He eats slow, watches sharper. “Remember when you told me you were going to run this island one day?”
“What does it matter?” I say, and the words are a knife with no place to go. “You won. Can’t we leave it at that?”
He smiles, and I find myself searching for the dimple hidden within the maddeningly sexy five o’clock shadow he sports. I drag my far too reluctant gaze away as he responds, “No, I’ve only just started and we have so very much to talk about.”
I purse my lips as he continues, laying down what my new life is going to be like.
By the time coffee appears, dark and glossy in cups that probably have a provenance longer than some marriages, my nerves vibrate like wires plucked by an unkind hand.
He looks at me like we are alone in a room crowded with ghosts and chandeliers, like he can feel the exact second my breath hitches, like he knows I can feel the ring he slid on my finger pulsing with its own cold heartbeat.
I set my cup down, lift my napkin, place it on the plate with surgical care. “It’s been a long day, Vasso. I’m going to bed. Goodnight,” I say, crisp as starched linen, and I stand before he can trap me in another memory that tastes like honey and sticks like tar.
“Run, then,” he says softly, not moving, and the worst part is he doesn’t sound triumphant, he sounds certain.
But I don’t give him the satisfaction of running.
I walk, spine a steel rod I forge with each step, through the gallery where the sea is a vast living painting, up the floating staircase and along a corridor that smells faintly of cedar and shiny new money, into the bedroom that overlooks the cove I used to claim as mine, the one that now throws back moonlight as if it, too, belongs to him.
I tell myself I’m going to read. I tell myself I’m going to shower until the hot water scrubs off the night. I tell myself a hundred small lies as if I have control when I have none.
And I’m in old cotton robe when the knock comes. My heart kicks into my throat, partly stopping my voice, but partly paralyzing me.
A second knock comes, then the door opens.
He walks in like he owns the air, like he owns me, like this house and this room is an extension of his reach.
“Do you understand the word privacy, Vasso?”
“I knocked,” he says lazily, voice brushing over my skin like smoke. “You didn’t answer.”
“That usually means ‘go away.’”
He ignores the boundary because of course he does. Vasso Dillinger meets fences the way the sea meets the shore—by erasing them a fraction at a time until you don’t remember where anything used to be.
“What do you want?” I ask, setting down the book I’m not reading and crossing my arms, which is ridiculous because my heart knows he isn’t a man you can barricade with wrists and elbows.
He closes the door with a soft click that sounds like a trap springing, and the part of me that still believes in omens makes a small, helpless sound. “To finish the talk we didn’t at dinner.”
“Talk,” I repeat, because the word means so little when his eyes are doing this, when they’re stripping, cataloging, remembering.Burning. “About what?”
“About the fuller terms of our… arrangement.” He takes his time, lets the word warm in his mouth until it almost sounds like something else. A caress. A sorcerer’s savored curse. “You think you know them all. You don’t.”
“You already got everything you wanted,” I say, and the bitterness in my voice could etch glass. “Your island. Your trophy. Your revenge.”
He moves toward me, slow and deliberate, making a study of distance and erasing it by degrees. He’s changed too, I note reluctantly, looks effortlessly hot and breathtaking in a black silk robe, his hair—always worn longer than boardroom convention dictated—sexily tousled by his long fingers.
I’m struggling not to stare at the gap baring his bronzed throat and silky hair dusted chest when he speaks. “Not everything.”
My pulse stutters, betrays me, lifts itself like a fledgling that can’t decide whether to fly or die. I step back on instinct, and the edge of the bed catches my knees.
Vasso doesn’t stop but he doesn’t crowd either.
He merely occupies the space my breath thought was safe until the scent of him—sandalwood and fury and the devilish patience of a man who knows he has the power, and exactly what to do with it—threads my head with heat and chaos.
“If you would’ve waited a few more minutes, I would’ve told you,” he says, and the smugness is there but tempered by purpose, “that the notary ceremony today was merely insurance, a lock on the back door while we walk through the front.”
I frown. “The front? Meaning?”
