She looked at her empty hands as though she didn’t know what to do with them.
He realized she wasn’t wearing his ring. Everything in him screeched to a stop.
He took her hands. Maybe he just wanted to touch her. Hell, yes, he did. He had been aching to lie with her as he’d left the bed they’d shared in London. His heart was racing, hackles up over her removing his ring, but her cheeks were hollow, her hands tense in his grip. He felt her brace herself against whatever he might say.
He ground his molars, defeated by her fragility.
“You’re going to relax if I have to force you.” He was joking, mostly.
Her mouth twitched, then quickly went down at the corners. “How can I?”
She pulled her hands from his and stood to move to the rail in the stern. The breeze dragged tendrils of hair from her ponytail, whipping them around her face.
When he moved to stand beside her, her profile remained pale and strained.
“There’s so much that needs to be sorted. Look, I’m sorry about what happened with your mother—”
“Scarlett. Stop.” He squeezed her shoulder, then set his forearms on the rail, hands linked, and watched the wake of the yacht trail in a widening V behind them. “I’ve talked to Mother. She admitted what you really proposed. I said it sounded like a damned good offer and advised her to take it.”
“But—” Her eyes became big pools of blue, wide and depthless as the Aegean surrounding them. “I can’t. Not now. I need that allowance for myself.”
The possessive beast in him roared, wanting to lunge and grab and drag her back into his lair. He suppressed it, clinging to what shreds of civility he still possessed.
“If that’s your way of telling me we’re not getting married, don’t. We’re going to spend the next week not talking about that. We’re just going to be.”
They took a dip in the sea before dinner, then ate while indigo and fuchsia bled across the horizon. They talked about inconsequential matters and took turns holding their son. When Javiero rose to put Locke down for the night, she protested, “I can do it. Please don’t treat me like an invalid.”
“Maybe I should,” he said with concern. “If you had broken your leg, you wouldn’t try so hard to do everything yourself. You would expect me to help. I don’t think less of you for needing me, Scarlett. I wish you would quit berating yourself for it.”
Fine to say when he didn’t need any help and she would be the last place he’d look if he did.
He offered the baby for her to kiss.
She did, and when he cradled Locke against his shoulder, she died at the picture he made, this brutish hulk of a man securing Locke’s tiny form so tenderly with his wide hands.
Nervous about what would happen when they went to bed, she searched out a romance novel from the small library of books in the saloon and fell asleep reading it.
She woke much later in their stateroom, still in her summer dress, spooned into his body with the weight of his arm across her waist. Through the baby monitor, she heard Locke stirring.
“I’ll get him,” Javiero said before her foot reached the edge of the mattress.
He brought Locke for feeding and took him back to bed after. She was asleep again before he rejoined her.
Perhaps it was the medication or the lull of the boat or maybe straight up boredom, but she seemed to sleep constantly for the next few days. In between, they swam and snorkeled and used the paddleboards. They read and ate the chef’s eclectic mixes of French pastries, Spanish tapas, Greek delicacies and freshly caught fish.
As for work, they allowed themselves one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon, just enough to answer a few pressing emails.
As Scarlett handed off her phone to the steward one afternoon, she said to Javiero, “Can I ask your advice? I completely respect that you want nothing to do with managing Niko’s money. I want to do it. I want to do it well. However, I don’t want to burn out and obviously that was starting to happen. How could I manage myself better? How do you do it?”
“Can I ask a very obvious question?” He paused in opening the spy thriller he’d been reading whenever she picked up her own book.
“Of course.”
“What did Niko have that you don’t?”
She tried to ignore the voice in her head that suggested Niko had been smarter than she was. She didn’t really believe that. By the end, he had often gone along with her suggestions even when she contradicted his first instincts. Still, she had to shrug.
“More experience?” she hazarded.
“For God’s sake, Scarlett. He had you. Hire yourself a PA as good as you were. Hire two. You went above and beyond far too often.”
“But I have me. I can do all the mindless things Niko couldn’t. I can type my own emails and summarize my own reports—Okay, I hear it.” She rolled her eyes at herself. The transition had been so gradual she had wound up over her head without realizing it.
Hiring an assistant wasn’t a silver bullet, but she felt she was doing something savvy and constructive when she put in a hiring request with a headhunter the next morning. The weight that had been suffocating her had eased a little, leaving her feeling more buoyant than she had in a long while.
They gave up their phones and took the Jet Skis with a picnic lunch into a small cove where an old ruin was reported to be hiding among the trees.
“I’m always astonished when a structure this big is reduced to almost nothing,” Scarlett said as they walked idly from one ancient room to another, stepping over walls that had disintegrated to knee height. The villa
