Chapter 4 Naomi
NAOMI
Itell myself I hate him.
I need to hate him.
I rehearse the word in my head until it becomes something chalky and stubborn that sticks to the backs of my teeth; but hatred is a brittle thing when set against a place you love, and nothing has ever unstitched me quite like Dillinger Island.
The way the ocean pours itself in sheets of hammered silver onto a crescent of pale sand at midnight, the way the old lighthouse throws its slow, patient blink across water that looks black until the sun lifts it into magnificent cobalt.
Even the way the dunes smell of wild thyme and salt and sun-warmed rope, the way gulls draw lazy cursive in the sky while the tide inhales and exhales and the whole world seems to remember how to breathe.
I grew up on this shore, scab-kneed and salt-streaked, building crooked kingdoms from driftwood and shells while the adults argued in rooms with heavy curtains and heavier words; I learned to swim in the wind-chopped shallows with Grandpa shouting instructions and pride in equal measure from the pier.
I memorized the jagged rocks that bite at the northern point and the secret cove where the sand is soft as talc and the seaweed ribbons your ankles in greeting when you wade out too far, and I learned the sound of summer rain on the old boathouse roof, the metallic tang of storms when the sky breaks green before it breaks open.
And once—this is the memory I don’t want, the one I fold into the smallest corner and still can’t make small enough—once there was a boy who wasn’t supposed to be anything to me, the housekeeper’s son with callused hands and an awkward smile who kept showing up, arrogant and persistent and… dammit, irresistible.
Who grew into something sure, something…more.
Who showed me the tide pools that only reveal themselves at a certain moon and taught me where the starfish hide and where sea glass is born.
Who kissed me in the shadow of the lighthouse as if he’d invented the idea of mouths meeting and mating in that specific filthy, intoxicating way, as the island itself leaned in to witness it…gave its blessing.
Dillinger Island, once Kane’s Reach, my home, the home of every Kane going back five generations, is his now, and as much as I strive to pretend that doesn’t matter, but my bones know better; they hum with every step I take on the dock as the launch knifes through the channel, and by the time we reach the private harbor and the house lifts itself into view—stone and glass and arrogance and pride—I’m wound so tight I could snap on a breath.
Dinner is a performance in the main dining room with crystal props and a view that could make a saint genuflect.
Felix, the white-haired butler, and his staff ghosts in and out with plates that belong in a magazine: oysters like opened moons, an exquisite salad and a main that smells of butter and lemon and a chef’s quiet pride.
They’re all thrilled with the reinvigorated energy on the island and while I’m happy for them, I can’t help the flash of resentment when I glance at the man responsible for all this.
Vasso sits at the head of the long coastal oak table because of course he does, and I sit at his right because optics are important, even without the audience we’re meant to be performing for.
Between us the candles hiss faintly as if they’re trying to speak sense into people who have none.
He sends me smug, heated looks, unbearable little weapons slung across linen and candlelight, and tosses remember whens with surgical precision, cutting where he knows it will bleed but not kill.
“Remember when you said the lighthouse was the island’s heartbeat,” he murmurs, voice low enough for only me.
“You cried when your father toyed with the idea of decommissioning it.”
“I was sixteen,” I say, spearing a too-perfect asparagus, not looking at him. “Foolish at the best of times, I expect.”
“You were passionate,” he corrects, storm-gray eyes the color of simmering mercury, catching the flame. “Remember when you learned to drive the skiff and nearly ran us into the pilings because you were laughing too hard?”
“I laughed because you screamed,” I answer, the smile I don’t mean to give him cutting my mouth and then vanishing. “I also have the scar to show for it.” As if on cue, the crescent-shaped scar on my knee tingles and I hate that my body reacts so viscerally to this man.
He eats slow, watches sharper. “Remember when you told me you were going to run this island one day?”
“What does it matter?” I say, and the words are a knife with no place to go. “You won. Can’t we leave it at that?”
He smiles, and I find myself searching for the dimple hidden within the maddeningly sexy five o’clock shadow he sports. I drag my far too reluctant gaze away as he responds, “No, I’ve only just started and we have so very much to talk about.”
I purse my lips as he continues, laying down what my new life is going to be like.
By the time coffee appears, dark and glossy in cups that probably have a provenance longer than some marriages, my nerves vibrate like wires plucked by an unkind hand.
He looks at me like we are alone in a room crowded with ghosts and chandeliers, like he can feel the exact second my breath hitches, like he knows I can feel the ring he slid on my finger pulsing with its own cold heartbeat.
I set my cup down, lift my napkin, place it on the plate with surgical care. “It’s been a long day, Vasso. I’m going to bed. Goodnight,” I say, crisp as starched linen, and I stand before he can trap me in another memory that tastes like honey and sticks like tar.
“Run, then,” he says softly, not moving, and the worst part is he doesn’t sound triumphant, he sounds certain.
But I don’t give him the satisfaction of running.
I walk, spine a steel rod I forge with each step, through the gallery where the sea is a vast living painting, up the floating staircase and along a corridor that smells faintly of cedar and shiny new money, into the bedroom that overlooks the cove I used to claim as mine, the one that now throws back moonlight as if it, too, belongs to him.
I tell myself I’m going to read. I tell myself I’m going to shower until the hot water scrubs off the night. I tell myself a hundred small lies as if I have control when I have none.
And I’m in old cotton robe when the knock comes. My heart kicks into my throat, partly stopping my voice, but partly paralyzing me.
A second knock comes, then the door opens.
He walks in like he owns the air, like he owns me, like this house and this room is an extension of his reach.
“Do you understand the word privacy, Vasso?”
“I knocked,” he says lazily, voice brushing over my skin like smoke. “You didn’t answer.”
“That usually means ‘go away.’”
He ignores the boundary because of course he does. Vasso Dillinger meets fences the way the sea meets the shore—by erasing them a fraction at a time until you don’t remember where anything used to be.
“What do you want?” I ask, setting down the book I’m not reading and crossing my arms, which is ridiculous because my heart knows he isn’t a man you can barricade with wrists and elbows.
He closes the door with a soft click that sounds like a trap springing, and the part of me that still believes in omens makes a small, helpless sound. “To finish the talk we didn’t at dinner.”
“Talk,” I repeat, because the word means so little when his eyes are doing this, when they’re stripping, cataloging, remembering. Burning. “About what?”
“About the fuller terms of our… arrangement.” He takes his time, lets the word warm in his mouth until it almost sounds like something else. A caress. A sorcerer’s savored curse. “You think you know them all. You don’t.”
“You already got everything you wanted,” I say, and the bitterness in my voice could etch glass. “Your island. Your trophy. Your revenge.”
He moves toward me, slow and deliberate, making a study of distance and erasing it by degrees. He’s changed too, I note reluctantly, looks effortlessly hot and breathtaking in a black silk robe, his hair—always worn longer than boardroom convention dictated—sexily tousled by his long fingers.
I’m struggling not to stare at the gap baring his bronzed throat and silky hair dusted chest when he speaks. “Not everything.”
My pulse stutters, betrays me, lifts itself like a fledgling that can’t decide whether to fly or die. I step back on instinct, and the edge of the bed catches my knees.
Vasso doesn’t stop but he doesn’t crowd either.
He merely occupies the space my breath thought was safe until the scent of him—sandalwood and fury and the devilish patience of a man who knows he has the power, and exactly what to do with it—threads my head with heat and chaos.
“If you would’ve waited a few more minutes, I would’ve told you,” he says, and the smugness is there but tempered by purpose, “that the notary ceremony today was merely insurance, a lock on the back door while we walk through the front.”
I frown. “The front? Meaning?”
“Meaning there will be a more lavish wedding that befits past and present status. The kind with a string quartet and an aisle and a press pen and a fuck off cake that looks like an architectural folly. Because Vasso Dillinger—the housekeeper’s boy who was deemed little more than trash—gets to prove them all wrong by landing the girl they swore was out of his league, and making her his wife.
And because the world prefers its narratives dressed properly, and the trust board, the fund, the banks, and the roadshow all like their stories with proofs.
” His mouth ticks, wicked and wounded at once.
“I would’ve told you all of that if you hadn’t thrown a tantrum and left me to eat my dinner alone. ”
I glare because he deserves it and because the word alone finds a soft place in me and presses.
And because this picture he’s so laconically painting, of impossibly breathtaking gowns and waltzes across ballroom floors, is prying open dreams I threw into a vault when he walked away.
“A proper wedding, Vasso? Really? Aren’t you taking this too far? ” I snap.
He merely smiles, then slowly raises his hand until the tips of his fingers hover an inch from my face. “You said no touching,” he murmurs then, eyes fixed on my mouth like a sexy atrocity he plans to commit slowly, thoroughly, “but did you truly mean it, wife?”
“Yes. I did.” Too fast. Too breathless. Too defensive.
“Then why,” he asks, and his fingers drifts down by body, then he strokes a forefinger over the tie of my robe, not touching, only ghosting the air where cotton clings, “are you shaking?”
“I’m not.” You are, my body replies, treacherous, fluent, alive in ways I don’t want him to remember.
“Are you sure?” he rasps softly. “Look down, Naomi,” he invites.
I should throw him out.
He may have changed almost beyond recognition but the Vasso I remember wouldn’t impose himself on a woman.
Hell, how silver-spoon sirens who visited Kane’s Reach in the summers pretended they didn’t notice the housekeeper’s but secretly yearned to fuck Vasso?
God, didn’t the Goldstein sisters try to sneak into his room when we were seventeen and get lost in the maze when they were thrown out by Mrs Dillinger?
My heart never roused the courage to ask if he’d slept with any of the girls who blatantly announced their availability.
“Be brave, princess.”
I snap into focus, and my head is dropping before I can stop it.
And I see what he sees.
My nipples at blatant attention, straining against the cotton. The quick rise and fall of my chest. And worst of all, the steep angle of my straining body, a hairsbreadth from him.
Everything in my posture screams take me, I’m yours. Take me, give me a taste of what I foolishly dared to call forever the night of my eighteenth birthday before it all turned to ash.
The reminder sears.
I reach for his wrist to push him away, to end a scene, but when my fingers close on his skin the contact sizzles through me like salt on a wound.
He freezes, eyes darkening, and for a suspended second neither of us moves because moving would be confession and stillness is only denial if someone names it.
Memory invades, of a younger and reckless me, behind the greenhouse, dirt under my nails and laughter on my tongue, his hands on my hips like he couldn’t believe the luck of being allowed to hold me, our mouths colliding like the world will end and we insist on meeting it properly.
One stolen moment turned into a dozen.
Until Vasso Dillinger was inside me, making me scream. Making me dream. Making me—
“Let me go,” I whisper, but my grip doesn’t loosen because I am not a liar in the ways that count.
“I would,” he says roughly, and the roughness is a bruise I will check in the mirror later, “if you weren’t the one holding me, baby.”
A sound gurgles from my throat as I force my fingers to release him.
He smiles, then his thumb brushes my wrist, barely there, and yet my knees consider weakening in betrayal. “You keep saying you hate me, Naomi,” he says, close enough now that the shape of my name is almost a kiss, “but your body remembers me.”
I suck in a breath, will the renounced Kane stubbornness into my body. “You caught me off guard. This doesn’t change anything.”
“No,” he disagrees, leaning until his mouth hovers beside my ear and the room shrinks to the precise distance between wanting and wreckage. “The way your body reacts to mine, darling princess. That changes everything.”
He steps back, turns around.
Just like that.
And I am left with breath that won’t behave and fury that has nowhere to go and a burn in places that have no business burning, the ring heavy on my hand and the island heavy in my chest.
“Goodnight, Mrs. Dillinger,” he says without looking back, and the formal address is a brand and a benediction and a dare, all at once.
When the door clicks again, I realize with bone-deep dread that I’m not playing the game anymore.
I’m losing it.