“You’re a shoo-in,” Dempsey assured him. “If the powers-that-be weren’t impressed, you wouldn’t have been invited down here in the first place.”
They shook hands again, the agent showed him out, and as he returned to the airport, Donovan put all thoughts of the agency and the missing fiancé out of his mind. As he focused instead on the night ahead with Lani, something that felt both good and dangerous at the same time moved in his heart.
14
Lani was on her knees, applying mastic to the back of a piece of horizontal glass tile when she felt someone watching her. Already knowing who it would be, she made an attempt to stay calm but wasn’t able to, and lifted her eyes. The hand she had lifted to rub the back of her weary neck dropped to her side.
“You’re back,” she managed, resisting the urge to leap on him, wrap her legs around his waist, and ride him into the paradise passion pit bedroom.
“I am. I like the tile.” But his warm blue eyes weren’t looking at it. They were looking at her, and his slow smile assured her that even though she was hot and sweaty, he liked what he saw.
“I’m glad.”
“Where did you learn to do all this?”
Seriously? They were going to talk about construction? Now? When her eager ovaries were on the verge of exploding like Christmas luau fireworks? “Makaio Kuala taught me.”
The tension in the air as he continued to look at her was beginning to make Lani’s head throb. “He lives next door to my parents. I sort of grew up over there,” she explained. “The members of my family were always locked away in their various studios, being ultra-creative—Daddy with his horrible paintings, Mother with her sculptures, Nate with his stories—so, feeling like a fifth wheel a lot, I used to go visit Makaio.”
She’d begun to babble. Because, dammit, he still wasn’t saying a single word. Just standing there, eating her up with his deep blue eyes, which were turning to indigo.
“He’s a local contractor; he built all our houses—my parents’, this one, mine. I’m certainly not in his league, but he taught me everything I know. He’s seventy-one years old. And still working.”
“That’s admirable,” he said. “Seems island time leads to long lives.”
“It does.”
They fell silent again. Donovan leaned against the doorframe, his hands jammed into the pockets of his gray dress slacks.
“You know what I said about your suit?”
“You said a lot. None of it very positive.”
“I take it back.” She’d begun fiddling with the razor knife she’d been working with when he’d suddenly arrived. Which, now that she thought of it, was more than a little annoying since she would have liked to have had advance warning so she could’ve bathed, buffed, and polished for him. “You look pretty damn good, Detective.”
“Not as good as you.” His gaze swept over her in that slow, assessing way he had, not like a detective checking out a suspect but like a hot guy checking out a woman he wanted to bang.
And boy, was Lani beyond ready to be banged.
Her mind, which was already clouded with hormones, had been fantasizing about tying him to Nate’s bed with that tie he’d loosened, when the blade slipped in her nerve-and-lust-dampened hand, leaving a gash across the tip of her index finger.
“Damn.” She immediately stuck her finger in her mouth, which caused his eyes to flare. Then, his cop instincts set in as he was by her side in seconds, lifting her off her feet. But instead of carrying her into the bedroom, Rhett Butler style, and having his wicked way with her as she’d fantasized, he sat her down on the toilet and retrieved a Band-Aid from the medicine cabinet she’d recessed into the wall. Then he wrapped the wound, which thankfully hadn’t taken off the tip of her finger because then he’d probably insist on taking her to the hospital, which was more of a clinic her father had established years ago.
When he appeared in no hurry to release her hand, Lani wondered if he could feel her trembling.
“Did you learn anything while you were on Oahu?”
“Yeah. But nothing we need to talk about now. I’d rather talk about you. And all the things I decided while flying to Kauai, then taking the ferry to here that I want to do to you. With you.”
“About time.” She traced his lips with her fingertip. The SpongeBob SquarePants Band-Aid she’d bought as a joke for Nate took a bit away from the sexiness of the gesture, but when he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her, really kissed her (and wow, could Donovan kiss!), hot and hard and deep, with a lot of tongue tangling, as every part of her body began belting out “The Hallelujah Chorus,” she forgot all about Bikini Bottom’s most popular yellow resident.