Dragon's Eden (23 page)

“Hungry?” he asked.

She nodded and pushed herself to a sitting
position. He reached out to help her, and they ended up very close
together as much by accident as by design.

“I’m . . . uh, not sure what this is, but
it’s good.” He took a bite of the fruit as if to say, See how good
it is?—before offering her the rest. He felt breathless, waiting
for her to take it, and he couldn’t remember a time when a woman
had left him breathless. Neither could he remember a time when
merely looking at a woman’s mouth had made him ache.

His fingers lingered on her lips after she
ate the fruit from his hand, and he smiled. He’d won something with
that small act of acquiescence, but he wasn’t sure what. “It’s
granadilla,” she said, lowering her lashes.

“Granadilla?”

The color heightened in her cheeks.
“
Passiflora edulis
. Passion fruit.”

“Ah.” Maybe that explained the way he felt,
as if he had to have her now or forever live without her, that if
he let her slip away this time, there would he no other chance.

“Not that kind of passion,” Sugar said,
daring an upward glance at Jackson. “The passion of the death and
resurrection of a god.” And surely that was what Jackson was, a man
in the image of the God who had made him.

From the safety of her childhood refuge, he
looked far less intimidating than he had on Cocorico, but no less
beautiful. The tawnyness of his skin was warm and inviting in the
late-afternoon sun. His hair was an ebony veil sliding across his
chest and draping over her thighs. Looking at him, she felt an
indescribable yearning to bury her face in the crook of his neck
and cloak herself in the silken strands, to lay her hand over his
dragon’s heart and feel the life pulse through him on every beat,
to somehow take him inside herself and never let him go.

She was in love.

“The god Eros?” he asked, moving closer.

“I’m—I’m not sure. I don’t think so.” Her
heartbeat speeded up with both fear and excitement in response to
his nearness. She’d awakened earlier and had found herself lying
next to him, his breath blowing softly across the top of her head,
his chest a wall of strength at her back. She’d known she should
leave, that her presence was a danger to those she loved, but
against all odds Jackson made her feel safe. Within the comforting
circle of his arms was a haven and a promise, freely given,
inviolate, one she was loath to relinquish. So she’d fallen back
into a dreamless sleep and awakened once more to find him still by
her side.

But this time the dragon was also awake,
feeding her from his hand as if she were the wild creature needing
to be tamed.

Strange, beautiful man. He was free now, and
in some new way so was she. He could leave, find and have any woman
to share his life.

“Well, I’m not a god, Sugar, but I do feel
resurrected,” he said, reaching out to touch her. The calluses on
his fingers were rough against her skin, and she reveled in the
difference. “Baolian didn’t manage to kill me, but she did forfeit
my life on that beach, and Shulan took it.”

“I know.” She looked away, a wave of guilt
making it impossible to face him. She had no right to want him the
way she did. “I’m sorry for everything, Jackson, for not helping
you more.”

“Don’t be,” he said, tilting her chin up.
Warm eyes gazed down into hers. “You took my life and held it, and
made it into something better than it had been before. You opened
up a part of me I didn’t know I had, the part that must have been
holding on to an image of you for aeons, because that’s how long I
feel like I’ve been waiting for you.”

“You don’t have to say those things.”

“Yes, I do, Sugar.” The strain of urgency
tightened his voice. “In a few hours my life starts up again. As
soon as Cooper comes, I go back to being what I am, and I need to
know you’re going to be a part of me.”

He was asking the impossible. She couldn’t
see where she would fit into his life. “I don’t know what you’ll
hold on to, Jackson, but you’ll always be a part of me.” And wasn’t
that all they could offer each other? Memories of a time that
shouldn’t have been?

“That’s not good enough,” he said, sounding
damn sure of himself and a little angry. “I want to marry you,
Sugar, bind you to me. I want to plant my seed deep inside your
womb and watch you blossom with our child.”

He’d shocked her. Jackson could tell by the
stunned look on her wide-eyed face. He needed to back off. He
needed to woo, but he no longer had the patience for words alone.
So he kissed her.

A fleeting kiss at first, a mere touching of
their mouths. His hands came up to cup her face, and he rested his
forehead on hers. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life
without you, knowing there was anything more I could have done to
win you.”

He kissed her again, inhaling her fragrance.
He didn’t know much about the kind of love he felt for her; it was
all too new. But he did know about pleasure, how it tangled around
a person’s heart and libido, how it imprinted on a body so that the
slightest touch from the one who had given it brought the
sensations back again. There was a bond in pleasure, intense and
intimate.

She wanted him. She’d said as much, said she
wanted him until she couldn’t see beyond the wanting into love. He
was putting his heart on the line, praying he could show her the
way.

Her lips were tender beneath his, her breath
growing shallow with even their chaste kiss. It emboldened him to
do more. In one lithe move, he lowered her to the bed and slid his
hand under her shirt, opening his mouth over hers at the same time.
She moaned, and a spiral of desire curled through his body down to
his groin. Arousal began thrumming through his veins.

Sugar had never known how good a man’s
weight could feel. He was lying half over her, his palm kneading
her breast, one of his thighs fitted in between hers, and she was
coming apart from the inside out.

His skin was satiny soft over hard muscle, a
sensory delight to her each place they touched. Every move he made,
from the seductive grind of his pelvis against hers to the more
subtle action of his breath, elicited a response from her
physically and emotionally. They were two people moving as one, two
halves striving to be a whole, and the path they led each other
down was laden with adventure and discovery.

She smoothed her hand over his abdomen and
felt the muscles there tighten. The breath soughed from his lips,
and he stilled on top of her. When she did nothing else, he angled
his mouth closer to her ear and whispered, “Go on, Sugar.
Lower.”

In answer, her fingers slid downward, over a
taut plane of ridged muscles and into a thatch of silky hair.
Instinct guided her to encircle him and move her hand up his shaft
. . . and back down.

“Ah, Sugar, Sugar.” He moved with her, and
when her hand came up again, he pushed her T-shirt up and lowered
his mouth to her bared breast.

The rhythm they worked together became the
vehicle for transcending time and space. The rhythm bridged the
distance between their skin, taking them deeper into each
other.

Heat and need consumed her, pushed her
onward, made her restless with a yearning she felt coursing through
her entire body. He laved her other breast, teasing her with his
tongue, and still it wasn’t enough.

‘Jackson.” His name came out on a gasp.

He levered himself up to kiss her mouth,
then rose to a sitting position, straddling her hips. He stripped
his shirt off and reached for hers, all the while watching her with
his smoldering green gaze. When he eased off the bed to remove his
pants, she lowered her eyes and met those of the dragon. Insatiable
beast, he looked as eager to devour her as his master, but the
beast was no more eager than she.

How a woman could be half-naked, her mouth
swollen from kisses and her breasts blushed from the same, and
still look innocent was beyond Jackson, but Sugar managed it,
beautifully. He stepped out of his pants and sat down on the edge
of the bed.

“Don’t let me do anything you don’t like,
ever,” he said, caressing the silky skin above her shorts. “I may
not always ask first, but if I start something that makes you
uncomfortable, all you have to say is no.”

Sugar answered with a softly spoken
agreement, but in her heart she knew if he would just kiss her
again, everything would be all right. The kiss he gave her, though,
was not the one she had expected.

Curling his fingers around her waistband, he
drew her shorts down and lowered his mouth to her mons. His tongue
slid up her cleft again and again until she melted into a shower of
falling stars. Then he moved up her body to take her mouth with his
as he began to take her virginity. His shaft was rigid, pulsing,
probing her secret core, creating and easing an ache she couldn’t
escape.

His name fell from her lips over and over.
She covered his face with sweet, hot kisses. His hair flowed around
them and trailed across her breasts like tendrils of silken fire.
Every atom of her being was alive and focused on the man sliding
into her body.

A single thrust broke her barrier. She
gasped a cry, which he caught with his kiss and took inside
himself.

“Ah, Sugar.” He crooned her name and
whispered little nothings in her ear, words of pleasure and
anticipation, of gentleness and caring and love.

He pumped slowly at first, easing his way
inside before beginning a careful withdrawal. His eyes drifted
closed on a heavenly sigh, layering thick lashes across his cheeks,
and a lazy smile graced his mouth.

“You feel so good.” The words were labored,
husky. “So good.” He opened his eyes and his smile broadened. “I
could do this the rest of the day, but I don’t think you’d thank me
for that, not the first time.”

She wasn’t so sure. She’d never known any
pleasure as great as the one of just watching him—the flowing
movement of his hair over his shoulders and across her chest, the
flexing of the muscles in his arms, the tightening of his abdomen,
watching where they joined with his much larger, darker body
meeting hers again and again.

Then something in her quickened, and she
felt a pleasure beyond the enticingly visual. Sensation deep inside
her stirred, a desire for more with every stroke he made. Her gaze
lifted to his face, and she watched the beautiful planes and angles
there tauten with the same need for completion that drove her.

She had known she would give herself to this
man. What she had not known was all he would give in return.

Her heart filled with love as wave upon wave
of her climax washed through her. He came into her one last time in
a shattering release, and she gathered him in her arms, the better
to hold him and feel all the magic they had made.

Sated, breathing heavily, Jackson shifted
his body off hers, taking as much weight as he could on his arms.
She was so small and yet so powerful. She made him tremble.

He’d probably been too rough, but she had
completely undone him and his good intentions.

“I’m sorry I hurt you.” He lifted his hand
and brushed strands of his hair off her cheek and out of her
eyelashes. Thanks to him they were completely wrapped up in each
other.

“You didn’t hurt me, Jackson.” Her smile was
weak. She was limp beneath him. “At least not much.”

“It will be better next time.”

“How many next times do I get?” She opened
her eyes for him, and they were fathomless, more enchanted than the
lunar mists of Cocorico.

“A lifetime of next times, Sugar,” he said,
bending his head to brush a kiss across her brow. “And then one
more time after that.”

Jackson stood in the San Francisco jungle
yard of his sister-in-law’s brother’s house. As he watched his wife
beguile the man with her knowledge of the bifurcation points of
indigenous tropical species, he wondered at the changes three
months of assumed death had brought to his life.

One thing was for damn certain, when death
hovered nearby, people took love a lot more seriously. Both he and
Cooper had ended up married, after years of globe-spanning
bachelorhood.

Well, not so many years for him. He was only
twenty-four. Conceivably, he could have been facing another decade
of footlooseness. He’d gotten lucky instead and found his woman on
a West Indian island half a world away from anyplace he ever would
have dreamed of looking.

Cooper came over and, as he’d been prone to
lately, gave Jackson a hug, a big hug of the bear variety.

“Hey, Coop.” He delicately extricated
himself from his big brother’s arms. Truth was, he’d about had his
fill of being hugged and coddled, except for the stuff Sugar dished
out. He couldn’t seem to get enough of that.

“Jessie and I have been talking,” Cooper
said, referring to his wife. “You and Sugar ought to have the beach
house. With the kids and all, we really need something bigger and
closer to town.”

“Okay,” Jackson said. It was another of
those amazing changes, he mused, Cooper being a ready-made dad,
with Jessie having two children from her first marriage. Of course,
Jackson knew from personal experience that his big brother made a
helluva father; he’d had lots of practice, having survived
Jackson’s hooligan years.

“We might even move into the suburbs,”
Cooper went on.

Things were really changing when they
allowed the Dragon to move into the suburbs, Jackson thought, but
all he said was, “We’re not there that much, so take your time
about finding a place. There’s no hurry or anything.”

Cooper slanted him a wry look. “Not unless I
don’t want the kids to grow up thinking married people spend all
their time locked in the bedroom.”

Jackson just grinned.

Cooper grew serious then. “There’s something
I wanted to talk to you about.”