Walking in Fire: Hawaiian Heroes, Book 1 (26 page)

He raised a taunting brow. “You think I won’t?” He grabbed the hem of his T-shirt, pulled it over his head and tossed it aside. Pushing down his pants, he let his erection spring free. It bobbed in the sunlight.

Then he lay down on the carpet in soft shades of green and crooked one arm behind his head, waiting. A little smile hitching up one corner of his wide mouth, he palmed his penis, stroking it up, then down, offering himself to her with complete unselfconsciousness.

Her mouth watered. If other women could see him like this, a great big erotic offering, they’d mob Hawaii in droves. But he was all hers. To do with as she pleased. She was pretty sure there wasn’t much he wouldn’t be up for. The thought made her pussy quake with need.

She untied the robe and pushed it back off her shoulders, letting it fall behind her in a soft slither. Stepping daintily over him, she straddled his hips and sank down onto him, balancing herself with her palms on his chest. He reached up to steady her with his hands on her hips, and she grabbed his big wrists as she had in the bedroom, pushing his arms back on the floor. His biceps bulged, his forearms knotted with muscle, but he let her hold him down, smiling up at her.

“About that licking thing you do,” she said severely. She bent her head to his throat, inhaling his scent, and tasted him delicately.

He tipped his head back and to the side, inviting more. A deep purr vibrated in his chest. He was like a big cat, wanting to be stroked. She kissed the damp patch of skin, then moved on, inhaling his scent, tasting as she pleased while sitting lightly on his massive erection, stroking her labia on him.

“Ah, pua,” he groaned. “You’re torturing me.”

“Good,” she murmured unrepentantly. She tortured him a little longer. Then, rising up on her knees, she reached down and took him in hand. He sucked in a breath of sheer relief as she sank down on him, very slowly, taking him into her inch by slow inch. By the time she had him all, he was shaking with the effort of remaining still, his eyes mere slits under his dark lashes, nostrils flared, cheekbones flushed.

He lifted his hands, reaching for her, and she shook her head, pointing her finger at him. “I am still angry. And I hate it that you can make me want you even when I’m mad.”

“Okay, pua.” Being an intelligent man, Malu subsided as his wahine treated him to the sweetest kind of torture, riding him with exquisite shallow slowness.

He watched raptly as she tossed her hair back and ran her hands down over her body, pinching her nipples, twirling them between her fingers, her eyes closed.

“God, that’s so sexy,” he said hoarsely. “Let me touch you.”

“No. Yes—just my pussy,” she decided, her tongue touching the corner of her mouth. “That’s all.”

Ah, she was learning her power over him, and he loved her. That was all he wanted, all he needed right now. Even frightened by the magnitude of the violence they’d been through and angry at her destiny being torn out of her control, she still wanted him. And he hoped he knew her well enough already to know that she wouldn’t give her body this freely to him if she hadn’t given her heart.

He leaned up on his elbow, watching as she took him, his glistening cock sliding in and out of the pink lips stretched taut around him. He touched her gently, enjoying the tender folds of flesh and the way she caught her breath.

Watching her face, he found her clitoris with the pad of his thumb and played it delicately. Her eyes closed, her lashes a fan on her flushed cheeks.

“Oh,” she whimpered, her lips parting in a sexy moue. “Yes. Harder. Harder.”

“Anything you want.”

He timed his short thrusts to meet her enthusiastic ride. Her breasts bounced with the undulations of her lithe body as she stroked him up and down with sweet, sweet friction.

She put her hand over his, holding it to her. The contractions began inside her, her pussy milking his cock as she came long and hard. She whimpered, a high, sweet sound of surrender, letting him pleasure her.

When she opened her eyes, heavy and dreamy, he smiled, full of fierce triumph. “
Ko’u makalapua.
My beautiful flower. Blooming only for me.”

Looking a little abashed at her own daring, she sucked her bottom lip between her teeth. Then she bent over, bracing her hands on his chest, her lips a hairbreadth from his. Her hair fell in a silky curtain around their faces.

“Now it’s your turn,” she whispered. “Fuck me any way you want, Ho’omalu.”

He kissed her, taking his time about it. “Ah, pua, what makes you think I need more? Just watching you come does it for me.”

Holding her there, he looked into her eyes, feeling the delicious feathering at the base of his scrotum as he moved very slowly under her. “You get me off, Melia a’u. Just you.”

Then he let her watch as he surrendered to the heat built up inside him, and the huhua’i rushed through him, sweet and powerful, pumping his love into her.

She kissed him again when he was finished, and then lay down on his chest, a hot, sweet weight of satisfied wahine. He thought he felt a few tears trickle down his neck. Women—a man never knew when they were going to cry.

“You okay?” he murmured, stroking her silken back down to his favorite grip on her round ass.

She nodded, relaxing a little more, her legs sliding down to tangle with his.

“David, what’s going to happen?” she asked. “I mean, with us?”

He paused to yawn deeply. Now that he was fed and sated with her for the time being, he was so sleepy he could hardly think. “You think you could stay here?” he asked. “Live here, I mean?”

She nodded, smoothing one hand over his chest. “I love it here. I’d want to go home to visit, of course. And there’s a lot of traveling I want to do. I haven’t really seen much of the world.”

“Okay,” he mumbled. “We’ll go together.”

Reaching out with one hand, he found the robe and pulled it over her. The edges trailed over his skin. Sunlight spilled over his legs and feet. With a sigh, he turned his chin against her hair and fell asleep.

Malu called down to the grocery store and had some fresh groceries delivered in time for lunch. He handed Melia a small pharmacy bag, and she tore it open as he moved around the kitchen, putting things away. But after reading the instructions, she scowled. “It says ‘may not give correct results for up to three weeks’.”

He shrugged. “Do you really doubt Pele’s words?”

She stared at him over the pineapple he held in one big hand. Here they were, involved in prosaic activities, just like an ordinary couple. It was hard to reconcile this with all that had happened in the last week. But it had happened, and given the Ho’omalu family’s duties, things like this might happen again.

She sighed gustily. “No, I guess not. It’s just hard to process. I have to adjust my thinking to include a freaking goddess—patroness, whatever, you know?”

He grinned at her. “You get used to it.”

“I hope so. Right now I’d just like to kick her ass.” She frowned at him uncertainly. “She can’t, um, hear everything I say, can she?”

It was too much to hope that he wouldn’t notice her blush, but he merely winked at her. “No. She has to be called by one of us.”

Relieved, she raised an eyebrow at him. “Figures. I guess if I were a goddess, I’d refuse to listen to anyone but hot guys too.”

“Pua, if you were a goddess, all the men on the island would be vying to serve you.”

Melia’s things arrived that evening from Nawea Bay, along with Frank and Leilani, who both hugged Melia and expressed their relief that she and Malu were safe and well.

“Got to leave in style, yeah?” Frank teased her. “A chopper ride back to Kona.”

Melia blinked. Of course, Malu had come up with an alternate story of how they’d left Nawea. Couldn’t very well tell people they’d gone through the heart of the volcano. She shivered at the suddenly all too vivid memory of the fiery abyss.

“Um, yes. It was pretty…exciting.” Frank and Leilani stared at her, both frowning.

Malu pulled her against his side. “Little too exciting for this wahine,” he said. “She didn’t think much of it.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you,” Leilani said, accepting this explanation. “One ride was enough for me. Thought I was gonna fall right out of that glass bubble.”

“Can’t believe what happened to those po’ino drug dealers,” Frank said, shaking his head. “Falling into a lava tube that way. But if they were hooked up with Dane, that’s the kind of people you don’t mind ending in Pele’s fire.
Kaulike
—justice!” He made the motion of a giant hand sweeping an annoying pest. “And all their drugs with them. Pele or Kanaloa gonna get ‘em, yeah?”

Malu nodded. “Kanaloa is the patron of our seas,” he told Melia.

Melia looked up at him. They could never tell anyone what had really happened, she realized. She couldn’t even share it with her best friends. Malu’s family powers enabled them to help Hawaii, but they also effectively isolated them in many ways. No wonder they were such a tightly knit family.

“I’ll go change,” she murmured. She took her duffle to the bedroom to slip into a coral T-shirt and white shorts. As she added a touch of makeup, she noticed her purse. Her phone—she had to call Claire, Bella and her folks. She couldn’t wait to hear their familiar, loved voices. She reached in to pull her phone from its pocket and perched on the end of Malu’s big bed.

But wait—what on earth was she going to tell them? She stared at her phone in silence and then rose to set it down carefully on her purse. She gazed at herself somberly in the mirror for a moment. She’d have to think for a while before she spoke with any of them.

Meanwhile, Malu and his friends were waiting. Her gaze sharpened critically. Did she look like she’d been dragged through a volcano backwards?

Then she blinked in surprise. She looked…wonderful. Not only did she not look traumatized by her ordeal, she looked better than ever. She smiled bemusedly at her reflection. A favor from Pele, or just David Ho’omalu and his volcano-hot loving?

Damn, it was going to take some time to process all of this. Shaking her head, she left the bedroom to join the others out on the lanai, where the sky was slowly turning pale lavender and pink. Malu held out his hand to her, pulling her onto the cushioned divan with him. He and Frank held cold beers, and there were bottles of juice for her and Leilani.

“That Dane Gifford had us all fooled, yeah?” Leilani shook her head. “Always smiling, so full of aloha, when all the time he was like a centipede, slithering up your leg.”

Melia shuddered at this imagery, and Malu gave her a little squeeze.

Frank leaned forward. “I’d like to know what kinda drugs they were trying to get in here that were so damn special. Must be some new designer poison.”

Malu nodded. “Yeah, must be.”

“Like meth isn’t bad enough,” Leilani said.

Melia remembered the look in Daniel Ho’omalu’s eyes that morning as he predicted the Helman cartel would be back, and soon, with more Kona Kula, the drug that made meth look mild.

“Oh, yeah,” Malu said. “But we’ll keep fighting it. Don’t forget just last month someone turned in one of the biggest meth labs to the police. Now they’re using the po’ino’s bank account to clean it up.”

Melia was pretty sure she knew who’d turned in the anonymous tip to the police. One of the Ho’omalus.

“Cherie’s gonna be okay,” Frank said. “Saw her today when we were up at the hospital visiting Keone. She’s bruised up, had a concussion, but no lasting damage.”

“Gonna have a few scars on her pretty skin, though,” Leilani added. “But at least he didn’t rape her.”

She and Melia shared a look of feminine understanding. Thank God Cherie had been spared that trauma. There was plastic surgery for her scars. And now Dane Gifford would never treat another woman or man like disposable trash.

“How is Keone?” she asked.

Frank snorted. “You heard what happened, yeah? Fool shot himself with his own gun.”

“He was trying to help,” Leilani said, glaring at her brother. “Keone might mek ass sometime, but he’s no ka ‘oi.”

“I guess,” Frank said without enthusiasm. “Told me today he’s saving up for a fishing boat. Might make a decent living for you after all.”

Leilani looked at her hands, suddenly self-conscious. Melia tipped back her head to exchange a look with Malu. Keone had evidently taken his brush with death to heart.

Chapter Twenty-One

Recipe for Ohana Tsunami—take one tourist, dress her up and pour over her an entire package of Ho’omalu family. Add hula and “mek house”.

The next morning, Malu took her shopping in Kona, at one of the resort boutiques. She wore her blue sundress, which Leilani had laundered for her. Malu wore one of the silk tees he seemed to favor, this one green, with a pair of black slacks.

In the shop, which had an aura of hushed elegance, Melia looked around and shook her head. “David, I can’t afford this place.”

Malu tipped her chin up, meeting her gaze. “Pua, I wanna buy you something pretty. C’mon. Let me give you something.”