Untamed. CAITLIN CREWS

there through all her dour swaddling clothes, in a few immodest strings and hopeful triangles.

      A few strings and triangles and nothing else.

      Just like he definitely wasn’t hot and hard and ready to go at the idea of smearing suntan lotion all over her lush little body.

      This was a dare, that was all. To force a conclusion to this little drama so he could go back to his busy schedule of doing absolutely nothing where no one could see him, the better to get his head right. The bikini was a gauntlet, thrown down the hotel desk in bright pink Lycra, and he fully expected her to balk.

      But he’d underestimated Lucinda.

      A surprising fact that made him only that much harder and more interested in this, he could admit. He’d done little more than roll his eyes when his buddy had called him from Fiji to let him know another suit had booked a flight to his island.

      “Another one incoming,” he’d said, laughing.

      “It’s a private island, brother,” Jason had growled. “You could say no.”

      “Where’s the fun in that?”

      Apparently, part of the fun had been failing to mention that this time, it was a woman instead of the usual smarmy dudes. That had been a nice surprise for Jason when she’d walked into the old hotel, without the usual salesman swagger of the others. He’d taken one look at all that porcelain paleness and had wanted nothing more than to get his hands all over her. And leave some marks.

      But then, Jason was well acquainted with his own animalistic urges. Some might say he reveled in them.

      He would never be a monk. But he’d taken this time to sit on a pretty island the father he’d always hated had bought and built a pretty house on to ask himself why he always looked for oblivion. In a bottle. Between a pair of sweet thighs. Testing his adrenaline in high-risk adventures. His mother had called him out after the reading of his father’s will, and Jason wasn’t built to ignore the woman who’d raised him—on her own, because the rich haole who’d literally left her pregnant by the side of the road couldn’t be bothered.

      “You’re so busy making sure you’re nothing like him that guess what?” His mother had shaken her head at him, as if Jason had disappointed her. He would rather she’d slapped him upside his head. It felt about the same. Worse, maybe. Then she’d twisted the knife. “So many women everywhere you go. Do you know their names? Or do you like the fact you’re carrying on his tradition of anonymous encounters everywhere you go? Seems to me you’re just like him, after all.”

      That had sucked.

      Jason had removed himself from all temptation the very next day.

      But what was he supposed to do when temptation wandered onto his very own deserted island? With an agenda all its own?

      He didn’t want to be a piece of shit like his father. But he was only a man.

      He watched Lucinda’s struggle play out across her perfect oval of a face. Her blue eyes gleamed from temper or emotion, and she looked at him like she was considering taking a strip or two out of his hide—or trying—but her flush mouth pressed into a tight line instead. She had a tough little chin, he noticed when she lifted it, high and belligerent like she was ready to fight.