Forced proximity. Tighter quarters. No conference rooms to retreat to, no parking garages to stand in while I fell apart. Just the ocean, the work, and a man I’d kissed in a blue-lit room and then told it meant nothing.
I nodded professionally. “I’ll have the equipment prepped and briefing materials ready by Saturday.”
He nodded back. We didn’t make eye contact.
Monday. Three p.m. The Gulfstream waited on the tarmac, white and gleaming in the afternoon sun.
Jason was practically vibrating with excitement beside me as we crossed the airfield. “Is this real? Are we actually getting on a private jet?”
“It’s transportation,” I said, echoing words I hadn’t heard Asher say but somehow knew he would have.
He was already aboard. Of course he was. Seated in the main cabin, jacket off, reviewing documents, a glass of water untouched on the table beside him. He looked up when I stepped through the door and our eyes met for the first time in four days.
Four days of Ms. Winters. Four days of professional distance so carefully maintained it felt like a performance. Four days of me getting exactly what I’d asked for and wanting to set it all on fire.
“Right on time,” he said.
“Punctuality is a virtue.” My voice came out steadier than I felt.
The interior was obscene—leather, polished wood, screens, a conference area in the back. I chose a seat across from him because it was the logical configuration and absolutely not because it was the closest I’d been to him since the morning I’d wrecked everything.
Jason dropped into a seat across the aisle, already pulling out his laptop. “This is amazing,” he said to no one in particular.
The engines hummed to life. I pulled a technical report from my bag and opened it on my lap. Page one. Acoustic deterrent frequency analysis. Words I’d read six times already.
I stared at the same paragraph for twenty minutes.
The problem wasn’t the report. The problem was that Asher was six feet away, and I could smell his cologne—something clean and warm that I’d first noticed at the bar and then again in the simulation chamber when his mouth had been on my neck—and his hands were resting on the table as he read, and I knew exactly what those hands felt like threaded through my hair.
He turned a page. I watched his fingers. Then I hated myself and looked out the window.
The Pacific was falling away beneath us, all that blue stretching to the horizon, and his reflection was ghosted in the glass. I could see him without looking at him. Could trace the line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders, the way he held his pen like it owed him something.
He glanced up. Our reflections met in the window. I didn’t look away fast enough, and neither did he.
Then he went back to his documents. And I went back to pretending to read a report I’d memorized three days ago.
Somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, Jason fell asleep. The cabin was quiet except for the engine hum and the occasional rustle of paper. Asher hadn’t spoken to me since takeoff. I hadn’t spoken to him. The silence between us was so loud it had a texture—heavy, charged, full of everything we weren’t saying.
I turned another page I hadn’t read and thought about his hands.
Outside the window, the sky was turning gold and pink above the clouds, the kind of sunset that would look beautiful from a beach in Honduras. From his beach. Where I’d be sleeping under his roof, working in his space, breathing air that smelled like whatever he smelled like when he wasn’t wearing a suit.
I’d told him it was a mistake. I’d told him it wouldn’t happen again. And now I was on his plane, heading to his island, sitting six feet from a man whose hands I couldn’t stop thinking about,pretending to read a report about acoustic frequencies when the only frequency I was tuned to was his.
It was going to be a very long two weeks.
11
ASHER
The salt air hit me before the plane door was fully open, and for a moment I was twenty-three again, stepping off a charter with Tommy beside me, both of us sunburned and stupid with excitement about the dive we’d planned for the next morning.
I gripped the handrail and breathed through it. Ten years. The island didn’t know that. The island smelled exactly the same—brine and frangipani and the diesel exhaust from the airstrip—and my body responded to those smells the way it always had, with a complicated cocktail of love and grief that no amount of distance had been able to dilute.
“You OK?” Mike asked, low enough that only I could hear.
“Fine.”
