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PROLOGUE

SEB

4 Years Ago

I’m going to fuck that woman.

She rose out of the Aegean Sea like that painting of the hot goddess in the clamshell, and my dick half rose with her. I pushed my sunglasses up on my head to get a better look. That was a mistake. The brilliant colors damn near singed my corneas. Pink sand, cerulean sea, and her, wet, pale skin slick and gleaming in the sharp sunlight like polished marble, and a riot of red hair clinging to her round shoulders and breasts.

“That motherfucking jellyfish stung me!” she hollered as she stormed out of the water onto the beach.

I kicked aside my snorkel gear and towel and grabbed my first aid kit. Other people were already moving in to help, but I moved faster.

“Don’t move.” I dropped down to examine the prettiest knee I had ever seen, which was currently being hugged by tentacles and an amorphous purple blob. “It’s still on you.” I unzipped my first aid pouch and pulled out disposable latex gloves.

“What an asshole.” And then, before I knew what was happening, she was limping her sweet ass back into the sea with the damn thing still clinging to her leg like a staticky balloon. “Come on, Sir Stings-a-Lot. Let’s get your stinging ass back into the sea.”

“What are you doing?” I called after her. My toes dug into the soft sand to hold my balance as I watched her ankles disappear into the water, then her calves.

“Saving a life,” she yelled back over her shoulder.

“Jellyfish don’t have brains, you know. They don’t have specialized nerve receptors. That means they don’t feel pain.”

“No, but I do.” She was thigh-deep in the water now, and she turned slowly to face me. “I have a brain, and I feel pain. And if I took a life when I could just as easily save it? I’d feel the pain of it. That’s the sort of thing that would weigh on my conscience at three a.m.”

My conscience knew all about that kind of weight. But I let her words sail past me on the salty breeze and squinted at the clusters of black rocks jutting from the turquoise waters. Focused my attention there instead of the black mark on my soul. Breathed in and out until I was steady again.

When I lifted my gaze to her, my smirk was firmly in place, my shoulders as relaxed as if they had never carried the dead weight of a friend’s body there. “It’s still holding on?”

“Yeah, he’s being a real dick about it.” Her lips crushed together in a grimace. “Stung me again, that little jerk.” She hinged at the waist and shouted to the water, “I’m not food, asshole!”

A dirty joke hovered on the tip of my tongue, but I bit back the words and let my lazy grin say it for me. It wouldn’t really have been a joke, anyway. She did look good enough to eat. Before sunrise, I planned to know exactly what she tasted like.

Her head tilted as she studied me, her lips pursed like she was reading my thoughts and hadn’t yet decided whether she approved. “What’s your name?”

“Sebastian Ashcroft. My friends call me Seb.”

“Well, Sebastian”—the way she drew out every syllable of my full name made my grin widen—“I feel obligated to inform you that golden showers aren’t my kink, and urine doesn’t work on jellyfish stings anyway, so that face you’re making”—she drew a circle in the air with her index finger—“you can put it away now.”

A shocked laugh burst out of me. “Swear to god, that never crossed my mind.”

“Hmm.” She eyed me with good-humored doubt, the corner of her mouth hitching up suspiciously. The glass-like sea barely churned as she waded toward me. There were no waves here. Water didn’t crash against the shore; it rippled languidly. “You were definitely scheming something.”

“Dessert. A jellyfish sting deserves dessert. I know a place, if you like portokalopita.”

“Who doesn’t like portokalopita? I’m Lila Ford, by the way. Remember my name. You’ll need it when you tell your grandkids about the legend who ate her weight in portokalopita. What are the tweezers for?”

“Jellyfish have a tendency to leave tentacles behind, and those tentacles can keep stinging you even without the jellyfish attached.”

Angry red lashes crisscrossed her calf. The sting wouldn’t kill her—the venom from the purple jellyfish that populated the Crete beaches wasn’t lethal unless you were allergic—but I could tell from the way she bit her bottom lip so hard it turned as white as her teeth that she was hurting. And still she leaned forward to get a better look at what I was doing, her hazel eyes alight with curiosity.

“So what brings you to Greece?” I asked to distract her from the pain. In the three weeks I’d been here, I’d discovered that tourists fell into two categories: the history nerds and the party animals. I had a hundred percent accuracy rate in guessing which category each person fell into, but something about this woman made me hesitate. She could be here for the ruins and the stories—she had that natural curiosity about her—but her playful smile suggested she was the life of every party, too.

“Photographing vultures.”

Well, shit. Of all the things she could have said, that hadn’t even occurred to me.

“Vultures?” I glanced up at her quickly and then refocused on my work.