My head snapped up. “You what.”
“Staff only. Everyone else got moved down past the rocks.”
I glanced around.
The umbrellas I’d taken for a busy morning suddenly looked very… empty. A couple of distant figures in uniform moved near the edge of the fenced boundary, but the loungers around us were deserted.
“Why,”
“That bikini could start a riot, baby.” His gaze flicked down, unapologetically possessive. “A riot led by me. Those nipples are mine.”
I rolled my eyes behind my sunglasses. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m a Crow,” he corrected. “Ridiculous is standard.”
He started walking, still holding my wrist, steering me toward the private exit cut into the fence. Every few steps his thumb stroked along the inside of my arm.
The drive didn’t take long.
Malice blurred past in pale stone and glass. The ocean stayed on our left, blue and glittering, showing off. This city didn’t understand restraint.
He drove one-handed, the other resting over my knee, thumb tracing slow circles on bare skin. Each pass calmed. My body leaned into the touch while my brain took notes on every red flag anyway.
“You own property here.”
“My cousins run this capital, I’d be an idiot not to have somewhere I can crash when we get called up here.”
“Of course Crows run Malice.”
“We run every capital that matters, angel.”
He said it like weather.
The gates to his place sat at the end of a private road that followed the curve of a cliff. Black steel, an understated crest worked into the design. Security scanned as we approached. The gates swung open before he had to stop.
The house spilled down the cliff in glass and slate. Wide balconies, an infinity pool pouring into the view of the ocean. It looked like a dynasty magazine spread:How to Vacation Like You Own the World.
Some part of me, the one raised on Thorne dinner conversations, logged it automatically. Asset. Status marker. Leverage. The rest of me thought,He brought me here. Me.
He killed the engine in a sheltered carport and came around to my side before I could reach for the handle. His fingers slid to my hip as soon as I stepped down, anchoring me to him in a way that made my nervous system breathe even as my brain hisseddanger.
Inside, it was cool. The main room was all open space and light. Floor-to-ceiling windows framed the water. Minimal furniture. No clutter. A house that could be closed up and left for months, then opened and made livable in an hour.
He tugged the cover-up off my shoulders and tossed it onto the back of a low couch.
Then he turned back, gaze dragging over me in a way that felt like a touch.
It always did, with him. Like he was inventorying something that belonged to him and checking for damage.
He stepped in close, hands finding my waist. His thumbs stroked over my sides, slow, deliberate. My pulse jumped hard enough I was sure he felt it.
“We’re about to work this out. All of it.”
I glanced around at the glass and ocean. “You dragged me across a city to have a feelings summit in a beach house.”
“You dragged yourself into another man’s bed to break up with me. We all make choices.”
His fingers tightened at my waist.
