Aria's POV
In the Maldives, and I had almost stopped listening for threats.
We'd settled into something I didn't have a word for yet — not routine, because routine implied ordinary, and nothing about lying in an overwater villa with your husband while the Indian Ocean moved beneath you was ordinary — but a rhythm, easy and unhurried, the kind that only existed when you'd agreed, collectively, to let the rest of the world wait.
Mornings were mine. I woke early by habit and sat on the deck with herbal tea I'd requested from the villa's kitchen, watching the water change color as the sun came up, and I wrote in the small notebook I'd brought — not business notes, not strategy, just thoughts, the kind I never made time for in Ravenwood because there was always something more urgent than thinking.
But the nights—and the afternoons, and sometimes the late mornings—were different. I couldn't get enough of him.
