Page 48 of My Wedding Mafia Style

I press my mouth to her hair and close my eyes, holding her closer than I should.

“Yes,” I murmur. “I’m beginning to understand that about you.”

Chapter 14

Lucy

Iwake up to sunlight. Not the polite kind that slips through curtains and asks if maybe I might consider opening one eye. No, this sunlight pours into Luca’s cabin like it owns the place, warm and golden and entirely too cheerful for a woman who fell asleep wrapped around a man she technically met yesterday.

Yesterday. That word feels insufficient.

Yesterday sounds like grocery lists and traffic and ordinary decisions made by ordinary women with ordinary lives. Yesterday does not sound like climbing into a stranger’s lap at a wedding, kissing him in front of an ex, meeting his entire family, being renamed by his grandmother, boarding a yacht, finding out said yacht was headed for the Bahamas, and then ending the night in Luca Moretti’s bed.

I stare at the ceiling for several seconds, letting my brain line up the facts. It refuses.

Beside me, the bed is empty, though the sheets still hold the shape of him. I press one hand lightly against the space where Luca slept, then immediately pull it back as if I’ve been caught doing something incriminating.

No one is here to catch me. Which somehow makes it worse.

I sit up slowly, holding the sheet against my chest, and look toward the wide window. For a second, I forget how to breathe.

The water outside is not dark anymore. It is turquoise. Ridiculously turquoise. The kind of color that looks fake in travel ads, like someone turned the saturation up too high and hoped no one would question it. Sunlight flashes over the surface in bright shards, and beyond the yacht, a strip of white sand curves along the edge of a small island like powdered sugar spilled against the sea.

White sand. Palm trees. Clear water. Blue sky.

Apparently, while I was sleeping, my bad decisions sailed into paradise.

“Oh,” I whisper.

The bathroom door opens.

Luca steps out wearing dark swim trunks and a white linen shirt open at the throat, his hair still damp froma shower. He stops when he sees me sitting in the bed, sheet clutched to my chest, mouth probably hanging open like a woman who has just discovered she has accidentally vacationed.

His gaze moves over me, and even after everything that happened last night, it has power. Maybe more power now, because there is no performance left to hide behind. No fake boyfriend. No family audience. No explanation I can point to and say, That was why.

This morning, his eyes are warm. Possessive.

“Good morning,” he says.

I look back out the window. “That is astounding water.”

His mouth curves. “Most people call it beautiful.”

“Most people were not kidnapped by romance and transported into a postcard.”

“You weren’t kidnapped.”

“I know. That’s the problem. I keep choosing things, and then they turn into geography.”

He laughs softly as he crosses the room, and the sound touches something tender in me. I like that laugh. I like knowing I can pull it out of him. That feels dangerous too, but everything about Luca has started to feel dangerous in increasingly specific categories.

He sits on the edge of the bed and brushes his fingers along my cheek. “Regrets?”

The question is quiet. Too quiet for a joke, though my instincts reach for one anyway. I could say yes, I regret not bringing sunscreen. I regret not asking yacht-related follow-up questions. I regret whatever my hair is doing right now.

But his eyes are on mine, steady and open in a way that deserves better.

“No,” I say.