Page 1 of Forbidden Hawaiian Nights
CHAPTER ONE
MAX STOWE LISTENED to his brother’s voice down the end of a telephone line thousands of miles away and did his utmost not to cut short the placatory monologue, which was designed to defuse the situation but was having the opposite effect.
James was currently in Dubai, dealing with the final nuts and bolts of the state-of-the-art eco-super-yacht they had commissioned to be hand-built a little over a year ago.
He, on the other hand, was here, staring out from the balcony of his hotel at a long strip of beach, mentally working out the approach he would take to discover the whereabouts of their wayward sister, who had done a midnight flit with only a brief goodbye and ‘Don’t worry about me’ delivered via text message.
Who, Max wondered, had got the better deal?
Jaw clenched, handsome features rigid with the simmering tension that had had ample time to build on the long and exhausting flight to Hawaii, he cut short the conversation and slipped his mobile back into his trouser pocket.
The glorious view was completely lost on him. He had already had a shower but out here, standing on the broad balcony, he was still baking hot and uncomfortable.
And he was in a foul mood.
Under any other circumstances, heads would have rolled for this. He was as fair as the next man, but you didn’t get to be at the top of the food chain by accepting incompetence and unreliability.
Unfortunately, these were far from normal circumstances, and with a sigh of frustrated resignation he spun round and headed back into the coldly air-conditioned penthouse suite of the five-star hotel.
Izzy. His sister. Where the hell was she? He knew where she wasn’t and that was here, in Hawaii, doing what she was being paid handsomely to do.
Max refused to succumb to dark thoughts and alarming hypothetical scenarios. He was a man finely honed when it came to dealing with facts and adept at finding solutions to problems as they arose. Izzy’s disappearance was simply a problem and he intended to find a solution to it. He knew exactly what road he was going to take to get where he wanted to go.
He glanced at his watch. It was four-thirty. The sun was beginning to dip outside, even though the heat continued unabated. On that beach, somewhere, lay the answer to this situation in the form of one Mia Kaiwi, age twenty-seven, height five-six, occupation landscape gardener and jack-of-all-trades at the boutique hotel he was currently having built on Oahu.
Two days ago, he had received his sister’s text. Two days ago, he had communicated with Nat, the foreman in charge of the project, to find out what the hell was happening. And two days ago he had found out that, while neither Nat nor his sidekick Kahale seemed to have the foggiest idea where his sister had gone, her close friend, Mia, would.
It had taken him twenty-four hours to close various deals he couldn’t possibly leave half finished. During that time, Max had resisted the temptation to get one of his people to track his sister down. It would have been easy enough, but he would wait until he could confront the best friend and get the information he needed from that source himself.
Weighing in with a heavy hand might win the battle but it wasn’t going to win the war.
But, hell, this was the last place he wanted to be—waiting for five o’clock to roll round so that he could walk the crowded strip of beach in search of some woman he didn’t know. A woman who, according to Nat, would reliably be found teaching surf lessons to kids, which was what she did like clockwork every Saturday afternoon between three and five.
He’d given orders that she was not to be alerted to his arrival. No time to do a runner or to rehearse any non-answers to his questions. No, he intended to surprise the woman into telling him what he wanted to know. Once he’d done that, he would allow himself the grand total of four days to sort out this thorny and inconvenient business so that he could return to London to pick up where he had left off with his fast paced, no-time-to-breathe life.
He would unearth his sister from wherever she was hiding, find out what the hell was going on, remind her of the easy ride she had been given—even if he had to write it down for her in bullet points—and get her back on track.
And he would do it in as non-judgemental a manner as he could possibly muster, even though he was genuinely having a hard time grasping her immaturity at taking off without warning.
Fifteen minutes later, he hit the beach at an easy pace. He’d packed the bare minimum of clothes because he anticipated a speedy return to London. Shorts had not featured. He possessed none. Right now, as he began strolling along the long and extremely crowded arc of sand, he was beginning to regret the lack of them because he was sweltering, even though the sun was beginning to set with dramatic splendour.
He walked slowly, eyes narrowed, missing nothing. The beach was emptying out and it was more beautiful than he had first thought. The ocean was darkening from rich turquoise to deep navy and the buildings behind him, of which his hotel was one, were beginning to twinkle as lights were switched on.
The air was filled with voices, bursts of laughter and the revving of motorbike engines.
And then there she was. Unmissable, as Nat had said. She was stacking surfboards, her movements fast and graceful, and she was so slender that she looked as though a puff of wind might blow her over. Her hair was tied up in a ponytail and she was surrounded by a bunch of excited kids. Surf for Kids. The sign was almost obscured by the upright arrangement of surfboards.
She was laughing and barefoot, wearing a bikini top and a sarong that dipped just below her belly button. When the last of the kids was led away she immediately slipped on a baggy tee shirt, consulted the over-sized watch on her wrist and began heading away, having roped the surfboards together and padlocked them.
Max quickened his pace. He was here to do a job and, the quicker the job got done, the quicker he would be able to leave.
Mia sensed Max behind her with a sort of sixth sense she had developed over the years. She had become accustomed to blowing off men who tried to chat her up. Here on the beach blowing off men was as irritating as swatting flies and she wasn’t in the mood for it. She was never in the mood for it, and she particularly wasn’t in the mood for it this evening.
She spun round without warning and stood back, arms folded, determined to give whoever it was a piece of her mind.
Her eyes travelled from the bottom up. From loafers and long silver-grey chinos, to the white polo shirt with the tiny black logo on the pocket, and up, up until her brown eyes collided with eyes very much the colour of the ocean as it was now—deep, dark and fringed with the thickest of lashes she had ever seen on a man.
The man was stupidly, sinfully drop-dead gorgeous, from the perfectly sculpted, lean features to the imposing beauty of his muscled body, which not even his idiotically inappropriate clothing could conceal.
