CHAPTER TWO #2
RUBY brINGS US BOTH coffee before retreating to the forward cabin, and I watch the way Alexei takes his cup without looking up from his tablet.
There’s an economy to his movements that fascinates me in a way I wish it didn’t.
Nothing wasted. Nothing accidental. Every gesture unhurried, as if the idea of rushing would be as foreign to him as breathing underwater is to me.
Which is not foreign to him at all, actually, given the Atlantis thing.
I take a sip of my coffee and refocus on my notes.
The problem is that “refocusing on my notes” requires me to look down at the tablet on the table, which means the edge of my vision contains his hands, his forearms, the dark fabric of his suit where it stretches over his shoulders.
He’s taken off his jacket and rolled his shirtsleeves to the elbow at some point, I didn’t see when, I was reading, I was definitely reading, and the forearms are. ..
I have no professional reason to be assessing my employer’s forearms.
Moving on.
He speaks for the first time about forty minutes into the flight, and I’m not prepared for what his voice sounds like in a small space.
In hallways and conference rooms, you only catch his voice in passing.
A low register. But here, three feet away, with nothing but a table and recycled air, it lands differently.
It’s...intimate. Not in a romantic way. In a physics way.
The soundwaves have nowhere else to go, so they come straight to me, and I feel them in my chest before I process the actual words.
“The delegate list for this afternoon.” He slides a thin folder across the table without looking up. “Familiarize yourself with the names marked in blue. Those are the ones most likely to have technical questions.”
I reach for the folder.
Our fingers don’t touch.
They don’t need to.
Because somehow, the two inches of space between his hand and mine when I take the folder is worse than contact would have been. It’s a gap that my body is acutely, almost painfully aware of, like a near-miss that leaves your nerves ringing.
“Thank you, Your Highness,” I say, and my voice is normal. Totally normal. The voice of a woman receiving a document on a business aircraft.
I open the folder and start reading.
And I don’t notice the way his gaze lifts from his tablet for exactly one second and rests on me before returning to whatever he was reading.
I don’t notice it because I’m not looking at him.
Except I am.
I’m watching his hands. Because his hands are right there, holding the tablet, and they’re hands that make you understand why sculptors used to spend years on a single marble figure.
Long fingers. Elegant but not delicate. There’s a strength to them that suggests they could be extraordinarily gentle or extraordinarily dangerous depending on what the situation required.
Stop looking at his hands, Zia.
I look at the delegate list.
I memorize every single name on it out of sheer survival instinct, because I need something, anything, to focus on that isn’t the physical attributes of my boss.
TURBULENCE.
Not bad turbulence. Not the sort that makes the oxygen masks drop or sends flight attendants stumbling. Just a brief, sharp jolt that catches me mid-sip of the water Ruby had set out, and my hand jerks, and the water sloshes, and I grab the edge of the table.
His hand is there before I even register that I’m off-balance.
Not on my hand. On my wrist. A quick, firm hold that stabilizes me instantly, the way you might catch a glass before it tips. Reflexive. Efficient.
And warm.
So warm.
His fingers are wrapped around my wrist, and I can feel my pulse beating against his palm, and I know, with the absolute, mortifying certainty of someone whose cardiovascular system has just betrayed her completely, that he can feel it too.
My heart, hammering against his skin.
For a preter with heightened senses, it might as well be a siren.
The turbulence passes.
He lets go.
“Careful,” he says. That’s all. One word. And then he’s back to his tablet, and I’m left looking down at the place on my wrist where his fingers were, where the skin is still tingling, where I can still feel the ghost of his grip like a brand.
I pick up my water.
I take a sip.
My hand is not shaking.
My hand is categorically, definitively not shaking.
I set the water down and pick up my tablet and pull up the V-Series specs because if I don’t find something concrete to do in the next five seconds, it’s going to replay the sensation of his fingers on my wrist on a continuous loop until I lose what’s left of my sanity.
Polymer composition. Tensile strength. UV resistance ratings.
His skin was warm. Not just normal-person warm. Warm like a furnace banked low, slow and constant.
Polymer composition. Tensile strength. UV resistance ratings.
I wonder if all preters run hot or if it’s just him. I wonder if it’s a stallion shifter thing. I wonder if his whole body is that warm, and then I immediately stop wondering because that line of inquiry leads nowhere appropriate.
I read about polymers. I read about polymers very, very intently.
But underneath the reading, underneath the specs and the technical language and the safe, solid world of product design, there is a question forming. A question I don’t want to ask because asking it means admitting that I’m feeling something I swore I would never feel again.
Is it just me?
Or is this...real?
He is my employer. He is royalty. He has probably forgotten more women than I will ever meet, and I’m sitting here with a racing pulse and polymer specs and the memory of his fingers on my wrist, wondering if I’ve finally lost it, like a character in one of the romance novels stacked on my windowsill.
There is nothing between us.
There is a table between us.
That’s it.
HE’S STARING AT ME.
I don’t catch it at first. I’m deep in the delegate list, cross-referencing names with the product specs Ruby loaded onto my tablet, making sure I can speak intelligently about every potential question the blue-marked names might ask.
It’s the sort of focused, methodical work that usually absorbs me.
Usually.
But there’s a prickling at the back of my neck. The sensation of being watched by something you can’t see but your body knows is there. The hardwired part of my brain that remembers what it was like to be prey.
I glance up.
His eyes are on me.
Not his screen. Not the window. Me.
And for one unguarded second before he looks away, smoothly, like he wasn’t doing anything at all, I see what’s in those pale eyes, and it doesn’t fit the Prince of Atlantis reviewing a junior employee’s work readiness.
Something that looks almost like—
No.
I go back to the delegate list.
But my skin is warm again. That sunlight-patch feeling.
And my heartbeat is doing its aware thing, its paying-attention thing, and I’m having an extremely firm conversation with myself about how a man like him doesn’t just lose his composure because a twenty-two-year-old human in borrowed heels happens to be sitting across from him.
He wasn’t staring at me.
He was looking in my general direction while thinking about trade policy or Atlantean politics or whatever it is that princes think about.
That’s all.
That is all.
Except.
Twenty minutes later, I glance up again, and his eyes are on me again. And this time, he doesn’t look away immediately. This time, there’s a beat, half a second, maybe less, where our gazes hold, and the air does something that air should not be able to do.
It thickens.
Like the molecules themselves are conspiring against me, rearranging into something heavier, warmer, harder to breathe. And in that half-second, the pull I’ve been fighting since I sat down goes from undertow to riptide, and I can feel it in my stomach, in my throat, in the space behind my ribs.
Then he looks down, and the moment passes, and I’m left sitting there wondering if I’m losing my mind.
Because this is what heartbreak does.
Right?
This is what happens when someone breaks your heart and you spend seven months putting yourself back together with duct tape and determination and an aggressive reading habit.
The cracks don’t actually heal. They just..
.wait. And then your body decides to develop a fixation on the most unattainable man on the planet, because apparently my survival instincts have the self-preservation skills of a lemming with a death wish.
It’s not real. It’s the emotional equivalent of a phantom limb, my heart grasping at sensation because the alternative is the numbness I’ve been living in since Billy’s text.
Four sentences. No apology. Seven months ago, and I’m apparently still so broken that sitting across from a beautiful man on a plane makes me invent chemistry out of thin air.
And that’s what this is.
Invention.
Fiction.
Because the alternative, the idea that something real and mutual and terrifying is humming in the space between me and the Prince of Atlantis, is so far beyond the realm of possibility that entertaining it would require a level of delusion I’m not currently capable of.
I steal one more look at him, because apparently I’m a glutton for punishment.
He’s reading again. His profile is sharp against the oval window, backlit by clouds, and the light catches the blue-black sheen of his hair and he looks like something out of a painting.
Not a modern painting. Something old. Something from a time when artists believed beauty was evidence of divinity.
He doesn’t look up.
See?
Fiction.
It’s not real, Zia.
It can’t be.
RUBY RETURNS TO brIEF us on arrival logistics, and her presence breaks the strange, charged atmosphere of the cabin like a window opening in a stuffy room. I breathe easier. I focus on her words. I take notes. I am poised and attentive and fine.
Ruby finishes and retreats again, and then it’s just us, and the descent has begun, and I can feel the plane losing altitude in the slight pressure against my ears.
I’m putting my notes into the shared file when I realize I’ve been staring at the same page for three minutes without saving it. I tap save, and the tablet makes a small chime, and I look up to check if the sound disturbed him.
He’s not reading.
His screen is on the table, face down. His body is angled toward me. Not fully, not obviously, but enough that I can feel the shift in his attention like a change in air pressure.
And he’s looking at me.
Not a glance this time. Not a stolen moment that could be explained away as coincidence. He is watching me with those pale, unreadable eyes, and there is nothing casual about it.
My breath catches.
“Your Highness?”
It comes out barely above a whisper. I don’t mean for it to. I mean for it to be brisk and slightly confused, the appropriate response of an employee who has noticed her employer looking at her. But my voice apparently has other plans.
He doesn’t answer. Not with words.
Instead, he leans forward.
Just slightly. Just enough that the distance shrinks from professional to something else. It makes my blood rush and my thoughts scatter and every sensible instinct I have scream at me to lean back, look away, break whatever is happening right now before it becomes something I can’t undo.
But I don’t lean back.
I don’t look away.
Because his eyes are on mine, and they’re not unreadable anymore. For the first time, I can see what’s in them, vast and deep and barely contained, like looking down into dark water and realizing it goes much, much further than you thought.
His gaze drops to my mouth.
Just for a second.
And my heart stops. Actually stops. I feel it stall in my chest like an engine cutting out, and the world narrows to the space between us, which is shrinking, which is almost nothing now, which is—
“Your Highness, this is Captain Fishburne. We’re beginning our final descent into Miami. Please ensure your seatbelts are fastened. We’ll be on the ground in approximately twelve minutes.”
The intercom crackles and goes silent.
Alexei leans back.
The distance returns. The air thins. The moment, whatever it was, whatever it almost was, dissolves like fog in morning light.
He picks up his screen. His expression is already resettled into that impenetrable calm, as if nothing happened, as if the last thirty seconds were a figment of my imagination.
And maybe they were.
Maybe I imagined the whole thing. The leaning, the look, the way his gaze dropped to my mouth like it was pulled there by something he couldn’t control.
Maybe my broken heart is playing tricks on me, conjuring connection where none exists, because feeling anything, even terror and impossibility, is better than feeling nothing at all.
I fasten my seatbelt with fingers that are categorically not shaking.
I don’t look at him.
I look out the window, where Miami is spreading beneath us in a glittering sprawl of coastline and concrete and sunlight, and I tell myself very firmly that I imagined it.
All of it.
I imagined it, and I don’t want it to be real.
I don’t.
Because I know what happens when you want something to be real. I know the exact shape of that hope, and I know the exact sound it makes when it breaks.
The plane descends toward Miami, and I grip my tablet and stare at the coastline and tell my stupid, misfiring, still-mending heart to be quiet.
It doesn’t listen.