Chapter Fourteen: Bora Bora

Layla’s POV

I lay face down on the pillow and stared at nothing.

Hailey had sent me seventeen emails overnight. I had read four of them, responded to two, and given up on the rest because the pillow was soft and the morning was warm and the idea of being a functional CEO felt very far away.

How had my life ended up here?

I had a plan. I had always had a plan — a clear, specific, completely reasonable plan for how my life was going to go. Build the company. Grow Thompson Jewelry into something my grandfather would be proud of. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, fall in love. Properly. With someone who chose me the way I intended to choose them — freely, completely, because there was no one else they would rather be with.

Simple. Achievable. Mine.

And then my Grandpa had sat behind his desk and rearranged everything in about four minutes.

I pushed myself up from the pillow and slid my feet into my flip flops.

The balcony doors were open. I dragged myself toward them and stepped outside.

Bora Bora.

The view hit me the same way it had hit me every morning since we arrived — like something that had no business being real. The lagoon stretched out in front of me in shades of blue and green that I had no names for, the kind of colours that existed in travel magazines and felt exaggerated until you were standing in front of them and realising the photographs had actually undersold it. The air was warm and clean and smelled like the ocean and flowers at the same time. Mount Otemanu rose in the distance, green and dramatic against the morning sky.

It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen in my life.

I had dreamed about coming here since I was a teenager. I had imagined it so many times — the lagoon, the overwater villa, the warmth — and in every version of that dream I had been standing exactly where I was standing now.

Just not with Ian Lawson few feet away on a laptop.

We had arrived three days ago after the longest flight of my life. I did not handle jet lag well under normal circumstances. I handled it even less well when the person sitting beside me on the plane responded to every attempt at conversation with monosyllables and eventually put on noise-cancelling headphones and went to sleep, leaving me to watch three films alone and develop an unreasonable grudge against airline pillows.

The villa was enormous. That was the one thing I could not complain about. A private overwater bungalow with a dining pavilion, an outdoor deck, a plunge pool that I had used exactly once and intended to use again today, and a golf cart for getting around the property. It was the kind of place that was designed to make two people feel like they were the only people in the world.

The irony was not lost on me.

For three days Ian and I had been operating in the same space like two people who shared a planet but occupied completely different atmospheres. Meals eaten separately. Conversations reduced to the minimum required to function in the same villa. We existed in parallel — him on his laptop, me on my phone, both of us very busy and very intentional about not acknowledging the other unless absolutely necessary.

The bed situation had been resolved with a pillow barricade. My idea. Implemented on the first night without discussion. Ian had looked at the row of pillows down the centre of the king bed and said nothing, which I took as acceptance.

I had been trying to focus on work. The Scott deal — the one I had been building for weeks, the collaboration between Thompson Jewelry and Scott’s distribution network that would take our new collection to a completely different market — had been moving smoothly until recently. For the last few weeks Mr. Scott had been harder to reach. Slower to respond. Something had changed and I could not identify what.

Hailey had told me to stop worrying. Enjoy Bora Bora, she had said. I will handle everything. You are on your honeymoon, even if it is a fake one.

I was trying.

I went back inside and opened the walk-in closet. The yellow sundress — short, flowery, exactly right for the weather. I changed quickly and checked my reflection and decided I looked like someone who was going sightseeing in French Polynesia and not someone who had been awake since five thinking about a business deal.

I grabbed my bag and the villa map and walked out into the living room.

Ian was on the sofa. Laptop open, as always. He looked up when I came in — a quick, assessing glance that moved over my outfit and back to the screen in approximately one second.

“Where are you going?”

I stopped. “Do I have to report to you every time I want to go somewhere?”

“No.” He didn’t look up from the laptop. “And I genuinely don’t care. But your grandfather pulled me aside before we left New York and told me to keep an eye on you.” He looked up now, and there was a smile on his face that was not a warm smile — the particular kind that meant he was enjoying something at my expense. “Because apparently the Thompson princess needs to be looked after at all times.”

I felt my jaw tighten.

I let it go. For my grandfather’s sake I let it go.

“I am going to look around the villa,” I said, keeping my voice even. “This is my first time in Bora Bora. Haze mentioned you’ve been here before so you already know everything. I would like to see it for myself.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You’re asking my brother about me?”

“I was not asking about you. We were talking about Bora Bora and your name came up incidentally.” I looked at him with all the composure I had available. “You are not interesting enough for me to actively inquire about.”

“Likewise,” he said pleasantly.

I looked at him for exactly one second.

“I have a map,” I said. “I don’t need you to protect me. I am not your baby and I am perfectly capable of navigating a resort property.” I turned toward the door. “Goodbye.”

“I’m hungry.”

I stopped.

My hand was already on the door handle. I turned slowly.

He was still on the sofa. Laptop beside him now instead of in his hands. Looking at me with an expression that was not quite asking and not quite telling — somewhere in the middle, in the unusual territory of Ian Lawson saying something that required a response from me that wasn’t an argument.

“What?” I said.

“I’m hungry.” He said it again, the same way, completely straightforward. “And you haven’t eaten either. I can tell.” He stood up. “There’s a restaurant nearby. We go, we eat, you do your sightseeing after. That’s it.”

I stared at him.

Three days of eating separately. Three days of parallel existences in a villa built for intimacy. Three days of elaborate mutual indifference.

And now he wanted to have lunch.

“Why?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He walked past me toward the bedroom — presumably to change — without offering any further explanation, as though the question had not been asked.

I stood at the door and watched him go.

Fine, I thought. Food first. Then sightseeing.

***

The restaurant was called Leo Treats and it sat at the edge of the lagoon with the particular confidence of a place that knew it had the best view in the area and had stopped trying to compete on anything else. The terrace extended over the water, the tables shaded by palm-leaf roofing, the whole thing warm and unhurried in the way of places where people had decided to stop rushing.

A waiter appeared the moment we arrived — middle-aged, warm-faced, his smile genuine and immediate.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Lawson.” He extended his hand. “It’s been a while. Very good to have you back.”

“Good afternoon, Pius.” Ian shook his hand. “Good to see you.”

Pius turned to me with the same warm smile — and then something shifted in his expression. Recognition, or what he thought was recognition, moving through his face before he had time to check it.

“I’m guessing this must be Miss Mandy,” he said.

The name landed on the table between us like something dropped from a height.

I turned to Ian.

He was looking at Pius with an expression I had not seen on his face before — not anger, not the cool detachment he usually wore. Something that had been caught off guard and was in the process of deciding how to respond.

“Mandy?” I said.

*******

Thank you for reading. Please like, comment, vote and add to library. Your support means everything.

— Ruthie ❤️