7. Finn
CHAPTER 7
Finn
Percy reddened and sweated and flinched at everything, but I spotted him talking to his sister with something like a smile on his face. Alicia showed me the infinity pool, its furthest edge blending seamlessly with the Aegean Sea until I stepped closer to the end of the terrace and saw the crescent sand beach far below. The borderless yard of the house sloped until it met the sea.
There was a young couple on a large beach towel, apparently exploring each other’s anatomies with hands and tongues. “Uh, your guests seem to be enjoying themselves.”
“Those aren’t our guests, darling,” Alicia said.
I lifted an eyebrow. “They’re at your beach, though.”
My fake mother-in-law-to-be smiled. “Nobody can own a beach, darling. And even if we could, what would we do with it all to ourselves?”
I probably should have known that, being a billionaire’s boyfriend and all, but it hadn’t crossed my mind that there was something on Earth Percy couldn’t buy. After all, he had a flying hotel at his disposal.
Lawrence, with his pencil mustache and his hair combed back like some modern version of Gomez Addams, joined us on the pool terrace. His arms wrapped around Alicia as he pulled her in, his front pressing her back. I looked at them, then promptly looked away because Lawrence buried his face in the nook of Alicia’s neck and kissed her with a growl.
Even my cheeks reddened with the loudness of the smack of Lawrence’s lips, his hands on Alicia’s stomach. She laughed merrily and scolded her husband, but she also turned around and planted her lips on his.
I glanced at them again, totally unsure what to do with myself. It was like the entire world fell away and the two of them remained on a patch of ground all of their own.
I cleared my throat and stepped back, lifting my gaze at the beach and the endless azure sea, wisps of foam scattered over its surface.
“I see you’re getting to know my parents,” an amused voice said. I turned to look at Emily, who wore a somewhat contemptuous look for the very public display of affection taking place three paces to my right. The giggles and growls heated my face.
“Ah, hm, yes, they’re very…passionate.” I tilted my head to follow the now horizontal position of Alicia Davenport while Lawrence held her and lifted her back to her feet, dancing to the sound of nature around us and humming some old tune I’d never heard before. They danced like it was their wedding day.
Emily chuckled, a hand resting on my shoulder in comfort. “You get used to it.”
“No, no. Thank you, Aunt Judith,” Percy protested, lifting his hands and diverting his gaze from Aunt Judith’s phone. She was tapping the screen and displaying something that made Percy eligible to compete in the national beet lookalike competition if someone had the brilliant idea of putting such a thing together. “How on Earth did you even get that?”
“He sent it to me, of course,” Judith said as if speaking to a child who didn’t have the capacity to understand that the Earth was round.
Percy glanced at the screen. “Dear Lord, those speedos are very small.”
“Oh, don’t be a prude, Percy. It’s today’s fashion. Isn’t it wonderful? Here. Look.” She thrust the phone at Percy and he jumped back as if it was an angry viper.
“Ah! Thank you, Aunt Judith, but I’m perfectly happy with Finn. No offense to…erm…”
“Brayden,” Judith supplied helpfully.
I looked at Emily, who was unperturbed. “Is this…?”
“Normal? Oh yeah.” Her nod made her fuzzy brown hair swing. Now that I was near her, I realized just how much she looked like Percy, minus the hair color. Her eyes were blue but with a slight touch of gray, and her features were sharp, defined, and elegant, as if she had been born to some European royalty. “And if you’re thinking we’re all mad as hatters, your assessment won’t be far from the truth.”
“That’s not at all what I thought,” I said, but my mouth was dry. I wasn’t sure if I was terrified out of my pants or if I loved every second of this chaos. All we needed were clay plates to smash against the floor and the evening would be complete.
Emily leaned in to conspire with me. “Shouldn’t you be rescuing your boyfriend?”
Lawrence and Alicia were busy with an improvised tango and I didn’t want to witness where it led them. Emily nudged me quite literally with her elbow. Judith made a gesture with her phone as if she was zooming into a photo very liberally. Percy won the beet lookalike race.
Inhaling a deep breath, I marched over to Percy. “Won’t you show me around the house, baby?”
Aunt Judith waved her hand down at Percy as if to urge him to be discreet about this and to promise to continue later. “You go on, my dears, I’ll just finish my Prosecco.”
“Of course, Aunt Judith,” Percy said, turning to me with immeasurable relief washing over his face. “I’ll gladly show you around the entire island if it gets me off this terrace.”
“I’m game,” I said with a wink.
The sun raced toward the horizon, spilling its orange glow over the surface of the water, and Percy led me away from the terrace of terrors.
The chatter faded away as we walked through the immense open space of the central area of the ground floor. One wing was clearly for sitting and lounging, the other was for dining, but with the weather so perfect and all the terrace doors wide open and separated by thin, silk curtains, the interior looked like it hadn’t been touched in some time.
“Your family seems very passionate,” I said as Percy led me to the wide staircase.
“Not the word I would use,” he said.
“Oh?”
He chuckled. “Imagine doing a school recital and seeing that in the middle of a quiet audience.”
I winced. “That’s gotta be rough for a kid.”
Percy shook his head in amusement.
“But hey, it’s better than if they passed out drunk after a day of shouting,” I suggested.
“Oh God. Were yours…?” He raised his eyebrows apologetically.
“No, not at all,” I said right away. “A friend of mine from school.” I inhaled a deep breath of air and held it for a moment. “I come from a pretty normal household. We played board games, ordered pizza on Saturdays, and they rarely embarrassed me at recitals.” We shared a laugh as we reached the top landing. The hallway between the suites was decorated like a very nice sitting room with chairs and coffee tables.
Who sat around the hallway?
The doors were rustic Greek and painted bright blue. Each had a nail in the middle with a wooden sign for the room.
“We’re in Apollo,” Percy explained. “Aphrodite is for my parents. Persephone is Emily’s room.”
“And Hermes is Aunt Judith?” I asked, assuming she might drill a hole in the wall between Hermes and Apollo to whisper at Percy until he dumped me for one of her handpicked men in tiny speedos.
“Aunt Judith doesn’t like climbing the stairs,” Percy said. “She’s staying on the ground floor.” He spoke with the same kind of relief I felt. The Apollo door swung open and Percy led me into his room.
My stomach felt hollow, butterflies filling in in an instant. The room had a view of the sea through its big, blue-framed windows, see-through white curtains filtered the flaming light of the sunset. A long ottoman was positioned under the row of windows on the right side and there was a large bed with a silk canopy and curtains straight ahead. The white curtains were tied to the large wooden bed posts with blue ribbons. Shades of blue and gray met the natural tones of wood. A desk was positioned to my right and a high-backed chair came with it. Nightstands flanked the bed on each side and a door on my far left opened to our en suite.
There was a bookcase sitting against the left wall and a dresser to my immediate left. On the dresser was a bright red vase with a dry flower arrangement. It was a surprising choice of color, but it elevated the space significantly. There were pots hanging from the ceiling and lush green plants with long vines and large leaves extended to the bed canopy and other corners of the room.
“Christ, I’ll never get used to this,” I whispered as Percy shut the door.
“I’m glad you like it,” he said.
“Like it? I want to marry this room and have its babies,” I said without thinking. His chuckle removed the momentary tension after saying such a silly thing.
I smirked at Percy when I discovered his cheeks were a little pink. That reminded me of the bed. “That’s…us?” I pointed at the bed. There was no chance either of us was sleeping on the long, narrow ottoman.
Percy walked into the en suite with a stride that spoke of an important mission and I followed. I now discovered that it was partially separated into two rooms. The further one was the actual bathroom and the nearer one was a closet. Percy pulled the accordion door to a side and revealed empty shelves for clothes as well as extra bedding. He grabbed a duvet and shot me a victorious smile. “We’ll sort everything out.”
Carrying the duvet to the bed, he quickly split our sleeping area into two equal parts. We each had a pillow and a duvet with a few inches of empty space between us.
I wondered if now was the right time to tell him what a messy sleeper I was. I bit my lip and decided to make it a surprise. “Perfect,” I exclaimed instead.
“Thanks for rescuing me,” Percy said softly.
“Rescuing? You seemed to be having a delightful time,” I teased.
Percy shuddered. “Finn, I saw things. Things you would never believe.”
“Things packed in very small speedos?” I asked.
Percy cringed in reply.
A gong—a real freaking gong—sounded and Percy casually explained that dinner was served. “Dimitrios likes adding a bit of flare.”
“You don’t say,” I muttered.
We returned downstairs for what was a very normal affair. Served on the dining table on the terrace, awash with the final rays of sunshine, the dinner consisted of every food known to man. From grilled squid to spinach pies to something fluffy, juicy, and smelling like orange with scoops of ice cream over it, there was enough food to feed a small army. Meat, seafood, cheese, vegetables, fruit, and three different kinds of bread cluttered the table. Carafes filled with blood-red wine were wet with condensation.
The dinner lasted for nearly two hours, but it started with Nektaria, a curly-haired woman in her forties and a sharp and commanding look in her eyes welcoming me to Naxos and the Davenport household. She was, as I gathered, the mastermind behind this entire operation. Where Dimitrios added the flare, Nektaria provided the sturdy bones for all things that happened around here.
Niktaria and Dimitrios ate with us, which I was not just glad about but pleasantly surprised, too. Why shouldn’t they? It was just that I had never expected a family worth billions to eat with their staff. But my ideas of what billionaires were like fell into the depths of the Aegean Sea when I was around Percy. These people weren’t separated from their staff; they were a family of sorts.
Percy caught me twice looking at him with wonder in my eyes.
“Oh, darlings, Lawrence and I are so glad to have you all here,” Alicia said midway through the meal. We all ate at the most leisurely pace with chit chat sprinkled throughout. Emily was my savior, sitting across from me and engaging me in conversation whenever Judith, positioned to my left, began asking questions about my and Percy’s relationship. It was safe to say her questions were designed to make me think. Where did we each see ourselves in five years? Did life in the public eye make me nervous? But Emily randomly brought up things to do on the island whenever I stammered through my replies.
“We’re very happy to see our Percy finally spending his time away from the computer,” Lawrence said in that elegant way of speaking, his words sharp and precise, his tone amused. “You finally found some time to be alive, son.”
“Relationships aren’t everything, Dad,” Percy said in a tired voice.
I could have smacked him right then. Grabbing his hand on the table, I made him stiffen and remember that he was here with a loving boyfriend.
“Of course, that was what I used to think,” Percy blurted. “But now, I see, erm, just how…”
“Just how wonderful it is to share these special moments with someone special,” I supplied.
Percy nodded with relief. “Yes. Of course.”
“Love is in the air,” Alicia said.
Lawrence drew a deep breath of air. “And it smells like ripe grapes and summer without an end.”
Alicia practically melted over her husband, whose eyes shone like shooting stars whenever his gaze landed on her.
What the actual fuck? I gaped as the two whispered sweet things at one another like two teenagers who had just gone out for the very first time and fell madly in love.
When dinner was over—the orange pie was the real banger of the night—Percy yawned just before Alicia suggested playing charades. “I think I, that is, we will pass,” he said. “It’s been a long journey.”
“Of course, darling,” Alicia said. “And let Dimitrios know if you need anything for the night.” The way she said anything made my face heat up, although I didn’t know why.
“No,” Percy said quickly, gaze darting at Dimitrios and head shaking. “There’s absolutely no need, thank you very much.”
Alicia didn’t seem to understand Percy’s abrupt reaction any more than I did, but she was unbothered by it, waving her hand. “Fine, darling. Sweet dreams, then.”
We retreated upstairs before everyone else, and once the door shut behind us, I asked what all that was about.
Percy, blushing and shaking his head as if to suppress past trauma from claiming him, looked away. “Once, years ago, I brought a boyfriend here—the last I ever brought for reasons that will become perfectly clear in the coming days if you didn’t get it already—and Mother tasked Dimitrios with setting the mood. Well, he and I entered my room to discover that Dimitrios had worked from a very specific list of requirements provided by my mother after some extensive Google research. The least of the problems were the rose petals scattered all over and around the bed, the curtains swapped from white to red, and the soft jazz playing from a portable speaker.” As if recounting the night he had been abandoned deep in the woods, Percy looked at me with horror in his eyes. “When we looked closer, we discovered a bowl of condoms of all sizes, two different bottles of lube because Mother couldn’t decide whether oil- or water-based was preferable, a jar of Vaseline, and a bottle of poppers. Do I need to keep going?”
My mouth dropped open. “What more could there be?”
Percy pulled on a sullen face, eyebrows flat and lips forming a little pout. “A prostate massager. When I demanded to know why on Earth that would be in my room, Mother had apparently read that people can be versatile, so she didn’t want the lack of equipment to hinder us.”
I was torn between laughing and crying, hysterically in either case.
“‘Why are you upset with me, darling? You’re ever so touchy,’” Percy said in a spot-on imitation of his mother. “Anyway, I forbade her from preparing any mood for me and my guests from that day forward. She refused to be ordered around, of course, so we agreed that I must tell her if I needed any items that would make my stay more enjoyable. What are you…? Stop laughing, Finn. That scarred me for the end of times.”
I didn’t even realize that I was biting my lip to stifle laughter, tears rolling down my cheeks and my tummy hurting. This was either the most inclusive house I’d ever entered or an insane asylum, but it sure wasn’t boring.
Percy spun away from me on his heels and marched to the right side of the bed. “I can’t believe this is amusing to you,” he muttered. He faced away from me, but it didn’t take much to know he was undoing the buttons of his shirt.
Here we were. The moment I’d been dreading and dreaming of since the moment I had laid my eyes on Percy Davenport. “I mean, you have to admit it’s funny that your mom researched prostate massagers.”
“It keeps a score of therapists employed,” Percy said, shrugging the shirt off and stopping my train of thought instantly.
I gazed at his broad back, the smooth skin taut over the knotting muscles and busied myself with my shirt. My fingertips tingled as I stole glimpses of Percy’s sculpted torso from behind the falling locks of my black hair. I swallowed, unaware until now of how tight my throat was.
As I turned away from Percy to place my shirt over the back of the desk chair, I heard the zipper of his shorts going down. The rustling of fabric against his legs made my breath hitch in my throat, and I copied his actions one after another.
When Kim had pitched this trip to me, getting hot for some abstract billionaire with an island villa was low on the list of threats to my well-being. I’d only just escaped a horrible human with ill intentions; feeling butterflies for one of the same kind had never crossed my mind as a real possibility. Except, as I turned back to Percy, wearing nothing but my black boxer briefs, shivers ran down my spine.
He faced me for only an instant, but that one moment stretched into an eternity. My gaze climbed from his feet firmly planted on the stone floor, up his legs, over the significant mound of his underwear, and along his heavenly abs. After seeing his chest and biting my tongue, I met his gaze. It was as surely on me as mine had been on him.
He looked away. “Guess it’s time to sleep,” Percy said, more to himself than anything else. From that moment on, he very much didn’t look at me.
My feet tapped lightly against the stone floor as I neared my side of the bed. I moved the duvet and sat on the edge of the bed, aware of my quickening pulse and wondering if I’d be able to fall asleep even for a minute. Maybe a few nights of staring at the canopy with blood boiling in my veins will help me to pass out from exhaustion eventually.
When I lay on my back and covered myself with the soft, thin duvet Percy had placed there for me, I closed my eyes. He flicked all the lights off from his side of the bed. As he shifted and inhaled, I became aware of the deafening silence in the room. Every little move was audible, every sigh, and every absence of sound for every breath I held.
Following Percy’s lead, I turned my back to him, murmured “goodnight,” and focused on breathing evenly so as not to reveal just how heated my body was and how heavy the pressure was on my chest. Although I fell asleep at some point, I was very aware that he was almost naked and only inches away from the almost naked me. It shouldn’t have been a problem, and I definitely wasn’t complaining because it bothered me, but it left me flustered and confused, struggling with all the weird sensations soaring through my chest.