I push open the door and flip on the light. The apartment is exactly as I left it: small, clean, and almost aggressively basic.
“Home sweet home.” My tone holds the edge that means I’m trying to hide behind bravado. “The good news is the commute takes roughly five seconds.”
From the doorway, Jeremy’s gaze slowly travelsacross the space. He takes in the bare walls and the milk crate Winnie considers a rustic end table. Molly brought me the plant on the windowsill that I’m bound to kill. I watch his face for the inevitable judgment when he realizes exactly how far I’ve fallen from the polished woman with the designer bags and French-tipped manicures.
That woman feels like a stranger, and I don’t really miss her.
“Avah.” His voice is low.
“Look, I know it’s not?—”
“I can’t see anything but you.”
The words pour over me like honey. I open my mouth to deflect with a cutting observation about how he’d better get his eyes checked, but he’s already closing the distance between us. As the door clicks shut behind him, the apartment suddenly feels intimate in a way that makes my knees weak.
“You’re ridiculous.” My hip hits the kitchen counter even though I don’t remember moving.
“Probably.” His hands anchor me in place. “I’ve been called worse, by you specifically.”
“I have an elaborate vocabulary.”
“I noticed.” His mouth brushes my jaw, and I feel the words more than hear them. “It’s one of my favorite things about you.”
The laugh that escapes sounds breathless to my own ears as Jeremy’s lips trace a path from my jaw to the hollow behind my ear. My fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt, searching for something solid to hold on to while the rest of me threatens to melt into a puddle on the scuffed floor.
“I should offer you a drink.” The words come out unsteady. “Like you’re a proper guest. I have tap water and this morning’s coffee.”
“Avah.” He pulls back just enough to meet my eyes, and the mix of desire and patience I see there makes my breath catch. “Tell me to stop, and I’ll stop.”
I should. Every self-protective instinct I’ve spent years honingis screaming that I’m too raw and too vulnerable and too freshly out of the wreckage of my last relationship to be letting anyone this close. We aren’t in paradise anymore. Skylark is my real life, and Jeremy could buy this building and the block it sits on and probably half the town if he wanted. That kind of power should send me running in the other direction.
Instead, I reach up and trace the line of his jaw, his stubble scratchy against my fingertips.
“I don’t want you to stop.”
He drags his mouth along my skin like he’s been waiting to do this since that morning I left the island. And I arch into the contact like I’m starving for it.
Maybe I am.
He reaches around to unzip my dress, then pushes it off my shoulders and down my body. I’m wearing a plain black bra and cotton panties underneath. Nothing fancy—I wasn’t planning on anyone else seeing it—but Jeremy’s gaze darkens like I’m a lingerie model.
“Christ, Avah.”
“I know you’ve seen bras before. Hell, my bikini top covered less.”
His thumb traces the edge just above the curve of my breast, a touch so light it borders on cruel. “But this is real life. Mine, and more importantly, yours.”
The distinction knocks something loose in my chest, because he’s right. If Bora Bora was a fantasy fever dream, this is real, and I’m choosing it regardless.
His mouth finds my collarbone as his hands work the clasp of my bra. The fabric falls away, and his lips trail lower, mapping the territory of my skin with the focus of an ancient cartographer. I thread my fingers through his hair to ground myself as a sound escapes my throat that I refuse to call a whimper.
His hands slide down and hook into my underwear. “These too?”
“Yes.”
He tugs them over my hips, cotton pooling at my feet. And suddenly, I’m standing in this basic-bitch apartment completely naked while a billionaire goes to his knees in front of me on the scuffed linoleum floor. It feels more inevitable than absurd, like we’ve been moving toward this since the moment he picked me up from that lounge chair in paradise.
With a low growl, Jeremy squeezes my ass cheeks, his thumbs tracing the jut of my hipbones. He looks up with an expression I can’t quite read. “I need to taste you, Avah. Now.”
