By the time the captain announces descent, I am leaning toward the window like a child at Christmas and hating myself for it.
Not a coastline or a mainland edge with roads and ports and cities arranged in sensible relation to one another.
A fucking island.
“Oh, you did not.”
Small enough that my first reaction is disbelief, then amusement so sudden it hits me in the chest like a burst of heat. Green jungle at its spine, pale beaches at the edges, one tidy private airstrip cut into it like a deliberate slash. The sea around it glitters brilliantly in the sun.
There’s something absurdly idyllic about the whole scene, the sort of place men like us usually buy under shell companies and never actually live on because paradise is more useful as a rumor than a reality.
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it.
The jet banks, giving me a better view. There’s a villa visible near the highest point, all white stone and glass, and farther down, tucked close to the trees, what looks like a smaller cottage or guest house.
The place is immaculate. Purpose-built. Expensive in the quiet, insane way that suggests one man with too much money and too much attachment to a bad idea followed it all the way through without stopping for feedback.
He bought the fucking island.
I put a hand over my mouth like that’s somehow going to stop the grin trying to break free and fail completely.
The landing is smooth enough that I barely feel it. My heart, however, has apparently mistaken this for a romantic ambush and starts pounding hard enough to be humiliating.
When the jet taxis to a stop on the strip, I’ve gone from irritated to deeply entertained to something worse, something warmer and far more dangerous.
The door opens, and heat spills into the cabin immediately, rich, salt-thick, and bright enough to feel like a second atmosphere after Rome’s marble. I stand, straighten my jacket out of reflex, and tell myself to at least try to enter this situation with a semblance of kingly dignity.
That plan dies the second I see Nikolaj waiting on the tarmac.
I stop halfway down, and for one profoundly humiliating moment, all coherent thought leaves my body.
I have seen him in many states now. Tuxedos, blood, half-dressed in my bed, shirtless in my kitchen, and leaning over coffee like a very large, very dangerous domestic hallucination.
None of that prepared me for this.
Sun on his skin. Arms bare and tattooed. Those absurdly broad shoulders outlined in a dark tank top that does exactly nothing to hide what he is. Black shorts hanging low on his hips, as if he dressed for the weather and forgot decency exists. Sunglasses hide his eyes and somehow only make him more offensive to my basic self-control.
He tips his face up toward me and grins.
I make it down the rest of the stairs with all the dignity available to a man whose lover has apparently bought an island and chosen to greet him dressed like sin after the gym.
The moment my shoes hit the tarmac, the jet begins to prepare for departure again behind me. I hear the engines deepen.
There’s no support convoy and no swarm of guards. Just sun and sea and Nikolaj looking entirely too pleased with himself.
The jet begins taxiing away behind me. The sound of it swells, then fades, and just like that, we’re alone on a private airstrip in the middle of nowhere with only water and sky and one terrible man between me and any remaining common sense.
I laugh helplessly this time and shake my head at him.
Nikolaj tips the sunglasses down with one finger just long enough to look at me over them. “Problem, Vieri?”
“You actually did it.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. “Told you I could.”
“You bought a fucking island, Nikolaj.”
He shrugs one shoulder like we’re discussing shoes and not geography. “Needed neutral ground.”
