Chapter 6 Wine and Want
Wine and Want
Edith
I spend an hour staring at the ceiling, reconstructing the vineyard like a crime scene.
His thumb on my lip. The wine transferring between us in a smear of gold. The way his eyes went molten and his voice dropped to a register that made my entire body pay attention.
Then: nothing. A switch flipped and the man who'd been touching my mouth like it was sacred yanked me toward the car like the hillside was about to detonate.
I replay the sequence obsessively, looking for the variable I missed.
One minute, the air between us was so charged I could taste it.
The next, his body went rigid, his gaze snapped to the horizon, and his voice came out flat and cold in a way that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with something I couldn't see.
He was scanning. Reading. Tracking some invisible threat across a landscape that looked perfectly empty.
Which means either he's clinically paranoid, or there was actually something out there.
I pull his pillow against my chest and breathe in cedar and spice and the thing underneath that I can't name. The scent that makes my hindbrain sit up and say pay attention in ways that my therapist would probably want to discuss at length.
The blade in the nightstand. The scars. The water displacement that defied physics. The body temperature that should require hospitalization. The way he moves; too quiet, too controlled, too aware, like he's running a constant threat assessment that never switches off.
Not paranoid. Trained. For something specific and violent, sustained over years.
The bitter voice in my head tries: Or he's controlling. Like every other man who thinks he knows what's best for you.
But that doesn't survive contact with the evidence. He cooked me breakfast. He asked permission before the vineyard. He said don't stop when I touched his scars, with a voice so stripped of defense it sounded like a man who'd forgotten what gentleness felt like.
He's not controlling me. He's protecting me.
From what, I don't know yet.
My phone buzzes. Rachel, finally.
Rachel Winters: Got your messages. Any updates? No movement from MediVista's team.
I stare at the screen. What do I tell her? That the resort owner touched my lip and I saw stars and then he turned into someone else entirely?
All quiet. Staying put.
Rachel Winters: Good. We file in nine days. After that, you breathe.
Nine days.
Copy. Signal's bad here. Will check in when I can.
Rachel Winters: Stay safe, Edith. No unnecessary risks.
I almost laugh. The sound comes out wrong; too sharp, too knowing. Unnecessary risks. Like falling for a man with a weapon in his nightstand and secrets layered so deep I can feel them in his skin.
Always careful.
I silence the phone and sit up. Outside, the sun is pouring gold and rose across the caldera.
In Portland, I'd be eating leftover pad thai and watching true crime documentaries.
Here, I'm wrapped in a stranger's sheets, obsessing over a man who ran too hot and pulled too close and then vanished without a word.
"Fuck this," I say to the empty room.
I am not going to lie here constructing conspiracy theories about a man who can't decide whether he wants to kiss me or flee from me.
I am Edith Kendrick. I took on a pharmaceutical company worth four billion dollars.
I survived depositions that lasted six hours.
I can survive a Greek sunset without a bodyguard.
I'm going into town.
The little black dress has been folded in my suitcase since Portland, waiting for an occasion that seemed increasingly unlikely.
I pull it out and shake the wrinkles loose. Sleeveless. Fitted through the bodice, falling to mid-thigh. The kind of dress that could go to a business dinner or a date depending on how you styled it.
I style it for war.
No bra — the dress has built-in support, and I want to feel dangerous. Delicate gold earrings I bought for myself when I made senior writer. The strappy sandals I splurged on before the trip, back when I still believed vacations could be uncomplicated.
In the bathroom mirror, I apply makeup with more care than I've taken in months. Foundation. Blush. Mascara that makes my eyes look bigger. And the lipstick, not the sensible nude I wear to the office. A deep berry that makes my mouth look like trouble.
Or a dare.
The woman in the mirror looks like she has her shit together. Put-together, sharp-edged, ready. Not a woman whose life imploded eight months ago. Not a woman who's hiding on a cliff while pharmaceutical executives debate whether she's more useful dead.
"You took on MediVista," I tell her. "You can handle dinner alone."
She looks skeptical but willing.
I reach for the door.
Then stop. Turn back.
Open the nightstand drawer.
The blade catches the golden light differently tonight. After the vineyard — after watching Kaz scan an empty horizon like he was reading a threat only he could perceive — the weapon in the drawer has reclassified itself. Not a curiosity. Not an antique. An answer to a question I'm still forming.
I pick it up. The leather grip is worn smooth from use — real use, not display. The inscriptions along the metal aren't decorative. They're tallies. Each mark deliberate, cut with intent.
A fight? A kill? A year survived?
He positioned himself between me and the open valley. His body went to full alert at something invisible. He moved me out of an exposed position with tactical precision.
He wasn't being controlling at the vineyard. He was being a soldier.
Against what?
I set the blade back. Close the drawer. Grab my clutch — phone, villa key, lip gloss, a credit card I probably shouldn't use, and check the mirror one last time.
The dress fits. The lipstick is bold. I look good.
I look like someone who doesn't wait.
The door opens onto the terrace, and I make it three steps before I see him.
Kaz is walking up the stone path, and whatever composure I assembled in the last forty minutes goes straight to hell.
He's changed clothes. Black linen shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows, forearms on display; the scarred, corded, too-warm forearms I've been thinking about since the pool.
Dark jeans that fit him like someone measured twice.
Hair damp from a recent shower. He's carrying a canvas bag in one hand and a wine bottle in the other, and the evening light is doing something criminal to his cheekbones.
He looks like a man who's come to apologize.
He looks like a man who's come to finish what he started.
We see each other at the same moment. He stops on the path. I stop on the terrace. The evening breeze carries jasmine between us, and the sun is setting behind him, backlighting his hair with gold, and we are two people who have no business standing this close to an edge.
"Going somewhere?" His voice is carefully neutral, but his eyes are doing something complicated as they track the black dress, the bare legs, the berry lipstick.
"Fira." I adjust my clutch, projecting confidence I'm manufacturing in real time. "I want to see Santorini. The actual island. Not just the view from this cliff."
"Alone?"
"That's what happens when you touch a woman's lip at the vineyard and then disappear for four hours without a word." The words come out sharper than I planned. Good. Let them cut. "I'm not going to sit around waiting."
Something crosses his face. Not anger — something rawer. Regret, maybe. Or the recognition that he earned this.
"Edith —"
"Move." I gesture at the path behind him. "The bus stops at the main road, right?"
I have absolutely no idea where the bus stops.
He doesn't move. We're at an impasse — me in my war dress and my battle lipstick, him blocking the path with groceries and wine and an expression that's trying very hard to be neutral and failing spectacularly.
"You can't go into town," he says.
"Excuse me?"
"It's not safe. Fira at sunset is pickpockets and drunk tourists and vendors who won't take no for —"
"Instead of what? Staying locked in this villa like a good little damsel?" I step forward, into his space, close enough to feel the heat coming off him. Always the heat. "I didn't come to Greece to be a prisoner, Kaz."
"You're not a prisoner."
"Then let me leave."
His jaw works. His free hand comes up — hovers near my face, close enough that I can feel the temperature differential between his skin and the evening air — then drops.
"I brought dinner." He lifts the canvas bag. His voice has shifted into something I haven't heard before — not commanding, not controlled. Almost desperate. "Please. Let me cook for you. Let me explain."
"You don't owe me an explanation."
"I owe you several." He holds my gaze. "Starting with why I pulled away at the vineyard."
"Fine. Why did you pull away?"
"Because if I hadn't, I would have kissed you."
The words land like a match on dry timber.
"And I wasn't sure," he continues, each word costing him something visible, "that you wanted that."
The air between us rearranges itself. All the sharp edges I've been maintaining — the lipstick armor, the confident stance, the righteous anger of a woman who was left without a word — soften into something more honest. Because he's looking at me the way he looked at me at the vineyard, right before the wine drop.
Like I'm the only solid thing in a world that keeps shifting under his feet.
"You're an idiot," I hear myself say.
His mouth twitches. "I've been told."
"I've been sleeping in your bed. Wearing your sheets.
Breathing you in from your pillow for three nights.
" The confession comes out fiercer than I intended.
"I let you feed me a fig from your fingers.
I traced your scars and you said don't stop and I didn't stop.
What part of any of that suggests I don't want you to kiss me? "
His pupils swallow the amber. The bag of groceries and the wine bottle hang from his hands like he's forgotten they exist.