Rolling in the Deep: Hawaiian Heroes, Book 2 (12 page)

It had taken all her self-control not to stroke her fingertips down his knotted forearm, slip her hand into his and twine her fingers through his. She wanted to walk beside him the way lovers did, hands linked when they couldn’t be in each other’s arms. And more than that, she wanted to do the other things lovers did. Oh, yeah, the big guy was going down.

She and Bella were looking good in their snug, yellow cocktail dresses, flowers in their upswept hair and diamonds glittering at their throats and ears. The pendants were a bridesmaid gift from Melia, the earrings from David. Bella was smiling mistily, the same look Claire knew was on her own face.

Melia’s father handed her over to David, who turned to face her before the pastor and the audience as the sun sank toward the sea in the west. The soft light gilded them all in a haze of coral.

Jason Mamaloa sang a haunting melody in Hawaiian. Though she couldn’t understand a word, Claire felt the emotion clear to her bones.

The seaside grotto was amazingly private, considering how close they were to the huge hotel and grounds. The swish of waves on the rocks and the music muffled any other sounds.

A tiny breeze ruffled Melia’s dress and teased a trailing lock of Claire’s hair, tickling her neck.

“Let us pray.” The pastor bowed his head, his stole of leaves ruffling in the soft breeze. “Dear Heavenly Father, we are gathered here together to join this man and woman in holy matrimony…”

Claire felt the power of the simple, beautiful words wrap warmly about her heart. Her family weren’t regular churchgoers, but growing up she’d gone to Sunday school, and she certainly believed in God. How could anyone not acknowledge that a divine hand had created the beauty and power of the oceans and mountains that formed her home and these tropical islands?

The pastor led David and Melia in their vows, the simple words spoken by so many and yet new for these two in this moment.

David took the ring from Daniel and slid it onto Melia’s finger, a wide band of gold to join her flashing ruby. Then it was time for Claire to hand David’s big golden band to Melia. The look in his eyes when it slid home was something Claire knew she’d carry with her for a long time to come.

David pulled Melia into his arms and bent to kiss her. The crowd let out a roar of approval, clapping loudly.

The beaming couple sauntered down the aisle arm in arm, and Claire stepped forward to take Daniel’s arm. She gave it an impulsive squeeze, pressing her breast against his biceps. “We did it.” She smiled glowingly at him.

To her delight, he smiled back at her, his eyes crinkling, teeth flashing white in his short black beard.

At the end of the promenade, she held on to his arm for a moment. “Save me a dance, okay?”

Just like that, his gaze shuttered, dark lashes veiling those eyes. “Oh, I imagine you’ll be pretty busy.”

And then he walked away, leaving Claire staring after him.

Daniel groaned, a low rumble of irritation in his chest as Claire cut through the crowd in the big open-air pavilion set up for the reception, ignoring the other men smiling at her, only to stop before his chair. Well, he sure as hell wasn’t going to encourage her. Kahni was here somewhere, and if he danced at all, it would be with her.

Thank God David and Melia had only done one dance together before inviting everyone to join them on the floor and had not forced their wedding party to do another. Dancing was orchestrated foreplay.

He wanted her too damn much; that was the problem. Safer to be with a wahine who didn’t make him shake with the need to back her up against the nearest surface and fuck her so long and hard she screamed.

The simple yet profound words of the wedding ceremony had left him full of such powerful tension, he was afraid he might snap. Anger and something that felt uncomfortably like longing roiled inside him.

Ah, the way David and Melia had looked at each other when they said those final “I do’s”, like two halves of a whole that nothing and no one could ever break apart. He’d never have that, never trust himself to make that kind of promise to a wahine—to have and to hold until death, to remain inside the shell of a “civilized man” and not bust out, show her the rampaging savage he really was.

“So, do you not dance or what?” Claire asked him now, half-smiling, half-challenging.

He looked at her from under his heavy brows, not bothering to rise. “Or what. You betta run along, keiki. Go find one of the other boys to play with.”

Her tanned cheeks flooded with pink, and a line appeared between her brows, but she looked him in the eye, her hands planted on her flaring hips.

That dress should be illegal. The shimmery yellow garment on her friend Bella was merely pretty and sexy. On this wahine…whoa. The fabric stretched taut in tiny pleats from a point somewhere under her left arm, then wrapped into a strap across her other shoulder, cradling her heavy breasts like melons. If a man managed to look beyond them, it nipped in at her waist and flared out over her pear-shaped ass and the slight curve of her belly, ending midway down her thighs.

Some might call her hips big, but to him they called a siren song to test their resiliency with his hands. And her long, strong legs—those he wanted wrapped around his waist, and then later, his neck.

But it was a chance he couldn’t afford to take. He wouldn’t drag his or his family’s reputation through the muck again.

“I’m not a keiki,” she said, her pretty mouth set in a mulish pout. “I’m well over twenty-one. Old enough to know what I want.”

He forced himself to take another drink and swallow. “Well, keep on offering, and I’m sure you’ll find a taker,” he drawled. “It just won’t be me.”

She flinched as if he’d slapped her. Her cheeks got even redder, and her hands clenched into fists. For a moment, he thought he was going to get his drink in his face. But she drew herself up like an angry young queen. If sea-blue eyes could have spit fire, he’d be a big grease spot. That was better than the hurt he’d glimpsed—he was ashamed of himself for causing it, even if it was necessary.

Then, with greater daring than he’d have believed, she leaned over his chair, planting her hands by his elbows, as if sharing a sweet secret. Her scent wrapped around him, heated woman and the scent of the flowers in her lei as it swung forward, nearly grazing his shoulder. Her splendid cleavage was just at his eye level.

“I’ll do that,” she murmured in a husky, seductive voice. “While you drink yourself into a stupor. Just remember, you’ll wake up with a hangover, and one of these other guys will have the best damn memories of his life—
asshole
.”

She straightened so fast her lei slapped him on the chin, turned on one heel and stalked away, that fabulous ass twitching with rage. He laughed to himself, but it sounded fake, even to him. He wanted to storm after her and throw her over his shoulder. Had she just called him an
‘ōkole
?

As he watched, bemused, itchy and royally pissed off, she grabbed David’s ex-football-player friend Jack, whom Daniel had liked up until this moment, and towed him out onto the dance floor, hardly breaking her stride. The big blond man looked surprised and then damn pleased. He pulled her into his arms, one hand in the small of her back as the band launched into a Keali’i Reichel number.

Daniel hoped Jack knew how lucky he was. He hoped the dude couldn’t get it up. He hoped Jack strangled on his next drink and she was left explaining the body.

He surged out of his chair and stalked out onto the lawn to where his father and some of the uncles were gathered. On the way, he passed Kahni, talking and laughing with some of the local women. Their eyes met, and she cocked her head at him, a little smile playing about her full mouth.

He nodded. Message received, and understood.

The group of men around Homu and Hilo were unexpectedly somber. Daniel nodded at a local judge and the police captain of the western district of the island.

“Captain Lee tells us his officers have found two locals dead in the last week,” Homu told him quietly. “Drug overdose.”

The hair on the back of Daniel’s neck stood up. This kind of thing happened over in Honolulu all the time, but on the Big Island they mostly stuck to drinking, maybe smoking a little Kona Gold now and then.

“Meth?” he asked. Hell of a thing to be hoping, as meth was a drug straight from hell, but at least it was the devil they knew.

Homu shook his head.

“This is something new,” Captain Lee said. “A designer drug—a hallucinogen. Remarkably harmless looking, from the packets we found with the victims. Looks like some kind of dried herbs, but it’s laced with the real drug.”

“Worst of all, the folks they found aren’t habitual drug users,” Hilo said. “One of them I know. Old Delores Koiliu, from that Native Traditions group trying to get the army kicked out of their training area up on the mountain. The other was a twenty-three-year-old from Ka’u, working on one of the coffee plantations up on Mamaloa Highway.”

Daniel met his uncle’s eyes. Only a month ago, David had nearly died, along with one of their Nawea neighbors. Keone Halama had tried to help smuggle in a cache of what he believed to be herbs that would assist him and other Hawaiians in their traditional religious ceremonies, giving them visions of their ancestors.

The cache was not herbs but Kona kula, coyly named Kona diamonds, a designer drug crafted by employees of the Helman brothers in some clandestine California lab. And this sounded like more of it.

“Hard to keep drugs out of Hawaii,” the judge said, “with all of our ship and air traffic. I sentenced a fellow just last week who’d been carrying in cocaine on commercial flights, in his packages of muscle-development supplement.”

The others nodded politely, but Daniel’s mind was racing. Was this kula from a shipment the Helmans already had brought in, or had it just been pulled from the sea? Whichever, it finished the job of shooting his mood straight to hell. He had to get out of this crowd before he exploded.

“I’m going to head out,” he muttered to his father. “Go see if I can find anything.”

Homu turned with him, raising a heavy silver eyebrow at him. “Daniel, it is night,” he replied just as quietly. “You can do little until morning, surely.”

“I know, I know. But I can’t just…sit,” Daniel said. “David’s married. It’s done. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

And his plan worked fine until he turned to find his mother standing before him. “Daniel? Why are you not dancing with these lovely girls?”

He groaned inwardly. “Ma, they’re fine without me.”

She frowned up at him. “You must at least dance with the bridesmaids. You don’t want to be rude.”

Daniel looked at his father for support, but Homu merely gave him a sympathetic look and cocked his head back toward the pavilion, where a dance was just ending in a flourish of drums.

“All right,” he said, resigned. His mother rarely demanded anything of him, but when she did, his father expected him to go along. “I’ll go dance. Happy?”

Smiling, his mother reached up to pat his cheek. “When you find a nice wahine like your brother has, that will make me happy. But for now, dance—and smile.”

He bared his teeth at her, and she chuckled.

Daniel approached the dance floor with mingled anticipation and dread. Maybe he’d dance with Bella—her he could touch without wanting to do more. But she was already taken.

He surveyed the other partiers mingling on the big dance floor. This was a varied crowd. The governor was dancing with the owner of a Maui gallery. There were the new owners of the hotel, and a local banker with his girlfriend. Next to them, Keone Halama, a local moke, danced with Leilani, Frank’s sister. She ran the house at Nawea Bay for his family. He nodded at them as he passed, and Leilani smiled.

And through the crowd he saw a familiar blonde head and a yellow dress. Claire, accepting a drink from the bartender at the flower-bedecked bar. His gaze locked on her, he cut through the couples chatting on the dance floor as the musicians tuned up for another number, barely beating another man to her side.

She turned as he walked up to her, and her eyes widened. She lowered her glass and licked a drop of something from her lower lip. He followed the tip of her tongue as it disappeared, and shivered, imagining it on his skin.

He held out his hand to her. “Dance?”

She made him wait. She took another drink, a long one, and her eyes narrowed. He clenched his teeth, not sure if he wanted to laugh or curse. So be it. She’d say no, and then he could go back out into the shadows of the lawn, away from temptation.

But then, as the mellow notes of a Hapa number filled the air, she set her glass down on the bar and turned back to him, shrugging. “Sure, why not?”

And of course it was a slow dance, so he had to touch her. He set his hand on her waist as lightly as he could and held out his other hand for hers. The indentation of her waist fit his hand perfectly, the resilient curve of her hip moving beneath his fingers. Her hand curled into his, and she lifted her other hand to his shoulder, where it stroked over the wide slope of muscle. He could feel the heat of her through his shirt and her thin dress.

He knew how to dance—his mother had insisted he and David suffer through haole-style dancing lessons along with the hula they both loved. Claire followed him with easy grace as he led her in and out of the other dancers, his hand tightening to keep her from colliding with another couple.

Glancing down, he followed the intricate coils of her hairdo to the long curls that had been left to trail down the back of her neck and over one bare shoulder. He had a world-class view of her cleavage. If they were in a little bar somewhere, he would pull her against him and feel those breasts pressed against his chest while he smoothed his hand down over the full curve of her ass and squeezed, rubbing his erection into her belly, teasing them both until they couldn’t stand it and had to go outside.

Damn! His cock, ever hopeful, was hard as
ohia
—its usual state around her. They weren’t speaking in words, but their bodies were communicating just fine. She smelled like heaven—woman and flowers—and felt like sex personified in his grasp.