“Dangerous.”
“Probably.” He watched a pelican cruise low over the water and disappear. “I’ve been trying to remember the last time I went ten days without caring very much about work. And I can’t.”
“Not once?”
“Not once. Since I was… probably a teenager.” He turned the sand dollar over in his fingers. He’d picked it up from the railing on the way down without realizing. “I always thought the work was the point. That everything else was what you did while you were waiting to get back to it.”
“And now?”
He looked at her. She was watching him with the look that had unnerved him in the boardroom, but today he found he didn’t mind it at all. In fact, it would be nice if she never stopped looking at him.
“And now I’m not sure that’s true anymore,” he said.
She didn’t say anything. She waited.
“I don’t want to go back tomorrow,” he said. “Not because of Graham, not because of the arrangement. I just…” He stopped.
Outside of a business context, he was not a man who said the thing plainly. He’d never needed to be. But she’d told him vulnerable things in the lamplight, and he owed her the same. “I’d like to stay here. I… want this. Whatever this week has been. I want more of it.”
The sun was touching the water now, the light going deep and gold across everything, across the sand and the waves and her face when she turned toward him.
“Nate,” she said quietly, and there was something in the way she said it — careful, the way you were careful with something you didn’t want to break.
“I know,” he said. “I know what the arrangement is. I know what we agreed to.” He turned the sand dollar over once more, then set it down on the sand between them. “I also know that there’s no one I’d rather fake-marry than you. And that the fake part is starting to feel like the wrong word.”
There it was. The truth. What was on his mind. In his heart.
His pulse raced, and he wondered if he’d just said something that was sure to make him look a fool. Maybe she’d even laugh in his face.
But she just looked at him for a long moment. The ocean moved between them and the horizon. The sun kept going down.
“There are no cameras here,” she said. It wasn’t a warning. It was something more like a question.
“I know,” he said.
“Then why?—”
“Because you’re the only person I want to be sitting here with. That’s the whole reason.”
She held his gaze, and he could see her working it out, the part of her that had spent weeks keeping him at arm’s length running calculations, and the part of her that had splashed him in the freezing shallows and laughed until she couldn’t breathe quietly declining to cooperate with it.
“You’re conflicted,” he said.
“I…” She caught her breath. “I was, yes. But if you’re saying that you feel the same way…” She searched his gaze, her eyes wide and hopeful, looking for confirmation.
He leaned in.
She put one hand briefly against his chest, not stopping him. Just feeling the fact of it. Then she looked up at him once more, and whatever she found there seemed to be enough, because she closed the remaining distance herself and kissed him.
It was nothing like the kiss at the magazine shoot, the one that had been brief and controlled and pointed at an audience. This one was slow, and warm, and entirely private, with the sun going down behind them and the sand cold under his palms and the sounds of nature creating a musical score all around them.
When they pulled back, she was looking at him with an expression he hadn’t seen on her before. Open. Unguarded. The version of her that existed when there was nothing left to protect.
“Well,” she said quietly.
“Yeah,” he said.
The sun finished setting. The sky went pink and then deep blue, and neither of them moved to go inside. The sand dollar sat between them on the sand catching the last of the light, and Nate thought that whatever came next — Graham, the wedding, the city, all of it — he was going to hold on to this particular hour for a very long time.
