So, I try to shrug, and say something else. “He’s tricky. Manipulative. He’ll start speaking Czech halfway through the conversation, his voice will get all rough, and he’s just got an unfair advantage, walking around and looking like that, don’t you think?”
One hand leaves my shoulder, and she taps my nose. “Some might say the advantage is yours. All that dark hair, eyes that blue, and that cute little triangle of freckles he loved to trace with his thumb?”
“I’d prefer not to test the theory.”
Tia exhales, lips tumbling into a sad smile before she squeezes my shoulders and takes a step back.
She’s running out of things to try and say to me, I can see it in the way she angles her head back and forth, studying me in the mirror.
Bohdan always said I was stubborn, and maybe he was right.
But it doesn’t matter what else she’s going to say because there’s a pounding on the door that could only belong to Talon.
He organized this whole thing with much more structure and thought than any of us could have ever imagined he had in him. The royal suite with the two stories of rooms, the sprawling, modern marble staircase in the middle, the monochrome cream furnishings set off with gold adornments, and the sweeping balcony with a view of the stretching ocean.
An excursion each day at each port, theme nights, and even designated downtime.
It all starts in fifteen minutes with a private tour of the ship.
All these small, minute details accounted for.
Tia throws open the door with a loud huff of breath. “We wouldn’t miss your little tour, Talon. I know how badly you want to see the captain’s quarters.”
What I don’t think he accounted for—he can be a bit obtuse like that—even though we were both on the invite list, was what it would mean for Bohdan and me to see each other again.
I see Bohdan now, one leg kicked up against the back of the giant sectional spanning the middle of the room. All that does is draw attention to the carved muscles of his thighs, and itisunfair. Arms crossed over his chest, face impassive and head angled in a way that makes him look like someone carved him from a marble statue, hair a shade of golden-brown in the sunlight shining through the floor-to-ceiling windows that I don’t think a painter could ever swirl the right colours to replicate, and grey eyes wholly on me.
His jaw flexes, and his hand tightens on his bicep when I walk by, and I think he might want to say something.
But it wouldn’t matter. I can’t hear him over my brain anyway.
Bad. Worthless. Insignificant.
Those words were always there. It’s funny how he spent the better part of a decade trying to get them to quiet down, to soften their edges, and to keep them from stabbing me from the inside out, but in the end, it was him who made them the loudest they’d ever been.
Bohdan
I watch Sloan tug either side of the brim of Tia’s giant hat down over her face, like she can hide from everyone on the ship.
It might work to keep strangers from noticing her, but she’s never be able to hide from me, and something about the way her knuckles turn white, fingers ramrod straight as she holds the ugly hat like it’s a buoy in the ocean, tells me she’s trying not to tap against it and count.
So, I do it for her, and hope her brain hears me and stops whatever it’s saying that makes her think she needs to atone through numbers. “Jedna. Dve. Tri.”
“Pay attention.” Talon cuts me a sideways look, elbow finding my shoulder as he walks along behind the suite concierge—Aron, a much too-friendly, too-passionate employee who definitely couldn’t read the tension in the room at all—on this little private tour of this giant ship he arranged for us. “What are you even saying?”
“I’m counting.”
“Counting what?” he prods, promptly forgetting his own demands to pay attention, eyes on me instead of watching this makeshift tour we’re being given.
“How long it’s going to take before my restraint snaps and I fucking clock you for doing this.” I jerk my chin towards Sloan where she walks side by side with Tia, nodding along like she’s so interested in the activities schedule and the water aerobics offerings. “How could you do this to her?”
I wait for him to repeat everything he said earlier. That he expected us to read the itinerary, that the booking was clearly for a suite, not individual rooms, that he never believed we’d both come.
But he stops, cocks his head back, eyes sharpening with something like disappointment, and asks me in this uncharacteristically quiet voice, “How could you?”
“Don’t tell me this was some shitty attempt at getting us back together.” I shake my head, pressing my fingers between my eyes before they find my temple. “It’s not going to work.”
Talon glances over his shoulder, waiting until Tia and Sloan are further down the hall with Aron before whistling through his teeth at Jay.
