.
The last person the money-driven workaholic expects to find is Lina, an ebony goddess who seduces him on his first night.
Forced to return to Boston without saying goodbye, Jack leaves Darwin convinced that his hasty exit is for the best. Never mind that he feels like he’s leaving behind true love and not just a lover.
Lina turns up in Boston, her unexpected reunion with Jack generating a heat that makes it easy to forget feelings of abandonment and deception.
Once she’s in Jack’s world, Lina finds herself falling in love with clam chowder, Samuel Adams lager, and a man who’s convinced that money is the only thing worth living for.
But when Lina awakens Jack’s longing for things money just can’t buy, he has to decide which means more to him…his wallet or his heart.
Excerpt:
“Marchand’s mine, Reginald,” Jack stated. “I know this game and I always win it. I’ll get J.T. Marchand. First thing tomorrow.”
He disconnected the call and tossed the phone back into the bedroom. When he turned back toward the patio, he saw her.
More stunned than surprised, a pained groan seeped from deep in his chest. True to the advance billing given by Reginald’s photos of Darwin’s female population, every woman Jack had encountered since his arrival, Levora included, had been nothing less than beautiful.
The woman slowly crossing his patio had to be their queen, which was odd considering that at first glance, she wasn’t particularly attractive. At least not in any conventional sense.
Individually, Jack found her features peculiar. Her nose was rather thin and elongated, her odd-colored eyes set too wide and her lower lip much fuller than the upper one. But puzzled together, they comprised an amazingly alluring face. Stars of moonlight gleamed in her blue-black hair and made her dark brown skin glow. Tendrils of her long hair whispered against her exposed shoulders and collarbones, and the movement guided Jack’s gaze lower, to her bare torso. Her breasts were magnificent. Round, high and tipped with tiny mahogany buds, they stoked a very specific hunger within the black knit of Jack’s shorts. Her lightly muscled abdomen drew his eyes to the sensuous swell of her hips, around which she wore a sarong made of what seemed to be a black silk handkerchief.
She walked with the grace and body awareness of a prima ballerina. Hypnotized by the sylph-like movement of her thighs and calves, Jack could look away from her body only after she was standing directly in front him and had captured his gaze within the crystalline grey of her own.
When her lips parted as if to speak, Jack had to clench his hands to stop himself from touching his fingertip to the plumpness of her lower lip.
He took a healthy step back before he embarrassed both of them by poking her in her stomach—with a body part far more insistent than his hands. “I like your outfit,” he blurted. He’d wanted to express admiration for the supple sheen of her skin, but then decided to keep his opening remarks more tame.
She’d never been self-conscious about her body. This was the first time she’d ever felt naked when she was half nude. Snared in the heat of the handsome American’s serious hazel gaze, she prickled with glorious exhilaration. This was it. He was it, the unknown something she had been expecting. All day, her sense of expectation had been a low simmer in her belly. Now, standing before him, that pleasant sensation began to roil. Following her instincts had earned great rewards or big trouble time and time again, with no in between. Unsure which path the trend would take, she circled the out-of-place American, her island’s most interesting new visitor.
“Is that a Moriori costume?”
She narrowed her eyes a bit. So he had done his homework. Many tourists came to Darwin with knowledge of the Maori, the indigenous tribesmen of neighboring New Zealand, but few took the time or interest to visit Darwin to learn of its indigenous people, the Moriori.
“Do you speak English?”
She reached past him and ran her fingertip along the rim of his tea goblet. Jack swallowed back a hard lump that traveled through his body and settled below his waist.
“¿Usted habla español?” he persisted.
She answered with an amused half smile.
Jack scrubbed a hand through his damp hair, leaving it more rakish. English, French and Maori were Darwin’s official languages, and Jack wanted to kick himself for not even trying to learn basic Maori phrases during his long flight. He gave it one last try. “Je parle français, et vous?”
She smiled, and its radiance made him sweat between his toes. His thigh muscles weakened under the force of her clean, unadorned beauty. All at once, he was relieved to know that she couldn’t understand him because it gave him the freedom to say whatever he wanted. He moved closer to her, so close that his words softly buffeted the top of her head as she sorted through the grapes on his tray.
“My work takes me all over the world,” he told her. “I’ve seen the sun set beyond the Greek isles and doves fly over the Taj Mahal. I’ve heard angels sing in the Sistine Chapel, and watched children play in Buckingham fountain. I’ve seen some of the most beautiful sights in the world…” A lump caught in his throat, and he was unable to continue until he forced it back. “But…my God…I have never seen anything as beautiful as you. I thought this was the most godforsaken rock on the planet, but now I suddenly find myself thinking I’m in paradise.”
She looked up at him, her eyes wide. Jack opened his mouth to apologize but then realized that she had not understood a word. He might have apologized anyway, had she not abruptly turned on her heel and started for the lagoon.
It never occurred to Jack to remain behind. He followed her to the water’s edge and found it surprisingly warm as he climbed down the natural steps and into a tile-lined section of the lagoon. His guide dived into the water with the sleek, splashless ease of a dolphin, and she swam out beyond the tile and into the cooler ocean water. She was as agile as an otter, spinning onto her back to see that he still followed before she ducked under the water only to emerge several yards ahead of him moments later.
He had no trouble finding her in the bright moonlight when she exited the water on the other side of the lagoon. With her sheer sarong molded to her perfect buttocks, she appeared totally nude as she scrambled atop an outcropping of volcanic rock.
She sat on the edge of the rock and watched him climb up after her, enjoying the sight of his arm and leg muscles working under his pale peach skin. He was nimble for such a large man, and it didn’t take him long to join her. She laughed when he shook like a St. Bernard, throwing salty water from his hair and body.
“Even your laugh is beautiful,” he remarked as he sat beside her.
She gathered her hair in her hands and squeezed it. Jack watched a rivulet of water run down her shoulder and over her breast. He forced his eyes to her face, which was even lovelier with her hair slicked away from it, and they spent a long time mutely contemplating each other and the loveliness of the starry ocean night.
Five minutes or five hours passed, Jack couldn’t be sure which, before he decided to interrupt the perfect peace between them. “This is really nice, sitting here with you like this. ‘Bathed in moonlight,’ ” he chuckled. “I read that in a poem in school once. The image stuck with me, but I didn’t quite get it until now.”
Even though she couldn’t understand him, her eyes seemed to smile despite her intense expression.
The words began to pour from Jack. With bitter honesty, he told her of his beginnings in South Boston. “My father came to the United States from Ireland thirty-seven years ago. He got work at a shipyard in Quincy—that’s south of Boston. He bought a two-bedroom clapboard shoebox of a house in Southie, and he married a tavern owner’s daughter. Three years later, I came along. Jackson Heathcliff DeVoy. My dad’s name is Sonny, and he thought it would be amusing to give all of his kids a name with the word ‘son’ in it. I have to thank one of the Brontës for my middle name. Wuthering Heights is one of my mother’s favorite books. Ever read it?” Jack held her gaze for a long moment. “You have no idea what I’m saying, do you?”
She bowed her head, and Jack took that as a sign to continue, to hope that she could understand the emotion behind his words even if she couldn’t translate their meaning.
“Harrison Rhett was born two years later, and Anderson Darcy finished off the set. Harry’s a pocket edition of my dad and Andy’s the goofy baby of the family. I love my brothers, don’t get me wrong, but…I’m glad my parents had to stop at three. A dockworker’s salary doesn’t go far. There was always food on the table, but by the time I was eight years old, I never wanted to see another boiled potato or bowl of oatmeal again in my life.”
Before he could censor himself, Jack was telling her about the embarrassments of going to school in third-hand clothes his mother purchased at church-run thrift shops, and the humiliation of being the only kid who had to use an old bread sleeve for a lunch bag.
“Being poor never seemed to bother my brother Harry.” Jack grabbed a handful of tiny black stones. As he spoke, he methodically tossed them over the edge of the rock. “Harry was always running with the jocks and the rich kids. He got picked first for all the teams, he always got the prettiest girl. I was so glad when I got to high school because I had two years without him to look forward to. I’d started mowing lawns and doing odd jobs when I was eleven, so by the time I was a sophomore, I had the money to buy some nicer clothes. I bought my first car, a real jalopy, when I was sixteen, so things were looking pretty good. By the time I was eighteen, I was captain of the football team, in the top two percent of my class, and I had the prettiest girl in school, Beth O’Leary, lined up for the Harvest Homecoming Dance.”
Jack kept to himself the rest of the Beth O’Leary story. Alone on the edge of the world with the attentive beauty who had taken him there, the Beth O’Leary tale suddenly lost its teeth. The golden, blue-eyed beauty of the Beth O’Leary in his memory seemed faded and two-dimensional compared to the dark goddess sitting before him.
He glossed over his stellar college football career at Boston University but savored the telling of his decision to pursue law and his acceptance to Harvard Law School. He avoided talking about his work and more specifically, his reason for coming to Darwin. The last thing he wanted was to taint this exquisite moment beneath the stars with talk of business.
“This is the kind of thing that happens in movies,” he said with a chuckle. “You’re nothing like the women I usually meet. I come across so many women hunting for a good match—financially, socially and physically, in that order. I’ve dodged a couple of bullets in the past several years.”
Jack turned slightly, to fully face her. “It’s not that they weren’t nice, accomplished women. Clio was a divorce attorney who liked swing dancing, Cinnabon and NASCAR. Eighteen months after we started dating, she draws up a pre-nup and wants to get married. I couldn’t do it. It was too soon, it didn’t feel right, I was just starting my career…I had a lot of excuses that seemed great at the time, but now…” He shook his head, and in so doing, ridded himself of the memory. “So she left. Then there was Erica. She was a fashion designer. We lasted almost three years, probably because she wasn’t in law. I know she wanted to get married, and she would have been a great wife and mother, but…I wasn’t ready. There was just so much I wanted to accomplish with my career before I settled down.”
Jack stared at his sea nymph, and in her silence, he realized what he’d never before admitted. “I didn’t love them. I don’t think I’ve ever been in love with any woman. I can’t afford to fall in love, not until my future is secure.” A slurry of unexpected emotions clogged his throat. “I must be jet-lagged. Nothing else explains why I’m suddenly wishing that I could spend the rest of my life right here on this rock, with you.”
She sat back on her heels. Her hair had dried and hung in lanks about her face and shoulders, and her skin shimmered with crystals of salt and sand. She reached a small hand forth and cupped his face.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you understood me.” He covered her hand with his and pressed it to his cheek. The whispery softness of her innocent touch set his nerve endings ablaze. She stood on her knees and inched closer to him, finally resting between his thighs. Afraid to touch her for fear of not being able to stop, Jack kept still. She set her free hand on his shoulder, leaning deeper into the cradle of his legs and torso. Her breath at his ear and temple left him breathing hard, and he closed his eyes, committing every second of her warmth and sea scent to memory.
When she withdrew, Jack opened his eyes to see her sitting back from him, framed by the purple-grey light of dawn. Because of its location, Darwin received the first light of every new day before anyplace else on Earth. Longing flooded through him as he gazed at his anonymous companion in the newest light of day. He had never seen such beauty, and he knew he likely never would again. This moment was a masterpiece, and the most fitting final stroke would be a kiss.
“I wish I spoke your language.” Jack lightly cupped her neck and touched his forehead to hers. “I want to kiss you, but I don’t know how to ask you.”
Her hands closed around his wrists as she lifted her face and tilted her head, aligning her lips with his. His breathing seemed to stop and he couldn’t move, not until she had brought her mouth delicately to his.
His hands moved into her hair, cradling her head. He took command of the kiss, feeding his hunger for the sweet warmth of her mouth. Her breath quickened when he tipped her head back to suckle her earlobes and kiss her neck, the fingers of one hand tracing her spine before coming to rest at the small of her back. She leaned back, allowing him to support her, and eagerly offered the plum-dark buds he found himself craving.
He had no will to resist, not after she cupped the back of his head and guided his mouth to her left breast. With a fierce tenderness he never knew he possessed, he sent her into a writhing frenzy that left her lying on the rock, panting, her body rigid and arched into his. His final restraints fell away when she slipped her hand into his shorts and between his legs, and she moaned her approval of what she found there.
Her touch left him shuddering atop her, fighting to regain control of himself. His knit shorts and her sarong were all that stood between his desire to fill her and feel her heat closing around him. But a needle of reason injected Jack with some of his own inescapable common sense.
“We can’t,” he breathed heavily. He took her wrist, but he couldn’t bring himself to remove her skilled hand from his hard flesh. “I won’t.” He groaned and collapsed onto his back, her hand never leaving him. He squinted against the brightening sunrise until she hunkered over him, blocking out the pink-tinged light. She kissed him, her hair teasing his shoulders and chest while her right hand continued its devilry in his shorts.
The silky heat of her mouth, the brush of her hair and breasts over the skin of his chest, and the expert pump of her hand sent a rocket of sensation exploding through Jack, and she smothered his loud response in a kiss.
Jack closed his eyes and thought he might actually lose consciousness. He lay there on his back, panting, overwrought and as weak as a newborn. “I wish I knew your name.” His voice sounded distant to his own ears. She stroked his hair, and it had the effect of a lullaby. “I wish I could stay right here with you forever,” he mumbled before resting his head on her soft thighs. With her fingers gently moving through his hair, he succumbed to the sleep that had eluded him hours earlier.
