“No. This is a private island. Owned by my brother-in-law.”
“He’s quite mysterious,” she said.
A strange spike of something hot hit him in the chest. “Not really. He’s the son of a Romanian crime lord.”
“Really?”
She sounded genuinely interested and he found that irritating.
“Yes,” he said. “Really.”
“That must be appalling to you,” she said.
“Why would it be?”
He got into the driver’s seat of the car. There would be no staff on the island while they were here. Everything was in place for them, meals had been preprepared and supplies had been delivered for the period of time that they would be taking their honeymoon, but they would be isolated. It had been at his request. He did not need an audience for this prison sentence with his little maid.
“Because you’re deeply snobbish.”
“Andrei is and has been like family to me all of his life. I don’t care who his parents were.”
“You certainly care about who mine were.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t.” She was right. That was the problem. She was right about the fact that what he really hated was what this said about him. That what he really despised was his own weakness reflected back at him in her eyes. The way that she made him feel even now.
He had been angry, ever since he’d discovered her at the ball, but it wasn’t at her. It was him.
The way that he had let himself obsess about her. The way that he had become so…frail. So human.
It was something he had never been allowed to be, and he had flung himself into it, and it had been the easiest thing in the world to leap to the worst conclusion possible so that he could push those feelings away. So that he could discount them.
It was easier to believe that she had put some kind of spell on him than it was to believe that he was just a man. One who had been held captive by his cock.
It was beautiful on the island. He was having difficulty taking it in. She sat in the passenger seat, looking out the window, deliberately looking away from him, and he started up the engine, the car purring to life.
The GPS in the car was programmed to take them to the house, though Andrei had told him that it was all very basic because there was only one road that went all the way around the island, and another one that led up to where the house sat, perched on the only high elevation that the island possessed.
He was out of his element, out of his comfort zone. And that was a very strange experience.
He was used to having staff, not used to being isolated like this. If he traveled it was typically for diplomatic events. He didn’t take vacations. Certainly he had never gone on a trip like this with Circe.
For one, brief moment, he had the realization that he and Birdie were suddenly on equal footing.
She had never been here; neither had he. There would be no staff, no servants. Nothing to put her more closely in their category and not his.
Was he a snob? It was quite a snobbish thought to have, he supposed.
When they reached the house, he parked the car in front of it. It was beautiful. Very unlike the palace. Modern and made of heavy, dark concrete, the windows large and expansive. It looked like a continuation of the mountain. The same black-lava rock color all around them. The bottom floor was completely shrouded by the jungle surrounding them. And the second floor rose up above the palms, likely offering beautiful, circular views of the glorious Caribbean Sea.
There were cracks in the concrete, naturally occurring from the elements and from shifting; moss and vines had begun to grow around and in them. It had the look of an ancient temple, and he felt a quiet whisper in his soul that was something like reverence.
He looked at Birdie, and saw that the expression on her face was reflecting much the same thing.
It was…off-putting to say the least. To experience such a unified response to this woman who…
He didn’t like the way she made him feel.
That was what it came down to. It was inconvenient. And it had nothing to do with his running of the country.
