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Lilah, who’d been stretched out on the lounger, pushed herself up and left the patio without a word.
“Now you’re just being childish,” he called after her and she flipped him off without looking back. She dropped her phone on the bed and tugged a pink slip dress from her increasingly messy, still wide-open suitcase—now that he’d seen her sexy night things, she really didn’t have any reason to keep the bag closed.
She dragged the dress on over her head, before grabbing her phone and camera bag, along with her trusty Canon EOS 6D, on her way to the front door.
“Where are you going?” He sounded alarmed but she didn’t care. She needed some breathing room.
“Out.”
“Wait, I’ll come with y—”
“No.” She looked back to find him hovering above his chair, one hand flattened on the table and the other curled around the back of the chair.
“I’ve had about as much of your company as I can stand right now.” She was proud of how assertive she sounded. “I think we could both use a break from each other. I’m going to do some exploring, take some photos. I don’t need you for that. In fact, I don’t need you for anything.”
Lilah exited the room before he had a chance to respond. She took a huge, cleansing breath once she was outside. The air was tinged with salt and the smell of distant frangipani blooms.
Lilah felt like she was the only person on the planet as she walked along the wooden pathway above the turquoise waters that would lead her from the overwater villas to the green, lush island just ahead.
Despite the less-than-ideal circumstances within which Lilah found herself, she couldn’t help but feel a little flutter of excitement in her stomach at the thought of exploring the tiny island. They hadn’t seen much upon arrival last night, but this morning all she could see was a relaxing palette of blues and greens and whites. Lilah had travelled a fair bit over the course of her life but this was quite simply one of the most beautiful places she’d ever seen.
She stopped frequently to snap photos along the way, happy that she’d equipped the camera with a 16mm lens to get the best landscape shots. She wasn’t taking any particularly original shots, but the camera had always been like an extension of herself and she felt naked without it. Besides, choosing the best angles and framing the shots kept her mind occupied. And that was exactly what she needed right now.
She roamed around aimlessly, taking pictures of people and of the ocean—enjoying the contrasts between the many shades of blues in the latter. The happy, honeymooning couples, were oblivious to her presence.
Lilah often felt a false sense of security behind the lens of her camera, invisible, untouchable, there but not. She always chronicled, but rarely participated. Her wedding, and her life with Ben after the wedding should have been her opportunity to finally be a part of something special. No longer the poor little rich girl, too fragile to play or partake, always forced to watch from the sidelines because of her asthma.
Lilah had had asthma for as long as she could remember, with only a brief respite during her mid-to-late teens. She’d hoped to outgrow it, and for a short time it had seemed as if she had, but it had returned with a vengeance during her first year of college.
As a result of her medical condition, Gramps had been extremely protective of her. It was only after Ben had appeared on the scene that Gramps had allowed Lilah some of the freedom she’d yearned for. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, Lilah understood that her freedom had been an illusion.
Ben had become her reluctant guardian. The one to watch over her when Gramps wasn’t around to do so. And Ben had literally just committed to continue martyring himself in this unnecessary capacity for the rest of his life.
Lilah knew that Ben felt indebted and grateful to her grandfather, she just hadn’t understood the extent to which he would go for the old man. Yes, part of this was probably for the business reasons, he certainly hadn’t denied that, but Lilah recognized that Ben’s greatest motivation by far was his need to please her grandfather.
She wondered if she’d hit the nail on the head with her wild theory about him fearing being left out of the will. But Ben had never struck her as a greedy man. He was proud and hardworking, and had accumulated his own wealth over the years as Gramps’s right hand man. There was an expectation that he would be in the will, of course there was, it was inevitable… but the bulk of her grandfather’s wealth would eventually pass to Lilah.
A tiny niggling voice in the back of her mind whispered that maybe he’d married her to eventually gain control of that wealth, but she ruthlessly suppressed it. Unable—even after the events of the last 48 hours—to believe Ben capable of such cold-blooded avariciousness.
