LITMIR.BIZ

      PROLOGUE

      HE REFUSED to look across the crowd of people dancing beneath the intense, dark Fijian sky, but a frown half hid his hard blue eyes. He resented this awareness, this almost psychic summons, mainly because he was accustomed to thinking of himself as a restrained man, easily able to control the emotions that prowled in the cage he’d fashioned for them five years ago.

      For some reason, tall, slim Jacinta Lyttelton rattled the bars of that cage. It didn’t help that she was completely unaware of her power, or that he didn’t know why the hell she possessed it.

      Ignoring a woman who’d been trying to catch his eye for the past four days, he let his gaze roam to the pillars on the edge of the dance floor.

      Heat gathered inside him. Yes, there she was, clad in one of the neat, not quite fashionable dresses she wore in the evening. She was standing alone and watching the dancers, looking interested rather than wistful.

      The day before, as he’d sat talking to her mother in the shade of the leaning coconut palms, the same insistent tug at his senses had pulled his gaze away from the older woman’s thin, lined face and along the hot white coral sand.

      ‘There’s Jacinta,’ Mrs Lyttelton had said, smiling, her face alight with pleasure.

      To his dazzled, suddenly feral eyes Jacinta had appeared as an embodiment of the fecund extravagance of the tropics, a glowing, sumptuous creature whose hair collected and intensified the sun’s rays, a woman gleaming in the soft, humid air like a spirit of fire and desire.

      An urgent hunger had slowed and thickened his blood. Although he’d tried to summon his usual ironic detachment to combat it, the violent physical reaction swamped both will-power and discipline.

      He’d been disappointed and relieved when she got closer and the fiery goddess turned into an almost plain woman, tall, too thin, her breasts hidden by a large, faded cotton shirt, only her long, lightly tanned legs hinting at that promise of hidden passion.

      Watching her now, he felt his gut clench and his body spring to painful life as he was gripped by the unmistakable burgeoning of desire. Thank God the torches that flamed around the dance floor cast enough shadows to hide his response.

      The flaring light touched her pale skin with fire and licked with adoring incandescence across the aureole of her hair. The previous day she’d worn the thick, tumbling curls pulled back in a practical ponytail, but tonight she’d left it unharnessed, and the bright abundance shouted an invitation.

      Dragging his eyes away, he concentrated his blue gaze on his hand on the table, saw with astonishment the rigid curl of his fingers as he fought for control. Within inches of those dark fingers flowers lay in artful, casual glory—vivid scarlet hibiscus, frilled and suggestive, and the cool, smooth stars of frangipani, their creamy restraint belied by the sweetly pervasive, erotic perfume. He wanted to crush them in his hands—he wanted to pick them up and heap them on a bed for her and take her on it for long, passionate hours until she surrendered completely and eagerly to his will.

      A couple of hundred years ago he’d have believed that Jacinta Lyttelton had bewitched him. Oh, he’d always been susceptible to brilliant colouring, but the women he desired had invariably been beautiful, with a certain mysterious allure that excited the explorer in him.

      Jacinta possessed neither. Skin of translucent ivory and big hazel eyes—even a soft, red, inviting mouth—were dominated by a straight, high-bridged nose and subdued by a round chin. Good legs and delicate ankles and wrists didn’t compensate for the hollows at her collarbone, the angular body. Apart from that astonishing colouring, he thought, trying to be coolly dispassionate, she had no presence.

      His bizarre reaction—the urge to carry her off to the nearest bedroom and stamp his imprint on her so starkly that she never looked at another man—was a sexual aberration, a primitive, freakish eccentricity caused by some delusion.

      Which was just as well, because she had enough to deal with at the moment. One glance had told him that her wheelchair-bound mother was dying. He had no idea why mother and daughter had chosen to stay at this expensive resort hotel in Fiji at the hottest time of the year, but Mrs Lyttelton was enjoying it and the affection between mother and daughter was

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