Blooming in the Wild Page 0,2
phone and look for a game. He’d taken to playing strategy games on his last trip into Asia, with long waits at every airport. His current favorite involved freeing an explorer from a mythical forest full of strange traps in the fewest moves possible—without getting killed, of course.
That was when he saw her—finally. A dark-haired beauty strode down the dock toward them, hips swaying, high heels tapping on the dock. He recognized the red duffel she pulled behind her. It was one of the new lines they’d be testing. He’d never seen the woman before. He would have remembered. She was Hawaiian, but the Honolulu version, from her red stilettos to her little white froth of a suit.
She stopped before him. He rose in one lithe motion.
“’Bout time, Princess,” he drawled.
She cocked her hip, planted one hand on it and looked at him from behind her sunglasses. “Did I keep you waiting? Well then, I’ll have to make up for lost time, yeah?” Her voice was low and clear, and laced with sweet sarcasm.
Letting go the handle of her duffel, she opened the single button of her little jacket and shrugged out of it in one lithe motion. It dropped onto her bag. He just had time to note the red spaghetti-strap tank she wore beneath it when she unfastened her skirt too.
The short garment slithered down, revealing a tiny pair of bikini bottoms, cut high on sloping rounded hips that lengthened into a pair of toned, pretty legs, every inch the color of Hawaiian honey. She stepped out of the skirt and tossed it onto the duffel as well, leaving her standing there in the undies and red fuck-me heels like a contestant in a dockside beauty pageant. She lifted her arms and unfastened her dark hair from the coil high on her head. As she shook her head, her hair slithered down her back in a fall of near-black silk.
Stepping out of her shoes, she wriggled her bare toes on the dock. She had a little red flower thing painted on one of her dainty toenails. His gaze slid back up the line of her legs, over those hips, her small waist and breasts, and up to her face.
The designer shades hid her eyes, but her soft, red lips curved up in a smirk that said she knew he’d been riveted to every move of her little strip show. “Fast enough for you, moke?”
She cocked her head to look past him, and her smile widened into the real thing, flashing white teeth and dimples at the corners of her mouth.
“Hi, Frank. Sorry I’m so late—the meeting ran long.”
Released from his sensual spell, Joel blinked. He sucked in a long breath and shook his head slightly. Damn! He’d stopped breathing about the time her skirt slid down. Of course, her tiny tease of a garment was really a swimsuit, and not the barest one he’d seen in Hawaii. However, the shock of her little strip show had had his mind going further, fast.
He watched in bemused lust and irritation as she bent over, her back to him, to gather up her suit and shoes and bundle them into the duffel. The move presented her heartshaped ass and rounded legs as if she were offering to let him finish undressing her. Yeah, he’d like to run his hands right under those little bottoms and pull them down, letting them drift to her ankles as he slid his fingertips between her thighs and cupped her where she’d be soft and wet and hot.
Her ass was surprisingly lush on her fit body. And that thin top—as she straightened, pulling the duffel toward the boat, the move outlined her breasts. They might be small, but on her they were…ka nani, so pretty, like halves of a ripe papaya.
The captain of the boat, a lean, wiry Hawaiian with silver in his dark hair, grinned back at her, his amusement clear. “Aloha, Bella. Welcome back to Kona.”
“Mahalo. Let me get my bag, and we can get going.”
Going—right. They needed to get going. He was going somewhere, not having hot monkey sex on a public dock. Blowing out a long breath, Joel leaned over and grabbed her duffel, swinging it forward and onto the boat, where it was scooped up by a skinny Hawaiian in a white Hawaiian Dive T-shirt and baggy shorts. Kobe—no, Frank had introduced him as Eddy. The stocky one was Kobe.
Ms. Hawaii’s dark brows scrunched together, a crease between them, but then