Donovans 02 - Jade Island

didn’t pick this boy up. He picked me up. Hard.”
    Grinning, Kyle watched Lianne fight to keep the fish from taking off any more line.
    “Keep the rod tip up,” he told her. “Let the fish fight the rod, not you.”
    “Easy for you to say. This sucker has a mind of its own.”
    Slowly she reeled the fish in closer and closer to the boat. “I can see it. Get the net!”
    “If you can see the fish, it can see the boat, which means—”
    Suddenly line screamed off the reel. Lianne yelped and snatched her knuckles away from the carnivorous handles. The fish headed for Farmer Island, which was a green blur several miles away.
    “Which means the fish will bolt,” Kyle finished with satisfaction. “You’ve got a blackmouth, sweetheart. And it’s big enough to keep.”
    “How do you know?”
    “You can tell a lot about a fish by the way it fights. I’ll bet this one stops taking line real soon, then sits and sulks.”
    She blew her hair out of her face. “I hope so. I feel like I’m trying to reel in a Land Rover.”
    “Want me to take it?”
    “Not on your life,” she said fiercely. “This one is mine.”
    “It must be. This is the wrong place for a salmon, the wrong time, wrong tide, and wrong method. Beginner’s luck beats skill every time.”
    Lianne was too busy trying to get four inches of line around the reel to listen to Kyle’s complaints.
    He judged the tension on the line, the deep arc of the rod, and her tight-lipped determination as she reeled. Or tried to. The salmon was way down deep, sulking over the herring snack that was fighting back.
    He looked at the western sky. Soon the sun would be a blazing orange disk dragging day behind it into theocean’s blue-black night. They might be late getting to the Institute of Asian Communications and Han Seng.
    The idea didn’t bother Kyle a bit.
    “Remember what I told you about pumping the rod?” he asked.
    “No,” she said, panting.
    “Like this.”
    Kyle stepped up behind Lianne, reached around her left side, and put his left hand above hers on the rod. His right hand came around her and eased the butt of the rod until it was snug against her torso.
    “If that hurts,” he said, “brace the rod against your hipbone or the top of your thigh. Honor does it one way and Faith the other.”
    “How do you do it?”
    “Upper-body strength. You don’t have it.”
    “Drop off,” Lianne muttered. “Brawn isn’t everything. Leverage counts more.”
    Kyle grinned and almost nuzzled the nape of her neck. She looked like a determined, grumpy cat. “So use leverage,” he said against her ear. “Like this.”
    He settled the rod butt in the crease between her torso and her left thigh. “How’s that?”
    “Better. Now what?”
    “Pull the rod toward you with your left hand. If you can’t do it with your elbow bent, straighten it.”
    “Leverage,” she said breathlessly, pulling.
    “That’s the idea.”
    She pulled harder, braced herself against Kyle, and pulled again. The rod didn’t move much.
    Kyle wished he could have said the same for his own rod. Surrounding Lianne like a blanket while her sweet little butt rubbed over his crotch was having a predictable and immediate effect.
    “Move your hand up higher,” he said. “More leverage that way.”
    More than her hand moved. Her whole body did. He gritted his teeth and thought about anything but the unintentional, fiercely sexual friction that came every time she changed her position even a bit.
    And she changed it often.
    “Got a good grip on the rod?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Straighten your arm, lean back with your whole body, then quickly lean forward and reel like hell at the same time. I’ll steady you until you get the rhythm.”
    Lianne rocked back, then forward, and reeled like hell, gaining about a foot of line.
    “Again,” Kyle said.
    Breathing hard from exertion, she repeated the maneuver again and again. After a few minutes he was breathing deeply, too, but exertion didn’t have anything to do with it. The smell of her flushed, perfumed skin, the heat of it, the feel of her body rubbing against him from chest to thighs, all added up to the kind of sustained sexual torture he hadn’t endured since his heavy petting days in high school.
    If he had touched her like this last night, he wouldn’t have had the control to let go of her. The only thing that was helping him now was that she was completely focused on the fish rather than on the man who was