Chapter 6 Naomi
NAOMI
The dress is a trap.
Slick black silk that glides over my skin like a second thought I don’t want to have, and it arrives hours before the gala with a note in Vasso’s precise, slanted hand:
Wear this. Be on my arm. Smile.
—V
Controlling bastard.
I wear it anyway.
For Grandpa when the nosy brigade call him to gossip tomorrow.
For the illusion.
For the war I’ve chosen to fight with lipstick and stilettos instead of swords.
We’re staying at the island house, but the event is across the water—a preservation trust gala at a Gilded Age cliffside mansion in Rhode Island, all limestone and arrogance with a ballroom that opens onto a terrace over exquisite grounds.
The sky is the color of cold champagne when we arrive; gulls wheel, cameras flash, and somewhere a quartet murders Vivaldi in a way only money forgives.
Forced proximity starts at the car door.
Vasso offers his hand; I take it because there are lenses everywhere, and his palm is warm and practiced, and his smile is the kind that makes donors sign checks and enemies grind teeth. Inside, the crowd parts like the tide around him.
He fits here in a way that makes me want to break something beautiful.
“How did you sleep?” he murmurs as we pause beneath a chandelier that looks like it should come with a maintenance crew and a prayer.
“Like a baby,” I lie, because my body still hums with the memory of his fingers ghosting the tie of my robe.
He doesn’t miss a beat. “You only say that when you’re lying.”
The floor shifts. That’s a sentence from another life—the greenhouse summer, the boy who knew my tells better than I did.
For half a breath we’re in that bubble again, where the noise falls away and only the two of us exist under something that feels like a sky.
He slides his hand to the small of my back as we move through the room—firm, possessive, a brand—and the heat where his palm rests becomes its own pulse. The mansion is a museum of old money with portraits that watch, corridors that echo, and ballroom windows tall enough to make the ocean bow.
Trustees hover in tasteful clusters, the men in midnight suits, the women in gowns that whisper when they walk. Every glass glitters; every smile judges.
“Smile,” Vasso murmurs against my ear, his breath a tease over skin. “They’re watching.”
I do, because I understand stakes, and because the board of this trust could bless or bury everything tied to Dillinger Island, and because appearances are bridges even when they’re built over hell.
We circle the room. He keeps me close.
He greets a senator who pretends not to recognize me; he introduces me to a hotel magnate who kisses my knuckles as if women are relics and I am a particularly valuable one.
I stand with the poise my grandmother molded into me and think about the lighthouse’s slow blink across the bay, steady as a heartbeat.
Then I see her.
Tall. Blonde. Dangerous. The kind of beauty money buys and the tabloids cultivate.
“Vivienne.” My voice is smooth; my stomach is not. Supermodel. Socialite.
Vasso’s very public former flame.
She laughs, a sound like ice cracking under stilettos. “Naomi. How charming. I didn’t realize you were the reason Vasso suddenly discovered monogamy.”
“Marriage can be… persuasive,” I say.
“You must have been very persuasive, then.”
“She was,” Vasso says, the silk of his voice wrapped around steel. His fingers shift on my back, a deliberate slide that makes my breath misbehave. “Still is.”
I cut him a look sharp enough to draw blood. He meets it with a smirk that is pure challenge and entirely private.
Vivienne’s eyes narrow, calculation sparking. “We’ll catch up later,” she purrs to me, which sounds less like a plan and more like a threat, and then she glides away to kiss both cheeks of a trustee whose wife is definitely watching.
As soon as she’s gone, I step forward, away from his hand; the absence feels like a bruise. “What the hell was that?”
“Exactly what it needed to be,” he says mildly. “She’s on the board. She needed to believe this isn’t a performance.”
“You didn’t have to touch me.”
He leans in, not quite touching now, cruel with proximity. “Didn’t I?”
The chandelier light paints him in gold and shadow. He looks like sin in a suit and I hate that my body keeps sending up flares.
We make it to our table overlooking the terrace. The bay is ink-blue beyond the glass, the lighthouse beam sweeping with its slow, holy metronome.
Place cards declare where power sits; donors drift past to be seen being seen. Conversation is a current, and I keep my head above water by counting breaths and cataloging enemies.
He knows it. He watches me with the same unblinking focus he gives a volatile stock. When I reach for my wine, my fingers find his; I yank back as if I’ve touched a wire.
“You’re jumpy tonight,” he says, voice pitched for me alone.
“Maybe because your ex was practically undressing you with her eyes.”
“Jealous, Mrs. Dillinger?”
“Of that? Hardly.” My voice cracks on the last syllable like a branch under too much snow.
He hears it. Worse, he enjoys it.
Courses arrive—caviar that tastes like clean salt, lamb that falls apart when you look at it.
The quartet softens into something lush and forgettable.
Between smiles for the table and bland comments about the restoration exhibit, Vasso keeps invading my space in small, exquisite ways.
His thigh brackets mine under the tablecloth when he turns to address the chair; his shoulder brushes my bare arm when he leans to pour water I don’t need; the back of his hand ghosts my wrist when he reaches for bread he won’t eat.
None of it photographable. All of it devastating.
Across the room, Vivienne laughs with the trustee, then slides her gaze to me like a blade and smiles. Everything in me goes tight. I lift my glass to give my hands purpose. The ring flashes in a cold starburst.
Dessert arrives—some architectural nonsense that tastes like cloud. That’s when his hand finds my knee under the linen, warm and unapologetic.
I freeze.
“Vasso,” I hiss without moving my lips.
He doesn’t look at me. He smiles at a passing donor like the devil paying a social call. “You want to sell this marriage?” he murmurs. “Then act like you want me.”
“I don’t.”
His thumb draws a slow stroke on the inside of my knee, and the heat rockets up my spine like a firework. My breath catches; the room tilts; the lighthouse beam washes the glass and keeps going.
“You’re lying,” he says simply, which is the worst part because he’s right and my body offers no defense.
On the terrace, the wind lifts the edge of a tent and the ocean answers.
Inside, crystal laughs and money talks and the past breathes between us like a third person no one else can see. He turns his head and finally looks at me as if the last ten years condensed into this second, his pupils a darker storm.
I hold his gaze and try very hard not to remember the greenhouse, and fail exquisitely.
And somewhere under the tablecloth, my treacherous knee tips toward his hand.
“Stop that,” I say, throat tight.
“Then stop changing the script.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“No,” he says, mouth tipping in the smallest, wickedest curve. “But your body is screaming plot twist, princess. And I’m discovering I may be in the mood to oblige you.”
“Please don’t,” I whisper, which isn’t no and we both hear it.
His jaw flexes like I’ve landed a gloved punch; his pupils go dark and wide, and the hand on my knee tightens with a restrained pressure that sends heat arrowing up my spine.
The air between us sharpens, all crystal edges and held breath.
For a second he looks like a man who’s just been given permission to pillage and is deciding which ruin or treasure to start with.
“I like hearing you beg,” he says, voice honey-glazed gravel.
“It’s been ten years, six months and…” He glances down at his watch with a deliberateness that makes my lungs forget their job.
My mouth parts. I hate that I’m waiting.
That I want the number carved into something that isn’t my chest. That I want him to have counted every single second since he walked away.
Then he looks up, flashes that white, merciless smile.
“Sadly, I don’t recall the days, hours, or minutes. ”
My disappointment is a flare I can’t stamp out fast enough.
It must flicker across my face, because he sees it and the corner of his mouth lifts like he’s just solved an equation.
“Don’t pout, Naomi,” he murmurs. “You’re not the only one who counts.”
“I’m not—I didn’t—” I start, then pause at the clever double-entendre. Before I can conjure up a sharp reply, he steals it, leaning in with an ease that reads as inevitability, his mouth sealing over mine in a kiss that is all claim and no question.
The ballroom keeps turning and the quartet lilts.
Someone laughs too loudly near the terrace doors; a camera flashes white.
I can’t move. I can’t slap him. The table is the ultimate stage and we’re on it, and I tell myself I’m enduring this because it’s the deal I signed, because optics are oxygen, because the trust board loves a love story.
And I signed on the dotted line, saved my grandfather from ruin and humiliation, just for this.
But…oh God, this is incredible.
He tastes faintly of dry champagne and something darker underneath—mint and heat and the ghost of a promise I swore I’d forgotten.
His hand is a brand at the small of my back and as it climbs, guiding the angle and distance, his thumb still a slow stroke on my knee under linen as if he owns the geography of me from two directions at once.
The kiss is precise and devastating, with enough tongue and teeth to drown me in sensation I haven’t felt since…dammit, him!
It’s not deep enough to scandalize but deep enough to undo and awaken, a slow press and part that turns my bones to liquid and the chandelier to blur.
The ring flashes between us like a star trapped in my fist; his breath skims my cheek; the world narrows to the drag of his lower lip and the way he inhales like he’s relearning how.
“You taste…incredible,” he rasps in my ear.
And that melting intensifies.
When he eases back, barely…cruelly, he doesn’t go far.
His forehead almost touches mine in a gesture of false intimacy.
We’re still close enough that I feel the shape of his next words before he speaks them, close enough that the lighthouse beam sweeps the window behind him and makes a halo where there shouldn’t be one.
“Careful,” he says softly, eyes fixed on my mouth as if he’s not finished. “You look intoxicatingly disappointed when I stop, too. Keep looking at me like that and I’ll be forced to say to hell with these people and the small print you insist on.”
I’m breathing like I ran the length of the whole island in these impossible heels. Heat rises at the back of my neck. My pulse is a drum I can’t quiet. I try to summon the fury that keeps me upright; it arrives, but it’s threaded with something traitorous and molten and old as the island.
“This is for show,” I manage, hating the shake I hear. “Don’t mistake it for anything else.”
“If you say so.” His thumb sketches one last outrageous line over the inside of my knee before he withdraws his hand, the ghost of his touch lingering like the afterimage of lightning. He turns to the room with a benign, mildly smug smile, as if he hasn’t just set me on fire in public.
Applause rolls from the far side of the ballroom for some speech I didn’t hear.
I lift my glass with an unsteady hand and take a sip to cool a mouth that isn’t cool, telling myself stories about strategy and survival and optics, telling myself that if such kisses are currency then I’m just balancing books.
But as the lighthouse blinks and the bay breathes and he rests his knuckles against the stem of my glass like a private promise, I know I’m lying to myself.
I know I’m in trouble with this man.
I know these feelings for Vasso Dillinger didn’t return tonight because they never left, and I am terrified that they never will.