Jaimie: Fire and Ice (The Wilde Sisters 2)

There was a staff. A cook, a housekeeper, a groundskeeper. Jaimie and Zacharias saw them once, when they arrived on the island by boat, and never again. There were always delicious meals in the fridge, the rooms—all open to the sea and sun—were spotless, and the grounds were manicured, but the staff seemed to understand their need for privacy and came and went as if under a cloak of invisibility.

The villa had four bedrooms.

They tried them all. Selected one and made it their own. It was where they took long, luxurious afternoon naps, where they spent the long, wonderful nights in each other’s arms. It was where Jaimie hung all her new clothes after Zach pointed out that she had to let him buy her new things because the jeans, sweaters and jacket she’d brought with her weren’t really suitable for sunny, hot days and moonlit, warm nights.

They went to Nassau, on New Providence island, where the elegant boutiques on Bay Street rivaled those of Milan and Paris and New York.

Zach bought everything Jaimie so much as touched until she figured that out and stopped touching.

After that, he bought her everything she looked at.

“I want to,” he kept saying, and she ended up with bikinis and long cotton sundresses and shorts and T-shirts and scarves and sandals. She told him that the boat he’d sailed them in would surely sink under the weight of so many packages and boxes and bags.

The boat, of course, would never have done anything so plebian.

It was a brand new J/88 and before setting sail, she had let him tell her all about sailing; she even let him show her how to cast off and she’d listened patiently to him explain that the ropes on a boat were properly called lines, but once they were at sea, the wind shifted and before he could say anything, she trimmed the jib.

“You know sailboats,” he said.

Jaimie admitted that she did. “I learned to sail the summer I was ten.”

“In Texas?”

The stark disbelief in those words made her laugh. She shoved back her wind-tossed hair and told him that she and her sisters had spent a month at a camp in Maine that summer while their father was there on some kind of presidential staff assignment, and then she looked at him and frowned.

“When did I tell you I was from Texas?”

Zach felt the world stand still. She hadn’t; they’d never talked about where either of them had grown up. He knew she’d been born and raised in Texas because he knew two of her brothers, but she didn’t know that.

This was his opening. It was the right time to confess everything. It would be hard; she would be upset. She’d push him away, and his job was to protect her.

He went for sounding like a guy who’d either forgotten a conversation or made a good guess.

“I don’t remember,” he said, “Or maybe you gave things away with that accent.”

For a tiny fraction of time, he could almost see the logical part of her brain turning over his answer, examining it from every direction.

Then she fluttered her lashes

like a perfect southern belle.

“You are wrong, suh. I do not have an accent of any kahnd whatsoevah.”

He laughed, and she laughed, and the part of his brain that was sly and reptilian warned that he couldn’t expect to pull this off forever. Sooner or later, his men would catch Young in the act, and she could press charges.

When that happened, he would have no choice but to confess everything.

Then what?

Protecting her was one thing, but it wasn’t the real reason he was afraid for her to know the facts.

If there was one thing hot days and warm nights alone with Jaimie had done, it was to make him admit that she mattered to him.

He wanted more of this, whatever this was.

And he wasn’t sure he could ever walk away from it.

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