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Sometimes when she finished her sunbath, she walked on the beach.
Cutter, who had lain there willing her to come inside for more than an hour, smiled triumphantly when she got up and peered anxiously through the window. He beckoned her inside.
She opened the door, her body flushed from the sun, her smile bright and teasing, her red hair and the dune flowers in it mussed. At the sight of her, a wild rhythm started in his chest.
She met his gaze and looked away. “You have to stop doing that.”
“What?”
Breathlessly, she said, “Looking at me that way.”
“I thought you liked me to.” He got up and moved toward her, trailing his blanket across the bleached pine floor.
“I—I...”
“What’s the matter?”
Frightened, she began backing. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“So—tell.”
“I’m practically engaged to another man.”
“Do you love him?”
The beach morning glories quivered in her hair. The tiny scar beneath her left eye, which was the only blemish on her near-perfect face, whitened. “Of—I’m not sure.”
“So—how do you feel about me?”
Her frantic eyes burned into him the same way her spicy food did.
“I have to know,” Cutter insisted.
“His brother doesn’t want us to marry. He doesn’t think I’m good enough. I—I came here to be alone—To think about Martin and our future together.” Her eyes glistened with unspoken pain as she studied Cutter. “Not for—”
“Not for this.” With one hand Cutter grasped her shoulder. With his other, he caught her red hair and flower petals. His mouth slanted across hers.
Her lips parted hesitantly; he felt her soft, indrawn breath. Next she shocked him by the full heat of her response to his kiss as her tongue slid against his. Consumed by hunger, his arms tightened around her slim waist as she surrendered passionately.
“Cheyenne—”
“No!” She stiffened and drew back. “Please—” She threw the door open and ran.
“Damn,” he muttered, watching her, not following even though he sensed that if he pressed her now, he could win. He was tempted to go after her, to pull her into the sand and seduce her. Then he could tell Martin and advise him that Lords didn’t marry easy women like her.
But three days with her had robbed Cutter of the appetite to destroy her.
She had been so nice to him.
She had saved his life.
Which meant he owed her. Yes. But how much?
Surely not Martin’s future and fortune.
There was a new wrinkle. Cutter now wanted her himself.
Tom, Cutter hesitated—and that wasn’t like him.
Why the hell didn’t he just seduce her?
It was only later that he wondered if he had not sensed the impending danger she would be to his coldly ordered life. To his soul.
But—until he met Cheyenne Rose, Cutter had not known he had a soul.
Until Cheyenne he had glided through life. First as the precocious, brilliant son and dutiful brother. Then as the ruthless businessman who believed that life was about money, not love. He had married; divorced. But ultimately, always—until Cheyenne—he’d been alone, an outcast. Envied and never loved. He had sought admiration. Not love. His loneliness hadn’t mattered—until her.
Arrogant to the core, Cutter was accustomed to the glitter of exotic capitals and the easy pleasures of beautiful women. Long ago, when he had become strong enough to crush his opposition, he had not imagined that anyone, least of all a girl, could ever crush him.
Cutter had lived in many houses and in many foreign lands. He had made many fortunes and had had many women. But nowhere and to no one had he ever belonged, least of all to himself. He spoke many languages, but not one of them was the language of his own soul. He’d had little understanding of those weaker than himself. He had not cared that his younger brother felt jealousy for him instead of love.
And then Cutter had washed up on his island, and she had turned the tables on him by saving his life. His cynical world and all its rules had changed.
Not completely.
Because when she had asked his name, he had lied and said, “Lyon.”
Cheyenne was wearing her bikini and holding her paperback and gauzy cover-up, but she couldn’t work up the nerve to go out on the deck for her daily sunbath.
Because Lyon was somewhere outside.
She couldn’t see him.
Or let him see her.
Lyon had avoided her ever since he’d kissed her yesterday, and she was grateful to him for that.
And yet, somehow, his absence made her think of him even more.
Whenever Lyon came near the house, she kept to Martin’s elegant bedroom with its long windows and dark blue walls and white throw carpets and paintings of the sea.
But she felt miserable and trapped as she stared, with white-knuckled fingers against the shuttered windows, out to the sea and the primroses in the dunes and wondered where Lyon was. She wanted to go out and lie in the sun and listen to the surf and think.
Did she have an hour before he came back?
She wanted to love Martin. Only Martin. Why then did thoughts of Lyon possess her? Why had the dune flowers started to bloom the moment she’d seen Lyon?
This couldn’t be happening.
She couldn’t let it.
All her life Cheyenne had wanted to legitimize herself, to be somebody, to marry someone who was somebody, to have the normal sort of life and family her half sister, Chantal, and so many people were born with and took for granted. To be accepted, valued—
But more than anything, even such a life, Cheyenne now wanted Lyon.
He was a stranger. She knew almost nothing about him.
He was a good listener, but he had revealed very little about himself.
What was he hiding?
He couldn’t hide the fact that he wanted her.
She had felt the hot physical bond almost from the first moment when he’d lain freezing and hurt and helpless on the beach.
Martin must never know.
She shivered in disgust. How could she think like that even for a second?
Because she was illegitimate, everybody in Westville had said she was trash. All her life Cheyenne had tried to live down the taint of her birth. She hadn’t dated because every time she looked at a boy, people said she was as bad and strange as her odd, fast-living mama, Ivory Rose.
As Martin Lord’s wife, everybody would admire her. She could go back to Westville with a grander name than the Wests, her father’s “real family.” Chantal could no longer act so superior. If she, Cheyenne, had her own husband, maybe it would no longer matter that Chantal had married Jack, the young boy whom Chantal’s mother had rescued from the barrio so many years ago. Ever since then, he’d used “West” as his surname.
Before coming to the island Cheyenne had told Martin she hadn’t made up her mind about marrying him. She’d told his odious brother the same thing.
Not that she’d thought there was much to think about. Jack was lost to her forever. Boyish and charming, Martin was the nicest guy she’d met since she’d escaped Westville.
Until Lyon.
A smart girl wouldn’t consider marriage to a stranger who’d washed up on a deserted beach. Even if he had made flowers bloom.
Distracted, she continued to stare outside.
Nothing. Just golden grass and white sand. And endless wildflowers. Yesterday Lyon hadn’t come back all day.
She decided to risk an hour on the deck.
Carefully she tiptoed outside where she took off her gauzy cover-up and swam several laps in the sparkling pool. The water was too cold, so she got out and dried off and lay down on a long white towel.
After a few minutes the warm sunlight drugged her senses.
She didn’t hear him approach.
Suddenly he was just there, blocking the sun—a huge male animal, bronzed and magnificent, his legs thrust widely apart as he loomed over her as if he were a dark giant from a fairy tale.
She twisted her head and looked straight into his starkly handsome face.
And suddenly Martin and all her dreams of a new life vanished.
There was only Lyon. Only this moment and this sharp need. Only this fierce recognition of her other half.
She saw her own desire mirrored in his fiery eyes and for the first time in a long, long time, all the lies she had told and lived since she had run from Westville to Dallas melted away. She didn’t know who he really was, and she didn’t care. His naked, lonely soul reached out to hers and re-created her into some truer self that had longed to exist but had lacked the courage to be until she had formed this incomprehensible bond with him.
Still, when she got up on shaky legs, and he held out her gauzy cover-up, she ran from those outstretched brown hands and from him.
But he had seen the truth in her glowing eyes, or maybe just her desire.
Whatever. He chased her.
Panting, she locked herself inside the patio doors.
But she stood there just inside, expectantly staring at him from behind the shining glass—waiting excitedly.
“Go away,” she whispered even as some deep and truer part of herself challenged him to unthought-of needs and violent deeds.
A huge piece of driftwood that she had found on the beach the first day before the storm and lugged to the deck glistened in the sun at his bronzed feet.
Easily he leaned down and picked up the limb. Then staring into her eager, wide gaze for a long moment, he lifted it high above his head.
Transfixed, she watched as the muscles of his arm bulged before he hurled the wood against the glass, smashing it.
The explosion of zillions of slivered shards of flying glass dazzled her.
Or was it just Lyon?
When he kicked a few shards aside and strode across that ruined threshold, his shoes made crackling sounds in the glass. She just stood there, as frozen and still as a statue while her blood sang with a silent, shocking wildness.
There was no wind, but a powerful force whipped the sea oxeye, sunflowers and sea oats. Suddenly more summer flowers burst forth into bloom.
She knew she should have run and fought and struggled.
But when he seized her and wrapped his body around hers, when his lips came down hard on hers, claiming her in that most basic and eternal way, she could deny him nothing.
She had never existed before his hot mouth made her flame into being just as the dune flowers had.
Nor had he.
Both their lives had been lies.
Nothing on earth—not all the precious dreams and ambitions she had lived on since a child, not even her dream to be as grand as her sister—mattered in the face of Lyon who had become the master of their mutual reality.
Lyon—who was he?
She didn’t know.
She only knew that even as his hands shredded her bikini and tore the bra from her breasts, even as he ripped off his ragged jeans and shirt, she would belong to him forever.
Even if all he ever wanted from her was sex.
