Like it doesn’t need to seduce you because it already knows it can.
The lobby glows in amber light and polished stone. Everything smells faintly of cedar and sea salt and money. My hand stays locked in Tristan’s the entire time we check in, and that alone feels intimate enough to make my pulse misbehave.
He signs something.
The concierge smiles in that perfectly discreet way luxury staff do when they absolutely clock the chemistry between two people and decide professionalism is the better part of survival.
A key card changes hands.
A porter appears and vanishes.
I barely track any of it.
Because Tristan’s thumb keeps brushing over my knuckles, absent and possessive at once, and every time it does my body remembers that private plane, his lap, his mouth, the way he kept stopping just short of where I wanted him most.
Then we step into the suite.
And I actually stop walking.
“Tristan.”
The room is outrageous.
Not hotel-nice.
Not college-kid fantasy nice.
Ridiculous.
A living area wrapped in glass.
A fireplace already lit.
Cream upholstery, dark wood, fresh flowers, a bottle of sparkling water chilling in silver.
Beyond that, open doors to a terrace suspended over the cliff, where a private outdoor hot tub steams against the cold Atlantic air like it was placed there specifically to tempt the weak.
Which is rude.
Because I am weak.
I walk toward the terrace in a daze, Tristan’s hand still clasping mine, and the wind immediately kisses my cheeks pink. Below us, the beach curves away in pale moonlit sand. The water crashes dark and endless against the rocks. Twinkling lights are strung along the railing and wound through the potted evergreens like some rich person’s idea of understated romance.
I turn slowly and point at the hot tub.
“You put me in a room with a private outdoor hot tub overlooking the ocean?”
His mouth curves.
“I put us in a room with a private outdoor hot tub overlooking the ocean.”
My heart does something catastrophic.
“It’s freezing.”
He steps in behind me, close enough that his chest brushes my back, close enough that all I can smell is him and salt air and the faint woodsmoke drifting from somewhere below.
“And yet,” he murmurs near my ear, “I had a feeling you’d still notice the hot tub first.”
