Chapter Twenty-One
EVERETT
She's still asleep.
I'm standing barefoot in the kitchen in sweats with no shirt on, unwrapping room service plates with my hands, trying to remember how much sugar goes in her coffee.
I woke up an hour ago with her on my chest. Her hand over my heart like she'd placed it there deliberately.
Her breathing slow and even. I stayed longer than I should have—sixty-two minutes of Mediterranean light sliding across the ceiling before my body couldn't take the stillness anymore and I moved to the kitchen.
Because staying too long like that might cause me to get used to it.
Getting used to Aria sleeping on me is the kind of thing I need to be careful of wanting.
Pierre's team sent the preliminary deal framework at three a.m. Paris time. The Vancouver stadium purchase is unresolved. Everly has texted me six times about the Foundation gala—the sixth one just a question mark, which from Everly, is a threat.
I haven't looked at any of it.
Why? Because I'm currently standing in the kitchen on my honeymoon, trying to remember how my wife takes her coffee.
Her father said four sugars.
Four sugars and an inch of cream. More cream than any reasonable person would use, but Aria isn't any reasonable person.
It's been almost seven months since I walked into my new Hawkeyes office and saw the assistant I'd already planned to let go.
Almost seven months of my brain running some background process that catalogs every detail about her and refuses to delete any of them.
Remembering details isn't unusual for me. Wanting to remember them is.
I couldn't tell you how Sienna takes her coffee—or quite frankly if she drinks the stuff at all. The very few women before her were merely flings. One-night stands, and to be fair, not many of those either.
Aria's different. I can't stop myself from absorbing anything she tells me.
There's nothing about her that I've forgotten.
Like how she slips her heels off under her desk after two p.m. though she thinks I don't know.
Or how she puts her index fingers on her lips when she's focusing really hard on something.
Or how her eyebrows raise just slightly before I take my first sip of coffee—optimism that she's finally cracked the code on my preferences.
Aria's father told me at the rehearsal dinner like he was handing me a small, private piece of his daughter and trusting me to use it well.
I've been holding it since then. Waiting for the right morning.
This one.
I pour the coffee. Four sugars, then cream until it's the color of beach sand. Mine, more like the color of a brown paper bag, because I am who I am.
I set the cup on the counter and go back to plating: eggs, fruit, and pastries.
They're all still warm from the resort kitchen.
I ordered it thirty minutes ago and answered the door in my sweats and the woman who delivered it looked at my chest and then at my face and then at my chest again and I closed the door before the interaction could become more uncomfortable for either of us.
The floor creaks from the bedroom.
Bare feet on the wood floor of the villa. The soft rustle of a robe. She rounds the corner into the kitchen and stops.
The expression on her face.
That's the thing about Aria. Every thought she has lives on the surface, unlike me.
She couldn't hide a reaction if her life depended on it.
Right now her face is cycling through surprise, confusion, and the particular kind of disbelief she reserves for moments when I do something she didn't expect a human being to be capable of.
Like standing in a kitchen without a suit on.
"Morning," I say.
She blinks at me from the edge of the room. "You're not in your office."
"No."
"You're not on a call."
"No."
"You're not wearing a suit."
"It's seven thirty in the morning, Aria."
She lets out a chuckle and starts walking again from where she'd frozen. "That has literally never stopped you before."
She makes a fair point.
I lean against the counter and watch her take inventory. The plated food, the two cups of coffee, the fact that I am standing here in bare feet like some approximation of a normal husband on a normal morning.
"I took the morning off," I say.
Her hand stalls on the fork she just picked up. She looks at me like I've grown another head.
"You took the morning off."
"You're repeating everything I say."
"Because nothing you're saying sounds real. Are you sick? Are you dying? You can tell me if you're dying."
The left corner of my lips shifts up. The one side I can never quite control around her.
I reach behind me for the coffee. Hold it out.
She crosses the kitchen slowly. Takes it. Wraps both hands around it and takes a deep inhale, her eyes fluttering closed.
Her eyes come up to mine.
"This is perfect. When did I tell you how I take my coffee?"
"You didn't. Your father told me. At the rehearsal dinner."
She stares at me. "You remembered that?"
"I don't miss details."
Especially when they are about you.
I don't say that last part out loud because I can remember quarterly revenue projections from three years ago. I remember the exact wording of a contract clause I read at twenty-two. The thing is, I don't remember any of those things the way I remember anything to do with her.
"Thank you," she says softly.
I nod and go back to plating. Not because the food needs more attention but because looking at her face right now hits in a way I hadn't calculated for.
She slides onto a stool at the island, and I set her plate in front of her. My own sitting in front of me.
She takes a few bites of the egg and then fruit, obviously pleased by the way her head sways ever so slightly when she likes what she's eating. Another thing I've noticed over the almost seven months I've been in contact with this woman.
"I want to take you somewhere today," I say.
She looks up from the croissant she just broke in half. "Where?"
"Villefranche-sur-Mer."
The half croissant stops before her mouth has a chance to taste it.
I watch it happen in real time. The recognition, the shock, the cascade she never bothers to hide. Her eyes go bright.
She knows what this means. She knows I know what this means.
I arranged the car this morning. Called the concierge and asked for a convertible with no driver, because I knew this needed to be just us. Her father's story from the rehearsal dinner. The peaches. The easel. The painter who told him his flirting needed work. The village where her parents met.
I heard the story and filed it. But this one didn't stay filed. It kept surfacing. After all, this is why she picked Cannes for our honeymoon. She wanted to see it.
"How —" she starts, and then stops. Because she already knows how.
"You don't have to," I say. The careful edge in my own voice. The out I'm offering. "If it's too much. If you'd rather —"
"Yes," she says, her back straightening immediately, almost as if she's ready to bolt for the door.
I stop.
"Yes, I want to go." Her voice is smaller than usual. Shaky at the edges. But certain. "I want to see it."
"Good," I nod. "I arranged a car from the resort."
"With a driver?"
"No. I'll drive."
She stares at me. "You're going to drive?"
"I thought it would be easier. We can stop where we need to. It gives us a little more freedom."
"Yes but... in France?"
"The roads aren't complicated."
"You just don't seem like the type to —"
"To what?"
"To do things yourself when you could pay someone else to do them."
I set my coffee down. Look at her.
Before my life as the Kauffman head of the family—before the driver, before the black car idling outside every building I walked into —I used to drive myself everywhere.
Conrad Kauffman still wanted to ensure the name showed wealth.
We were all given expensive cars, expensive schools, anything to signal superiority.
But behind the wheel was one of the few places that was actually mine.
"I don't pay for everything," I say. "Just like fucking you on the jet last night. Some things I want to do myself."
The words come out carrying more than I intended. Her jaw drops but neither of us addresses it.
"Okay," she says, moving on though I can see her cheeks flush. "When do we leave?"
"Whenever you're ready."
"Give me twenty minutes."
"Take your time."
She slides off the stool and heads for the bedroom with her coffee in both hands.
I stand in the kitchen for a moment after she's gone. Bare feet on cool wood floors. Morning light through the windows. The sound of the shower running in the bathroom and it takes all I have not to ask if I can join.
Then it hits me that I just took a morning off. For her.
She comes back in fifteen minutes.
White linen sundress. Hair tied back with a ribbon. Canvas satchel on her shoulder but this time she doesn't bring her painting supplies. I assume the bag is for other things we might find along the trip.
The sight of her in the morning light, walking toward me with that bag and that dress moving in the breeze—I file it away. She only agreed to be married to me for a year.
I'm not stupid enough to believe that Aria Taylor would have agreed to marry me if she hadn't been desperate. I wasn't exactly the most charming man over the first six months we knew each other. Though there was a reason for that. To make sure the feelings I'm starting to have never came to be.
I've put on a white T-shirt and linen trousers. Sunglasses hooked at my collar. Keys in my hand. I'm leaning against the silver convertible the resort left in the drive—low and sleek and entirely too beautiful for winding coastal roads, which means it's going to be perfect for them.
I open her door and then close it once she's safely inside. I walk around and slide behind the wheel.
"Ready?" I say.
"Ready."
The engine turns over and I pull out of the drive and onto the coastal road, and within minutes Cannes falls away behind us.
The road hugs the coastline with water on one side, cliffs and cypress on the other. The morning air is warm and the wind catches her hair almost immediately, pulling it free from the ribbon. She doesn't fix it. She leans her head back, closes her eyes, and lets it happen.
I glance at her. Just once. Just a flicker. Then back to the road.
The tension she carries about her father, and about money. About a contract she signed because she didn't have a better option than to marry me for a year—all of it is gone. Her face is unguarded in a way that's only possible when she thinks no one is watching.
I shift gears and the car accelerates around a curve, smooth and controlled. The villages get smaller while the cliffs get steeper and the water gets closer.
Somewhere ahead of us, Villefranche-sur-Mer is waiting.
Because she mentioned it once.
And I don't miss details.