Chapter Fourteen
ARIA
The private jet looks exactly how I imagined a billionaire's jet would look.
Which is to say: ridiculous.
Cream leather seats. Glossy walnut trim.
Champagne already chilling in a silver bucket I'm too intimidated to look at for too long.
There's a bowl of fruit that looks hand-selected by someone who has never eaten a bruised banana in their life, and the cabin smells like expensive air and cedar and Everett's cologne.
I stop in the aisle for half a second and stare.
Everett, already inside and somehow making a private jet look like just another conference room he owns, glances up from his phone.
"You can sit," he says.
I shoot him a look. "Thank you. I was actually considering standing for the next eleven hours."
One corner of his mouth twitches.
That tiny almost-smile has become its own kind of violence.
The flight attendant appears beside me with a warm, professional smile. "Mrs. Kauffman, can I take your wrap?"
My brain catches on the name hard enough to skid.
Mrs. Kauffman.
I hand over the wrap before I can make this weird and slide into the seat across from Everett, then immediately realize the seats are facing each other and this is somehow more intimate than if we were side by side.
Of course it is.
Everything with this man is an ambush in a suit.
He glances up again. "You okay?"
"Fine," I say automatically.
"Liar."
I blink.
"You stole that from me," I tell him.
"I'm aware."
Then his gaze drops to the carry-on at my feet. To the garment bag tucked behind me. To the blush still living high in my cheeks from last night and, possibly, from the memory of standing in my doorway telling my husband that my suitcase is full of lingerie the night before.
A woman could die of embarrassment and Everett Kauffman would probably still look at her with that same level, controlled expression and ask if she needed water.
The engines hum louder as the pilot prepares for takeoff.
I fasten my seatbelt and look out the oval window, watching the gray Seattle morning blur at the edges. My reflection stares back at me in pieces. Big sunglasses. Hair pulled back. Wedding ring.
Wife.
The word still lands strangely in my body.
Across from me, Everett is scrolling through something on his phone, his tie gone for once, the top two buttons of his shirt undone. He looks less severe dressed down for travel, which would be helpful if it didn't also make him look even more unfairly attractive.
My gaze catches on his hand resting against the armrest.
The ring.
Plain platinum. Minimal. Clean.
It does something weird to me all over again, seeing it there in daylight. On the hand of a man who once fired me for being redundant and is now taking me to Cannes for our honeymoon like that's a sentence that makes any sense at all.
The plane begins to taxi.
I grip the armrests without thinking.
Everett notices immediately. Of course he does.
"You don't like flying?"
"I've barely done it."
His brows lift. "Barely?"
"I went to Vegas once with Penelope and Cammy. We hit turbulence over Nevada and Cammy threw up in a barf bag while telling a man in first class that his vibes were evil."
That gets an actual laugh out of him.
Low. Brief. Real.
It hits me square in the chest.
"I'm sorry," he says, and I can hear the smile still threaded through the words. "Did you just say evil vibes?"
"She was not herself."
"I'd hope not."
The plane turns, pauses, then surges forward.
My stomach drops.
Without looking away from the window, I say, "If I die on this plane before I see the French Riviera, I will haunt you specifically."
"You're not going to die."
"How do you know?"
"Because I own the jet, and I don't make bad investments."
I look over at him then. "That might be the least comforting thing anyone has ever said to me."
His mouth shifts again.
God, I hate how much I like making him almost smile.
The jet lifts.
Seattle drops away beneath us in a blur of gray water and glass towers and life that already feels farther away than it should.
I exhale slowly once we level out.
"See?" Everett says. "Still alive."
"For now."
The flight attendant returns with coffee.
Before Everett can say anything, she turns to him and asks, "How do you take it, sir?"
I open my mouth at the same time he does.
"One and a half sugars, and a splash of cream," I say.
Everett's gaze cuts to mine.
The flight attendant smiles, amused by something in the air I'm trying not to examine too closely, and fixes it exactly that way.
He takes a sip.
No grimace.
Just that look.
That devastating, unreadable look that says he's thinking something he has absolutely no intention of sharing with the class.
The first few hours of the flight settle into something quieter than I expected.
Everett works.
Of course he does.
Laptop open. Headphones in. Phone buzzing every twenty minutes with another call or email or crisis only he can apparently solve.
He goes over numbers, reviews something Christian sent, takes one curt call with Wes about an acquisition in Singapore, and never once loses his tone or posture or control.
Watching him work is its own form of intimidation.
No wasted motion. No rambling. No uncertainty.
Just clean decisions and focus that makes you understand how a man like this ends up running an empire before he turns thirty-five.
At some point, lunch appears.
Real lunch, not airplane food. Seared salmon and tiny potatoes and a salad with shaved fennel and citrus segments that looks too pretty to stab with a fork.
I do anyway.
Everett closes his laptop long enough to eat across from me, and for a few strange minutes we almost look like a normal couple traveling together.
Almost.
Until my brain reminds me that normal couples usually aren't headed to the French Riviera under legal pressure with consummation clauses hovering over their heads like horny little vultures.
I nearly choke on my water.
Everett notices.
Again.
"Are you okay?"
I nod too fast. "Fine."
His eyes narrow. "You keep saying that."
"Maybe one day it'll be true."
That earns me another one of those tiny mouth-twitches.
He goes back to his coffee.
I go back to trying not to think about the fact that at some point in the very near future, we are going to arrive at a villa in Cannes and there will be one bed.
Maybe.
Probably.
Definitely, because Everly is running point on this trip and would absolutely weaponize European architecture against my peace.
The cabin grows dimmer later, the windows shaded halfway as the afternoon stretches. At some point I doze off despite myself, curled sideways in the oversized seat with a blanket tucked around my legs.
When I wake, I'm warm.
And Everett's jacket is draped over me.
I go very still.
The leather-soft fabric smells like him. Cedar, spice, clean starch, and a deeper note beneath it that my body has apparently decided is home now, which is a problem for several reasons I don't have the strength to name.
I look up.
He's still working.
Or pretending to.
His eyes are on the screen, but his jaw is too tight, his posture too aware.
"You put this on me," I say quietly.
He doesn't look up. "You were cold."
I touch the sleeve. "Thank you."
That's when he glances over.
Only for a second.
Long enough that the air between us pulls taut in the low, private light of the cabin.
Then he looks away again.
"You drool in your sleep," he says.
My mouth falls open. "I do not."
"You absolutely do."
"I hate you."
"No, you don't."
The words land too softly.
Too accurately.
I yank the jacket tighter around me and stare out the window so he won't see the blush climbing back into my face.
By the time the pilot announces our descent, my nerves are back in full force.
The coastline below is impossible.
Blue water. Bright white boats cutting across it. Clusters of terracotta roofs and gleaming hotels and hills rolling up behind the sea like the whole south of France was painted by someone with no respect for subtlety.
My chest tightens.
This place.
My place.
Or the place that was always supposed to become mine someday, if life had gone the way my mother imagined it would.
I press closer to the window without thinking.
"It's beautiful," I whisper.
Everett's voice comes from beside me, quieter than usual.
"Yes."
But when I turn, he isn't looking out at the coastline.
He's looking at me.
The car waiting on the tarmac is white and gleaming and too polished to be real.
A driver in a pressed uniform opens the door before we've fully descended the jet stairs, and another man loads our luggage into the trunk with the quiet efficiency of someone who does this for people like Everett every day of the week.
Everett tips his head toward the car. "Come on."
The drive to the villa takes twenty minutes along winding roads lined with cypress trees and climbing bougainvillea so bright it almost hurts to look at.
Then we turn through wrought-iron gates.
And I forget how to breathe again.
The villa is stone and cream stucco and pale green shutters, all wrapped in climbing roses and sunlight. Olive trees dot the drive. Lavender spills over the edges of the path. The sea glitters in the distance just beyond the terrace like someone staged it for a film.
It is absurdly, impossibly perfect.
I step out of the car and just stand there.
My mother used to describe this place to me when I was little. The light. The flowers. The smell of salt and citrus and old stone warmed by the sun.
And here it is.
Real.
Not in a painting. Not in a story. Not in one of Dad's old retellings over cookies and coffee.
Real.
"You okay?" Everett asks again.
I laugh softly and wipe under one eye before any tears can make this humiliating.
"Yes," I say. "I just… yes."
For once, he doesn't push.
He lets me have the moment.
Inside, the villa is somehow even worse.
Worse in the sense that now I may actually cry.