Dragon's Eden (14 page)

He pushed himself off the bed, gratified by
the shock widening her eyes. He leaned down and with feigned
casualness brushed his mouth across hers. It was a hell of a chance
to take, but he had to kiss her; and as he’d feared, one kiss
wasn’t enough. Time slowed within the space of a pulse beat, his
smile faded, and of their own accord his hands came up and molded
themselves to her shoulders, his fingers straying across her bared
skin.

“Sugar,” he whispered, her name a reverent
question on his lips. He hated revealing his weakness for her, and
he would have left if she’d given any sign of wanting him to
leave.

She didn’t.

Her lashes fell in feathery crescents to her
cheeks, her breath caught, and he was captured—so easily.

So easy to push the silk shirt completely
off her shoulder. So easy to let his gaze slide over the bared tops
of her breasts. It would be so easy to lower her to the bed and
follow her down, to fit his body to hers and let the thrill of
contact flood his senses and fill his heart. So damn easy to put
himself at her sweet mercy.

He curled his hands into fists and pulled
away. Nothing short of a miracle was going to keep him sane and
celibate much longer.

Sugar felt his withdrawal and opened her
eyes to watch him leave, all macho arrogance and graceful strength
dressed in nothing except the loose, flowing black cotton pants. He
was so much stronger than she.

The plan she’d had to befriend him had
proven to be dangerously absurd. Her only hope of surviving him, of
keeping herself from begging him for his touch, was to avoid him at
all costs. She couldn’t have him for keeps, so she was better off
not knowing what she was missing.

Her body called her a liar and a fool. It
wanted him at any cost, but her heart was adamant in its
denial.

She reached over and picked up a slice of
the papaya he’d brought for her. The fruit was sweet and silky in
her mouth—the way his tongue had been when he’d kissed her on the
beach. The way she’d hoped it would be again only moments
before.

She reached for another slice of fruit and
savored it slowly, remembering. She could fall in love with his
kiss, maybe with more than his kiss.

Captivity, even in a tropical paradise, was
rotting his brain. Jackson lay perfectly still in the sparse grass,
holding a string in his left hand. In front of him, about ten feet
away, was a box trap he’d fashioned out of sticks and more string.
A little farther out, about twelve feet away, was a blue-and-green
lizard, otherwise known as snake bait.

She hadn’t said anything about trapping
their mysterious visitor. She’d only said he couldn’t kill it.
Before he could trap the snake, though, he had to trap the bait.
Inside the box, he’d staked out a cockroach. All he had to do was
wait for Mother Nature to take a ride on the food chain.

A flash of color in the lush growth of
forest caught his eye. He glanced up in time to see Sugar disappear
behind the base of a gracefully buttressed tree, a splash of bright
yellow against a world of unremitting green. Lianas trailed from
the higher limbs of the
châtaignier
, any one of which could be camouflaging
the snake he was trying to catch.

He swore under his breath. She was a great
one to go forbidding him to do things. He should have forbidden her
to go into the forest.

The slightest skittering sound brought his
attention back to the lizard, and with a quick jerk of the string,
he had his bait trapped in the box, happily eating its last
meal.

Now to go get Sugar before something else
did.

* * *

Sugar carefully picked her way across the
rocks at the base of the tiered waterfall that dropped down off the
cliffs. Getting to her hideaway was never easy, but it was always
worthwhile. She had discovered the small beach and cove while
exploring the labyrinth of caverns that honeycombed the cliffs.

Chemical warfare was as prevalent in the
rock structure of Cocorico as it was in the forest vegetation. Rain
became a diluted carbonic-acid solution by picking up carbon
dioxide in the air and from the decomposing plants on the ground.
The weak acid dissolved the almost pure calcium carbonate that made
up the limestone, sinking through fissures and crannies in the rock
to carve out caves over the millennia.

The waterfall was nothing more than a
trickle of the river that ran through the caves, four tributaries
that had been diverted by breaks high in the outside wall. Far back
in the labyrinth, she’d built one of the deeper, more isolated
caverns into a water storage tank as a precaution against drought.
Once a week she opened the sluice gates on the natural tank and let
it empty and refill with fresh water from the river.

She would do that job today, she decided,
for she doubted she would get another chance to sneak away. Both
men had been preoccupied when she’d come out of the cottage, Jen
doing what he spent most of his days doing—looking out to sea—and
Jackson sleeping in the grass. That wasn’t such an unusual pastime,
considering that he spent much of his nights doing what Jen did
during the day, but a very unusual pastime for someone worried
about big snakes.

A grin twitched her lips. Maybe enamored or
challenged was a better way to describe his interest. One animal
worthy of the term
dangerous
showed up,
and Jackson’s protective and predatory instincts rushed to the
fore—until the warm sun and soft grass got the better of him.

Still grinning, she reached for the handhold
she’d carved in the cliff wall and stepped behind the
waterfall.

Sugar disappeared. Jackson stared for a
moment at the place where she’d been, then broke into a run, legs
pumping, his feet flying through the forest. He vaulted over downed
trees and pushed aside branches, heedless of any damage he might do
to her plants, though he knew there would be hell to pay when she
noticed. He was not going to lose her. She was leading him to
freedom. His pulse quickened in anticipation. He’d known there was
a way off the island, but he’d be damned if he could find it.
Shulan, Sher Chang, and the pilot had left. Henry had left. In a
few hours he would leave too.

Or maybe he wouldn’t, he thought, even as he
leaped to the top of a boulder and jumped down the other side. Not
in a few hours anyway. He had time before Shulan returned. Knowing
he could escape was the important thing, not the escape itself.

Fool. The warning voice rang loud and clear
in his mind and stopped him in his tracks. What in the hell was he
thinking?

He grimaced at his faulty, lust-induced
reasoning, not believing the direction his thoughts had taken. He
needed to leave at the first opportunity, no discussion. He could
come back if he found he couldn’t live without her, which he
sincerely hoped he wouldn’t. She was a piece of loose karma, not
his destiny. She was a temptation to be overcome, not one to render
him helpless. In the worst of scenarios, she wasn’t even real,
merely a figment of his imagination conjured up by Shulan to tease
and entice him, a means to his destruction by the slow, sweet
torture of constant arousal and sexual frustration.

Swearing, he scrambled over the last stretch
of rocks leading to the source of the stream. The waterfall foamed
down in front of him, sending a freshwater mist into the air and
obscuring her escape hatch. He stuck his hand through the water and
felt rock. He was going after her, and when he found the route to
freedom, he was taking it. Twice more he jammed his hand into the
water and hit rock, then victory. His arm went through to
emptiness, and he followed, cutting through the water and entering
another world, one of steaming mist and faint light.

He used both hands to slick his wet hair
back off his face. The walls and floor of the cavern were dripping
with moisture and covered with an amazing orange-brown slime. There
was no sign of Sugar or her passing. He stepped forward, hoping to
get a glimpse of her farther back in the cave, but his foot never
hit the floor again. There was no floor, only a gaping hole full of
mirror-smooth water with his foot breaking the surface. He had
enough presence of mind to fill his lungs with air before he went
down, flailing for a handhold on the slimy rock, which offered
none.

Time ceased to exist under the water. All
physical movement dropped into slow motion, except for the pounding
of his heart, which jumped into double time as the current sucked
him deeper into the hole, into darkness, pulling him down while
every survival instinct he had was screaming for him to go up, to
regain the surface and life-giving air.

He was scraped against a blunt edge of rock
in his headlong flight, but in the middle of the maelstrom there
were no surrounding walls, just fast-running water bearing him
along. He reached a hand for the surface and encountered a
submerged ceiling of solid rock.

True panic set in.

This then was how he was going to die, not
as the scornful paramour of the Dragon Whore, nor as the conquering
hero of childhood dreams, rescuing fair maidens and dark-eyed
beauties, righting injustice and defending the weak, but drowning
alone in the dark.

The epitaph no sooner formed than it was
disproved. His head came out of the water just as the last of his
breath gave way. Lungs burning, he swallowed a gulp of air, then
another. His chest heaved with the exertion of trying to catch his
breath and keep upright in the swiftly swirling water.

Surrounded by darkness, he fought
disorientation by peering into the gloom and using his other senses
to fix his location. The sound of rushing water filled his ears.
The smell of sweet water overlaid the mustiness in the air, and all
around him there was water and more water. He couldn’t feel a
bottom and keep his head above the river at the same rime, and he
was disinclined to submerge himself again. There was no telling
where he might come up, or what he might come up against.

The current rushed along, propelling him
into more darkness, heading deeper and deeper into the earth.
Cooper had always said impulsiveness would be the death of him, but
the impulse to follow Sugar had been undeniable, instinctive, like
a cat chasing a mouse. She’d been running away, and he’d felt a
compelling need to chase her. He couldn’t have resisted it any more
than he could have resisted kissing her.

The river slowed suddenly, as if hitting an
invisible wall, and he floated out into a much larger body of
water. Ahead of him, across a distance he couldn’t estimate, a
narrow circle of bright light beckoned.

He began swimming toward the light,
controlling each breaststroke so it barely made a ripple. He didn’t
know where he was or what he might encounter. It was a sure bet
Sugar hadn’t gone the same way he had, through a hole in the floor.
This was her lair, and he’d been caught but good. He just hoped
there was another way out. Backtracking his route was out of the
question.

He slid through the water, his breath easing
back down to normal. Now that death was off the list of imminent
possibilities, he was intrigued. The cavern was huge, the ceiling
far above him and rustling with movement and noise. If worse came
to worst, he wondered if he could eat a bat. He doubted it.

The circle of light grew bigger and
brighter, until he could see blue sky and a fringe of greenery
around the perimeter. The smell of fresh and growing things cut
through the mustiness in the cave. A cloud scudded across the
opening. When it passed, a shaft of sunlight pierced the gloom,
reaching far into the cavern and reflecting off the sleek form and
tangled blond curls of Sugar Caine as she swam silently through the
dark pool.

Jackson stopped and treaded water, watching
as she reached the opening and pulled herself up onto the ledge.
She slicked her hair off her face, shook the water onto the floor,
then proceeded to take off her clothes.

A dark thrill shot through him like a streak
of wildfire, igniting his mind and body with equal intensity. A
nice man would have said something to warn her she wasn’t alone.
Jackson just watched, a sinful smile curving across his face.

Her T-shirt came off first, skimmed over her
head and off her arms, her every move as graceful as a gazelle’s.
Sunlight lovingly backlit the gentle curves of her body and made a
halo around her angel’s face.

God, she was beautiful, her breasts small,
but full and round and tipped in pink. He swallowed softly, unable
to take his eyes off her.

He followed the descent of her shorts and
underwear, his body hardening with every inch of skin she revealed
in the wake of the yellow cotton. His smile was long gone. She bent
over to pull the clothes off her feet, and when she straightened,
his gaze went unerringly to the juncture of her thighs. His tongue
came out to dampen suddenly dry lips. He’d seen naked women before,
but he hadn’t seen Sugar, and something about her made it feel like
the first time, the first time for everything. The first time he’d
watched a woman undress . . . the first time a woman had opened
herself for him . . . the first time he’d slid his hand, and his
mouth, and his sex into that magical place.

She raised her arms over her head and
stretched from the tips of her fingers to the tips of her toes, and
he almost drowned for the second time.

He was entranced. With a powerful kick, he
pushed through the water, counting on himself to have enough
strength and decency to ask if she’d like to make love before he
took her. Then she turned, showing him a luscious backside. That
distracted him for the only instant he had to call out and keep her
from soaring off the cliff and out of sight.

Watching her fly off the edge cut through
his sexual haze pretty damn quick. Five strong strokes brought him
to the rocks where she’d left her clothes. He pulled himself up and
ran toward the edge, catching himself just before he would have
gone over.