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Chapter Twenty-Three
EVERETT
The villa looks different when you know you’re leaving it.
As if every room has quietly collected evidence against me while I wasn’t looking, and now I’m expected to walk back through it all without noticing what it became.
The suitcase won’t close.
I stare at the offending corner of a shirt sleeve—possibly mine, possibly hers. I can’t tell anymore because at some point over the last few days our clothes stopped respecting drawer assignments—and press the lid down harder.
It springs back up like it’s staging a revolt against me.
"You have to sit on it."
I turn to find Aria leaning in the doorway, hair still damp from the shower we took together, cheeks still a little flushed from when I took her against the shower tile, one of my T-shirts hanging loose over a pair of linen shorts. Her satchel is already slung over one shoulder. The portfolio case with her canvases rests beside her foot like something precious enough to travel armed.
"I do not need to sit on it," I say. "It’s a structural issue."
She crosses the room, hip-checks me out of the way, and drops her full weight onto the suitcase lid. It compresses shut instantly. She flips both latches with infuriating ease, then stands and pats the top once like it’s a particularly stupid dog that has finally obeyed.
"Well, look at that. Structural issue officially solved."
I catch her around the waist before she can walk away.
A laugh breaks out of her as I pull her back against me, and then I kiss her because apparently leaving France has made me more possessive, not less. Or maybe I was always this far gone and only needed privacy and a villa to stop pretending otherwise.
When I pull back, she’s looking at me with that soft, dazed expression I still haven’t learned how to take without feeling it somewhere in my ribs.
"What would I do without you?" I ask.
She glances at the now-closed suitcase, then back at me. "You’d probably spiral immediately and stop eating and sleeping. And somehow end up with bangs."
"That seems dramatic… I’d never get bangs."
She chuckles. "You’re right. What was I thinking? You’re far too responsible for a drastic new hairstyle." Her mouth curves. "You’d probably just make Jeremy solve it and then pretend you had it handled the whole time."
Then she shifts in my hold, looking past me toward the open cases on the bed. "I should finish packing the art supplies before we leave."
I let her go, though not very far.
She moves to the chair by the window where her brushes are laid flat in a row and the tubes of paint are sorted with the same unconscious precision she used to bring to my desk. One by one, she slides them into the roll case Gabriel insisted she needed. Then she lifts the first canvas and wraps it carefully in tissue paper, smoothing the corners with both hands.
I lean against the bedpost and watch her.
Two weeks ago, I walked into this villa with a contract wife and a plan to spend most of our honeymoon working from behind glass doors.
I’m leaving it with something I don’t yet know how to name without sounding like a man who has already lost control of the narrative.
Her gaze lifts.
"What?" she asks.
"Nothing."
"That look means it isn’t nothing."
"You seem very sure of that."
