Free Blame It on Paradise by Crystal Hubbard

produced such a visually stunning final product.
    “You’re staring,” Lina said softly.
    “You’re a curiosity.”
    “Am I?”
    “Your hair and your eyes…they’re so unusual for someone with such dark skin.”
    “My hair comes from one of my grandmothers,” she told him. “My skin color comes from the other. She was an Aborigine. She lived with her mum in Australia until she was relocated. She was sent to live with a white Australian family in the Northern Territory when she was eleven. She was fourteen when the family moved to Darwin.”
    Jack kinked an eyebrow. “Relocated?”
    “My grandmum’s father was white. English. Her mother was Aborigine. At the time, the Australian government was concerned about an unwanted third race being created through the intermarriage of Aborigines and Caucasians. Light-skinned or half-caste Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their parents and sent to live in camps. They were schooled, adopted by white families, and later married to Caucasians. The belief at the time was that by the third generation of intermarriage with whites, the Aboriginal blood would no longer manifest itself.”
    “If you can’t kill them, breed them out,” Jack murmured. “It’s an ancient form of genocide.”
    “As you’re seeing now,” Lina smiled, “nature has a way of reasserting herself.”
    Jack stroked her cheek, his thumb moving lightly over her lower lip. “Her work is quite exquisite.”
    “Indeed,” she agreed, studying Jack’s face as intently as he studied hers. She stroked his hair from his forehead and admired the way sleepiness softened the serious set of his features. Lina wondered if the honest, open emotion she saw in his clear gaze was his or a reflection of her own. Jack DeVoy had gotten under her skin in more ways than she’d anticipated. The longer she basked in the light of his eyes, the less secure she felt lying in his arms. “I should go now.” She started to shrug her way out of his embrace.
    “You can’t.”
    She stilled. The lock of her hair slowly slid from her shoulder, and the movement reminded Jack of the dying note of a lovely song.
    “What I mean is…” He cleared his throat to camouflage his sudden anxiousness. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
    “Why?”
    He shifted his head closer to hers on the pillow they shared and spent a long moment pondering his answer. He couldn’t tell her that she was like a narcotic, an exotic, addictive drug that he’d go itchy without.
    “Jack? Why can’t I leave?”
    He rose on his elbow and splayed his hand over her heart. “Because I’m not finished seducing you.”

CHAPTER 5
    Lina woke up to the pale grey of early dawn and the fragrance of flowers on the humid breeze. She rose slightly on her left elbow to peer at Jack, who slept with his back to the patio doors. His shoulder blocked the sleek, Sharper Image mini alarm clock on the nightstand, but judging from the brightening sky, it was about five a.m.
    Time to go, she thought, although her body made no effort to obey the directive.
    She spent a moment watching Jack sleep. She had always considered her lovely little island to be nothing less than paradise, but she had never expected to discover a god walking among the mortals. She lightly stroked her fingers over Jack’s shoulder and arm, along his torso and his waist. The terrain of his sculpted physique was irresistible. He was that rare male creature who had a fantastic body along with the stamina and imagination to make the most pleasing use of it.
    Goosebumps rose on his skin and his muscles twitched when her fingers glided over his abdomen and along the sensitive arrangement of flesh resting on his right thigh. It sprang to rigid life and saluted the new day under Lina’s careful touch. She thought of a dozen creative acts she could have performed to rouse the rest of Jack DeVoy, but her sense of responsibility—and the condom wrappers on the nightstand, the floor, the bathroom sink