“I suggested we work something out.”
“This is me working something out.”
I laugh again, because what else is left?
Nikolaj steps closer, slow enough to let me look as much as I want and obvious enough that he knows exactly what he’s doing. The sunglasses come off, and ice-blue eyes in full sunlight are almost unfair.
“Welcome to Isle Lucia.”
The name punches the rest of the laughter right out of me. “Lucia,” I repeat.
He nods once, watching me carefully now.
My mind goes immediately, involuntarily, to my father’s sister. Lucia Vieri. Dead too young. Beloved by everyone who knew her and the only person in my family who ever managedto scold Salvatore and be kissed on the forehead for it instead of being threatened.
The same Lucia whose name still lives in too many rooms and stories for me not to feel it in my bones when I hear it.
I look back at Nikolaj. “You named an island after my aunt.”
His mouth curves. Then, without warning or any apparent concern for runway protocol, he steps in, catches my face in both hands, and kisses me.
The heat, the sun, the sea, the absurdity of the island, all of it collapses into the contact. He tastes like coffee and the faint salt of the air and himself, and I make a low sound into his mouth that has far too much feeling in it for a tarmac in daylight.
He kisses me with the same shameless certainty he seems to have applied to the purchase of landmass and naming rights. Like I should have known all along he’d do this. Like there was never any real possibility that he’d invite me to a neutral location and then not turn it into a declaration.
When he pulls back, my heartbeat has gone thoroughly to hell.
“Come on,” he says, and starts walking before I decide whether to protest.
The path cuts inland through low stone landscaping and wild olive trees that shouldn’t be here and yet thrive anyway. The irony of that almost makes me smile again.
The larger structure I saw from the plane rises through the greenery as we move, and I instinctively assume it’s where we’re going.
But Nikolaj doesn’t lead me there; he takes me past it.
I gesture toward the villa. “We’re not going there?”
“No.”
He keeps walking.
“Nikolaj.”
“You’ll see.”
I hate that phrase from him because it usually means the explanation is either more emotional or more insane than I’m prepared for.
The path curves again, this time down toward the coast of the island, where the trees thin out and the air grows saltier and brighter. Ahead, partly hidden by low cypress and a white stone wall, is the cottage I saw.
Beautiful, actually, in a clean, old-world way, all pale stone, deep porch, dark shutters, climbing green over one side, and enough seclusion to feel intimate rather than strategic.
It sits above the water with a view wide enough to break a weaker man open. It is the sort of place built for stolen mornings and impossible conversations.
And on the porch, wrapped up in each other like I’ve stepped into a fever dream constructed from family ghosts and too much whiskey, are our fathers.
I stop so hard that Nikolaj nearly has to turn back to keep from pulling me off balance.
My father looks older than the last time I saw him, which should not be possible because time is rude enough without becoming theatrical.
