The second kiss happened on the flight back from Miami, which I haven’t mentioned yet because I’ve been trying very hard to pretend it didn’t happen. After the elevator, after the “I’ll give you a week” that was still ringing in my ears like a detonation, Ruby appeared from nowhere (the woman has a sixth sense for post-crisis logistics) and ushered me back to the plane. I sat in my seat. I stared at the window. I didn’t look at him.
For approximately forty-five minutes.
And then, somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, he said my name. Just my name. “Zia.” And I turned, because I’m apparently incapable of not responding when he says my name in that voice, that low, intimate voice that makes two syllables sound like a confession, and he was right there, closer than I expected, and before I could form the wordsYour Highness, we need to discuss boundaries,his mouth was on mine.
Brief. Soft. Gone before I could even decide whether to kiss him back, which I did, which I didn’t mean to, which my lips apparently decided entirely on their own.
He pulled back and returned to his tablet like nothing had happened.
I spent the rest of the flight pressing my fingers against my lips and staring at the clouds and questioning every life choice I’d ever made.
Kiss number three was this morning. Monday. Day two of the week. I was at my desk at 8:47, early, as always, because punctuality is the one thing in my life I still have under control, when the air in the design wing changed the way it always does when he’s nearby. That shift in pressure. That gravitational pull. I looked up from my screen and he was there, standing at the entrance to my section like he had every right to be on the fourteenth floor at 8:47 in the morning.
Which, technically, he did.
“Your Highness,” I managed, and my voice did that thing where it tried to be professional and came out breathless instead. The entire design wing was watching. The whole company had been watching me since the L’Alliance Today headline dropped, their gazes ranging from curiosity to awe to the particular wide-eyedconfusion of people who couldn’t fathom how the girl who ate onigiri at her desk had ended up engaged to their boss.
Join the club. I couldn’t fathom it either.
“Walk with me,” he said.
It wasn’t a question.
I walked with him, because what was I going to do, say no to the Prince of Atlantis in front of my entire department? He led me to the corridor outside the design wing, quiet, empty, the early morning light falling through the floor-to-ceiling windows in long amber strips, and stopped.
“You haven’t been eating breakfast.”
I blinked. “What?”
“You arrive every morning at 8:47. You go directly to your desk. You begin working immediately. You don’t eat until noon, and even then, it’s...” He paused, as if the words caused him physical discomfort. “Onigiri.”
Two things struck me at once.
First: the Prince of Atlantis knew what I ate for lunch.
Second: the Prince of Atlantis was offended by what I ate for lunch.
“Onigiri is a perfectly balanced—”
“There will be breakfast delivered to your desk each morning beginning tomorrow. And lunch.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Zia.”
There it was again. My name in his mouth. Two syllables that shouldn’t have the power to make my knees unreliable, but did, because nothing about this situation followed any rules I understood.
And then he kissed me.
Right there in the corridor. 8:52 in the morning. The amber light falling around us like something out of a scene I’d read in one of the paperbacks on my windowsill, except in the books the heroine always did something empowered like push him away or demand answers, and what I did was make a small, startled sound against his lips and then stand very still while his mouth moved over mine with that same thorough patience, that same gentle restraint that whisperedI have all the time in the world and I’m willing to spend every minute of it convincing you.
When he pulled back, I was gripping the edge of my tablet so hard the case was creaking.
“Breakfast,” he murmured, as if the kiss had been a punctuation mark and the sentence was about nutrition. “Tomorrow.”
And he walked away.
He just walked away, back straight, stride even, disappearing around the corner like a man who had not just short-circuited every neuron in my body with a kiss that lasted approximately four seconds and ruined me for at least the next four years.
