Blame It on Paradise (4 page)

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 beauty 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 doing so, 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 any other place 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.

CHAPTER 3

“You’re late.”

Jack had tortured himself with those two words ever since he woke up on a black rock under a broiling morning sun. His night companion had disappeared so thoroughly, he would have thought the encounter a dream if the satisfied phantom memories of his body had not convinced him otherwise. He was no wilderness scout capable of telling the time by the position of the sun, but he’d known that it was well past seven when he dived back into the ocean and swam back to his cottage.

He’d spent two minutes showering, dressed in his remaining suit and gathered his cell phone and briefcase before fleeing the cottage. He’d trotted the two miles to Marchand’s offices, leaping over mud puddles and skirting past bicyclists, pedestrians and rickety carts the way he’d once avoided grunting linesmen on the gridiron. Along the way, he’d cursed his own stupidity, Marchand and Darwin mint tea, and underneath it all had been the admonition,
You’re late
.

Hearing the receptionist’s deadpan delivery of the words made Jack’s annoyance burn that much hotter. “I know I’m late. Last night, I was…Look, could you please just let J.T. Marchand know that I’m here?”

The receptionist dragged a red fingernail along her collarbone, which was exposed by her low-cut floral blouse. “J.T. waited for you, Mr. Coyle-Wexler Rep,” she said, addressing him by the title written in her appointment book. “J.T. had another engagement this morning and had to leave at nine. You really are quite late.”

Jack ground the heel of his hand into his eye in frustration. “Where can I find him?”

“Him who?”

Jack gnashed his teeth. “J.T. Marchand.”

She giggled. “Do you know anything at all about J.T.? I suggest you not refer to J.T. as—”

“Although I appreciate your advice, I’ve been doing what I do for quite a long time without the help of a phone jockey,” Jack trumpeted over her. “I know everything I need to know about your boss.” He dropped all pretenses toward politeness. “Now if you don’t mind, tell me where Marchand is, or do I have to search the building myself and—”

A stampede of jabbering business suits burst into the lobby, drowning out Jack’s threat. The receptionist stood, her eyes wide in fear, amazement or annoyance. She held up her hands to ward off the army armed with cell phones, digital assistants and briefcases.

Jack refused to be moved from his prime position at the front of the receptionist’s counter until a familiar voice on the fringe of the corporate wave stole his attention.

“Carol Crowley,” he growled under his breath. He shoved his way to the edge of the fracas and circled around to the rival who was always a half step behind him in his business dealings. “You’re a long way from Boston, Carol.” He forced a pleasant grin. “What brings you to this side of the world?”

“Same thing that brought you, stud.” Carol, her petite fame impeccably attired in navy blue Anne Klein, flipped shut her cell phone and gave her blonde locks a flirty flip. “I hear you can get a good cup of tea on this island, Jack.”

“You know, I’m not really surprised to see you here. PharmaChemix seems to have a knack for sniffing out Coyle-Wexler’s new product leads. But I have to wonder how the rest of those lemmings got in on it.” He tipped his head toward the well-dressed corporate reps gathered around the receptionist like a flock of starving geese around a cob of fresh corn. The receptionist was invisible in the crowd, but Jack clearly heard her voice above the anxious murmurings of her audience.

“J.T. Marchand is available by appointment
only
.” She stood on her chair, pointed her finger like a pistol and aimed it at Jack. “You. Before J.T. left, I took the liberty of rescheduling you for eleven tomorrow morning.”

Jack gave her a hearty thumbs-up and mouthed, “Thank you.” A chorus of voices requested appointments, but the receptionist’s aggravatingly even voice silenced them. “I can’t make appointments without the master schedule and the master schedule is with J.T., who is gone for the day.”

An angry male voice rose above the others. “We just spent an hour jam-packed in a minivan with no floor, for heaven’s sake, all for you to tell us that we have to
wait
God-knows-how-long to make an appointment to see J.T. Marchand?”

The receptionist picked up a magazine and a pair of sunglasses. She set an
out to lunch
sign on her counter. “Wonderful. We understand each other. Good day.”

* * *

While the newly arrived pharmaceutical reps loitered like lost goslings in the lobby, Jack embarked on a manhunt. Rather, a woman hunt. With Carol Crowley doing a poor job of tailing him, he walked briskly through the bustling town center. His fair hair and skin, his height, his European-designed business suit and his hurry made him stand out among the tourists and easy-going, casually dressed locals and vendors in the busy marketplace.

He passed an elderly man calling out the prices of a water-speckled, rainbow assortment of fruits and vegetables packed in stacked crates around him. He shouldered his way through the crowd of patrons jockeying for position at a fish stand, where the day’s freshest catches were prominently displayed. In deference to the morning heat, Jack loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar as he turned sideways to avoid a collision with a group of laughing college-aged tourists.

Jack stopped at a news kiosk attended by a dark-skinned young man in dungaree cutoffs and an ancient Kool & the Gang T-shirt. He bought a
New York Times
and a
Boston Globe
, and he had to remind himself that he was on Darwin, not Mars. No matter how backward the place and populace seemed, it had something going for it if the
Times
and the
Globe
could be had.

He tucked the papers under his arm and resumed his search, not going far before he saw the very person he’d been looking for. “Levora!” He broke into a trot when he saw her untying BeBe and CeCe in front of an outdoor café. “Mrs. Solomon!”

She planted her hands on her hips and smiled at him once he was standing in front of her. “You had it right the first time. It’s Levora. Mrs. Solomon is my mother-in-law, may she choke on a chicken bone.” She scrunched up her nose as she studied him from head to foot. “Never properly dressed for the occasion, are you?”

He ignored her inquiry. “I need your help.” He glanced back the way he’d come. Carol’s overcoiffued blonde head was stalled in a heavy glut of spectators watching a trio of muscular Moriori street performers. “Is there someplace we can go to talk privately?”

Levora indicated her cart. “Hop in.”

He swung his briefcase into the back of the empty cart and offered Levora a hand as she planted a foot on the driver’s step.

She gave him a dazzling smile. “You’re one refined city boy, Jack DeVoy.” She tightly clasped his hand and allowed him to help her onto the backless bench. After climbing up himself, he looked back once more to see Carol’s stylish but impractical navy pumps closing the distance between them.

With a click of her tongue, a flick of her flywhisk and a tug on the leather reins, Levora started her goats. Their long, shaggy hair blowing in the wind, BeBe and CeCe lurched along with the speed of snails on sand.

There’s never an escaped chicken to give a pair of goats a turbo boost when you need one,
Jack thought sullenly.

Levora skillfully steered her cart through the congestion of bicyclists, pedestrians and carts pulled by donkeys. She waited until they were on the outskirts of the town center, surrounded by nikau, the tall palms native to the island, before she asked, “How can I help you, Jack?”

He played his lowest card. “I need to find someone.”

“J.T. Marchand?” she grinned.

“What gave me away?”

“The forty-five Brooks Brothers clones who flew in this morning. Suits tend to follow suits, and you’re the suit that got here first. All that bunch talked about was grabbing up some Darwin mint tea and catching the next flight out. Ricky Nikuradse carted half of them into town in his minibus and the ingrates tipped him only ten bucks American. Cheapskates.”

“Levora…” Jack prompted her to stay on track with him.

“My guess is that our big secret’s out,” she laughed. “America’s got a bad case of Venus envy, and you came here to get first crack at J.T., to get that tea.”

“I never said anything about the tea, Lev—Venus envy?”

She laughed lightly. “Women are very good at recognizing beauty, except when they look at themselves. They hear about the tea and they come here, looking for a magic fix-it-all to make them beautiful. What they don’t know is that they’re already beautiful. Each one of them. There’s beauty in the stretch marks a woman earns during pregnancy, and in the fingernails she breaks washing dishes and scouring bathtubs. The tea has its own merits, I admit that, but it’s only a part of the quest for true beauty and good health.” She winked at him. “It’s a good thing you aren’t here for the tea. You’d be wasting your time.”

He took a long hard look at Levora. Working on her husband’s oyster farm had blunted her fingernails. He studied the lines at her eyes and mouth, the ones that came alive when she smiled and laughed. Flour and some sort of berry juice muddied her dungarees, and she seemed to always smell like vanilla. She was older than his mother, yet Levora was easily one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. “Venus envy,” he muttered. “Women are strange.”

“Yes, Jack,” she happily agreed. “And that, too, makes us beautiful.”

His own beliefs about the tea pushed aside, he focused on his assignment. “Can you take me to J.T. Marchand?”

She snorted. “If you hotshots did your homework properly, you’d know that privacy is very important to J.T. And J.T. is very important to Darwin Island.”

“Does that mean you won’t help me?”

“It means I
can’t
help you. Your guess is as good as mine as far as J.T. Marchand’s whereabouts are concerned. Some people just know how to disappear when they don’t want to be bothered. J.T. does it better than anybody.”

Tension crept into Jack’s neck and lower back as he took his cell phone from his inner breast pocket. He dreaded the call he had to make: to tell Wexler that the secret of the tea was out, that the island was now overrun with rival companies stricken with Venus envy, and that he still had not met Marchand, let alone secured the rights to Darwin mint.

He breathed a short sigh of relief when he couldn’t get a calling signal on his phone, so he put it away, took off his jacket, and then turned to stow it in the back of the cart as Levora brought BeBe and CeCe to a halt on the right side of the dirt road. “Look who we have here,” she crooned.

Jack turned and looked. “You!” He added a stern finger point to the word he shouted at the raven-haired woman sitting in front of the lone thatch-and-stone cottage on the right side of the road.

“You two have met?” A surprised Levora held the reins in lax hands as BeBe and CeCe guided the cart’s wheels into the deep ruts in the dirt drive beside the cottage.

“Oh, we’ve met, all right.” Jack leaped from the cart before it fully stopped, and he started for the woman. It was a struggle to control his temper as he studied her in the clear, clean light of day. “You deliberately distracted me to make me miss my meeting, didn’t you?”

Unimpressed by Jack’s show of Yankee temper, his midnight paramour merely watched his lips move.

Jack whirled on Levora as he rolled up his shirtsleeves. “Lawrence Taylor used to send escorts to the hotel rooms of his rivals the night before big NFL games,” he told her. “Someone sent
her
to me.” He again jabbed a finger toward the woman in front of the cottage. “This is a sick little game you’re playing, lady!”

Jack, angrier with himself than at Marchand or his unnamed sea nymph, failed to see the bewildered look exchanged by the two women.

“You’re confusing me,” Levora said. “You know Lina?”

“Lina?” he repeated, tossing up his hands. He stood straighter, thrusting his chest slightly forward, but she held her ground when he moved to stand directly in front of her. “Your name is Lina?”

Her fine eyebrows wrinkled. “Yes.”

Jack’s eyes bulged. Not only could she speak, even more frustrating, the sultry purr of her voice sent his blood rushing south. “You can speak?” he finally worked out for lack of anything better to say. “English?”

“Of course she speaks English.” Levora approached them and gave Jack a playful shove. “Lina also speaks French, Spanish, Japanese, Maori, and when she really wants to impress, some mighty fine Italian.”

“Mum, we just received an order for five-dozen cane-and-lime muffins and six-dozen ginger-raspberry muffins for the luncheon at the medical center next Friday,” Lina said. “Do you think we’ll be able to fill it on such short notice?”

“Anything for you, kid.” She gave Lina’s shoulders an affectionate squeeze before bidding Jack good morning, opening the front door of the cottage and disappearing inside.

A deep furrow split Jack’s forehead as he eyeballed Lina. On the outside, he knew he appeared ferocious and cold, but on the inside…He cringed, admitting to himself that on the inside, he was a shuddering glob of need. Lina wore a formless, sleeveless dress of pale, airy cotton, and it was hard to stay angry when he couldn’t stop thinking of what was under the dress. The strands of neon blue glinting in her hair further distracted him. Once she pinned him with her silvery eyes, Jack’s anger swirled away.

“You never said you spoke English,” he accused.

“I never said anything.”

He tried to place her accent. She sounded mostly Australian, but she could have been English or perhaps even South African. “Where are you from?”

“I was born here on Darwin, but I went to university overseas. My dialect is something of a hodgepodge.”

“How old are you?” By day, she looked even younger than she had at night. Given how the citizenry of Darwin aged, she could be anywhere from sixteen—God forbid—to thirty.

The tip of her tongue peeked from the corner of her lips. “I’m old enough to go skinny-dipping with a man at midnight.”