Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
She’d been in his car plenty of times, but never like this.
It was the kind of quiet that seeped into your chest, made your own breath sound guilty. He’d barely spoken since picking her up. No teasing, no small talk. Just the sense of a reckoning pulling closer with every mile.
Her heart hammered against her sternum as she sat beside him, fighting the urge to fill the silence with nonsense. The smell of him—salt, soap, spice—made concentration impossible.
He finally turned the car off the main road and pulled into a secluded overlook. He shifted into park but didn’t kill the engine. “We’re not walking into Nico’s graduation with this between us.”
Bea nodded, prepared for the moment. She kept her eyes fixed on the window, on anything but him. “It wasn’t fair to you, thinking of Gage in that moment.”
“You told me that already.” His voice was flat. “It’s—understandable.” He forced the word out, like it scraped his throat. “What I want to know is why you avoided me after.”
She gripped her skirt, nails digging into the fabric. “I didn’t.”
His gaze seared through her. “This is the first time I’ve seen you in over a week.”
“I had exams,” she said weakly.
“Try again.”
She shoved her hands under her thighs so he wouldn’t see them tremble. Her voice fractured. “I don’t know how to stop my brain from—” She broke off, breath coming ragged. “What if it happens again?”
There it was. The truth, ugly and exposed.
She’d accepted that her wanting for Rafael wasn’t cerebral. It lived deep, in the pulse of her blood and the marrow of her bones. They’d come so far. Her body no longer mistook him for danger. It didn’t flinch; it reached.
But the next step was where wanting became giving, where she’d have to open every door inside her and trust that none of them still led to Gage. If memory intruded, if the past slipped into a moment meant to be only theirs, she’d wound him afresh. And that was the last thing she wanted.
The engine’s muted growl filled the void. It vibrated beneath the soles of her feet, climbed through the seat beneath her, a reminder that stillness with Rafael was never really still—it was the pause before movement.
“You think you hurt me.”
Her head snapped toward him.
“You did. You do,” he acknowledged. His mouth went taut. “But don’t make that an excuse. Because the worst is when you starve me. And you did. Every day you hid.”
The air thinned, the world sharpened around his words. She’d called it space, time to think, but what she’d really done was shut him out. Hearing it named as punishment made her skin prickle with shame.
“I’m not a man who breaks. Don’t ever think you’re protecting me by pulling away. The last thing I want is distance.”
His words landed and kept landing. She hadn’t realized how much her silence could hurt a man built to withstand everything but that. The longing to apologize tangled with the impulse to defend. Neither made it to her mouth. She could only sit there, pulse hammering, every nerve tuned to him.
His hand flexed once on the wheel. “I need you to tell me, Bea.”
Her fingertips pressed into the leather beneath her thighs. “Tell you what?”
“That you want me. That you want to be with me. I need to hear it.”
The cabin seemed to shrink. Her pulse thudded, but she stayed frozen. She stared at her knees, at the hem of her skirt.
Her brain scrambled for an escape hatch. A lie, a quip, anything to defuse the bomb he’d just lobbed at her. But everything about the way he held himself, the way his eyes looked at her, told her he was at the end of his tether.
Seconds stretched, her throat tight, words sticking.
Don’t you dare choke now.
“You’ve always known,” she whispered.
The words dwelt. He stilled, eyes tracing her mouth as if replaying them, letting their truth settle like balm over something that had been raw too long. “I have.”
He drew one hand from beneath her leg, and lifted it to his lips. The kiss was brief, almost reverent, before he set her hand on his thigh and kept it there.
The moment seemed to steady something in him and unravel everything in her. As he pulled back onto the highway, she felt as if she’d just given him the last piece he’d been waiting for.
The long table at Nico’s house was celebration city: six conversations collided midair, silverware flashed, voices leapt over each other like kids in a pool.
The table overflowed: rosemary lamb, lemon potatoes, dolma, garlic bread that kept multiplying like magic.
Nico seemed slightly stunned to be the center of it all, already halfway through a glass of wine one of his uncles had poured him “accidentally on purpose.”
Rafael had pulled the seat out for her and taken his place by her side.
His arm stretched along the back of her chair, not touching, but so close her molecules were vibrating like a tuning fork.
The gesture was casual enough for a room full of family, but to Bea it felt like the echo of everything said in the car, altering the rhythm of every breath.
Laurent sat across from them, eyes flicking from her to Rafael like he was watching the slowest confession in history and enjoying every second.
“Bea.” Marie, Nico’s mother, pointed a wooden spoon at her. “Thank you. He graduated with honors. After nearly failing everything except recess as a freshman.”
“Recess happens at school too,” Nico protested.
“Not on the report card,” Leon countered, earning a chorus of chuckles.
Bea smiled. “Nico did the work.”
Stefano, Nico’s father, said, “You taught him how to study.”
“It was easy once I figured out how to bribe him with snacks.”
“You think I was gonna annotate Macbeth for free?” Nico joked.
“Man worked hard for Pocky and white rabbit candy,” Laurent said, taking a sip of beer.
“He’s set the foundations for officer track,” Bea said proudly.
“That’s true,” Stefano said. “My kid was up at six some mornings studying. Like some kind of responsible adult.”
“He started turning down PlayStation marathons,” one of Nico’s cousins added. “I thought he had a head injury.”
Bea had relaxed, but only until she met Rafael’s gaze again. She grabbed her water glass like it owed her emotional support. Tried to sip.
Missed.
Baptized her chin.
Excellent.
She blotted fast, praying no one noticed. Spoiler: they noticed. Rafael’s nostrils flared in amusement. Laurent had the nerve to wink.
“Try this, everyone,” Marie ordered, passing cookies in a basket that smelled like citrus and holidays. “It’s my cousin’s melomakarona recipe, but I added blood-orange zest because I’m better than her.”
Not a single person dared refuse. The consensus was that they tasted incredible.
“Of course they do because I baked them.” Her spoon was now pointed at Rafael. “This one tried to tell me last week that he doesn’t like cloves.”
“I said it didn’t belong in cake,” Rafael said evenly.
“Then you’ve never had my walnut cake.”
“She’s right,” Stefano chimed in from the head of the table. “The cake is suspiciously good.”
“Suspiciously?” Marie repeated.
“Alarmingly good,” Leon said, reaching for another cookie. “I’d eat it for breakfast every day.”
“You did. For a month, until your trainer staged an intervention.”
“He was right. Abs don’t maintain themselves,” he said, which earned him a swat from Selene.
“Let’s toast,” Stefano said, lifting his glass. Twenty-six more lifted high. “To my son, who graduated on the dean’s list!”
They all clinked and drank to Nico’s achievements and bright future.
“That’s called genius,” Nico bragged above the din of praise.
“That’s called Bea,” Rafael corrected.
Nico grinned. “I learned how to think in color-code, El Jefe.”
Bea felt Rafael’s fingertips slide, smooth and deliberate, along her bare shoulder. Every nerve in her arm lit up like his finger had closed an electrical circuit.
That was her only warning.
“Sounds about right,” Rafael said, voice pitched perfectly for every ear at the table. Then, without even looking at her: “My girl can get even the worst of us in line.”
The silence was immediate. Forks hovered. Wineglasses were suspended in the air. Even the cicadas seemed to have gone mute.
She could feel every pair of eyes on her.
His fingers slid to the back of her neck, thumb drawing an insufferable circle where she’d tensed.
Bea turned to glare at him. Instead of being contrite, he had a smile playing at each corner of his mouth. “Something you want to add for everyone, baby?”
Her thoughts fell straight off a cliff. Baby had no business sounding that good in his mouth. The endearment was way worse than little Bea, and left no room for ambiguity. It was a declaration.
She wanted to kiss him. Or smack him. Or both.
“That,” she said through clenched teeth, “was not a soft launch, Rafael.”
His eyebrow quirked. A challenge: Deny it. Go on.
He’d dropped her into the family tree, and everyone, including a dozen people she’d only met an hour ago, four of whom shared his DNA, were waiting with bated breath for her reaction.
She drew a breath, sat taller. “Don’t look too smug, El Jefe. You’re still on probation.”
The room erupted. Cheers, forks hitting plates, overlapping delight. In the din she heard Nico crow, Told you you like him! Rafael lounged back, every inch of him unabashed satisfaction.
She felt under the table and pinched the inside of his thigh. Hard enough to make his eyelid twitch, not enough to erase the grin. Infuriating man. And somehow, that only made her laugh.
It was the kind of fair that felt larger than life, as if summer itself had decided to park here for the night.
Kristal Beach stretched wide and golden, the tide rolling in gentle arcs along the sand. A wooden boardwalk ran the length of the shore, illuminated by strings of lanterns, carts trimmed in brass and velvet, and rides flashing with colored lights.