“Though if your version of boring still involves island purchases, I reserve the right to complain.”
“You can complain all you want.”
“That sounds suspicious.”
“It should.”
I kiss him then, because if this island is going to be ours, I intend to start using it properly. His mouth opens to mine immediately, familiar and warm and unhurried in a way that makes something deep in me finally understand what free might mean after all.
Not safety. Not forever. Not the absence of danger.
Just this.
A place where I can kiss Nikolaj in open light and hear no footsteps coming to stop me. A place where his hand at my waist is not a stolen thing or a risk measured in seconds. A place where, if I wake in the middle of the night aching from the shape of a life that still has to exist outside these walls, he can pull me back against him and remind me that we are not only what the world forced us to be when it watched.
When the kiss breaks, we stay close, foreheads touching, his breath warm over my mouth.
“Isle Lucia,” I say softly.
His eyes search mine. “Isle Lucia.”
The name still aches, but now it does so with something gentler stitched through it. Memory, grief, inheritance, miracle. A dead girl’s name given to a place where two generations of men who loved wrong are trying, however badly, to begin again.
thirty-one
Nikolaj
Thebathistoolarge and warm for a man like me, which is probably why I like it tonight.
Steam curls slowly off the surface of the water and fogs the edges of the huge windows overlooking the black silk of the sea beyond the villa. The lights inside are low—gold from the sconces and the candles Vincenzo lit because apparently the King of the Five Families can’t help himself when it comes to atmosphere.
The whole room smells faintly of sandalwood soap, whisky, and salt drifting in through the cracked balcony doors.
It should feel soft enough to make my skin itch. It should feel like the kind of luxury meant for other men, men who know how to rest without turning it into strategy. Men who can sink into warm water without some part of them cataloging exits and weapons.
Instead, it feels like him.
That’s the problem with everything now. It all keeps becoming him.
Vincenzo sits between my legs, his back to my chest, the water lapping high against both of us. One of my arms is draped loosely over his middle, hand resting flat against the wet plane of his stomach, and the other hooks over the rim of the tub with a glass of whisky hanging from my fingers.
His own glass sits on the ledge within reach. He tilted his head back against my shoulder a while ago, comfortable in the kind of unconscious way that still hits me harder than anything deliberate.
For all his elegance and the control he wraps around himself like a second skin, there are these moments when he melts without noticing. Settling, trusting, and giving me the weight of him like it doesn’t cost anything.
It costs everything.
That’s what I never say out loud, because once I do, it’ll sound too much like prayer.
I drag my thumb once over his abs slowly, more to feel him there than because the movement means anything on its own. He takes a sip of whisky and exhales softly.
I glance down at him even though he can’t see it from where he’s leaning against me. He’s been telling me about Arabella and her lover, Marie.
“She asked me why I wasn’t disgusted.”
That pulls my hand still beneath the water.
He tips his head back slightly, looking up at me from where he sits cradled between my legs. Candlelight catches in his dark eyes, turning them softer than they should ever be allowed to look.
