“—the shave ice had melted into lukewarm pineapple slush.”
“It’s the thought that counts.” His kiss started out sweet but quickly morphed into wild and demanding.
When he finally released her, she gazed up at him, her body buzzing, her mind in a whirl. “We’re not teenagers any more.” But her protest was half-hearted, and Dillon knew it.
“The chemistry’s the same,” he said with another of those wicked smiles. Then he tossed her over his shoulder and headed for the gazebo.
“Hey! Put me down!”
“All in good time,” he said and smacked her bottom. “Quit squirming. I don’t want to drop you on that pretty head.”
No, getting dropped on her head didn’t sound like much fun, whereas . . . She tugged his shirt free of his jeans and splayed her hands out over the warm skin of his back.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Just checking things out,” she said.
“Then turnabout’s—” he slid a hand between her thighs “—fair play.”
Benches lined seven of the eight walls of the octagonal gazebo. Dillon deposited Noelani on the red-and-white flowered cushions of the bench opposite the entrance.
“Oh, right,” she said in mock annoyance. “Get a girl all worked up, then just dump her.”
He kicked off his shoes and stripped off his shirt and jeans.
Noelani gazed at him, her eyes huge and luminous. “We’re really going to do this, aren’t we?”
“We really are,” he said, then sat down beside her and started to remove her clothes, a job that turned out to be more difficult than anticipated when her lacy pink bra got snagged on her necklace.
“Don’t pull,” she said. “You’ll break it.”
“The bra?” he asked, then realized what she was talking about when the pendant suddenly came free. A tiny horse’s head carved from koa wood, dark against the skin of her breast, hung from a chain around her neck. “You kept that trinket? All these years?”
“You made it,” she said. “It was all I had left of you.”
“But you thought I’d forgotten you. You must have hated me.”
She shook her head solemnly. “Never. Did you hate me?”
“I tried,” he said honestly, “but the minute I laid eyes on you in the Shamrock, I knew I hadn’t succeeded.”
“Lucky for me.”
“Lucky for us.” He kissed her, tenderly at first, and then with increasing passion. They made love in a delicious tangle of limbs, playful and intense by turns, and when they were both sated, basking in the afterglow, he repeated, “Lucky for us.”
Noelani studied Dillon’s face in the flickering shade of swaying palms and royal poinciana trees, her expression solemn. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” He brushed a thumb across her full lower lip. “So why so serious?”
“I don’t understand why she did it. Grandmother, I mean. She banished me to boarding school and confiscated your letters. She must have known the hell I was going through. I thought she loved me.” She hesitated. “Do you think that’s why she killed herself ... to atone?”
“No.” His heart clenched at the expression on her face. “I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t your fault.”
“Then why? Why suicide?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe we never will, but—” he shoved himself to his feet “—we still have three-quarters of the attic to search. We may find a clue yet.”
“Maybe.” Noelani started to sit up. “Ouch!” She snatched back the hand she’d been using to lever herself up. A trickle of blood ran down her palm.