Inside, crystal laughs and money talks and the past breathes between us like a third person no one else can see. He turns his head and finally looks at me as if the last ten years condensed into this second, his pupils a darker storm.
I hold his gaze and try very hard not to remember the greenhouse, and fail exquisitely.
And somewhere under the tablecloth, my treacherous knee tips toward his hand.
“Stop that,” I say, throat tight.
“Then stop changing the script.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“No,” he says, mouth tipping in the smallest, wickedest curve. “But your body is screamingplot twist, princess. And I’m discovering I may be in the mood to oblige you.”
“Please don’t,” I whisper, which isn’tnoand we both hear it.
His jaw flexes like I’ve landed a gloved punch; his pupils go dark and wide, and the hand on my knee tightens with a restrained pressure that sends heat arrowing up my spine. The air between us sharpens, all crystal edges and held breath. For a second he looks like a man who’s just been given permission to pillage and is deciding which ruin or treasure to start with.
“I like hearing you beg,” he says, voice honey-glazed gravel. “It’s been ten years, six months and…” He glances down at his watch with a deliberateness that makes my lungs forget their job. My mouth parts. I hate that I’m waiting. That I want the number carved into something that isn’t my chest. That I want him to have counted every single second since he walked away. Then he looks up, flashes that white, merciless smile. “Sadly, I don’t recall the days, hours, or minutes.”
My disappointment is a flare I can’t stamp out fast enough.
It must flicker across my face, because he sees it and the corner of his mouth lifts like he’s just solved an equation.
“Don’t pout, Naomi,” he murmurs. “You’re not the only one who counts.”
“I’m not—I didn’t—” I start, then pause at the clever double-entendre. Before I can conjure up a sharp reply, he steals it, leaning in with an ease that reads as inevitability, his mouth sealing over mine in a kiss that is all claim and no question.
The ballroom keeps turning and the quartet lilts. Someone laughs too loudly near the terrace doors; a camera flashes white. I can’t move. I can’t slap him. The table is the ultimate stage and we’re on it, and I tell myself I’m enduring this because it’s the deal I signed, because optics are oxygen, because the trust board loves a love story. And I signed on the dotted line, saved my grandfather from ruin and humiliation, just for this.
But…oh God,thisis incredible.
He tastes faintly of dry champagne and something darker underneath—mint and heat and the ghost of a promise I sworeI’d forgotten. His hand is a brand at the small of my back and as it climbs, guiding the angle and distance, his thumb still a slow stroke on my knee under linen as if he owns the geography of me from two directions at once.
The kiss is precise and devastating, with enough tongue and teeth to drown me in sensation I haven’t felt since…dammit, him!
It’s not deep enough to scandalize but deep enough to undo and awaken, a slow press and part that turns my bones to liquid and the chandelier to blur. The ring flashes between us like a star trapped in my fist; his breath skims my cheek; the world narrows to the drag of his lower lip and the way he inhales like he’s relearning how.
“You taste…incredible,” he rasps in my ear.
And that melting intensifies.
When he eases back, barely…cruelly, he doesn’t go far. His forehead almost touches mine in a gesture of false intimacy. We’re still close enough that I feel the shape of his next words before he speaks them, close enough that the lighthouse beam sweeps the window behind him and makes a halo where there shouldn’t be one.
“Careful,” he says softly, eyes fixed on my mouth as if he’s not finished. “You look intoxicatingly disappointed when I stop, too. Keep looking at me like that and I’ll be forced to say to hell with these people and the small print you insist on.”
I’m breathing like I ran the length of the whole island in these impossible heels. Heat rises at the back of my neck. My pulse is a drum I can’t quiet. I try to summon the fury that keeps me upright; it arrives, but it’s threaded with something traitorous and molten and old as the island.
“This is for show,” I manage, hating the shake I hear. “Don’t mistake it for anything else.”
“If you say so.” His thumb sketches one last outrageous line over the inside of my knee before he withdraws his hand, the ghost of his touch lingering like the afterimage of lightning. He turns to the room with a benign, mildly smug smile, as if he hasn’t just set me on fire in public.
Applause rolls from the far side of the ballroom for some speech I didn’t hear. I lift my glass with an unsteady hand and take a sip to cool a mouth that isn’t cool, telling myself stories about strategy and survival and optics, telling myself that if such kisses are currency then I’m just balancing books.
But as the lighthouse blinks and the bay breathes and he rests his knuckles against the stem of my glass like a private promise, I know I’m lying to myself.
I know I’m in trouble with this man.
I know these feelings for Vasso Dillinger didn’t return tonight because theyneverleft, and I am terrified that they never will.
