But you are not alone in this.

“You know you could have taken off these stuncuffs before we escaped,” Djarin huffs. “It would makes things easier.”  

He’s crouched down beside you, blaster shots whizzing by your heads as you try to get back to Zeb and the waiting ship.

“Maybe I like you restrained like this,” you murmur.

He lets out a low grunt and you grin, grabbing his bound wrists and dragging him to his feet as you fire a few more shots and make a run for the gangway.

Once you’re safely in the ship, Zeb asks no questions and prepares for takeoff. Djarin leans against the wall, breathing heavily.

“Can you take these off now?” he asks, a playful edge to his voice.

You shake your head no and step closer, pushing on his chest until his back hits the wall. Light fingers dance up his chest until they find the edge of his helmet. You lift, the pull deliberate until his lips are revealed.

You kiss them once, softly, before removing his helmet completely and leaning in, letting the distance collapse as your breath skims his cheek, then the line of his jaw.

“I missed you.” It’s a whisper into his throat, just hovering and you hear his rasp of breath.

Your hand slides to the back of his neck, fingers threading into dark curls, holding him steady as his lips curve upwards. You taste the spot, slow and teasing, and then claim his mouth, swallowing his satisfied moan.

“You know you could have taken off these stuncuffs before we escaped,” Djarin huffs. “It would makes things easier.”  

He’s crouched down beside you, blaster shots whizzing by your heads as you try to get back to Zeb and the waiting ship.

“Maybe I like you restrained like this,” you murmur.

He lets out a low grunt and you grin, grabbing his bound wrists and dragging him to his feet as you fire a few more shots and make a run for the gangway.

Once you’re safely in the ship, Zeb asks no questions and prepares for takeoff. Djarin leans against the wall, breathing heavily.

“Can you take these off now?” he asks, a playful edge to his voice.

You shake your head no and step closer, pushing on his chest until his back hits the wall. Light fingers dance up his chest until they find the edge of his helmet. You lift, the pull deliberate until his lips are revealed.

You kiss them once, softly, before removing his helmet completely and leaning in, letting the distance collapse as your breath skims his cheek, then the line of his jaw.

“I missed you.” It’s a whisper into his throat, just hovering and you hear his rasp of breath.

Your hand slides to the back of his neck, fingers threading into dark curls, holding him steady as his lips curve upwards. You taste the spot, slow and teasing, and then claim his mouth, swallowing his satisfied moan.

The pad of your thumb runs across his bottom lip. “Is it working?”

His hands shoot up, tightening around your wrists with a bruising force, his helmet falling to the ground with a loud crack. In one fluid, deft motion, he wrenches your arms up, pinning them to the wall on either side of your head. He rolls into you, the hardness between his legs throbbing against your stomach.

“Working?!” he shouts before dipping his head to brush his nose over yours, his voice dropping to a lethal whisper. “I know what you’re doing sweetheart.”

He tilts his head, his lips hovering inches from yours, tantalizingly close and you roll your hips, grinding along his hard cock.

“Well something is definitely working,” you purr.

His only answer is to crash his mouth to yours with a hunger so strong it feels like it might swallow you whole.

You rub against each other, your leathers and his armor creating a maddening barrier.

“Have you ever thought about the consequences of your actions?” he pants. “You’re going to get yourself killed!”

You yank your hands free and reach between your bodies, fingers fumbling with the armor at his waist.

“I can’t promise that I won’t do that,” you breathe out, lips titled into a defiant smirk.

He groans, broken and desperate, hips betraying him as he pushes into your touch.

“Fuck,” he hisses, resistance crumbling. “I’m going to ruin you.”

“He needs this,” you say quietly.

His eyes hold yours before following the slope of your nose and settling on your mouth. The air between you thickens, growing heavy and charged.

“We all do,” he agrees, his voice dropping to a rough timbre that vibrates the small space between you.

Slowly, he lifts a hand, his thick, calloused fingers shaping to the side of your neck.

“The galaxy is full of danger,” you whisper. “All we have are these moments.”

His thumb rests gently against the line of your jaw and he lowers his head. The distance evaporates until there’s no air left to breathe, just him. Warm lips brush yours, soft and slow and you melt into it, your fingers finding purchase on the edges of his chest plate, anchoring yourself against his strength.

“And I want to spend every one of them with you.” he murmurs along your lips. “I’ll go wherever you will go.”

Your fingers trace up and over the wide breadth of his shoulders, finding his hair and combing through gently as your forehead rests to his.

“And I’ll stay with you for all of time,” you answer, watching the slow dip of his head until your lips meet again.

Your eyes flutter shut and each pass of your lips earns a soft groan from him, low and desperate. His arm bands around you, large hand splayed at your back, every inch of you pressed against him.

“If we make too much noise,” you whisper to Grogu. “We’ll get in trouble. We have to be quiet.”

Grogu’s ears fall back and he presses his lips together. “Don’t worry. It’ll be worth it. They’re finally ripe!”

You carefully free the stool of it’s hiding spot and tip toe toward the cabin door, peeking around the edge. “It looks like he might be asleep…”

Grogu stands between your legs, doing the same. You secure the stool against the side of your body, trying to hide it as much as possible before you walk out.

“Come on buddy, let’s go pick some oranges!”

He waddles out the door after you, both of you passing quietly by Djarin who’s seated comfortably against the side of the cabin, seemingly resting.

You don’t notice his helmet turn as his gaze follows or hear his exasperated sigh before he asks, “what are they up to now?”

You can smell the oranges before the tree comes into view and when you round the cabin to the back it sits nestled between some rocks, growing tall against the backdrop of the mountains beyond.

Once you find a flat spot on the ground you set the stool down, turning to Grogu with a smile.

“I can’t wait for you to try one!”

He coos and holds out his open hands. “Ok, let me just get up here….”

You’re just finding your balance on the stool when you feel a pair of strong, warm hands at your waist.

“If you’re trying to give me a heart attack, it just might work.”

His words are soft against the shell of your ear as he presses your back to his chest.

“I just wanted some oranges,” you pout, turning to face him and resting your hands on his wide shoulders.

“What did I tell you about climbing on things,” he replies, helping you off the stool. “And lifting…”

You place a palm on his armored chest. “I know, I know…lifting heavy things and carrying too much and not eating or drinking enough and making sure I rest…”

“I love you,” he whispers, his hand gently sliding along your hip to the soft curve of your stomach. “All three of you.”

He looks Grogu’s way, chuckling as he watches him study the oranges on the tree then focuses on you again, his hand caressing the gentle bump you’re growing.

The sweet moment is disrupted when you hear Grogu straining, his hand outstretched toward the top of the tree. With a  disgruntled sound he falls back just before a bunch of oranges fall loose of the tree and onto the ground.

“He’s making me look bad,” Djarin grumbles.

You raise an eyebrow. “How?”

“I could have done that!” he says, hands resting on his hips.

“Not like that!” you tease.

Even though you can’t see his face you know he’s giving you a challenging glare.

“But I can do it like this,” he says and pulls out his blaster, masterfully aiming and shooting down three oranges in succession. Each one falls to the ground, not a spot singed and even a leaf or two intact.

Grogu’s ears fall and he looks at you with big eyes.

“Aww, you did great kid!” you say, patting his head softly. “Thanks!”

You start to reach for an orange but Djarin swoops in and grabs some before you can and you give him a pointed look. “I can bend down!”

“But you don’t have to,” he says in answer, ushering you back toward the cabin with his free hand splayed at your lower back.

Grogu follows behind already digging into an orange.

Once you’re seated comfortably just outside the cabin, cushioned by the blanket Djarin insisted you use, you show Grogu how to properly peel the orange.

“See,” you say, digging your thumb into the soft skin. “Just get it started like this then you can pull the off the rest.”

Grogu’s ears move up and down like antennae as he watches you, then he takes his own orange and sticks one of his fingers in. Some juice squirts out into his face, and he squeals before falling backward.

“Good start,” you giggle.

He tries again and stabs holes in the orange more than peels it before giving up and just biting into it, skin, and all.

“That works too” you smile.

Djarin comes back outside to join you, cup in hand.

“Freshly squeezed,” he says as he hands it to you.

Your eyes light up and you take a sip. “Delicious! How did you manage it?”

“Don’t ask,” he says and you hear the smile in his voice.

He sits down next to you then pulls the helmet from his head. You immediately run your fingers through his hair, tousling the already mussed curls. You pop an orange slice into your mouth, moaning around the juicy and sweet taste.

Feeling the weight of his gaze you turn your face his way, holding up a wedge of orange. His lips part and you feed him the piece, leaning closer when you notice some juice escape. You kiss the corner of his mouth.

“Thank you.”

It’s a whisper against his lips and he kisses you, tasting of sweet orange.

“For?”  he murmurs as his fingers trace the column of your neck before splaying along your cheek, thumb delicately brushing your bottom lip.

“Searching the galaxy for an orange tree,…” you murmur, kissing him again. “And bringing it here.” Another kiss. “And planting it and making sure it grew.”

His eyes close, dark lashes fluttering against his cheeks as his smile meets your kisses.

“I told you,” he says softly. “I would give you the world. You simply have to ask.”

You can read his thoughts as well as your own because they’re the same; the feel of your curves pressed against him, the taste of skin, and the perfect little sounds he draws from your parted lips.

When the meeting is adjourned you turn to follow the others out, doing your best to ignore the weight of the Mandalorian’s gaze.

He closes the distance, blocking your path and pushing you back against the wall, one hand resting above your head. His thumb strokes along your jaw. “You enjoy torturing me.”

“Maybe,” you whisper, heart kicking into a faster rhythm as his hand drops and his fingers run up your waist.

Your hands find his helmet, slowly pulling it free. His dark eyes burn into you before he presses a soft kiss behind your ear. When his lips brush over your pulse and you gasp he hums softly into your neck.

“And just for this little stunt you pulled,” he murmurs, toying with the silky fabric of your dress, “I’m going to make you come with my mouth and my cock.”

“Hardly seems like punishment,” you say, sucking in a breath when his hand closes around your throat with perfect pressure.

He dips his head, smiling victoriously, then kisses you hard and claiming; a rhythm you know intuitively.

Mando remains silent so Zeb follows his line of sight, catching you leaning over the bar seductively and blowing Mando a kiss.

“Can’t say I blame you,” Zeb mutters, his eyes still on you.

The chair scrapes against the floor, earning Zeb’s attention. “Keep your eyes to yourself,” Mando warns.

Zeb gives him a crooked smile, “just saying…she’ll make you go insane, that one.”

As if on cue you saunter over.

“Hey,” you purr, fingers ghosting along Mando’s glinting armor.

“Hi baby,” he says softly, though his voice never loses that gravelly edge.

You dip your head near his ear and whisper, “I’d like you to take me home now.”

He quickly drops some credits on the bar and with his hand held out for yours, nods at Zeb.

Before you even step foot onto the gangway of the Razor crest and without warning, you loop your arms around his neck and push him against the ship’s loading gear.

He grunts and pulls you in closer, running his hand down your back. Your breath catches as his hand slides down to the back of one of your thighs, lifting it around his waist. He does the same with the other leg and lifts you into his arms.

“Eager tonight aren’t we?” he murmurs. “Are you already wet for me?”

You nod and start to tug on his helmet.

“Good girl,” he whispers against the shell of your ear.

You have learned to read Andy well through the past weeks: the way he stands at a window, how he crosses the flagstone kitchen after lunch, the angle of his body when he sits at the enormous marble island, elbows planted, hands steepled. Today, there is nothing predatory in his posture—no sharpness, no smirk—but a kind of diffident calculation, as though he’s rehearsing a script only halfway written. Still, you leave him to reveal whatever it is he’s thinking about for when he decides to bring it out and present it to you. He remains contemplative all morning.

You are rinsing your plates after lunch, and you’re considering taking the walk down to the lake, when Andy finally says, “Wait.” The word lands with no urgency or demand, it is simply a marker before what he wants to come next.

When you turn, he is already moving toward the glass-fronted cabinet near the pantry—a section you have seen but never opened, because you’ve lived off simple meals through the early parts of the day—bread, figs, cheeses. And for the rest of your meals, at some point a private chef descends either to cook dinner or drop off dishes for the week, and occasionally Andy will drive you to one of the lakeshore trattorias and order for you in his fluent, unshowy Italian.

Andy returns to your side with an old, battered notebook in hand. He sets the notebook on the counter with both hands, a careful act. You recognize the reverence in his fingers, feel the slight uptick of gravity in the room.

It’s a spiral-bound thing, the kind you’d expect to find in a grandmother’s kitchen drawer—edges dog-eared, pages stained with rings and flour-dust, a dozen tabs made of masking tape and ancient Post-its. The front cover says, in an elaborate, feminine hand: FAMILY RECIPES.

You dry your hands before reaching for the precious tome. You flip through the pages, careful, running your thumb along the edge the way you might with old money or ancient letters. Most of the recipes are written in faded, looping script, others in blocky, penciled all-caps. There are short, cryptic notes in the margins—“add more lemon if not fresh,” “marinate overnight or don’t bother”—and the effect is of something not curated for show, but built up over years of trial and error.

You glance up at Andy, who is watching you with a studied nonchalance, as if he might bolt if you laugh at this offering.

You run your hand down the page, feeling the indentations of the pen, the grit of flour caught in the spiral’s seam. “Did you ever make these? Or is this… was this your mom’s?”

“It was hers. We made most everything in there at some point together.” He shrugs, not quite meeting your eyes. You imagine the blocky script then has to be his additions and annotations. “I thought it might be good to have a few things from home here. For the future.”

The word future lands heavy between you, but not unwelcome. He edges closer, almost bashful, as if worried that presenting this piece of his past is a violation, or an imposition, or worse, a vulnerability. You can hardly believe how tentative this moment is between the two of you, how precious and telling.

“Which do you like?” you ask, voice softer than you intend, but Andy doesn’t seem to mind. He leans in and flips to a page marked with a yellowing Post-it, the ink here a mix of bold and delicate: LEMON CHICKEN. There is a doodle of a chicken in the margin, and a note in a younger hand: “good for impressing guests.”

Andy’s finger rests there, but he doesn’t speak right away. Instead, he moves behind you, arms coming to rest on either side of the notebook, bracketing you in. His chin finds your shoulder. “We could try this one,” he says, after a moment. Another beat, and then, “It’s more complicated than it looks.” His mouth is close to your ear, but the games are absent; this is not a seduction, but something closer to an ask. You realize it is important to him, more than he will admit.

Your turn your head slightly so you can meet each others’ eyes. “For tonight?”

You see the exact second he wants to say, No, not tonight, but he’s set this gambit in motion, and a mafia boss won’t blink. “Tonight’s good if you’re up for it,” he says, as though it isn’t the most loaded suggestion possible.

You are up for it. And it’s the first of what becomes the everyday ritual of cooking something out of the family recipe book for dinner together.

The first day you attempt the lemon chicken, you are both so hyper-focused on the recipe that you forget to set the table, and end up eating off the kitchen island straight out of the pans.

The next night you try the thyme and basil roast pork, and the next after that, a tortellini in brodo that requires two hours of simmering and a phone call to Ugo for advice about the right kind of herbs to gather from the garden.

By the end of the week, you are inviting dinner guests—first just a pair, then a trickle, then somehow, the momentum of the lake and the villa and the rumor of a young American couple in residence brings neighbors out of the woodwork. There’s a widow from the slope above, her British accent perfection and her opinions more so, and the retired engineer with his grandchild, and eventually, a small parade of acquaintances who rotate through with bottles of local wine and offers to swap garden produce. The first time, you’re nervous, certain one or another of them will see through you and Andy, but the rhythm of food and small talk smooths everything while also seeming to stitch the two of you closer together.

If there’s one spot on the estate of this Italian villa that you love more than any other, it is, without question, the terrace that features a fine outdoor dining table intended for small gatherings of friends or family, nestled under a lush, vine-covered pergola looking directly over the lake. Now that it’s coming into late October, the evening temperatures of autumn are crisp enough that everyone is in sweaters, and there are heat lamps, but with the warmth precautions, it’s still pleasant enough to eat outside in the stunning setting. The space is illuminated by a stunning chandelier glass chandelier, augmented with strings of white lights threaded through the vines. It’s been the most enchanting place to host your new friends with your new husband in this new life that feels endlessly surreal.

The dinner table is big enough for twelve, but tonight it’s just eight. There is a bowl of lemons at the center, bright as orbs stolen from a still-life painting, and the smell of the lake is so clean and sharp you can taste it even through the heady wafts of roast chicken and white wine. Andy pours for everyone, moving around the table with a host’s grace that no one at the table would clock as anything but camaraderie, except you who knows that he’s a ruthless mafia boss back home, but even you question who he is now that you’ve seen so many new elements of him that exist here.

Tonight, the table is loud with stories and laughter. The gathering includes the widow, Sarah, with her foxlike charm and acid tongue; the engineer, Paolo, his wife, and their college-aged grandson, who is mortified by everything; and a pair from lower on the hillside, a married couple who bring a kind of Mediterranean tennis-pro energy despite clearly hating sports. There are also two empty seats for “a last-minute add-on,” as Andy puts it, and when they arrive, it’s a surprise: Sarah’s daughter, home from Rome, and her boyfriend, a Spaniard who teaches at the university.

You’ve come to relish hosting the rotating circle strangers-turned-friends you’re quickly building, but you’re still adjusting to the tradition of an Italian dinner party, which is as much about the relentless, cascading waves of conversation, as it is about the food. Here, no one is allowed to be quiet for long.

You’re impressed at the ease with which Andy navigates all pockets of conversation across the table, how deftly he manages the pivots from politics, to soccer, to the village gossip. It seems impossible, but he makes it look like he’s always lived here, always belonged.

You play the part too, trading stories, laughing into the night. When Sarah asks, point-blank and with the confidence of the terminally curious, “So. You two—how did this happen?” she makes a little waggle of her empty glass at your newly minted wedding bands. “You’re newlyweds, and you said it was a quick engagement, but what got you to that altar? How did you and Andy meet? You never told us the whole of that story.”

The table hushes, expectant. You’ve become aware how much you’ve inherited Andy’s ability to evade and deflect, to answer with a truth that is not entirely true.

Andy’s head cocks. He’s winding up for a deadpan lie or a polite deflection, but you’re quicker tonight, emboldened by the wine and the waves of collective cheer.

“Oh, it’s nothing as romantic as it looks.” You set your fork down, lean an elbow on the table, and say, “He extorted me. Threatened to ruin my life if I didn’t say yes.”

There’s a beat of silence, then the neighbors laugh—first a burst from the widow, then the rest, the sound rolling in like the waves lapping up against the property of the villa. “Honestly, I’m trapped. A prisoner of the fearsome Andy Barber.”

The joke lands, the table erupts in laughter, but Andy is not among them. His mouth approximates a smile, sure, but there’s a sudden, unmistakable torque to his jaw that tells you he in no way appreciates your antics. Nobody else catches it, and then Paolo is recounting his own disastrous engagement story for the benefit of his grandson and the young Spaniard, who are, against all odds, enraptured. But you see the way Andy’s hand curls around his wine stem, the white of his thumb gone bloodless, and you feel the new coil of tension slither under the table straight from where he sits at the head of the table to where you sit on the other end.

When you excuse yourself to fetch dessert from the kitchen inside, Andy follows. He is so casual about it—“let me help,” because he always does as you two host these evenings—that no one at the table thinks twice. But when you pass from the spill of terrace light into the dimness of the patio leading up to the villa, you feel the change in pressure, the sharp coiled energy in the silence. You can feel every motion of Andy stalking behind you, every footstep measured, the gravity of his attention drawing up the length of your spine.

You step into the kitchen and turn to face him, but he’s already seized your wrist, pinning you to the cool marble counter with so little force it’s almost nothing, but you both know the implication. His eyes are dark, unblinking.

“Don’t do that again,” Andy says, voice only just above a whisper. “Don’t ever joke about me owning you.”

You stare at him, momentarily stunned by the vehemence, but you hardly miss a beat, and the words, “But you do, don’t you?” tumble out of your mouth.

You say it like a dare, but Andy steps even closer, eliminating the gap until your hip is pressed flat to the lip of the counter. “I would burn down everything you’ve ever loved before I let you make a cheap joke of this,” he says, but his hand is shaking, and he doesn’t even try to hide it. “Don’t do that again.” His grip tightens, a flash of heat, then he releases you. He turns away, breath ragged. You haven’t seen him so intensely worked up in months. You forgot this part of him existed.

You stay where you are, hand braced on the marble, as Andy looms back to his full height. You feel something flare at your core—that traitorous twist of desire when he’s like this, a spike of outrage that he’s resorted to it, the seams of both threading together tight as wire.

You tilt your chin up to meet his gaze, your pulse steadying into a challenge of its own. “It was only meant to be clever banter,” you say, careful to keep your voice low and even, but letting him hear the needle in it. “No one believed it.”

He doesn’t respond right away. Andy’s eyes bore into you, reading for signs of retreat or remorse. When he finds neither, he finally inhales—slow, deliberate, calming himself by increments.

“I know what you were doing,” he says. Because you know as well as he does that jokes are always a vector for the truth. “But I mean it. Don’t.”

He’s still a gracious, charming host the rest of the evening, but you see that it’s subdued, less warm.

The moment you’ve called out the last of your goodnights from the front steps as your guests wander home, Andy turns, looks at you with those hard, steel blue eyes, and goes inside without a word.

Now it’s you following him into the kitchen, because the clean up from these dinners with friends has become part of the closing ritual that you two share, as well, but when you step up next to Andy at the sink, he growls, “Leave it and go upstairs.”

You don’t bother to argue, to offer some response meant to salve either of you and smooth things over. Instead, you pivot with a clipped, “Fine,” and leave him. You don’t bother flipping on lights as you reach the master. You stand there in the dark, hearing your own heart thumping, feeling every inch of your skin alive and restless, your body trying to decide if it is angry or simply keyed up by the aftershock of that confrontation.

You pace the bedroom, back and forth, and finally drop onto the edge of the bed, arms crossed hard over your chest. For endless minutes, you’re just locked there in the moon-shadow, staring out over the black sweep of the lake, counting seconds. You’re waiting to hear Andy’s footsteps, the sound of him coming up to finish what he started, to demand a further reckoning.

When Andy finally comes upstairs, you’re ready for him. He enters without a word—just a sweep of dark eyes, a tightening of his mouth as he closes the door behind him, the quiet slide of the latch declaring this space sealed from the rest of the world. You don’t let him get two steps in before you say, “It’s not going to be anything like it is here when we go back to Boston, is it?”

He stops. The shadows cut the sharp lines of his bearded jaw, and for a second you wonder if he’ll lie—if he’ll even bother with a performance for your benefit or simply bulldoze past the question. Instead, he stands there, hands in his pockets, and weighs you like a problem.

“No,” he says. “It won’t.”

You push up from the bed and take a few steps forward. “Why?”

He stalks the edge of the bedroom, not coming closer, his hands still jammed in his pockets. His voice is quieter, but it vibrates at a pitch meant for you alone. “Because,” Andy says, each syllable landing deliberate, “a honeymoon is a liminal space, a fairytale. It isn’t real.”

You know what he means, but you want to punish him for the admission, want to see how far he’ll go in spelling it out. You cross your arms tighter, say nothing, hold the silence until he continues. He’s right, but this hurts because you wanted it to be more than temporary.

“This,” he gestures vaguely—at your body, at the lake, at the high, old bones of the house, and the air quivering between you—“is a retreat. It’s not the world. It’s not sustainable. I borrowed this time for us. But it can’t last.” You watch him, still and wary.

“Why can’t you fucking want us?” Andy asks.

You want to scream because somehow you’ve unraveled everything right back to the start in the space of mere hours. You don’t scream, but you do choke on a frustrating sob when you say, “Because you demanded it. I would have chosen you if you’d been kind instead of cruel, but you never even gave me a choice.”

You say that last part too loud, but you want him to hear the garble and the pain in it, that you want him to finally react as a person, not as an institution or a fortress. Andy holds very still.

“Don’t you see?” he says, and he’s close enough now that you can see the quiver in his left hand. Then his hands curl, not into fists, but into something worse—into the shape of wanting to touch you. He comes closer, walking with a kind of exhausted inevitability, and you can tell he’s been fighting with the words since before he came up the stairs. “If I didn’t take you, you would have run.”

You surge forward and raise your hand to slap him, but he catches your wrist before you can strike. You try to shake out of his hold, but he doesn’t let you.

“You don’t know that,” you argue. “You never even let me make the call.”

Andy doesn’t flinch, but his grip changes, less capture and more containment. Andy’s breaths are ugly and uneven. “I wasn’t going to risk it. I couldn’t.”

Your pulse is skittering under his thumb where it grips your wrist. You wish you could say the feelings are all anger, but the emotions are thick with something raw and unkillable that’s lived under your skin since the first week you met, all the more terrible and breathtaking now that whatever’s between you has evolved and expanded deeply here in Italy. You close your eyes, just for a second, because the only thing worse than being seen by Andy is seeing the want on his face.

He yanks your body tight to his, foreheads nearly colliding. You feel the way his whole being is trembling, probably close to shattering, you in the fallout zone. “You don’t understand,” Andy says, and you hear the ferocity in his conviction.

“Then make me,” you bite back.

You are thrust backward, the world contracting to the violence of his mouth on yours, then down the column of your neck, his tongue ferocious and wild. There is nothing careful in the way Andy drags you toward the bed, your body crashing against the mattress, his grip so absolute you know you’ll wear the ghost of his fingers for days. He tears at your clothes—not undressing you, but stripping you, rough and elemental—and pins your wrists above your head, his weight a pact that you are not leaving, not now, not ever.

He fucks you with a savagery you haven’t seen in him since the earliest days, when everything between you was a war, and then an addiction, and then a war again. There is no foreplay because your bodies remember every password, every escalation, and Andy knows yours by heart. He forces you open, mouths your skin so hard you arch up in shock, pleasure already a cry from your throat. He bites at your mouth, your jaw, the line of your neck.

He forces a knee between your legs, spreads you wide, and fucks into you in a single, savage thrust so deep your vision whites out for a second. There’s only the impact of Andy’s hips crashing into you, the push and force of hands you could never mistake for gentle. You are flipped as if you weigh nothing, your face pressed to the mattress, your body pinned in a way that is—should be—danger, but now reads as his. Because his cock finds you wet, spread, so ready you want to scream with the humiliation of it, and when he plunges in, you do scream, muffled by fists knotted in the bedding. He fucks you with a violence that lights up every nerve ending in your body, stroking so deep it feels like he’s remaking you, each thrust a seismic reminder that you are his, that you have always been his, that even now, especially now, you want it. You want it more than you want to win.

He is relentless. He takes you from behind so hard you nearly lose your bearings, his hands bruising your hips, his cock battering a rhythm into you with no mercy, no space for anything but the friction and fullness. He grunts into your shoulder, each sound a confirmation that the only thing he wants is more—more from you, more inside you, more of everything you have to give.

When you come, it’s not a climax so much as a collapse, a convulsion that tears something loose, but Andy doesn’t slow down. He fucks you through it, not letting up, as if your pleasure is a thing to be drained. You sob, raw, and he covers your mouth with his—biting, licking, silencing the sharpness with his tongue. He flips you again, manhandling you onto your back, and hooks your knees over his elbows, spreading you so wide you can barely breathe. His cock pistons in you, deeper, until you are gasping, keening, until you are reduced to the rawest version of yourself, nothing left but sensation, the feel of him, the violence of his wanting you.

He is not gentle, not even a little, and you don’t want gentle. You want to be consumed, and Andy obliges—he fucks you until your body is shaking, until the tears spill down your face, until your voice is hoarse from the pleading, the yes, the please, the more that you can’t help falling from your lips. He does not stop. Not until you are truly broken open, legs trembling, cunt so raw and used you think you will never get the ache out of your bones.

He circles back to your mouth, forces his tongue inside, kisses you with the same ferocity as he fucks you. He bites your lower lip until you taste blood, and then licks it away, tongue soft as an apology, but you know it is not one. You have been wrecked in the span of a few minutes, but it’s clear he’s not done.

He is going to fuck you until you don’t remember your own name.

He crawls up over your body, grabbing your jaw with his big hand and shoving the wet head of his cock between your lips, not waiting for an invitation. The first taste is salt and skin, your juices and his precum, the burn of him so deep on your tongue you gag, but Andy does not relent. He drives his cock into your throat, one hand fisting in your hair to keep you exactly where he needs you, the other bracing against the wall as he looms over you, and all you can do is take it. If you try to twist away, he holds you tighter. If you choke, he says, “Good girl,” and pushes in further. Your vision blurs with new tears as he fucks your face, the thick, hot shaft of him relentless, your mouth ruined already from the earlier kisses and now wrecked by the invasion.

You want to hate him for it, you’re sure you do, but you are gone, reduced to this animal need to please and to be conquered, to see how far he’ll push you and whether you’ll break. You need to be ruined by him, made anew, fucked out of even the memory of the anger that brought you here. You try to breathe through your nose but he’s too deep for too long, and when he finally lets go, you gasp so hard your lungs ache.

Andy groans as he fists himself furiously and then comes across your face, and shifts so he can shoot the rest of his load over your chest. When he finally releases your head, you collapse backward on the bed, breath heaving, spit and come and tears streaking your face. Andy towers over you, his own chest heaving in time with yours.

You feel the collapsing hush of the bedroom as Andy composes himself, standing at the edge of the mattress, his features still marred by the wet brilliance of anger and longing both. Your legs are spread, trembling, and you hate how much you love the weightless aftermath of being used until your head empties out, until there’s no room for doubt, only this: this knowing, this rawness, like a secret you must never confess.

You don’t flinch as he reaches for your chin, thumb smearing his come from the corner of your mouth and dragging it slow across your cheek, tracing his claim into the skin. It’s humiliating, and it’s the only thing that quells the shaking inside you.

He leans down, bracing his hands on either side of your head, and you see the play of war and reverence in his face—still caught between violence and awe. Then he kisses you, you, deep, with a hunger that seems bottomless, the heat of his tongue against your teeth and the salt-blind taste of your own tears and the ache he’s left in every muscle. The kiss is messy, open-mouthed, more bite than balm, but it binds you to him in ways words never could. You can taste the iron resolve in it, the promise of obliteration and devotion entwined. He doesn’t say “I love you” — and you don’t want him to. Not like this, not ever. All the same, you know the truth of it down to your marrow.

Andy injects his cursed, talented fingers into your cunt, tormenting you with the mess of your ruin, again, knuckles grazing your clit and making you buck up on reflex because you are so tender and slick all movement is pain-laced pleasure, so much more intense than usual. He probes two fingers inside, pressing deep and curling to stroke that perfect, devastating spot. “You’re dripping, cunt still gripping for me,” he murmurs with a strange reverence, as if confirming a suspicion about the physics of your body. He works his fingers in and out with increasing speed, and the obscene wet sound of it is so raw you want to die. “You take every inch of me,” he says, not as a question, but as the ending to an equation. “You’re made for me.”

He moves with a deliberate roughness, fucking you with his hand, thumb never leaving your clit, and in seconds you’re strung out and shuddering again, unable to stop. You wail into the darkness, no longer caring if it sounds like anger, or keening, or the wound of wanting. Andy doubles down, unrelenting, until your body spasms and you break yet another time for him, this time so wrung out you black the edges of your own consciousness, every muscle clamped and helpless to resist.

After, you lie there, wrecked, every limb trembling and dead, your breathing wild and uneven. Andy finally draws away from you, leaving, and you can’t pinpoint to where since you can hardly sustain your own functionality.

Andy’s presence is gone for less than a minute, but the void is so total it makes your ears ring. When he returns, he is silent. He carries a hand towel in one hand, and in the other, a damp cloth. You lie there, still splayed and shaking, and let him clean you—face, chin, the slick mess over your breasts. He is methodical, almost gentle, the movements so unlike the violence that came before you want to claw at him for the contradiction. You’d planned to meet his eyes, maybe spit a retort or something wounding to break the spell, but the look on his face is so devastating, so utterly intent on you, that you can only stare back and let him do what he will.

He wipes his hands and sets the towel aside. Then leans back, surveying you. He should be satisfied, should be spent, but you feel the air thicken again—the promise of more, of escalation. Without further warning, Andy slides his hands under your shoulder and thigh and flips you face-down to the mattress, your body a ragdoll in his grip. You are so dazed you don’t even register the force of it, the way he wrests your upper half down to the pillows while yanking your hips up with his other hand. You wind up face down, arms crushed beneath your chest, your ass arched in the air and on display, vulnerable and wide open.

You whimper, not even sure if it’s resistance or anticipation, and try to close your legs, but Andy just presses your knees wider, immobilizing you with a ruthlessness that’s almost tender.

He presses your chest to the mattress with one palm, weight pinning you flat, the other hand palming your ass, squeezing, kneading, as if cataloguing every inch of you before making a decision. You can’t see him, but you feel the heat of his breath ghost over your skin, and then—his tongue, hot and slick, working a slow, punishing stripe from your cunt to the rosebud of your asshole. You buck, shocked at the invasion, but Andy’s grip on your hip is iron.

The first lick is speculative, as if Andy is testing the edge of your reaction, what you have left in you tonight, but when your hips jerk and you press back, he doubles down, dragging his tongue in slow, obscene circles around your rim, then spearing it in with a precision that leaves you keening into the bedding. He holds you wide, open, and feasts on you, his tongue circling and plunging, working you in both places with obscene, relentless pressure. It is too much, and not enough, and you cannot believe you are so needy that when he works his thumb inside your ass, you nearly come from just that.

He fucks you with his tongue and his fingers and then both, alternating, escalating, until your thighs are slick and the sheets beneath them are soaked, and you have lost the thread of yourself entirely. There is no air, no sound but your own voice breaking, the wet slick of his mouth and the way your body trembles and begs for more. You arch, you plead, you scream into the mattress, devoured, mindless, reduced to a surface of nerves and a single quaking need. It is worse—better—when he spits on your asshole, massaging it with two wet fingers before working them in, stretching, filling, never ceasing his licking and sucking at your clit.

You sob, humiliated and mind-shattered, when Andy’s fingers press deeper, opening you; you arch and shudder, every part of you stinging, burning, exquisitely ruined. He pushes three fingers into your cunt, then adds a second into your ass, the double invasion so intense it makes you come almost instantly, the orgasm breaking through you like a blackout. You can’t move, can’t even process the pleasure—just take it, and take it, every aftershock.

Andy finishes you, and himself, in a blur of escalation and satisfaction, then, without ceremony, lifts you from the wreckage of the sheets—one arm under your knees, the other braced at your back. You’re so limp he might as well be carrying a sack of flour. He deposits you so achingly gently onto the still cool and untouched side f te bed, then climbs in beside you. He wraps both arms around you, winding you tight into his chest, flushed naked skin next to his flushed naked skin. You don’t fight him. In fact, you’re still so strung out that you cling to him, so spent it takes you a minute to realize he’s murmuring something—a string of words, low and urgent, nearly inaudible above the static in your ears.

You scrabble for a reply, but your own pulse is so loud it drowns out everything; your only coherent thought is the feel of his hand in your hair, the rough sweetness of it, an anchor to reality.

You drift toward sleep. Andy holds you so tightly you can’t tell if your ribs ache from the aftershocks or from the pressure of his arms. His breath comes in a slow, deliberate cadence, each inhale a claim, each exhale an ironclad reassurance.

He never releases you. Even as your breathing slows, even as your mind empties out, he keeps you pinned to him, chest to chest, as unwilling to let you drift in sleep as he is this marriage. You can’t move. You don’t want to. There’s nothing left in you that isn’t claimed, nothing untouched by Andy’s insistence. Even your bones feel different.

Andy presses a solemn kiss to your forehead, and the weight of it is so grave, so final, that for a moment you are sure you will never be released.

You try to stay awake, to hold on to something—anger, maybe, or identity—but it dissolves, every thought leaching out of you until only Andy’s grip remains, steady and absolute.

You wake at dawn with your thigh thrown over his hip, his hand still buried in your hair. The room is cold, but your body is kept warmed by his. He still has you locked, but the violence is gone, replaced by a solemn stillness that feels almost, but not quite, like peace. You move to extricate yourself, but he anticipates the

As the waves of everything that transpired the night before roll over you, battering your memory, your throat aches, and your eyes burn, and softly you start to cry.

The last time you were held like this was years ago, childhood, your mother tucking you in on the worst night of your life. The same hush, the same grave quiet, as if by clutching close she could keep the world from breaking you. Some animal core in you recognizes the shape of this hold, the way it’s designed not just to possess but to comfort, to render you safe against your will.

You hate him for it. You hate him in a way that loops back on itself and becomes something else entirely. You hate that he’s devastatingly handsome, that he’s capable, that he’s clever and so good at loving you—yes, loving, you are not a fool. You hate that he can make you want him even after he’s destroyed you, that he can ruin your body for anyone else and then hold you like you are a thing to be treasured.

Andy wakes exactly when you need him to, which is to say, when you are at your worst, about to break down. His arms shift; his breath changes. You sense him resurface and look at you, then the thumb at your cheek, rough but oddly tender, and he wipes away a tear.

“Don’t cry,” he soothes, and you lean into his touch for one brief last moment.

When you push to roll away, Andy lets you go. You shift to the other side of the mattress, heft your legs over the side, and pull yourself out of bed. “I want to go back,” you say, voice sanded raw. You don’t say back to where—you both already know.

Andy props himself on an elbow, gaze unreadable. “Good,” he says. “I already arranged it.” His tone is flat, businesslike. “But not until the end of the week.”

You blink, waiting for the justification, and he gives it without you having to ask. “We’re expected for dinner at Paolo’s tomorrow, brunch at Sarah’s on Thursday, and we owe our neighbors a few more nightly dinners, so they don’t think anything’s awry.”

“You just expect me to play house with you until you let us leave?”

“That’s exactly what I expect of you. The charming newlyweds who’ve welcomed so many new friends to their home wouldn’t leave without inviting everyone over for a farewell-for-now dinner.”

It takes everything in you not to stamp your foot. “You’re unbelievably infuriating.”

You don’t wait for Andy to respond, biting down the taste of an argument you know he won’t let you win. You dress in whatever shirt is closest, clambering into soft pants and hissing at the burn between your legs as you do. You stalk through the villa and out onto the upper terrace. The sun is not fully over the mountains, and wind off the lake stings your face, cooling the sweat and salt and tears you haven’t yet washed off.

You pace the perimeter path above the water for an hour before you realize you haven’t brought anything with you—no phone, no shoes, not even the scarf you’ve worn every morning for weeks. It doesn’t matter. You don’t need anything but the sensation of your feet striking the cold flagstones, don’t need anything but the air to burn out the memory of last night and everything that led to it.

You re-enter the villa through the kitchen, hoping for empty space, but Andy’s already there, leaning over the marble island, hunched in concentration as he prepares your preferred morning drink right alongside his. He doesn’t look up right away, only when he’s poured your cup and slides it across the counter to you.

You take it, despite yourself, and let the liquid sooth the rawness in your throat.

“Chef’s been notified to resume evening meals,” he says without any undercurrent. “I told her to stock us up for the week, until we leave. If there’s anything you want, just let me know.”

“I’d like to have no plans,” you say, and the words come out so blunt it surprises even you. “No social obligations. No guests. No performances.”

Andy shakes his head. “You already know that’s not up for negotiation.”

“I won’t share a room with you here anymore.”

Andy takes a beat, then nods. “Fine,” he says, and you can feel the shift in him—the hard retraction of self.

You did not expect him to agree to that. And certainly not so easily.

So you quickly add, “I don’t want to share a room when we get back to Boston, either.”

Andy scoffs, and his eyes narrow. “No deal. We both own that this honeymoon has been a suspension of real life, so separate rooms will do us both good to recalibrate. But when we get back to Boston, you are my wife. My wife, not my guest. We start our real life then.”

You wonder if Andy’s version of real is something you will even recognize, let alone want.

You set your mug down with care, fingers curling around the handle as if to anchor yourself. Andy watches, lips pressed thin, and you can see he's expecting a counter or a protest. Instead, you say, “I don’t know if why you never believed me or never understood, but I said it in the beginning, I said it last night, and I still mean it now: you never should have forced me into you bed or to accept your proposal. You keep making these choices for us, and you keep assuming I would have run if you hadn’t forced it.” You wait for him to look at you, to meet your eyes, and when he does, you let out a breath that tastes like iron. “But that night—the first night—if you’d asked, really asked, I would have chosen you. No threat, no blackmail, no war. I would have said yes.”

You say this, and your hands shake around the mug, but you don’t look away. Andy doesn’t either. The stillness is absolute—so sharp you hear the tremor in your pulse, the old house humming with the tension of two people who want, and are ruined, and will not concede.

You really would have said yes to that first night and undoubtedly so much more.

You didn't know he was this—the depth and breadth of so much good, so much bad, so much ugly—but part of you had wanted him and assumed he'd never seriously entertain your as an option.

He’d taken you so seriously you never saw him coming.

A fairytale honeymoon had been the curse, not the breaking of a spell, and the next chapter awaiting you in Boston? You truly didn’t know where you would land, how it would mold and carve itself, especially now that you knew what had existed here with him in Lake Como, both of you transformed, and now seemingly all of it lost.

This is how I feel posting this chapter. I've questioned going back on it all week, but ... I think the fact that I'm so conflicted means it was what needed to happen. I'm not second-guessing the longterm plot, I only feel bad about how it hits in this moment right now.

↠ Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

The first thing you notice, waking from a nap on the floating bed in the pool, is that Andy is gone.

Not gone gone, just not on any visible axis of the infinity pool, nor on the adjacent stone terrace, nor peering at you from the shade of the loggia the way he sometimes does, as if he’s making a private study of how thoroughly the Italian sun kisses your skin. You hear the distant echo of his voice, maybe a phone call, maybe not, and the hush of water lapping gently under your body—then, nothing but bird noise and the lethargic patter of an October breeze, already shifting the air toward winter.

You close your eyes and count each lapping wave, the buzz of distant bees, the punctuation of a single, insistent fly spiraling nearby is the only irritant these days. It’s nearly impossible to believe this is your life now, but three weeks in, the unreality is smoothing into a different genre of normal.

The days have been long and slow, a sequence of luxuries and heat, the kind of leisure you used to think only existed for other people. You and Andy fuck constantly, everywhere—on the bed, the pool steps, once on the sun-warmed hood of the vintage Maserati that he’s aquired for this house. There is no schedule, no work—or rather, your work is to be together, to weather the strange storm of his affection and your own disbelief that you are, in fact, married.

The rhythm of the days is built around meals and sex, though not always in that order. Some mornings you wake to croissants and espresso, some to the weight of Andy’s body already moving inside you, his mouth flattening any chance you had at protest. There’s a kind of athleticism to it now, a drive that’s less about conquest than about seeing how far the two of you can dissolve into each other before you lose track of who’s who.

And here there is just time: for sleeping in, for reading entire novels on the terrace, for walking the estate’s perimeter in silence, hand-in-hand, or apart but within each other’s sightlines.

Only twice in these three weeks has Andy vanished, usually for less than an hour, silent and grim, striding off with his phone pressed to his ear. Each time you think you should be annoyed, resent the way he leaves you alone, but shouldn’t you want the alone time? Regardless, the sense of abandonment never quite blooms. He always comes back to you, faster than you expect, with a heat in his eyes that insists you are the thing he wants most.

You learn the gentle rhythms of the house. The gardener, Ugo, arrives at sunrise, and if Andy’s not already up and prowling the study, you’ll often find him barefoot on the dew-wet grass, talking with Ugo in a tangle of Italian that sounds almost like music. You learn that the best breakfast is not at the marble table but at the ancient wooden bench near the back door, looking out over the lake with your legs over Andy’s lap, watching the chop of early light on the water.

The villa is built on a steep slope that plunges into Lake Como, all pale stone and terracotta roof tile, the kind of property purchased only by those who intend to keep it for generations.

Andy is softer here, in a way that doesn’t mean gentle. He is more relentless, if anything, but less guarded. He will spend hours reading in a chair beside you, or spiral into long monologues about Roman history, or sleep like the dead, one hand always on your skin, as if the long habit of possession won’t dissolve even under a Mediterranean sun.

You get out of the pool, towel off in the sun and walk toward the second floor bedroom you share with its view onto the glassy blue lake. You peel off the swimsuit, and change into a loose linen shirt and soft drawstring pants, and even this luxury feels excessive. Since your engagement, Andy has thrown out half your old wardrobe, replacing it with indecently fine things that you pretend to resent but wear anyway. It makes your skin buzz, the way he dresses you for both your pleasure and his.

You tidy your hair in front of the wide, low vanity—a walnut table, ancient, with a marble top. It’s the kind of thing you would have rolled your eyes at a year ago—the velvet stool, a beveled oval mirror, and an array of perfumes and powders, all staged with an artful disregard for clutter. But you’re drawn to it every day, primarily because of the golden brush and hand mirror that sit at its center, a vintage set that Andy gifted to you the first morning here in Lake Como.

He presented them to you the very first morning. They’d been in a heavy walnut case lined with blue silk. “It belonged to my grandmother,” he’d said, watching your reaction with the same intensity he brought to every other element of his life. “My mother used it every day. I think she’d rather you have it than leave it locked in a safe.” The set was shockingly beautiful—brushed gold handles, and fine porcelain painted with an intricate flower pattern. The bristles are impossibly soft. The mirror refracts your face into something both clearer and less familiar. Every morning, you brush your hair with it. Every morning, you catch Andy watching you in the reflection.

He is in the doorway now, arms folded, his own shirt liberally unbuttoned down the front. You didn’t hear him come up. He has a look you know: right on the seam between hunger and amusement, as if the sight of you is a surprise every time, but never unexpected.

“You’re lurking,” you say. In the mirror you watch Andy tilt his head very slightly, a fox reading a threshold.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” He approaches and stops just behind you, not touching you yet, but close enough that you feel the warmth of him.

He watches you finish brushing your hair all the way through, slow, deliberate strokes until the ends fall perfectly straight. Setting down the brush, you turn and face him, waiting.

“You look like you belong here,” he observes.

You arch a brow. “Didn’t you hope it was an inevitability?”

“I don’t leave things to hope.”

He bends and kisses your shoulder—slow, savoring—then lingers, breathing in the scent at your neck. Despite your engagement and these three weeks, you are not yet immune to this. He knows it, too, the way every nerve in you wakes up and goes hunting for more.

But today, he does not escalate—he holds you, chest pressed to your shoulder-blade, and lets the moment dissolve without claiming it. You wonder if he’s in a rare mood of restraint, or whether some part of him is truly, for once, at peace.

You pivot in his arms—quick, surprising him—until you face him fully. The top three buttons of his shirt are undone, exposing the familiar whorl of dark hair, a constellation of fading scars, and the lick of some of his tattoos exposed.

Andy’s hands settle at your hips, his thumb pressing the linen flat to your skin. “We’re having company tonight,” he says, almost offhand, but you catch the flicker of something in his face—a signal flare if you care to read it.

You blink. “Who?”

He feigns a sigh, but there is almost the hint of a smile around his mouth. “Someone we can’t avoid any longer.”

“That sounds cryptic and ominous,” you say, though not entirely without humor. “Are they dangerous?”

Andy tilts his head as if considering how much he wants to reveal before confirming, “Not to you.”

You frown. “Who is it, then? Another family? A business rival?” You half expect to hear a name you’ll have to Google later, some ancient consigliere or a senator’s nephew with a gambling problem.

Andy hesitates longer than you expect, then finally, “My stepbrother.”

Your brain stutters, reboots.

Stepbrother?

Not a word you’d ever heard applied to the realm of Andy. You comb through every memory of his disclosures, minimal though they have been thus far, and come up empty. You shake your head, as if a drop of pool water still clings to the inside of your ear. “You never said—” you start, but Andy is already laughing, soft and sharp.

“Didn’t seem relevant, until now.” He grins, his hands tightening at your hips as if to steady you through the shock. “He’s an acquired taste.”

“So, is he coming for dinner, or for war?” you ask.

He shrugs one shoulder, brushing off the gravity even as you feel an undertow. “He’ll be here at seven. He’s in Switzerland, claims traffic, but really he’s just never been on time for anything like this.”

You lean back against the vanity. “Why now?”

The answer is a smile, but not one that reaches his eyes. “Curiosity.”

You process this. Maybe you should be mad, but if Thea read way too many mafia romance novels, you’ve read just as many mafia and non-mafia romance novels to have where the heroine manufactures outrage over nothing, and you’ve always found it exhausting—the obligatory fight, the unnecessary tension, the reconciliation that changes nothing.

And you’re not actually mad at all that he hasn’t told you about a stepbrother. There’s a long list of things you haven’t told him about because you don’t want to.

So really, you’re just genuinely shocked at a stepbrother’s existence.

“Should I be nervous?” you ask. You’re already running the math in your head: whether this stepbrother is the mold Andy was cast from, or the thing he was cast against. Whether they’re estranged or just whatever the word is for two men who have learned to exist in separate countries.

“You’re not the nervous type,” Andy says, though there’s a sweetness in it, a note of reassurance. He tugs you closer, hands molding you against his chest. “It’s just a meal. He’s not the enemy, he’s just…” Andy trails off, one hand sliding up and down your waist. “Don’t let him get in your head,” he says, softer now. “He’s got a talent for it.”

You know a warning when you hear one.

Seven isn’t so far off. You spend a bit more time trying to care about what to wear, but finally just keep on the linen, Andy insisting that you don’t need to dress up. Your husband, without comment, switches out his shirt for another almost as lazily unbuttoned.

At precisely 6:58 pm, Andy’s phone vibrates where it’s been abandoned on the edge of the sideboard, humming a predatory sound against the wood. He glances at it, then at you, and the look—dry, resigned—tells you more than words could.

“He’s early,” Andy says, but doesn’t move to get the door. Instead, he lets you lead, and you do, padding barefoot down the stone staircase, the cool tile sending a charge up your calves.

The villa’s front door has already been opened by one of the Italian security detail, and waiting on the threshold is a man who waits, arms crossed, with a patience that broadcasts itself as challenge.

The men are nearly the same height, but the similarities differ endlessly between them. Where Andy is all cool blue flame, this man is severe angles and a sharp, surgical presence, muscles hardly contained by his frame. His blue eyes are nearly black, set under straight, unyielding brows—nothing of Andy’s bright, sly smile here. His nose is as straight as a blade. Even his hair is a darker, more exacting version of Andy’s, trimmed so close at the sides it’s nearly military, but longer on top and combed back with obsessive precision.

His clothes are immaculate, but in a way that feels less tailored and more engineered: a black shirt, jacket fitted so closely it suggests armor. Ex-military, you think immediately, but then you see the tiny glint of gold at his left wrist, a watch so expensive and so quietly worn that only someone who doesn’t need you to notice it would ever put it there.

And that mustache.

That’s certainly its own personality trait altogether.

Andy’s stepbrother is attractive, but not in any safe or approachable way. If Andy is handsome in a way that draws you in, this one is repellent, polar, a negative charge that wants to spark or burn.

Even his name, when Andy says it, carries its own weight: “Lloyd.”

“Andrew.” The greeting is a handshake, but Lloyd’s eyes dart sideways, taking you in with an efficiency that’s almost anatomical.

He clocks you in less than a second, blue eyes cutting across the foyer before you can even finish your first, startled blink. A once-over that would be offensive if it weren’t so openly, audaciously clinical. You feel yourself stand a little straighter, some competitive impulse sparked by his entrance, so you paste a smile on your mouth and force yourself to hold his stare.

He doesn’t smile back. “The wife,” Lloyd says, like a fact he’s verifying on a checklist.

You offer your hand because it’s the only move that gets you both out of the standoff, and he takes it in his own, the grip surgical and dry, yet with a voltage that makes your wrist bones hum. He doesn’t give his name or prompt you for yours, just releases and steps inside, sweeping the room with a predatory calm. When he’s satisfied, Lloyd turns his attention back to Andy, and whatever conversation occurs between them is nonverbal but absolutely deafening.

“Congratulations,” Lloyd says, and the word lands somewhere that feels simultaneously genuine and hideously sarcastic.

Andy only smirks. “Let me get you a drink.”

You watch them move into the library off the foyer, and you follow in their wake, observing Lloyd as he glances at the rows of rare books like he’s casing the place for weak spots.

“Scotch?” Andy asks.

“Negroni, if you’ve got a proper vermouth.”

Andy doesn’t dignify this request with a joke, just flips open a lacquered sideboard and pulls down a cut-glass decanter of gin, a bottle of Campari, and an unfamiliar squat bottle with an Italian label. “They make this two kilometers from here,” he says, pouring with a reverence that is almost priestly.

Lloyd, meanwhile, has found the one chair in the room that could double as a throne and seats himself with a proprietary air. Without invitation, he props a booted foot on the low table, surveying you over steepled fingers. He says nothing, but the silence is medical in its sharpness, and you sense he is running diagnostics with each flick of his gaze. You perch on the leather couch next to where you know Andy will sit, knees angled out, showing Lloyd you’re not planning to shrink beneath a family dynamic you have just now learned exists.

It is an old, beautiful library, full of rare bindings and the smell of dust and oil, but the air between the men is fresher, the distinctions newer. Andy sets Lloyd’s negroni before him, then offers a glass of your favorite drink to you, settling in beside you.

“So, Lloyd,” you try, figuring you might as well trot out some kind of conversational opening gambit, “how long are you in Italy?”

He weighs the question for sport. “I’m based out of Switzerland. But till Friday. Then Tokyo.” He sips the drink, his mouth compressing to a tight, precise line, then finally flickers a look your way. “I’ll admit,” he says, “I did not think Andy would ever get married again.” He makes the word again do all the work of a punchline.

Andy’s face does not move, but you sense him recalibrating in the space beside you.

You shrug, as if immune to the dig. “I was as surprised as anyone.”

“You must have really good dirt on him,” Lloyd says, turning to you with a wry arch of his eyebrow. “Otherwise, I can’t imagine him tying himself down at this stage of the game.”

You sputter, shocked since it was exactly the opposite. But Andy intervenes, with a hand on your thigh. “She doesn’t need dirt to get what she wants from me,” Andy says, just on the edge of a threat, but it seems to be a warning to Lloyd, not to you. “She’s the only woman who’s ever really tempted me.”

You blink at Andy, a little surprised, warmth squirming through your chest, unsure how to catalog what he’s saying, and if it’s just for Lloyd, or if it’s actually true.

You’re still processing what even to say to that, but before you can land a response, Lloyd sets his glass down with a decisive clink and leans forward, elbows on knees, gaze slicing into you with surgical clarity.

“So, what do you actually do, then? Wife of Andrew Barber.” The way he says it, with the capital W, makes it clear he sees it as a job in itself. You cock your head, deciding whether to play petulant, sincere, or unvarnished.

“I sleep in, I swim, I read too much. Apparently, I get kidnapped from my life in Boston and flown here for undetermined weeks of forced relaxation.”

Lloyd surveys you, a flicker of amusement passing across the frost of his face, then turns to Andy. “I really hope ‘forced relaxation’ is code for indecent amounts of honeymoon sex or else I’ll have to object to everything this marriage stands for.”

“Lloyd!” Andy’s tone is the admonishment of an older brother, but also a little exasperated, as if Lloyd is forever blurting the worst possible thing at the best possible time.

You can’t help but laugh, which seems to catch Lloyd off guard. “Oh, it’s absolutely code,” you say. If Andy’s hand tightens a fractional increment on your thigh, it’s matched by the up-curve at the corner of his mouth.

Lloyd throws his head back and barks out a single, cold laugh, and then, abruptly, all the armored tension in the room fractures. He shoots you a look that’s almost warm—impressed, maybe, or at least entertained—and Andy, feeling the shift, leans more comfortably into the sofa.

“For a second, I thought you’d be one of those tragic, blink-twice-if-you-need-rescue brides or a total waif and a bore,” Lloyd says. “But I think I’m going to like you. You’ve got bite. A spine. Under different circumstances we might’ve had a one-night-stand.”

You say nothing to that—what can you say?—and take a slow sip of your drink. Lloyd grins, animate now, as if he’s been waiting for a worthy audience all along.

Andy glances over, reading the beat of your silence, and says to Lloyd, “She’d have eaten you alive.”

“She’s doing that now, Andy,” Lloyd says, tipping his glass at you.

The more Lloyd talks the more you see—he’s not so much Andy’s shadow as his negative. Where Andy is tactician, Lloyd is dismantler. Maybe even a little unhinged, but in a way that’s technically useful. You can see why Andy can’t ignore him, but also why he’s arranged his life at a safe distance.

“Tell me, Lloyd,” you say, enjoying the game, “what do you actually do? And do you bring this much charisma to all your diplomatic functions?”

Lloyd refills his own drink, swirling the red liquid with a kind of absent, precise menace. “Officially, I’m a strategic consultant. Audit committees, risk and compliance, that sort of thing. Unofficially… Let’s say I help people find their limits, sometimes by exceeding them.”

You smile, liking this more than you should. “So, you’re the fixer.”

Lloyd shrugs, a gesture of such exaggerated modesty it circles around to arrogance. “I fix things, sometimes. Break them, sometimes. It’s the same art, in the end.” He slouches further in his chair, all calculated ease. “But unlike Andy, I don’t long for power. I just want to see how everything works. People, organizations, the occasional marriage.” He flashes a brief, knife-sharp smile. “I’m here because I couldn’t miss the spectacle.”

Andy groans before throwing back the rest of his drink. “Let’s get this dinner over with.”

It’s late, and the moon is a white saw-curve over the lake, when you and Andy finally give Lloyd a send-off in the gravel half-moon of the drive, hand in hand.

Lloyd had commented on every course over dinner, praising the risotto, bemoaning the use of an olive tapenade as an accompaniment to the roasted vegetables (to which you had to agree), and providing a two-minute oral history of the grappa served afterward (“Never drink it after midnight, unless you want to wake up in another country, married to a Turkish heiress, with a contract out on your spleen”). He did not attempt to murder Andy, nor did he try to seduce you, though there was a blank period in the middle of the evening where he became weirdly intent on teaching you the difference between “threat” and “risk” (both as a business concept and a party game).

Lloyd catches your eye, and for a moment you see the flicker of a new alliance—something conspiratorial. You suspect the two of you are possibly the only two people in existence to challenge Andy so much, and the shock of it seems almost to delight him.

“How long’s this honeymoon gig scheduled to last for you lovebirds?” Lloyd asks.

You, of course, don’t know, so you turn to Andy, who responds with a simple, “Undetermined.”

Lloyd raises both eyebrows. “If that’s true, that’s a first for the mastermind of our operation.”

Andy doesn’t react to the dig—just shrugs, unbothered—but you catch the way his grip tightens imperceptibly on your hand. Lloyd’s grin is the most honest expression he’s worn all evening, something primal and delighted lighting his face.

“Listen, don’t you ever let him win at anything,” Lloyd says, blatantly baiting Andy for maybe the eightiegh time this evening.

“Careful,” Andy says, “You’re going to make a friend out of my wife, and I wasn’t the marrying kind, but we all know you don’t do friends.”

“No friendship here,” Lloyd laughs. “Maybe an ally though,” he says with a ridiculous wink.

You grin, and at that moment you know you’ve not only survived an impossible dinner, but recruited a kind of secret weapon—one more unpredictable variable in a world where all bets have been, for so long, placed in advance.

You’re not sure what you expected from Andy’s stepbrother—less terror, more frat boy turned finance bro smarm—but the actual Lloyd is something more dangerous. The air always feels as if it’s about to spark, but you’re reassured with the knowledge that the threat is mostly performance. He is less a bomb than a demolition analyst, carefully always looking for the support beams to test.

Lloyd shakes Andy’s hand, the briefest clamp of muscle around bone, then holds your gaze a half-second longer than is polite. “Next time,” he says, tilting his head at you, “let’s try for lunch. Or something more dangerous.”

He stalks off into the dark, coat slung over his shoulder. His footsteps barely crunch on the gravel; you imagine he never leaves a trace.

You and Andy linger at the end of the drive until the taillights are just two points of red at the base of the hill. There’s static in the air, a lingering voltage that belongs to the aftershock of Lloyd, but maybe to something else, too.

“Are all your family gatherings like that?” you ask.

Andy chuckles. “Not even close. He’s the only family I really have left, and that’s the most time I’ve spent with him in years.”

“Really?”

He hums in the affirmative. “Lloyd’s dad married my mom when the two of us were in our last two years of high school. We put up with and defended each other in equal measure. Built trust. Still stuck with each other even though both our parents are gone.”

You soak this in as you walk back into the villa, side by side, Andy’s pinky hooked in yours as if he doesn’t trust the night not to take you. The air’s gone cool, the breeze off the lake hinting at woodsmoke and dying leaves. You’re so full of food and conversation that you could float, but you also sense the edge of some deeper story curling beneath everything Andy’s said tonight.

Upstairs, the master suite is all golden lamp light and the faint scent of warm linens and cypress from the trees outside. You kick off your sandals near the door and watch Andy cross to the low settee at the foot of the bed. He sits, elbows on knees, head bowed in that posture you’re learning means he’s prepping to tell you something he hasn’t told anyone in years.

You open the window wide, let silence in with the night air, and begin your bedtime routine. You’ve learned that it soothes Andy to watch you. You move through it slow, deliberate—untangling your hair, massaging lotion into your legs, washing your face, brushing your teeth. When you glance in the mirror, you see he’s still hunched, lost in the linen folds of his shirt, and you feel a pang that is half affection, half something harder.

Whatever the complex mix of what’s brought you to this point, he is your husband, and there’s a solid, warm weight about that fact that exists in the cavity of your chest now, unquestionably.

You finish by the window, looking out at the moonrise over the lake, and say, “Tell me about your mom and Lloyd’s dad.” You don’t mean it as a challenge, only an invitation.

He stretches his legs, slides his palms down his thighs, then says, “He was widowed, and she was divorced, of course.” He glances up, eyes catching on yours, then flicking away. “The man who ws my father was put behind bars for murder when I was eight. Looking back I can see that the man put us through too much for her to ever want to tie herself to a man again. But when she met Lloyd’s dad—Henry—he found her compelling enough to put in the time, talking, showing up, respecting her boundaries for months before she finally agreed to go out with him. He was aggressive, but not creepy. Just… very determined, reliable.” Andy huffs a laugh. “They were ridiculously happy together. Lloyd and I hated each other at first, but we saw our parents were too happy to ruin it for them. I thought he was a sociopath; he thought I was a pretentious little shit. We were both right.”

You laugh before you can stop yourself, the sound bouncing off the bedroom’s high ceiling. “You still hate each other?”

Andy’s mouth twitches. “We still keep each other sharp.” There’s a thread of pride in it, or something very close. “He’s the only person alive who can predict my moves.” He’s quiet for a moment, then stands and begins to undress for bed as well. “He tests everyone, all the time. You saw that. But if you pass, he’s loyal.” He glances up at you. “Loyalty means something different to him than most people.”

“So you trust him?”

“Essentially,” Andy says flatly. “He’ll always do what he says he will do. That’s almost the same.”

You study Andy’s face as he peels away his shirt—watch the uncanny way his body sets itself at ease, all muscle and self-discipline. He rakes a hand through his hair, the thick, floofy strands that your fingers easily melt into in your intimacies.

“Lloyd’s dad was killed in a hit-and-run accident. My mom made it clear she still considered him a son, but then she only made it two more years—we discovered she had advanced and aggressive breast cancer. We couldn’t save her. He was there for her for every moment at the end. You could say we were trauma bonded.”

Though it’s a stripped-down recounting, you intuit just how much more is unsaid. It’s not happenstance that’s kept these forced-brothers bonded, but a gravitational choice not to sever the association. What they have makes sense given the context of what you know of each man.

And then there’s his mother. Though he’s spoken only rarely of her, the way he speaks of her, you know he loved her with a ferocity that was rare and consuming. You saw it in the reverence with which he gifted you her brush set, in the way he measures his words about her now, in the fondness you’ve seen in his eyes the handful of other times he’s told you something about her.

Now, in the huge, moonlit room, Andy undoes his belt and lets the sound of the leather sliding free punctuate the silence. He steps out of his trousers, as at home in nakedness as in a suit. There is no shame in him, no self-consciousness—only the expectation that you will watch and be affected.

You could, if you wished, make a study of him for hours. You have, some nights: lying sated beside him, or else propped on an elbow, watching the way breath shifts the shadows across his ribs, or how his chest rises and falls when he is, on the rare occasion, truly asleep while you’re still awake.

Andy pulls back the covers and slides in. You move instinctually to join him, crossing the room, barefoot, skin prickled from the open window and the cold stone underfoot. You watch his eyes track your movement, the intensity in his gaze a physical thing, heavy as a hand on your shoulder.

You climb onto the bed, the mattress dipping beneath your weight. He reaches for you, but he has no need to draw you in tonight. You want him.

You straddle him, sliding over his hips with the smooth confidence of repetition. Andy’s cock is half hard, and the moment your thigh brushes it you feel him tense—a preemptive shudder that assures you how deeply he wants you, never mind that he had you three times earlier in the day. His hands close around your waist, greedy, guiding you down until the heat of him notches against you. You sink down slow, unhurried, taking him inch by inch.

He hisses through his teeth, eyes slitted, watching your face for every flicker of sensation. When you bottom out, you pause, savoring the fullness. His hands grip tighter, thumbs digging into the soft flesh at your waist, insistently rocking you forward. You let him set the rhythm at first—he always wants to be in control—but you slide your hands against his chest and demand the kisses you want in tandem with the slow fucking.

Your lips and tongues are devoted to devastating each other. You fuck him the way you’ve learned he likes best, slow, steady, a kind of deliberate mutual detonation, nothing performative, just the honest, hungry slide of your bodies.

It hasn’t escaped you that the reason he likes this the best is likely because he knows the level to which it completely undoes you.

You rock into him, savoring the friction, feeling every inch. Andy’s lips roam your jaw, your throat, his hands possessive at your hips, thumbs stroking small, private circles into your skin. You move together in a rhythm that’s almost lazy, but the heat underneath is anything but.

Andy’s cock pulses inside you, warm and thick. He slips one hand up to your breast, kneading it gently, running his thumb over your nipple until it’s stiff and aching. You arch into him, letting your head tip back, throat bared, and you hear the catch in his breath—the way he loses a thread of composure whenever you let him see you undone.

You ride him, your nails leaving crescents in his chest, the thick, slow grind so deep you could weep from the goodness of it. When your orgasm comes, it’s not a thunderclap but a long, exquisite ache that blooms out slow and stays. Andy holds you tight through it, riding your shudders, his hips rolling up to meet yours in perfect counterpoint until he comes, not with violence, but with a decisive, shivering surrender. He pulls you down with him, chest to chest, his arms locked around your back, the world narrowing to the feel of his pulse under your fingertips, the aftershocks echoing through both of you.

After, you lie together without talking, your cheek pressed to his heart, his hand running lazy paths over your shoulder, the length of your arm, the line of your spine. You are so tired you think you might sleep, but there is a question lingering, and you decide to put it out there, wondering if he may deign you with an answer.

“What did you mean when you told Lloyd the length of our honeymoon was ‘undetermined?’”

Andy doesn’t answer immediately, but he doesn’t tense or look away, just keeps stroking your shoulder, his fingers tracing patterns that feel like a signature.

“I meant it exactly as I said,” he murmurs, settling a little deeper into the pillow. “We have no return date. I haven’t set one. There’s no obligation for us to go back until we want to.”

You frown at him skeptically. “You don’t have obligations and business you have to get back to?”

Andy’s smile is lazy, almost smug. “Perk of being the one that runs the show,” he says. “I decide when I’m needed. I decide when I’m not.” He nudges your ankle with his foot under the covers, a quiet intimacy that feels more too normal to belong to the two of you. “If anyone has a problem, they’ll take it up with me when I feel like answering.”

You settle your cheek into the warm spot above his heart. “I didn’t realize crime lords had PTO.”

“Not PTO,” Andy says, his voice rumbling against your ear. “Sabbatical. Indefinite. I worked for years to keep the world in order enough that I could disappear for a while, if I wanted. Most days I didn’t want to. Now, I do.” He doesn’t have to say with you; it’s so palpable in every gesture, every way he rearranges the days around the shape of your body.

You’re quiet, surprised by how much you don’t want to leave this place either, not yet. Not ever, if you’re honest. The luxury is lovely, but it’s the feeling of waking up every day with nothing to do but want and be wanted that you’re afraid to lose.

He catches your silence, fingers tightening a fraction at your arm. “I like us here,” he murmurs reverently into your ear.

He says it so matter-of-factly, with no expectation or agenda, that you go absolutely still, unprepared for how real it lands.

But then you melt, and admit, “I do, too.”

Anyone joining me with a little swooning?

ALSO

CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR BROTHER-IN-LAW! MWAHAHAHA!

↠ Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

“I don’t like waking up with you not in my bed,” Djarin’s gruff voice rumbles against your ear.

You twist in your seat, finding him already dressed in his armor, except for his helmet, dark hair still deliciously disheveled. His mouth closes over yours, capturing your lips in a deep, decadent kiss. It’s slow and thorough and makes you forget it’s right in front of everyone at the Imperial base.

Someone whistles loudly.

“Never thought I’d see the day,” Zeb chuckles as you break apart.

With his arm still around you, Djarin reaches for your glass of tea, taking a sip of the warm liquid. “I don’t know how you drink this stuff!” he says, making a face.

Your lips turn down. “What do you mean? You drink it all the time.”

Djarin huffs out a laugh. “Never.”

“But it’s always in your bag. You have it on the ship!”

“Who’d you think that was for?” He kisses your neck gently. “You told me on the first night we met that it’s your favorite. I keep getting it because of you.”

Warmth blooms throughout your body and you whisper, “let me get you something you like.” Reluctantly he lets you go and sits in the seat you vacated, long legs stretched out and ankles crossed.

“Really? Tea?” Zeb says, his eyes bright.

“She’s in love with me,” Djarin answers. “And I’ll do anything to keep it that way.”

He drags your lips to his, swallowing every exhaled breath in a kiss that devours, clutching you as if you’ll vanish from his arms. Lips trail down the column of your neck and along the curve of your collarbone.

Your fingers thread through his hair and you wrap your arms around his broad shoulders.

“Let me give you what you need.” With a gentle tug, you tip his head back and kiss his throat, preening at the sound of satisfaction that vibrates against your lips.

Piece by piece, your clothes find the floor, his palms trailing after them, touching every inch of your body. He leans back to remove his chest plate and tunic, exposing the hard planes of muscle, your fingertips sliding over scarred skin before you follow with kisses. He tenses and grabs your wrists, his eyes pleading as he stares at you.

“I can’t think…I just want…,” he says through a hiss.

“Take what you need,” you whisper against his lips, dropping your hand to pull at his pants.

“Every breath. Every heartbeat,” he murmurs. “You belong to me.”

Seizing your lips he curls one large hand around your waist and presses your hips to his, urging you over the wet tip of his cock. He releases a pressured groan, and you fall against his chest, wanting every part of you touching his skin.

“I don’t like waking up with you not in my bed,” Djarin’s gruff voice rumbles against your ear.

You twist in your seat, finding him already dressed in his armor, except for his helmet, dark hair still deliciously disheveled. His mouth closes over yours, capturing your lips in a deep, decadent kiss. It’s slow and thorough and makes you forget it’s right in front of everyone at the Imperial base.

Someone whistles loudly.

“Never thought I’d see the day,” Zeb chuckles as you break apart.

With his arm still around you, Djarin reaches for your glass of tea, taking a sip of the warm liquid. “I don’t know how you drink this stuff!” he says, making a face.

Your lips turn down. “What do you mean? You drink it all the time.”

Djarin huffs out a laugh. “Never.”

“But it’s always in your bag. You have it on the ship!”

“Who’d you think that was for?” He kisses your neck gently. “You told me on the first night we met that it’s your favorite. I keep getting it because of you.”

Warmth blooms throughout your body and you whisper, “let me get you something you like.” Reluctantly he lets you go and sits in the seat you vacated, long legs stretched out and ankles crossed.

“Really? Tea?” Zeb says, his eyes bright.

“She’s in love with me,” Djarin answers. “And I’ll do anything to keep it that way.”

Your hand slips from his hair to cup the side of his face, your expression softening.

“I love you.” It’s a whisper, your voice cracking.

“Say it again,” he murmurs, his grip tightening.

Your fingertips trace the lines of his face with reverence. “I love you.”

He heaves a shuddering breath, not trusting himself to speak. You hold his gaze. “I’ve never been so scared in all my life…”

“I know,” he says, voice faltering, and then he kisses you.

You draw him closer and moan, the sound vibrating down into his chest.

“I love you,” he whispers, thumb brushing your cheek. “For always and ever, now and forever.”

As your mouth moves over his and your hand rests against his heart, he wonders if it’s another dream, one he wants to stay in forever.

He pushes you against the wall and kisses you like a man possessed. You refuse to let go as he presses his powerful frame to yours, his hands in a frenzy to remove anything between you. A low rumble of desire escapes him when he manages to find a sliver of warm skin.

You trace the hard planes of his abdomen and chest then his broad shoulders, careful of any wounds he may have suffered. But he leans into your caress with a ferocity that tells you he wants to feel every inch of contact between you, no matter the pain, his fingers mapping you the same way.

Your hands move back to his hair, holding him in place against you, where he belongs. “I love you,” you whisper against his lips.

Your teeth sink into your bottom lip and you hold his gaze from under your lashes.

Awareness.

You’re always so fucking aware of him.

He reaches the couch and stands over you, leaning down slightly to trace the curve of your shoulder.

You sit up and he wraps a gentle hand around your throat, lifting your eyes to his with a brush of his thumb just under your chin.

“What did you do all day without me?” He asks.

“Miss you.”

Your hands lift to his belt buckle and with quick ministrations you have it open and the zipper of his jeans pulled down.

He hums and slides his hand from your throat, down to your breast to massage the softness.

When he falls to the couch you move onto his lap and he drags his lips slowly across yours.

“Oh yeah?” He simpers, smiling against your mouth.

Your breathy response is swallowed by his hard kiss, his fingers splaying and sliding along your skin to tug you closer.

Your head falls back to expose your neck and at the drag of his beard along your skin you moan out his name and rock your hips.

With the tilt of your head and your gaze upward you catch sight of something hanging from the ceiling.

At first it looks like a string of dust but when it starts to wiggle and climb you go still and your body tenses.

“Angel?” He asks, immediately removing his mouth from your skin, concern clouding his features.

“Joel.”

“Yeah…?”

“There’s a GIGANTIC spider hanging from the ceiling. Oh my god.”

He chuckles, his nose a soft bump against yours when he whispers, “ain’t nothin’ to fret about.”

You shake your head, tightly gripping the front of his flannel.

“No. Nope. You have to do something!”

He pauses with his lips hovering above yours.

“Now angel?”

“Right now!”

With a pained sigh he lifts you off him and stands, walking toward the door to grab one of his large boots.

“What are you doing?” You ask, your voice rising to a frantic tone.

“Takin’ care of the spider.”

“You can’t kill it!”

He turns to you with a look of disbelief.

“Then what do you want me to do with it? Walk him outside and put him in the garden?”

You swallow and look back at the spider then to Joel.

“Yes please.”

His eyes narrow.

“You ain’t jokin’ darlin’.”

You crawl to the edge of the couch and grab his hips.

“Just put him outside somewhere safe!”

He stares down at you, jaw set in a hard line before his expression softens and he purses his lips.

“Fine.”

He sets down the boot and lifts onto his toes, his open jeans sliding further down his hips to reveal the dark trail of hair below his belly button.

You reach out and trace your fingertips through it, making him wiggle.

“Darlin,” he warns.

You refrain but your eyes never leave the spot, lips wet and parted.

“I can feel you starin’,” he says through a smile.

“Just staying focused on something other than the spider.”

His large hands are delicate as he wraps a thick finger around the silken strand and pulls it off the ceiling.

With sure movements-while also careful not to bring the arachnid too close to you- he heads toward the door.

You get up in a rush and skirt around him to open it. He walks outside and to the garden, bending down to gently set the spider inside a potted plant.

When he stands and turns to you, his pants still undone but a soft smile on his face, you’re overcome with love, rushing out to fall into his arms.

“You’re my hero,” you whisper into his chest.

“Love you angel,” he murmurs. “And that little cockblocker better be happy now.”

The first thing you notice, waking from a nap on the floating bed in the pool, is that Andy is gone.

Not gone gone, just not on any visible axis of the infinity pool, nor on the adjacent stone terrace, nor peering at you from the shade of the loggia the way he sometimes does, as if he’s making a private study of how thoroughly the Italian sun kisses your skin. You hear the distant echo of his voice, maybe a phone call, maybe not, and the hush of water lapping gently under your body—then, nothing but bird noise and the lethargic patter of an October breeze, already shifting the air toward winter.

You close your eyes and count each lapping wave, the buzz of distant bees, the punctuation of a single, insistent fly spiraling nearby is the only irritant these days. It’s nearly impossible to believe this is your life now, but three weeks in, the unreality is smoothing into a different genre of normal.

The days have been long and slow, a sequence of luxuries and heat, the kind of leisure you used to think only existed for other people. You and Andy fuck constantly, everywhere—on the bed, the pool steps, once on the sun-warmed hood of the vintage Maserati that he’s aquired for this house. There is no schedule, no work—or rather, your work is to be together, to weather the strange storm of his affection and your own disbelief that you are, in fact, married.

The rhythm of the days is built around meals and sex, though not always in that order. Some mornings you wake to croissants and espresso, some to the weight of Andy’s body already moving inside you, his mouth flattening any chance you had at protest. There’s a kind of athleticism to it now, a drive that’s less about conquest than about seeing how far the two of you can dissolve into each other before you lose track of who’s who.

And here there is just time: for sleeping in, for reading entire novels on the terrace, for walking the estate’s perimeter in silence, hand-in-hand, or apart but within each other’s sightlines.

Only twice in these three weeks has Andy vanished, usually for less than an hour, silent and grim, striding off with his phone pressed to his ear. Each time you think you should be annoyed, resent the way he leaves you alone, but shouldn’t you want the alone time? Regardless, the sense of abandonment never quite blooms. He always comes back to you, faster than you expect, with a heat in his eyes that insists you are the thing he wants most.

You learn the gentle rhythms of the house. The gardener, Ugo, arrives at sunrise, and if Andy’s not already up and prowling the study, you’ll often find him barefoot on the dew-wet grass, talking with Ugo in a tangle of Italian that sounds almost like music. You learn that the best breakfast is not at the marble table but at the ancient wooden bench near the back door, looking out over the lake with your legs over Andy’s lap, watching the chop of early light on the water.

The villa is built on a steep slope that plunges into Lake Como, all pale stone and terracotta roof tile, the kind of property purchased only by those who intend to keep it for generations.

Andy is softer here, in a way that doesn’t mean gentle. He is more relentless, if anything, but less guarded. He will spend hours reading in a chair beside you, or spiral into long monologues about Roman history, or sleep like the dead, one hand always on your skin, as if the long habit of possession won’t dissolve even under a Mediterranean sun.

You get out of the pool, towel off in the sun and walk toward the second floor bedroom you share with its view onto the glassy blue lake. You peel off the swimsuit, and change into a loose linen shirt and soft drawstring pants, and even this luxury feels excessive. Since your engagement, Andy has thrown out half your old wardrobe, replacing it with indecently fine things that you pretend to resent but wear anyway. It makes your skin buzz, the way he dresses you for both your pleasure and his.

You tidy your hair in front of the wide, low vanity—a walnut table, ancient, with a marble top. It’s the kind of thing you would have rolled your eyes at a year ago—the velvet stool, a beveled oval mirror, and an array of perfumes and powders, all staged with an artful disregard for clutter. But you’re drawn to it every day, primarily because of the golden brush and hand mirror that sit at its center, a vintage set that Andy gifted to you the first morning here in Lake Como.

He presented them to you the very first morning. They’d been in a heavy walnut case lined with blue silk. “It belonged to my grandmother,” he’d said, watching your reaction with the same intensity he brought to every other element of his life. “My mother used it every day. I think she’d rather you have it than leave it locked in a safe.” The set was shockingly beautiful—brushed gold handles, and fine porcelain painted with an intricate flower pattern. The bristles are impossibly soft. The mirror refracts your face into something both clearer and less familiar. Every morning, you brush your hair with it. Every morning, you catch Andy watching you in the reflection.

He is in the doorway now, arms folded, his own shirt liberally unbuttoned down the front. You didn’t hear him come up. He has a look you know: right on the seam between hunger and amusement, as if the sight of you is a surprise every time, but never unexpected.

“You’re lurking,” you say. In the mirror you watch Andy tilt his head very slightly, a fox reading a threshold.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” He approaches and stops just behind you, not touching you yet, but close enough that you feel the warmth of him.

He watches you finish brushing your hair all the way through, slow, deliberate strokes until the ends fall perfectly straight. Setting down the brush, you turn and face him, waiting.

“You look like you belong here,” he observes.

You arch a brow. “Didn’t you hope it was an inevitability?”

“I don’t leave things to hope.”

He bends and kisses your shoulder—slow, savoring—then lingers, breathing in the scent at your neck. Despite your engagement and these three weeks, you are not yet immune to this. He knows it, too, the way every nerve in you wakes up and goes hunting for more.

But today, he does not escalate—he holds you, chest pressed to your shoulder-blade, and lets the moment dissolve without claiming it. You wonder if he’s in a rare mood of restraint, or whether some part of him is truly, for once, at peace.

You pivot in his arms—quick, surprising him—until you face him fully. The top three buttons of his shirt are undone, exposing the familiar whorl of dark hair, a constellation of fading scars, and the lick of some of his tattoos exposed.

Andy’s hands settle at your hips, his thumb pressing the linen flat to your skin. “We’re having company tonight,” he says, almost offhand, but you catch the flicker of something in his face—a signal flare if you care to read it.

You blink. “Who?”

He feigns a sigh, but there is almost the hint of a smile around his mouth. “Someone we can’t avoid any longer.”

“That sounds cryptic and ominous,” you say, though not entirely without humor. “Are they dangerous?”

Andy tilts his head as if considering how much he wants to reveal before confirming, “Not to you.”

You frown. “Who is it, then? Another family? A business rival?” You half expect to hear a name you’ll have to Google later, some ancient consigliere or a senator’s nephew with a gambling problem.

Andy hesitates longer than you expect, then finally, “My stepbrother.”

Your brain stutters, reboots.

Stepbrother?

Not a word you’d ever heard applied to the realm of Andy. You comb through every memory of his disclosures, minimal though they have been thus far, and come up empty. You shake your head, as if a drop of pool water still clings to the inside of your ear. “You never said—” you start, but Andy is already laughing, soft and sharp.

“Didn’t seem relevant, until now.” He grins, his hands tightening at your hips as if to steady you through the shock. “He’s an acquired taste.”

“So, is he coming for dinner, or for war?” you ask.

He shrugs one shoulder, brushing off the gravity even as you feel an undertow. “He’ll be here at seven. He’s in Switzerland, claims traffic, but really he’s just never been on time for anything like this.”

You lean back against the vanity. “Why now?”

The answer is a smile, but not one that reaches his eyes. “Curiosity.”

You process this. Maybe you should be mad, but if Thea read way too many mafia romance novels, you’ve read just as many mafia and non-mafia romance novels to have where the heroine manufactures outrage over nothing, and you’ve always found it exhausting—the obligatory fight, the unnecessary tension, the reconciliation that changes nothing.

And you’re not actually mad at all that he hasn’t told you about a stepbrother. There’s a long list of things you haven’t told him about because you don’t want to.

So really, you’re just genuinely shocked at a stepbrother’s existence.

“Should I be nervous?” you ask. You’re already running the math in your head: whether this stepbrother is the mold Andy was cast from, or the thing he was cast against. Whether they’re estranged or just whatever the word is for two men who have learned to exist in separate countries.

“You’re not the nervous type,” Andy says, though there’s a sweetness in it, a note of reassurance. He tugs you closer, hands molding you against his chest. “It’s just a meal. He’s not the enemy, he’s just…” Andy trails off, one hand sliding up and down your waist. “Don’t let him get in your head,” he says, softer now. “He’s got a talent for it.”

You know a warning when you hear one.

Seven isn’t so far off. You spend a bit more time trying to care about what to wear, but finally just keep on the linen, Andy insisting that you don’t need to dress up. Your husband, without comment, switches out his shirt for another almost as lazily unbuttoned.

At precisely 6:58 pm, Andy’s phone vibrates where it’s been abandoned on the edge of the sideboard, humming a predatory sound against the wood. He glances at it, then at you, and the look—dry, resigned—tells you more than words could.

“He’s early,” Andy says, but doesn’t move to get the door. Instead, he lets you lead, and you do, padding barefoot down the stone staircase, the cool tile sending a charge up your calves.

The villa’s front door has already been opened by one of the Italian security detail, and waiting on the threshold is a man who waits, arms crossed, with a patience that broadcasts itself as challenge.

The men are nearly the same height, but the similarities differ endlessly between them. Where Andy is all cool blue flame, this man is severe angles and a sharp, surgical presence, muscles hardly contained by his frame. His blue eyes are nearly black, set under straight, unyielding brows—nothing of Andy’s bright, sly smile here. His nose is as straight as a blade. Even his hair is a darker, more exacting version of Andy’s, trimmed so close at the sides it’s nearly military, but longer on top and combed back with obsessive precision.

His clothes are immaculate, but in a way that feels less tailored and more engineered: a black shirt, jacket fitted so closely it suggests armor. Ex-military, you think immediately, but then you see the tiny glint of gold at his left wrist, a watch so expensive and so quietly worn that only someone who doesn’t need you to notice it would ever put it there.

And that mustache.

That’s certainly its own personality trait altogether.

Andy’s stepbrother is attractive, but not in any safe or approachable way. If Andy is handsome in a way that draws you in, this one is repellent, polar, a negative charge that wants to spark or burn.

Even his name, when Andy says it, carries its own weight: “Lloyd.”

“Andrew.” The greeting is a handshake, but Lloyd’s eyes dart sideways, taking you in with an efficiency that’s almost anatomical.

He clocks you in less than a second, blue eyes cutting across the foyer before you can even finish your first, startled blink. A once-over that would be offensive if it weren’t so openly, audaciously clinical. You feel yourself stand a little straighter, some competitive impulse sparked by his entrance, so you paste a smile on your mouth and force yourself to hold his stare.

He doesn’t smile back. “The wife,” Lloyd says, like a fact he’s verifying on a checklist.

You offer your hand because it’s the only move that gets you both out of the standoff, and he takes it in his own, the grip surgical and dry, yet with a voltage that makes your wrist bones hum. He doesn’t give his name or prompt you for yours, just releases and steps inside, sweeping the room with a predatory calm. When he’s satisfied, Lloyd turns his attention back to Andy, and whatever conversation occurs between them is nonverbal but absolutely deafening.

“Congratulations,” Lloyd says, and the word lands somewhere that feels simultaneously genuine and hideously sarcastic.

Andy only smirks. “Let me get you a drink.”

You watch them move into the library off the foyer, and you follow in their wake, observing Lloyd as he glances at the rows of rare books like he’s casing the place for weak spots.

“Scotch?” Andy asks.

“Negroni, if you’ve got a proper vermouth.”

Andy doesn’t dignify this request with a joke, just flips open a lacquered sideboard and pulls down a cut-glass decanter of gin, a bottle of Campari, and an unfamiliar squat bottle with an Italian label. “They make this two kilometers from here,” he says, pouring with a reverence that is almost priestly.

Lloyd, meanwhile, has found the one chair in the room that could double as a throne and seats himself with a proprietary air. Without invitation, he props a booted foot on the low table, surveying you over steepled fingers. He says nothing, but the silence is medical in its sharpness, and you sense he is running diagnostics with each flick of his gaze. You perch on the leather couch next to where you know Andy will sit, knees angled out, showing Lloyd you’re not planning to shrink beneath a family dynamic you have just now learned exists.

It is an old, beautiful library, full of rare bindings and the smell of dust and oil, but the air between the men is fresher, the distinctions newer. Andy sets Lloyd’s negroni before him, then offers a glass of your favorite drink to you, settling in beside you.

“So, Lloyd,” you try, figuring you might as well trot out some kind of conversational opening gambit, “how long are you in Italy?”

He weighs the question for sport. “I’m based out of Switzerland. But till Friday. Then Tokyo.” He sips the drink, his mouth compressing to a tight, precise line, then finally flickers a look your way. “I’ll admit,” he says, “I did not think Andy would ever get married again.” He makes the word again do all the work of a punchline.

Andy’s face does not move, but you sense him recalibrating in the space beside you.

You shrug, as if immune to the dig. “I was as surprised as anyone.”

“You must have really good dirt on him,” Lloyd says, turning to you with a wry arch of his eyebrow. “Otherwise, I can’t imagine him tying himself down at this stage of the game.”

You sputter, shocked since it was exactly the opposite. But Andy intervenes, with a hand on your thigh. “She doesn’t need dirt to get what she wants from me,” Andy says, just on the edge of a threat, but it seems to be a warning to Lloyd, not to you. “She’s the only woman who’s ever really tempted me.”

You blink at Andy, a little surprised, warmth squirming through your chest, unsure how to catalog what he’s saying, and if it’s just for Lloyd, or if it’s actually true.

You’re still processing what even to say to that, but before you can land a response, Lloyd sets his glass down with a decisive clink and leans forward, elbows on knees, gaze slicing into you with surgical clarity.

“So, what do you actually do, then? Wife of Andrew Barber.” The way he says it, with the capital W, makes it clear he sees it as a job in itself. You cock your head, deciding whether to play petulant, sincere, or unvarnished.

“I sleep in, I swim, I read too much. Apparently, I get kidnapped from my life in Boston and flown here for undetermined weeks of forced relaxation.”

Lloyd surveys you, a flicker of amusement passing across the frost of his face, then turns to Andy. “I really hope ‘forced relaxation’ is code for indecent amounts of honeymoon sex or else I’ll have to object to everything this marriage stands for.”

“Lloyd!” Andy’s tone is the admonishment of an older brother, but also a little exasperated, as if Lloyd is forever blurting the worst possible thing at the best possible time.

You can’t help but laugh, which seems to catch Lloyd off guard. “Oh, it’s absolutely code,” you say. If Andy’s hand tightens a fractional increment on your thigh, it’s matched by the up-curve at the corner of his mouth.

Lloyd throws his head back and barks out a single, cold laugh, and then, abruptly, all the armored tension in the room fractures. He shoots you a look that’s almost warm—impressed, maybe, or at least entertained—and Andy, feeling the shift, leans more comfortably into the sofa.

“For a second, I thought you’d be one of those tragic, blink-twice-if-you-need-rescue brides or a total waif and a bore,” Lloyd says. “But I think I’m going to like you. You’ve got bite. A spine. Under different circumstances we might’ve had a one-night-stand.”

You say nothing to that—what can you say?—and take a slow sip of your drink. Lloyd grins, animate now, as if he’s been waiting for a worthy audience all along.

Andy glances over, reading the beat of your silence, and says to Lloyd, “She’d have eaten you alive.”

“She’s doing that now, Andy,” Lloyd says, tipping his glass at you.

The more Lloyd talks the more you see—he’s not so much Andy’s shadow as his negative. Where Andy is tactician, Lloyd is dismantler. Maybe even a little unhinged, but in a way that’s technically useful. You can see why Andy can’t ignore him, but also why he’s arranged his life at a safe distance.

“Tell me, Lloyd,” you say, enjoying the game, “what do you actually do? And do you bring this much charisma to all your diplomatic functions?”

Lloyd refills his own drink, swirling the red liquid with a kind of absent, precise menace. “Officially, I’m a strategic consultant. Audit committees, risk and compliance, that sort of thing. Unofficially… Let’s say I help people find their limits, sometimes by exceeding them.”

You smile, liking this more than you should. “So, you’re the fixer.”

Lloyd shrugs, a gesture of such exaggerated modesty it circles around to arrogance. “I fix things, sometimes. Break them, sometimes. It’s the same art, in the end.” He slouches further in his chair, all calculated ease. “But unlike Andy, I don’t long for power. I just want to see how everything works. People, organizations, the occasional marriage.” He flashes a brief, knife-sharp smile. “I’m here because I couldn’t miss the spectacle.”

Andy groans before throwing back the rest of his drink. “Let’s get this dinner over with.”

It’s late, and the moon is a white saw-curve over the lake, when you and Andy finally give Lloyd a send-off in the gravel half-moon of the drive, hand in hand.

Lloyd had commented on every course over dinner, praising the risotto, bemoaning the use of an olive tapenade as an accompaniment to the roasted vegetables (to which you had to agree), and providing a two-minute oral history of the grappa served afterward (“Never drink it after midnight, unless you want to wake up in another country, married to a Turkish heiress, with a contract out on your spleen”). He did not attempt to murder Andy, nor did he try to seduce you, though there was a blank period in the middle of the evening where he became weirdly intent on teaching you the difference between “threat” and “risk” (both as a business concept and a party game).

Lloyd catches your eye, and for a moment you see the flicker of a new alliance—something conspiratorial. You suspect the two of you are possibly the only two people in existence to challenge Andy so much, and the shock of it seems almost to delight him.

“How long’s this honeymoon gig scheduled to last for you lovebirds?” Lloyd asks.

You, of course, don’t know, so you turn to Andy, who responds with a simple, “Undetermined.”

Lloyd raises both eyebrows. “If that’s true, that’s a first for the mastermind of our operation.”

Andy doesn’t react to the dig—just shrugs, unbothered—but you catch the way his grip tightens imperceptibly on your hand. Lloyd’s grin is the most honest expression he’s worn all evening, something primal and delighted lighting his face.

“Listen, don’t you ever let him win at anything,” Lloyd says, blatantly baiting Andy for maybe the eightiegh time this evening.

“Careful,” Andy says, “You’re going to make a friend out of my wife, and I wasn’t the marrying kind, but we all know you don’t do friends.”

“No friendship here,” Lloyd laughs. “Maybe an ally though,” he says with a ridiculous wink.

You grin, and at that moment you know you’ve not only survived an impossible dinner, but recruited a kind of secret weapon—one more unpredictable variable in a world where all bets have been, for so long, placed in advance.

You’re not sure what you expected from Andy’s stepbrother—less terror, more frat boy turned finance bro smarm—but the actual Lloyd is something more dangerous. The air always feels as if it’s about to spark, but you’re reassured with the knowledge that the threat is mostly performance. He is less a bomb than a demolition analyst, carefully always looking for the support beams to test.

Lloyd shakes Andy’s hand, the briefest clamp of muscle around bone, then holds your gaze a half-second longer than is polite. “Next time,” he says, tilting his head at you, “let’s try for lunch. Or something more dangerous.”

He stalks off into the dark, coat slung over his shoulder. His footsteps barely crunch on the gravel; you imagine he never leaves a trace.

You and Andy linger at the end of the drive until the taillights are just two points of red at the base of the hill. There’s static in the air, a lingering voltage that belongs to the aftershock of Lloyd, but maybe to something else, too.

“Are all your family gatherings like that?” you ask.

Andy chuckles. “Not even close. He’s the only family I really have left, and that’s the most time I’ve spent with him in years.”

“Really?”

He hums in the affirmative. “Lloyd’s dad married my mom when the two of us were in our last two years of high school. We put up with and defended each other in equal measure. Built trust. Still stuck with each other even though both our parents are gone.”

You soak this in as you walk back into the villa, side by side, Andy’s pinky hooked in yours as if he doesn’t trust the night not to take you. The air’s gone cool, the breeze off the lake hinting at woodsmoke and dying leaves. You’re so full of food and conversation that you could float, but you also sense the edge of some deeper story curling beneath everything Andy’s said tonight.

Upstairs, the master suite is all golden lamp light and the faint scent of warm linens and cypress from the trees outside. You kick off your sandals near the door and watch Andy cross to the low settee at the foot of the bed. He sits, elbows on knees, head bowed in that posture you’re learning means he’s prepping to tell you something he hasn’t told anyone in years.

You open the window wide, let silence in with the night air, and begin your bedtime routine. You’ve learned that it soothes Andy to watch you. You move through it slow, deliberate—untangling your hair, massaging lotion into your legs, washing your face, brushing your teeth. When you glance in the mirror, you see he’s still hunched, lost in the linen folds of his shirt, and you feel a pang that is half affection, half something harder.

Whatever the complex mix of what’s brought you to this point, he is your husband, and there’s a solid, warm weight about that fact that exists in the cavity of your chest now, unquestionably.

You finish by the window, looking out at the moonrise over the lake, and say, “Tell me about your mom and Lloyd’s dad.” You don’t mean it as a challenge, only an invitation.

He stretches his legs, slides his palms down his thighs, then says, “He was widowed, and she was divorced, of course.” He glances up, eyes catching on yours, then flicking away. “The man who ws my father was put behind bars for murder when I was eight. Looking back I can see that the man put us through too much for her to ever want to tie herself to a man again. But when she met Lloyd’s dad—Henry—he found her compelling enough to put in the time, talking, showing up, respecting her boundaries for months before she finally agreed to go out with him. He was aggressive, but not creepy. Just… very determined, reliable.” Andy huffs a laugh. “They were ridiculously happy together. Lloyd and I hated each other at first, but we saw our parents were too happy to ruin it for them. I thought he was a sociopath; he thought I was a pretentious little shit. We were both right.”

You laugh before you can stop yourself, the sound bouncing off the bedroom’s high ceiling. “You still hate each other?”

Andy’s mouth twitches. “We still keep each other sharp.” There’s a thread of pride in it, or something very close. “He’s the only person alive who can predict my moves.” He’s quiet for a moment, then stands and begins to undress for bed as well. “He tests everyone, all the time. You saw that. But if you pass, he’s loyal.” He glances up at you. “Loyalty means something different to him than most people.”

“So you trust him?”

“Essentially,” Andy says flatly. “He’ll always do what he says he will do. That’s almost the same.”

You study Andy’s face as he peels away his shirt—watch the uncanny way his body sets itself at ease, all muscle and self-discipline. He rakes a hand through his hair, the thick, floofy strands that your fingers easily melt into in your intimacies.

“Lloyd’s dad was killed in a hit-and-run accident. My mom made it clear she still considered him a son, but then she only made it two more years—we discovered she had advanced and aggressive breast cancer. We couldn’t save her. He was there for her for every moment at the end. You could say we were trauma bonded.”

Though it’s a stripped-down recounting, you intuit just how much more is unsaid. It’s not happenstance that’s kept these forced-brothers bonded, but a gravitational choice not to sever the association. What they have makes sense given the context of what you know of each man.

And then there’s his mother. Though he’s spoken only rarely of her, the way he speaks of her, you know he loved her with a ferocity that was rare and consuming. You saw it in the reverence with which he gifted you her brush set, in the way he measures his words about her now, in the fondness you’ve seen in his eyes the handful of other times he’s told you something about her.

Now, in the huge, moonlit room, Andy undoes his belt and lets the sound of the leather sliding free punctuate the silence. He steps out of his trousers, as at home in nakedness as in a suit. There is no shame in him, no self-consciousness—only the expectation that you will watch and be affected.

You could, if you wished, make a study of him for hours. You have, some nights: lying sated beside him, or else propped on an elbow, watching the way breath shifts the shadows across his ribs, or how his chest rises and falls when he is, on the rare occasion, truly asleep while you’re still awake.

Andy pulls back the covers and slides in. You move instinctually to join him, crossing the room, barefoot, skin prickled from the open window and the cold stone underfoot. You watch his eyes track your movement, the intensity in his gaze a physical thing, heavy as a hand on your shoulder.

You climb onto the bed, the mattress dipping beneath your weight. He reaches for you, but he has no need to draw you in tonight. You want him.

You straddle him, sliding over his hips with the smooth confidence of repetition. Andy’s cock is half hard, and the moment your thigh brushes it you feel him tense—a preemptive shudder that assures you how deeply he wants you, never mind that he had you three times earlier in the day. His hands close around your waist, greedy, guiding you down until the heat of him notches against you. You sink down slow, unhurried, taking him inch by inch.

He hisses through his teeth, eyes slitted, watching your face for every flicker of sensation. When you bottom out, you pause, savoring the fullness. His hands grip tighter, thumbs digging into the soft flesh at your waist, insistently rocking you forward. You let him set the rhythm at first—he always wants to be in control—but you slide your hands against his chest and demand the kisses you want in tandem with the slow fucking.

Your lips and tongues are devoted to devastating each other. You fuck him the way you’ve learned he likes best, slow, steady, a kind of deliberate mutual detonation, nothing performative, just the honest, hungry slide of your bodies.

It hasn’t escaped you that the reason he likes this the best is likely because he knows the level to which it completely undoes you.

You rock into him, savoring the friction, feeling every inch. Andy’s lips roam your jaw, your throat, his hands possessive at your hips, thumbs stroking small, private circles into your skin. You move together in a rhythm that’s almost lazy, but the heat underneath is anything but.

Andy’s cock pulses inside you, warm and thick. He slips one hand up to your breast, kneading it gently, running his thumb over your nipple until it’s stiff and aching. You arch into him, letting your head tip back, throat bared, and you hear the catch in his breath—the way he loses a thread of composure whenever you let him see you undone.

You ride him, your nails leaving crescents in his chest, the thick, slow grind so deep you could weep from the goodness of it. When your orgasm comes, it’s not a thunderclap but a long, exquisite ache that blooms out slow and stays. Andy holds you tight through it, riding your shudders, his hips rolling up to meet yours in perfect counterpoint until he comes, not with violence, but with a decisive, shivering surrender. He pulls you down with him, chest to chest, his arms locked around your back, the world narrowing to the feel of his pulse under your fingertips, the aftershocks echoing through both of you.

After, you lie together without talking, your cheek pressed to his heart, his hand running lazy paths over your shoulder, the length of your arm, the line of your spine. You are so tired you think you might sleep, but there is a question lingering, and you decide to put it out there, wondering if he may deign you with an answer.

“What did you mean when you told Lloyd the length of our honeymoon was ‘undetermined?’”

Andy doesn’t answer immediately, but he doesn’t tense or look away, just keeps stroking your shoulder, his fingers tracing patterns that feel like a signature.

“I meant it exactly as I said,” he murmurs, settling a little deeper into the pillow. “We have no return date. I haven’t set one. There’s no obligation for us to go back until we want to.”

You frown at him skeptically. “You don’t have obligations and business you have to get back to?”

Andy’s smile is lazy, almost smug. “Perk of being the one that runs the show,” he says. “I decide when I’m needed. I decide when I’m not.” He nudges your ankle with his foot under the covers, a quiet intimacy that feels more too normal to belong to the two of you. “If anyone has a problem, they’ll take it up with me when I feel like answering.”

You settle your cheek into the warm spot above his heart. “I didn’t realize crime lords had PTO.”

“Not PTO,” Andy says, his voice rumbling against your ear. “Sabbatical. Indefinite. I worked for years to keep the world in order enough that I could disappear for a while, if I wanted. Most days I didn’t want to. Now, I do.” He doesn’t have to say with you; it’s so palpable in every gesture, every way he rearranges the days around the shape of your body.

You’re quiet, surprised by how much you don’t want to leave this place either, not yet. Not ever, if you’re honest. The luxury is lovely, but it’s the feeling of waking up every day with nothing to do but want and be wanted that you’re afraid to lose.

He catches your silence, fingers tightening a fraction at your arm. “I like us here,” he murmurs reverently into your ear.

He says it so matter-of-factly, with no expectation or agenda, that you go absolutely still, unprepared for how real it lands.

But then you melt, and admit, “I do, too.”

Anyone joining me with a little swooning?

ALSO

CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR BROTHER-IN-LAW! MWAHAHAHA!

↠ Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest