Dragon's Eden (13 page)

She extended her hand and ran a finger
through the caramelized goo of butter and sugar pooled on the
plate. The syrup was still warm from the oven. So was the small
piece of roll she tore off. He must have just been in her room.

A blush crept up her cheeks, reminding her
of why she was hiding out for the rest of the day. She couldn’t
face him, not after he’d kissed her. Not today, maybe not ever,
even considering how difficult, actually impossible, that would be
with the two of them trapped on the same small plot of land. She
couldn’t get away from him until Shulan came and took him
away—unless she let him go.

She swore softly at the thought. Jackson
Daniels was playing hell on her loyalties and her values. She had
to keep reminding herself that Shulan was only trying to protect
him. She had to do the same.

The syrup made a slow track off the roll,
running onto her finger. She hurriedly stuck the piece of roll in
her mouth to keep from getting cinnamon goo on the bed. Her eyes
widened briefly at the first bite, then drifted closed in
ecstasy.

The tastes in her mouth were ambrosial,
exquisite, imploding on her senses and melting away her
discouraging thoughts. She sank back into her pillows. The man
could cook.

She reached over and tore off another piece
of roll, thinking she ought to hide him from Shulan just to keep
him there. Any man who baked cinnamon rolls in the morning and
delivered them, fresh, hot, and divine to a woman’s bedside, was
worth keeping.

On the other hand, any woman who kept
Jackson Daniels just because he could cook, probably needed her
head examined. The man needed nothing more than his kiss, no more
talent than what it took to hold a woman in his arms, to make him
of rare value.

A secret smile played across her lips. She’d
loved his kiss, the way he’d tasted, and being wrapped in his arms
with his body hot and hard against hers. It wasn’t his fault all of
that hadn’t been enough. The truth had surprised even her.

All these years on Cocorico, she’d dreamed
of having someone to love. When Jackson had been delivered to her,
young, strong, beautifully masculine, and exotic enough to entice,
she’d thought her dreams had come true.

When he’d kissed her, though, she had
realized it wasn’t enough that he was all she’d dreamed of and that
he wanted her. Suddenly she had wanted love, the forever kind. It
hadn’t been good enough to know he would be there in the morning,
simply because he couldn’t get away. She needed to know he would be
there when the fruit trees bloomed again, and when it was time to
harvest the cassava, and only because he would never want to leave
her.

Making love with him without having his love
would have been an unmitigated disaster—even though it would have
been incredibly glorious. Her secret smile returned, a little
sadder, but no less dreamy. She didn’t have a doubt it would have
been glorious.

Jackson sat motionless in the shadows of her
room, every nerve ending on fire with the pure, unadulterated
wanting of her. He’d never seen anyone awake so sensuously, using
touch, taste, brief glances of sight, and smell to explore her
morning world. He wanted to be the focus of all that attention,
especially touch and taste. He wanted to be the one to suck the
sugar off her fingers and then keep going until he’d covered every
inch of her.

She bent her knee into the air while eating
another piece of cinnamon roll, and his gaze followed a heated path
up the newly exposed inside of her thigh. A scrap of cotton hid her
most private place from his view, and he was grateful. He could
hardly breathe as it was for the ache she’d started in him. Any
more voyeuristic pleasures and he’d do something rash—like pounce
on her.

“Mmmmmm,” she murmured, licking her fingers,
her knee swaying back and forth.

“I’m glad you like it.” His voice was so
hoarse, he hardly recognized it as his own.

Sugar didn’t have any trouble recognizing
the voice. She shot up in the bed.

“You,” she gasped.

“Me,” he admitted.

He was half-hidden in the shadows darkening
the far corner of the bedroom, lazily gracing a rattan chair with
his hands clasped across his stomach and his legs spread wide,
watching her with a predatory gleam in his eyes.

“What are you doing in here?” she demanded,
working a fair amount of righteous indignation into her words.

“Thinking.”

“About what?” she asked incredulously.

Sex, he wanted to say, the sex we didn’t
have last night, but he doubted if telling her the truth was in his
best interest.

“I thought we could talk,” he said
instead.

Sugar couldn’t believe his audacity. He’d
not only come into her room uninvited, he’d hung around and watched
her sleep. Exactly what she had done to him when he’d first
arrived, she thought with a little twinge of guilt. A very little
twinge. “I don’t want to talk.”

“Good.” A sensual smile curved across his
face, and in one lithe movement, he was out of the chair and coming
for her.

She scrambled back to the head of the bed,
clutching at the sheet she’d worked off during the night and
jerking it up to her chin.

“Does that really make you feel safer?” he
asked, dropping down on the bed and gesturing at the sheet crumpled
in her fingers.

“What would make me feel safer is if you
left. You shouldn’t have come in here in the first place.” Her
self-righteous indignation had done a nosedive into crossness, and
it was all his fault. She could have held on to the high ground if
he’d stayed put on the other side of the room. This close, her
reaction to him couldn’t be ignored, and it irritated her no
end.

“I thought you might like breakfast in bed
for a change,” he said. “And from what I could see, I think I was
right.”

He was baiting her and raising her internal
temperature to a sultry simmer at the same time. Bands of light
from the partially opened jalousies streaked his face and body,
revealing the teasing light in his eyes and the bareness of his
chest. The dragon looked particularly content this morning,
stretched across a landscape of beautifully defined muscle, basking
in the sunshine . . . warming his heart with flames of red and
gold.

He’d kissed her, and she knew he would kiss
her again if she offered the slightest encouragement. It was a
heady power, a tantalizing choice, but unlike him, she wasn’t one
who dared anything and the consequences be damned.

She slowly lifted her gaze to meet his,
determined to neutralize the tension, the situation, and her own
wayward emotions. “You were right. Thank you.”

A polite
thank you
should have cooled his ardor, but Jackson had underestimated the
mistake he’d made by getting so close to her, close enough to feel
the warmth of her body and smell the woman’s scent of her.

They were on her bed, with her hair all
tousled from sleep and her eyes still soft from dreaming. The silk
shirt he’d felt in the night was midnight blue and nearly half off
one shoulder, exposing a delectable expanse of skin darkened to a
golden hue by the sun.

He should have swum last night as if his
life depended on it, because he was beginning to believe it might,
what with the innocent-erotic magic of Sugar Caine working on him,
pulling him ever deeper into the place where she nurtured her
gardens and tracked the moon across the sky each night. More than
any machinations by Shulan, it was Sugar who could keep him on the
island, bind him more securely than chains and threats.

He’d never once thought he could make love
with her and not be changed. Every woman he’d ever loved had
changed him, whether they’d physically consummated their feelings
or not. He didn’t believe in sex without love, but he’d be the
first to admit that love was easy to conjure up when fueled by
desire.

Sugar was different, though, what he felt
for her was different. He’d never been afraid of a woman, but she
scared the hell out of him—and it still wasn’t enough to make him
run.

“I found a honey jar marked
Before the Bees Died
in the pantry and used some of
it.” He leaned over and helped himself to a slice of papaya,
bringing them very close for the eternal span of a heartbeat.

He offered her the fruit, but her eyes
shifted away from him to where she was fingering the sheet in her
lap. For an instant, no more, he allowed himself to wonder how much
of his soul a second kiss would cost. Then he ate the papaya
himself.

“I thought I tasted the wildness of honey,”
she said, creasing the sheet with a fingernail, seemingly absorbed
in the task.

He wanted to tell her he’d tasted a wildness
in her kiss, but the price was too high, even for mere words. He
couldn’t play at love with her and hope to win. In truth, he
couldn’t win at ail. If he stayed and touched her, if he whispered
what he feared was in his heart, he was lost. If he left, he was
condemned to burn with a desire no other woman could appease.

He would be a fool to strengthen her hold on
him any more.

“Yeah, well,” he said, “before things get
any wilder around here, I think we should discuss a few
alternatives.” He deliberately put an edge in his voice to fight
the tenderness welling up inside him. God, she was the most
dangerous thing on two legs he’d ever been up against, including
Fang Baolian. The Dragon Whore had only wanted his body. Sugar was
consuming him, mind, body, and soul.

“What differences?”

He didn’t miss the wariness in her voice,
but he did nothing to assuage her suspicions. It was time to lay
his cards on the table.

“I give you money, and you help me leave.
Clean, simple, and effective.” He left out the word
painful
. The last thing he wanted was to feel pain
at leaving her. She was a stranger, nothing more than a beautiful
stranger.

When she didn’t respond except to look at
him with increased doubt, he sweetened the pot.

“Think about it, Sugar. No more extra mouth
to feed, no one you have to save in the middle of the night, no
more questions to answer.” Despite his best intentions, his voice
softened and he let his gaze trail over her from shoulder to thigh.
Damn her for being what she was, for making him throw caution to
the wind. “No more hot kisses on the beach keeping you up half the
night because all you got was kisses.” He took a rough breath,
forcing his gaze above her waist. “No more waking up with a man in
your room who’s been watching you sleep and wondering how good it
could be if he took off his clothes and lay down beside you.”

The color in her face heightened and spread
down across her chest.

“All you have to do is name your price. I
can meet it.”

“I can’t be bought,” she said, stubbornly
refusing to meet his eyes.

“How much is Shulan paying you?”

“Nothing. I’m the one who owes her.”

A hundred questions came to mind with her
statement, but he didn’t ask them. He just waited.

“Whatever you’re thinking, you’re probably
wrong,” she said after a few moments of uncomfortable silence, her
eyes flicking up to his.

“I’m thinking about sex,” he said, as much
to tell her the truth as to throw her a curve. “But if you want me
to think about something else, feel free to make a suggestion . . .
or a confession.”

She drew her knees in tighter to her chest,
a bit of body language with only one interpretation: She was
battening down the hatches.

Jackson silently conceded defeat. His only
consolation was in knowing it hadn’t been the mention of sex that
had put her on the defensive. It had been the mention of a
confession. She hated to give away her secrets, and everything
about herself and Cocorico was a sacred secret.

“I thought I’d look for the snake today,” he
said, changing the subject. His attempt at bribery had failed, so
far, and he knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere by intimidating
her. “If I get lucky, maybe we could cook it up for dinner.”

“Dinner? My snake?” He had definitely gotten
her attention.

“Your snake?”

Her face took on a rebellious expression. “I
meant what I said, Jackson. No hunting. If it’s here on the island,
no matter how it got here, I have a responsibility to care for
it.”

Her words rang with more conviction than
he’d ever heard offered in the name of a reptile. He wondered if
she felt the same about dragons.

“If it’s a bushmaster, it doesn’t need all
that much care, just a little fresh meat every now and then,” he
said, still curious, but trying to be reasonable. “The same goes
for an anaconda or a boa. I’d just like to make sure the fresh meat
isn’t one of us, either by accident or design.”

“I don’t know how anything as big as an
anaconda or a boa constrictor could have gotten on the island,” she
said, dismissing at least half of his theory, the less dangerous
half by his estimation.

“And a bushmaster?”

“Nearly as impossible. They’re not exactly
small.”

“Well, I don’t know how you could have
gotten on the island either, but you’re here,” he countered,
clearly open to an explanation.

One she obviously wasn’t going to give. “You
can’t kill my snake.”

He gave up. “No snake killing, no swimming.
You’re not leaving me much for entertainment, Sugar, unless you had
something else in mind.” He considered giving her a wicked grin,
then thought better of the idea.

“You’re not here to be entertained.”

She had a point, but he wasn’t there to get
himself tangled up with another woman either, and that was
certainly happening.

“Okay, I won’t kill the snake,” he agreed,
the wicked grin slipping through his better intentions. “But if you
feel something slither up to you in the middle of the night and it
doesn’t answer to my name, you better jump.”