Dragon's Eden (6 page)

His fingers closed around hers, and he
pulled her up with startling ease, positioning her in front of him.
Physically, she was no match for him; she was a complement. He had
the strength of power, she had the strength to endure. He was
tawny-skinned and dark-haired. Everything about her was fair, even
the shade of her inevitable tan. His body was large, angles and
planes of muscle layered over a broad-shouldered frame. She was
slender, her muscles hidden beneath softer curves.

He was a man, she a woman. Male and
female.

“Off the point,” he said, pointing to where
a cargo boat cut through the waves about a mile offshore.

“You never would have made it.” She tried to
ignore how close she was to him, close enough to feel the warmth of
his body as they balanced on the rough stones.

“I’m a pretty good swimmer,” he said with a
shrug, not taking his eyes off the boat.

Even if he had made it, she doubted if the
captain of the
Mary Sue
would have done
anything except shoot him, the same thing a captain would do to any
man, woman, beast, or fish that came up out of the ocean in the
middle of the night and tried to board his boat.

A quick wisp of sound and shadow passed
through the air above them, then another, and another. She felt his
hand curve around her upper arm as more of the small creatures
filled the sky, darting and weaving, a path home before the sun
rose.

He moved closer to her, making her wonder
how deep his protective instincts ran. The whole of Cocorico was a
sanctuary, a place where she needed no protection, a place to which
he’d been brought to be protected, and yet twice he’d put himself
between her and a perceived harm. She only hoped he would let her
do the same for him while he was there.

“You have a lot of bats in paradise, Miss
Caine,” he said, taking the last step necessary to bring his chest
against her back. The warmth of him seeped through her jacket and
T-shirt, and she had to fight the urge to lean into him

“The red bats started arriving last week,”
she said, “migrating south, bringing the island back up to three
confirmed species. A few months ago I found a small carcass on the
beach that looked like a Pallas’s long tongued bat. But there
wasn’t enough left of it to positively identify.” She knew she
sounded like an educational tape on West Indian flying mammals, but
it was hard to sound natural when she was holding her breath to
keep from letting out the sigh building in her throat.

The cloud of tiny animals was passing them
by. She hadn’t realized how tense he’d been until he relaxed his
hold on her and stepped back to his original position.

“Don’t you like bats?” she asked, looking at
him to better gauge his answer. Maybe he’d gotten close to her
because he’d felt threatened. It wouldn’t hurt for her to know his
weaknesses. Not so she could exploit them, but so she could ease as
much of the stress out of his life as possible. He still had some
healing to do.

“I like them fine,” he replied. “But I’ve
never met a woman who did.”

As far as she could see, he was telling the
truth. He’d been protecting her again, not looking for protection
for himself.

“It took me a while to learn to like them,”
she said, a confession she’d only made to Carolina. “I grew up in
the islands, so I was used to bats. I just wasn’t used to having so
many of them live so close.”

“And now?”

“And now I figure God made the bats, even
the strange ones, just like She made all the cute things like
puppies and ladybugs, and all the elegant things like jaguars and
Arabian horses.”

“She?” he repeated in a tone that made a
grin twitch at the corners of her mouth.

“Do you have a problem with that, Mr.
Daniels?” she asked with a guileless glance in his direction.

“Not me.” Jackson couldn’t believe his luck,
or rather the lack thereof. Not only had he been stranded on an
island with his unattainable sexual fantasy, she was a feminist.
There was a lesson to be learned from that, he was sure. Maybe it
was penance for past deeds, though he’d be damned if he could think
of a woman he needed to do penance for. He recalled a few tearful
farewells, but that was part of living. Nobody got through life
without having her—or his—heart broken, without crying for somebody
who wasn’t coming back.

He looked down at the woman sharing the
jetty and the moonlight with him, and he wondered whom she cried
for. He wondered who cried because she wasn’t coming back, and
suddenly he was angry again.

“Don’t you ever want to leave this place?”
he asked, his voice harsher than he’d meant it to be.

The teasing smile faded from her lips, and
he felt like a first-class bastard. She couldn’t have much in her
life, and he’d just stolen her smile.

She shouldn’t let herself be so
vulnerable.

“Well, I do,” he answered when she
didn’t.

“You can’t leave the island,” she said,
turning away from him. “There’s no way off, and if you try to find
a way, or make a way, you’re only going to get yourself hurt.”

“What about you?” he asked. “What’s going to
hurt you? Going to jail for aiding and abetting a criminal? A
kidnapping charge? Or doesn’t it bother you that what you’re doing
is wrong?”

Sugar blanched at his words. She’d let her
guard down, allowed herself to pretend they were two normal people,
and now she was paying the price of feeling betrayed when anyone in
his situation would be a fool not to use her emotions against
her.

Though wide of a legal mark, his accusations
laid open a truth she hadn’t fully acknowledged: However altruistic
she and Shulan considered their actions, he saw only that he’d been
captured and detained. But he was wrong.

“You’re damned ungrateful for a person who
could have been dead by now,” she said, giving him her version of
the situation.

He looked down at her again and laughed, a
self-deprecating sound that grew until she was thoroughly
humiliated.

“It’s true,” she said.

“You call this living?” he replied,
gesturing around himself. “Being holed up on an island full of bats
and surrounded by sharks?” The look he gave her definitely included
her in the description.

“I’m not a bat or a shark.”

“No? Then what are you, Sugar Caine? A
beautiful woman with a strange name who lives all alone in paradise
doing God knows what with her days? Or are you Shulan’s warden, the
keeper of her private penitentiary?”

“This isn’t a penitentiary,” she said,
trying to maintain her equanimity and failing miserably. “It’s my
home, and for the record, I keep damn busy with my days. I have a
job.”

“A job?” he asked, not sounding for a second
as if he believed her.

“Yes.” She didn’t have much, but she did
have work to support herself. She wasn’t a charity case living off
her father, or Shulan.

He was silent for a long moment, looking
down at her with one eyebrow raised in doubt.

“Well?” he finally asked, his question
clear.

“I garden,” she said. “I’m a gardener.”

The silence lengthened uncomfortably again,
until he broke it with a snide remark.

“A hell of a job, I’m sure,” he said, then
climbed down the rocks toward the beach.

Sugar turned her gaze toward the sea,
refusing to feel the hurt he’d inflicted with his casual dismissal
of the one thing she had to keep her going.

The
Mary Sue
slipped past the point, on its way to Kingstown. No doubt it
carried some supplies destined for Cocorico—she was due to restock
both her larder and her laboratory, such as it was—but no regularly
scheduled ferries stopped at Cocorico. Henry was the only one who
brought her supplies and took out her shipments, the small packages
of seeds she harvested from the rare and endangered tropical plants
she cultivated in her gardens. Once a month he also brought
Carolina to stay for a few days. More rarely, her father deserted
his medical practice for a day or two to visit, and even more
rarely, her mother. A few botanists, ethnobotanists, and research
associates had come and gone over the years. She was sure more
would come, and she was just as sure that they all would leave.

Nobody stayed. Nobody.

* * *

Jackson made it all the way to the beach
stairs before guilt got the better of him. He’d behaved like a
jerk. He should go back and apologize, but he could think of few
things stupider than for a captive to apologize to his captor.
Whether she spent her days gardening or not, she was still the one
keeping him on this rock in the middle of nowhere. There had to be
a way off, and until she revealed it to him, she was the enemy, she
and Jen.

That still left the drunk, Henry.

The thought no sooner formed than it
catapulted him into action. He lengthened his stride and took the
stairs two at a time all the way to the top. The old man had had
all night to sleep off his rum. It was time to question him again.
He only had to make sure he didn’t alert Jen. Without a weapon, he
was at the Chinaman’s mercy.

* * *

Sugar wiped at a stubborn tear with the back
of her hand, turning just in time to see Jackson clear the top step
and break into a run for the kitchen cottage.

“Damn,” she muttered, and took off after
him, her tears forgotten in the burst of panic she felt. She knew
what he was up to. Henry.

Minutes later she cleared the cabana
threshold and came to a skidding stop. It was empty. The blanket
she’d given Henry was wadded up into a ball on a caned chair. The
rucksack he always kept with him wasn’t anywhere in sight.

The smell of coffee brought her head around
toward the kitchen, the aroma making her swear under her breath.
Jackson hadn’t had time to make coffee. He hadn’t been that far
ahead of her. Henry must have awakened and made the coffee, and the
two of them were probably in the kitchen talking up a storm. The
old sailor was as garrulous as he was guileless.

Her body tense, she strode into the kitchen,
ready to break up the party. There was no party, though. There was
only one dragon man holding a cup of steaming brew, staring out the
window at the sea with his back to the rest of the room.

“You lied to me again,” he said, not
bothering to turn around.

She scanned the kitchen on her way to check
the pantry. Henry had a sweet tooth. More than once she’d found him
rustling through her grocery supplies, looking for candy or
cane.

The small room was empty.

“He’s gone,” Jackson said as she crossed
behind him, heading for the porch.

“Don’t bother,” Jackson called after her.
“I’ve already checked the whole damn place, and all I found was
Jen.”

She looked anyway, then came back to stand
in the doorway.

“He could he wandering around outside,” she
said “Henry likes to wander.”

“No. Jen got rid of him.”

A shiver of fear rippled down her spine.
“What do you mean?”

“I mean everybody here seems to know how to
leave except me.” He turned and leveled her with an angry gaze.
“I’ve been all over this place tonight. It’s like a damn fortress
with those cliffs, and I haven’t seen so much as a raft for
transportation. How did Henry get away? Fly? Swim? Beam up?”

She wasn’t going to answer his question.
There was only one way out of Cocorico, and Jen had made his camp
in the icehouse that concealed the old pirate’s door.

Jackson swore at her silence and turned back
toward the window. She walked over to the stove and poured herself
a cup of the still-hot coffee. The fragrant steam tickled her nose
as she took her first sip. There were few luxuries in her life.
Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee was one of them.

She looked up at him over the rim of her
mug. He hadn’t moved from in front of the window. Within the
quarter-paned glass—it was the only window that still had glass—the
sun was climbing up into the arch, rimming it with brilliant
light.

“God, you don’t even have a phone or a
radio.” He shook his head in disgust, and his hair swayed in a long
sinuous line from his shoulders to his hips, ebony silk against the
black cotton shirt. “There are no clothes in the laundry except
yours, no clothes in your bedroom except yours. You have one rain
slicker hanging in the cabana and one toothbrush in a cup by the
sink. As far as I can tell, you don’t get mail or pay bills. You
don’t have a canceled check or an invoice anywhere in the
house.”

“You have no right to go through my things,”
she said.

He glanced at her over his shoulder. “Yeah,
well, we’re all pretty damn short of rights around here.”

It was a useless point to argue, Sugar knew.
He was going to do as he pleased, and the only way she could stop
him was to call on Jen. Considering the Chinaman’s methods, she’d
rather deal with Jackson’s searches than have to doctor him up
again. The only things she had to hide were her feelings and the
way out of Cocorico.

“You do have plants, though,” he admitted
with a sigh. “Hundreds of them. Thousands. Probably millions.” He
faced her fully, the barest trace of contrition showing in the
curve of his mouth. “I saw your potting room, or whatever you call
it, off the cabana. I’m sorry about what I said out on the
beach.”

She could have thrown his apology back in
his face, the way he’d done with hers. Vindictiveness wasn’t part
of her nature, though, and she didn’t want another war on her
hands. It was bad enough having him and Jen at each other’s
throats.

“I have close to forty endangered species
I’m cultivating at any one time. All the other plants are
indigenous, or planted for pleasure or eating.”

“It’s still a lot of plants.” The faintest
grin touched his lips again. “It’s like living in an out-of-control
greenhouse.”