Chapter 27
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
AMELIE
The breakfast was light and airy, the juice fresh and cold.
It was a beautiful day, and I wanted to soak in the warmth of the Mediterranean sun on our last day in Beirut.
We requested to be seated at the outdoor patio for that reason.
The only thing dampening my mood was the incessant number of calls and messages from Stefan.
I ignored them all.
Instead, I finally gave myself permission to be happy with Kai. Things had shifted between us since we landed in Beirut. I knew he felt it, too, and was dreading returning home. He thought I’d turn cold the moment we were back to reality, but he needn’t worry.
The last couple of days had stripped away every defense I’d carefully constructed against him. Kai was the same man, same jaw, same hands, same unhurried way of moving through a room, but I was looking at him through entirely new lenses. It was alarmingly easy once I let myself live in the moment.
Only once, over the last two days, did I gather the nerve to ask him about the future.
Although I still didn’t understand why me when he could have any woman, I was starting to realize that grief made people do preposterous things.
Even a man like Kai could get lonely. Perhaps he bought a family to fill the hole left behind by the insurmountable tragedy of his parents’ death.
Now that things had changed between us, what did he want out of this relationship?
And how was I supposed to navigate a polyandrous marriage, given Kai’s uncontrollable jealousy and possessiveness?
He paid stupid amounts of money to secure my time.
He paid a man never to look at me again.
He was openly competing with Stefan, orchestrating a charade to make me like him better.
Even if that were the case, surely, Kai knew that Stefan would always be a part of my life.
Despite my current anger, the Nobles had been my family since I was sixteen, and that included Stefan.
His parents welcomed me into their home with open arms and called me their pseudo daughter.
Their younger children thought of me as their sister, rather than a sister-in-law.
The twins were in diapers when I met Stefan, and I was in the hospital when Bella was born.
When I moved across the country for university, I returned to the Nobles’ home for the holidays, spring break, and summer.
The kids had never known a life without me.
Although I thought of them as my siblings, too, Stefan was the one related to them by blood.
I had no claim without his consent, not that I would ever separate them or make the children choose between us.
I couldn’t imagine a life where the five of us weren’t a family.
Well, I supposed it was the six of us now.
What kind of future did Kai envision for us?
We discussed it before the wedding. At that time, I assumed Kai would eventually start chasing skirts once he was bored with playing house, and I’d return to my marriage with Stefan.
I had since learned that Kai’s attention wasn’t so fickle.
He was serious about this marriage, and I was dying to find out what kind of life he imagined for us.
“Kai. Can I ask you a question?” I had asked over lunch on our second day in Beirut.
“Mm.”
“What do you want out of…” I gestured vaguely between us. “This.”
“You know what I want.”
Me. The implication was blatant. Kai had never been subtle about expressing his desire for me.
I turned my cup of lemon-mint tea, needing something to do with my hands.
He watched me pensively. “What do you want?”
What did I want?
I grew up as an only child with the house staff for company.
I used to be so jealous whenever I went over to Stefan’s house, and they’d all sit down for family dinners and do game nights like an all-American household.
When I married him, I thought I had signed up for exactly that—a typical family.
An imperfect house with a messy living room.
Pictionary. Sibling rivalry. Family barbecues. Everything I didn’t have growing up.
“I want a totally ordinary life,” I had said absentmindedly.
Kai was quiet for a moment. “Then that’s what I want as well.”
My chest had warmed at the answer. I’d lost the nerve to ask more questions. While I loved his answer, I was nervous that one day he’d give me a response I couldn’t ignore. Imagine he’d said what he wanted out of this was sex until his dream girl divorced her husband.
I hated letting his past haunt me. I trusted Kai. It was stupid to think he’d run back to some phantom woman after everything we had shared. I had reminded myself that people’s pasts were just that for a reason.
Since then, we had spent most of our time between the sheets, emerging periodically to visit cafes and gorge on the local cuisine.
There was a lustful haze surrounding him, and I had no idea how to break out of it.
Nothing could slow this train down, and this animalistic need between us was growing by the minute.
I propped my chin in my hand, staring at Kai like he was my favorite new show.
He was reading the news over breakfast as usual, but not off his phone like a normal person.
Instead, he was reading a physical newspaper because he was a zillion years old.
There was something sexy about his old-timer ways and mannerisms. The paper was folded with the neatness of someone who had done it a thousand times.
He did this every day, an ordinary routine he had become comfortable sharing with me.
I was in so much trouble because I even found this erotic. It might as well be soft-core porn.
He felt my eyes on him. He always did. “Can I help you with something, Princess?” He still hadn’t looked up. The confidence of that—not needing to glance, just knowing—made my pulse pick up.
I lifted my cup of tea to my lips, trying to identify the precise moment I had lost my mind. “Just looking.”
“At?”
“The view.”
He turned the page. “The view is flattered.”
I rolled my eyes. Cocky asshole.
He finally looked up. It was brief, unhurried, just his eyes moving from the page to my face, but my heart lurched sideways. He had this way of looking at me like I was already his and had simply forgotten to notice. “It must be some view if you still can’t look away.”
“It’s fascinating, is all. I can’t recall the last time I saw someone read a real newspaper. It makes sense. Paper was invented the same year you were born.”
His lips twitched, and he lowered the newspaper a fraction. “No wonder I feel nostalgic.”
There was a comfortable lull as he went back to reading his paper.
I generally read my romance novels over breakfast—I read them off my phone because I was a normal person—but today, I was too busy staring at Kai.
He reached for his coffee without glancing up.
His forearms rested on the table, and I ogled the shapely veins peeking out from around his sleeves rolled to the elbow.
My gaze slid up to his biceps, then to his pale blue shirt covering his chest.
Oh God, I needed help.
I wasn’t the only one enamored by his movements.
A woman at the next table had been watching him since we sat down.
I noticed because I had been watching him too, which meant I was paying attention to everyone else who was doing the same thing.
She was beautiful, early thirties, sunglasses pushed up into her hair.
When Kai speared a piece of watermelon with his fork, her gaze tracked the fruit sliding between his lips.
My chest tightened. The man might as well be walking, talking live porn without doing a thing.
It was insufferable how comfortable he was with being gawked at because people always checked him out.
He was too good-looking to be sitting across from me at breakfast like it was a normal thing that happened to normal people.
Forcing my gaze away from his stupidly perfect face, I concentrated on my beautiful surroundings.
The sun was warm on the table.
The woman at the next table was still staring at my husband. Get your own, I wanted to scream and surprised myself with the ferocity of it.
A pigeon landed on the pavement near us.
The waitress, who’d already refilled his coffee twice, had returned for the third time, even though his cup was mostly full. I was rapidly running out of excuses to pretend she was ‘just doing her job.’
A couple walked hand in hand, the woman leaning slightly into the man.
Another woman, two tables over, kept finding excuses to orient herself toward Kai. There was no way he didn’t notice the effect he had on women.
A car honked at a jaywalker in the street running parallel to the cafe.
A mother at a nearby table was engaged in a stalemate with her toddler, who had decided that fruit was a personal insult. Her gaze stopped short on Kai.
Dear God!
My gaze wandered inside the restaurant to the guests seated indoors, those who had chosen shade. Surely, they weren’t looking at Kai.
I stopped dead.
My mind must be playing tricks on me. Because it couldn’t be.
Through the window, at a table near the glass, a woman sat over the remains of a long meal.
Her hair was different, shorter, carefully maintained.
The man beside her had the settled posture of someone who had been in the same chair a hundred times.
Two teenagers at the table, laughing at something, the boy reaching across to steal food from the girl’s plate.
I watched the way the woman angled toward the man when he spoke, not leaning forward, just shifting slightly, the gravitational drift of someone at ease in their own life.
The woman laughed. It was a real one. I could see it through the glass, the way her shoulders dropped, the way her head tilted back. I knew that laugh all too well, even though it had been years since I last heard it.
“Amelie. What’s wrong?” Kai’s voice came from far away.