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Instead it only makes the wanting feel uglier… because I do want her.
I want her in this villa with salt in her hair and paint on her hands and that stupid blue dress lifting around her knees in the breeze. I want her in my bed without having to ration how close I let myself get. I want her leaning against my kitchen counter humming under her breath and looking at me like I'm something other than a title, a trust clause, and a problem.
And that is exactly why we are a poor match.
Not for lack of attraction or that somehow this marriage could never be real. It’s because it can. Too easily and too fast. I’d be the selfish asshole to let her agree when I know what it would ultimately do to her… what it would do to us.
I lean back in the chair and stare out through the glass toward the sea.
Frame it as logic, I tell myself. That's what I know how to do.
Frame it as long-term risk analysis. Frame it as compassion. Frame it as realism. Anything but the truth. Which is that I’m dangerously close to wanting a future with her. A future with men like me come at a cost.
The glass doors stand between me and the rest of the villa. I can see everything through them. But I'm still in here.
And Aria is still out there, moving toward something brighter than I know how to be part of.
The worst part is, I want to be anyway.
Chapter Seventeen
ARIA
By the time I reach the promenade, the morning has already turned warm enough to kiss the tops of my shoulders.
Seattle never does this.
Seattle is beautiful in a moodier way. Steel, rain, evergreen edges, and gray water that looks gorgeous and haunting at the same time. This place glitters. This place preens. This place has never once apologized for being gorgeous, and I think maybe that's why it makes my chest ache the way it does.
Because my mother wouldn't have apologized either.
I stop at the same café as yesterday, order a still-warm pastry in French, and carry it down to my spot on the promenade with the ridiculous, impossible thought that I might already have a spot on the promenade.
It's a low stone wall with a view of the water and just enough foot traffic to feel alive without making me feel watched. Yesterday I sat here for hours and painted for the first time in three years. The coastline. The boats. The safe, pretty things that let me ease back into it without having to feel too much.
This morning, when I left, Everett was already in the office.
The glass French doors had been shut.
I could see him from the kitchen like always now—one hand braced on the desk, his coffee beside the laptop, his expression set in that cool, focused way of his that says he's already halfway across the world in his head, solving problems nobody else is qualified to touch. Visible, but unreachable. Right there and nowhere I could actually get to.
When I came down in my dress and grabbed my satchel, he looked at me like I'd startled him just by existing so brightly that early in the morning.
Then he offered me coffee.
Not in a grand, romantic gesture sort of way. Not with flowers or slow smiles or any of the other things my younger self once thought love was supposed to look like. He just reached for a to-go cup and asked how I take it.
Four sugars. More cream than he'd ever willingly put in anything.
He made it exactly right.
Now I sit on the warm stone, set the cup beside me, and pull out my canvas and brushes with a little more confidence than I had yesterday.
Not much more.
Just enough to be dangerous.
The sea stretches out in front of me in impossible shades of blue. White boats cut through it in the distance, leaving clean bright wakes behind them. A gull cries overhead. Somewhere farther down the promenade, someone laughs in French, quick and musical.
