“Security said they saw you heading this way on the cameras, so I came to get you. This wing isn’t safe, so let’s get back to the main hotel.”
She turned and walked back down the hallway, her footsteps echoing on the old floorboards until they faded to nothing.
Silence.
I couldn't look at him. I stared at the floor, at the dust motes swirling in the light, at anything that wasn't Sebastian. My heart was still pounding. My lips were still tingling. My whole body was still humming with a want I couldn't afford to feel.
"Aria…"
"That didn't happen." My words came out too fast, too sharp.
"What?"
"Whatever that was." I forced myself to look at him. He was still sitting on the edge of the bed, dust in his hair, his eyes soft and confused, and so unbearably hopeful it made my chest ache. "It can't happen again. We're on opposite sides of this. We're competing for the same hotel. This is exactly what Mr. Kahale is watching for."
"Aria…"
"I'm not going to lose this hotel because I can't control myself around you."
His expression shuttered. The softness vanished, replaced by something carefully blank.
I walked past him. Out the door. Down the dusty hallway, past the old photographs, past the covered furniture, past the ghosts of a history I was supposed to be honoring instead of making out with my competitor.
I didn't look back.
But I could feel his eyes on me the entire way.
14SEBASTIAN
Aria had become a ghost.
Two days since the locked room, and I'd barely caught a glimpse of her. She slipped out of the restaurant before I arrived. Vanished around corners when I appeared. At dinner last night, she'd eaten so fast I wondered if she'd even tasted the food, then mumbled something about an early morning and was gone before dessert.
She was avoiding me. I couldn't blame her.
I moved through the days without really being present. Meetings with staff. Tours of the grounds. Conversations with Mr. Kahale where I said words that must have made sense because he nodded along. But my mind kept drifting back to that dusty room. The weight of her on top of me. The way she'd kissed me like she was trying to consume me whole.
I'd stopped hating her somewhere along the way. I couldn't pinpoint when it happened. Maybe when she laughed about the hermit crabs. Maybe when she defended her charity work with that fire in her eyes. Maybe long before that, and I'd just been too stubborn to see it.
Whatever had replaced the hate was worse.
I wanted her. Not just her body, though that occupied more of my thoughts than I cared to admit. I wanted to know what went on behind those blue eyes when she stared at the ocean. What made her laugh. What kept her up at night.
The wanting was the problem.
Wanting things made you weak. I'd learned that watching my parents circle each other like polite strangers, my mother pretending she didn't know about the affair, my father pretending he wasn't living a double life. I'd learned it again with Caroline, letting myself believe we had something real, only to come home to an empty closet and a lawyer at the door.
Better to keep people at arm's length. Safer.
But Aria wouldn't stay at arm's length. Even when she was hiding from me, she was everywhere. Her perfume on the breeze. Her laugh floated from across the pool. Her silhouette on the shore at dawn, too far away to reach.
I was heading down to the beach when my phone rang. Isabelle.
"Hi dad,” Evie's voice came through the line, not my sister's. "When are you coming back?"
"Soon. About a week."
"Okay. Aunt Isabelle's been cool. We've been doing stuff."