Chapter two

The first thing I registered was warmth.

The second was the soft press of lips against my jaw, my neck, the corner of my mouth—slow and deliberate, the kind of waking up that was designed to make a man forget he had anywhere to be.

I opened my eyes.

Morning light was cutting through the bedroom window at an angle that made me squint, and Violet was propped up on one elbow beside me, grinning with the particular satisfaction of a woman who knew exactly what she looked like and was entirely comfortable with the knowledge. The sheet had pooled at her waist. She made no move to adjust it.

"Good morning," she said.

"Morning." I pushed myself upright and dragged a hand through my hair, taking a moment to orient myself—the familiar ceiling of my penthouse, the city noise twenty floors below, the dull ache in my shoulders from the late hours I'd spent hunched over project files before she'd arrived last night.

Violet had been in my life for six months, which was longer than any other woman in recent memory had managed to hold the position. That wasn't an accident. Violet Reyes was thirty-four, fiercely intelligent, one of the sharpest legal minds on my corporate team, and completely uninterested in turning what we had into something it was never designed to be. She didn't ask me about my feelings. She didn't linger over breakfast making pointed observations about the future. She didn't leave things at my apartment as quiet, deliberate acts of territory-claiming. She wanted exactly what I wanted—company, physical release, and a clean exit when it was over—and she had never once pretended otherwise.

It was the only kind of arrangement I had the bandwidth for. My work was my priority. It always had been. The research on Meridian Island was at a stage that demanded everything I had, and the funding secured against the next breakthrough was worth enough that a single significant mistake could unravel years of careful, painstaking work. I didn't have the space in my life for love, attachment, or the particular emotional maintenance that real relationships required, and I had stopped apologizing for that a long time ago.

I was a man. I had needs. Violet was the simplest possible solution, and it worked cleanly for both of us.

Her hand slid under the sheet and found me, and I felt myself respond before I'd made any conscious decision about it. She let out a low, satisfied laugh.

"You know," she said, "a decent man would let a woman sleep in after a night like that. I think I got maybe three hours, Matthias. Three."

"You didn't complain last night."

"I'm not complaining now." She tilted her head, watching me. "I'm just establishing the record."

I got a hand at her hip and rolled her beneath me in one smooth motion. She went easily, still laughing, her arms looping around my neck as I looked down at her.

"Sleep," I said. "We'll sleep."

"When?"

"Later."

I lowered my head toward hers.

My phone rang.

The sound cut through the room like something personally designed to ruin mornings, and Violet made a sharp noise of protest as I went still. I held position for exactly two seconds, willing it to go to voicemail. It didn't. I exhaled slowly through my nose, reached across her to the nightstand, and picked it up.

The name on the screen made me frown.

Daniel Laurent.

My brother-in-law. My sister Camille's husband, which made him family by the particular technicality of a marriage I generally respected and occasionally found extremely inconvenient. I stared at his name for a moment with the distinct feeling of a man who already knows the shape of what's coming and wants no part of it.

I pressed the screen and got out of the bed.

"Give me a minute," I said.

Violet pulled the sheet up with the easy generosity of a woman who understood that certain calls required privacy and didn't take it personally.

I walked to the window, put the phone to my ear. "Daniel."

"Matthias." He had a specific tone he used when he was building toward something—overly warm, careful, laying groundwork before he got to the actual point. We exchanged exactly enough pleasantries for him to feel like he'd softened the ground, and then he said, "It's about Ivy."

I said nothing for a moment. "What about her?"

"She's going to the island. To stay with you." He said it quickly, the way a man delivers news he knows will not land softly. "Six months. Camille and I have already sorted the travel arrangements—she'll be on her way to you by tomorrow morning."

I pulled the phone away from my ear, looked at it for a moment, then put it back. "Daniel. Walk me through the part where you and my sister arranged to send someone to my research facility—my island, my project, my staff—without once picking up the phone to ask me whether that was something I was willing to do."

"I know how this looks—"

"It looks like you've already made the decision and this call is you informing me of it and hoping I care too much about family to undo it. Which, for the record, is a fairly calculated move."

A pause. "She was expelled, Matthias. Third university. She threw an illegal rave, caused forty-three thousand dollars in property damage, and got twelve people arrested. Her dean rang me at six this morning to personally tell me that Ivy is permanently barred from re-enrollment and that his institution's legal team would prefer never to hear from ours again. In two years she has been arrested once, expelled twice before this, and made the gossip columns more times than I can count without getting angry all over again."

I rubbed the bridge of my nose and said nothing.

"She is getting worse," Daniel continued, and beneath the frustration in his voice there was something that sounded genuinely, bone-deeply exhausted. "Every opportunity we give her, she demolishes it. Every school, every fresh start, every resource we throw at this—she finds a way to blow it up and walk away like it means nothing. I don't know what to do with her anymore, Matthias. I genuinely don't. The island is isolated, there's nowhere for her to run, and you can put her to work on something real. Give her structure, give her responsibility. She cannot cause trouble in the middle of the Pacific Ocean."

"I have a billion-dollar project at a critical stage on that island," I said. "I have a team that is working around the clock on research that could change the direction of renewable energy globally. What I do not have is the time, the patience, or the spare capacity to play babysitter to a spoiled twenty-year-old who has apparently made a lifestyle out of dismantling every good thing put in front of her."

"I know. I know all of that, and I swear to you I would not be calling if I had a single other option left." His voice dropped. "Please, Matthias. She's Camille's stepdaughter. She's family. I am out of road here."

I stood at the window and stared at the city laid out below me for a long, quiet moment.

"Fine," I said. "I'll do it. For Camille." I turned from the glass. "When exactly is she arriving, Daniel? Since the travel is already arranged and I'm apparently the last person to be consulted on any of this."

"Tomorrow," he said. "She's already on her way."

"I don't like this."

"I know."

"But I'll do it."

I ended the call and set the phone on the windowsill, standing there with my hands braced against the frame and the particular stillness of a man running rapid, unhappy calculations.

"Everything alright?" Violet had sat up against the headboard, watching me with the easy, uncomplicated curiosity that was one of the things I genuinely appreciated about her. Present. Not pushing.

"My sister's husband has just decided to ship their disaster of a stepdaughter to my island for six months," I said, moving back to the bed and sitting on the edge of it with my elbows on my knees. "She got herself expelled from her third university, they've run out of civilized solutions, and apparently the next logical step is to make her my problem."

Violet raised an eyebrow. "Third university?"

"Third."

"That's genuinely impressive in the worst possible way."

"She has never done a single useful thing for herself in her entire life," I said. "Everything handed to her, and everything handed to her thrown directly against the nearest wall. No work ethic, no direction, no regard for anyone who has to clean up after her. She is exactly the kind of disruption I cannot afford on that island right now."

Violet shifted across the bed and pressed herself against my back, arms winding around my shoulders. "Hey. It's six months, not a life sentence. We'll manage her."

"I hope so," I said quietly.

But even as I said it, even with Violet's arms around me and the morning light moving slowly across the floor, I was already aware—with the grim, precise awareness of a man who has spent two years building very specific walls for very specific reasons—that Ivy Laurent on my island was not a problem I could solve with structure and discipline alone.

Her recklessness wasn't what kept me up at night.

What I remembered—what I had spent two years attempting to bury under work and distance and the warm, uncomplicated company of women who wanted nothing complicated from me—was the look on her face the night of her eighteenth birthday. The way she had said I love you like it wasn't a confession at all, just a fact she had grown too tired of carrying alone. And that kiss—barely a kiss, one single second, the softest press of her mouth against mine before I had pulled back and done what I was supposed to do.

One second. Two years ago.

And it had not left me once.

I had rejected her. I had removed myself from every room she occupied and every gathering she attended. I had buried myself in work, taken appropriate women to appropriate dinners, and told myself with the practiced, iron conviction of a man who knows exactly what he is supposed to want that what I felt for her was something I could choose not to feel.

I had been wrong about that. I just hadn't allowed myself to say it out loud.

And now she was coming to my island.

How in God's name was I supposed to survive six months of isolation with the one woman who occupied every dark, forbidden corner of my imagination—the girl I had wanted since before I had any right to want her, the girl I knew with complete and absolute certainty I should never, under any circumstances, have?