I stare at him.
“Greece,” he says again. “Three nights. Private villa. I've already booked it.”
“You already booked it?”
He shrugs. “Tuesday morning efficiency. It's a gift.”
I throw my head back, stare at the Parisian ceiling I have memorized from every angle. The thing about Ian is he's usually right. I just need a moment to be annoyed about it first.
The rest of the morning plays out like it always does. Us moving around each other in this kitchen like a system two people develop without deciding to.
He makes the coffee; I get the cups. He takes the left burner; I take the right. He opens the fridge; I step aside without being asked. It's the choreography of people who share space long enough that they stop thinking about it.
This morning, I stop thinking about it at the wrong moment.
I turn from the counter with my cup just as he turns from the fridge, and we collide—nothing dramatic, just a small collision of two people who forgot to account for each other for half a second.
Coffee sloshes. I freeze. His hand shoots out and catches my wrist before the cup tips, his other hand landing at my waist.
We both go still.
Something shifts from that easy thing we’ve had for months to something else. Something with a pulse.
For a fraction of a second, his palm rests against the curve of my waist. His face is close enough that I catch the faint scar I’ve never noticed before through his left eyebrow. There are tiny flecks of amber in his green eyes, like God loaded a paintbrush and flicked it. Eyes that hold mine a beat longer than they should.
There’s no familiar protective glint, no dry amusement or mischief in them. But something…naked. Vulnerable. With heatat the edges. Stirring a kind of awareness that feels disloyal the moment it registers.
He clears his throat and steps back, sliding his hand from my waist with deliberate care. His fingers linger a half-second on my wrist before releasing that too.
“Greece,” he says, voice rougher than usual. Like the word is the period at the end of a sentence that started somewhere else.
I look at my cup. At the coffee that didn't spill. “Fine. Greece it is.”
The plane door opens and the heat walks in like it owns the place.
Not Paris heat. Not the tentative, apologetic warmth of a northern city remembering it's summer. This is the real thing—dense and immediate and completely unapologetic, wrapping around you before you've finished stepping onto the tarmac. The air smells like salt and dry thyme and something older underneath it, the island's own perfume rising off the hills in the evening warmth.
Ian appears beside me and inhales deeply with the satisfaction of a man who has been proven right and intends to take his time enjoying it.
“Don't,” I say.
“I haven't said anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I was about to say the air here is extraordinary and you should breathe it.”
“It's warm.”
“It's perfect.”
“It's warm, Ian.”
A car is waiting at the bottom of the steps. Ian takes the keys from whoever left them there without breaking stride, throws our bags in the back, and gets behind the wheel with the ease of a man who has driven in worse places than a Greek island on a Wednesday evening.
I get in the passenger seat. “Where are we going?”
“The villa.”
