Chapter 24: Unexpected Accident
I moved before I thought.
I caught her wrist and yanked hard, expecting to pull her back onto the dry stone. But the thing about catching soone whose center of gravity is already past the edge is that you don’t pull them back. You just go with them.
We both hit the water.
It was cold. Very cold. It punched the air out of your chest in one clean shot.
I ca up gasping and she ca up next to
a half second later, hair plastered flat against her skull, mascara doing sothing tragic under her eyes, her silk blouse turned dark and clinging to her, breathing hard.
We stared at each other.
"...Lukas," she whispered softly.
"Yeah."
"Did you just pull
into the pool."
I rolled my eyes. "Technically you fell."
"Technically you ca with ."
"Technically I was being a hero."
"Technically you ruined my blouse, sweetheart."
I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. She was furious and dripping and her hair was a disaster and she had never looked less like a woman who scared a roomful of millionaires into rearranging their seating an hour ago.
She tried to glare at
but couldn’t control it anymore and she started laughing too.
We were both treading water in the deep end, holding each other for balance without thinking, and sowhere in there the laughing thinned and the holding didn’t.
She was very close.
The blouse was very wet.
She had stopped talking.
I beca, all at once, extrely aware that her thigh was against mine under the water, that her hand was on my chest, that her other hand had found my hip and stayed there. The cold was suddenly not the loudest thing in my body anymore. It wasn’t even close.
In my head, a little angel and a devil with horns appeared, arguing with each other.
’This is your aunt. She is your aunt. She is Aunty Mira. Aunt.’
’She’s also not blood.’
’Shut up.’
’You shut up.’
She wasn’t looking at my eyes anymore. She was looking at my mouth. My mouth, for its part, had stopped doing anything useful.
"Lukas." Her voice was lower than it had been a minute ago.
I gulped down. "Yeah."
She whispered softly, "This is a very bad idea."
"Probably." I knew it.
"Hm."
Our lips found each other.
It wasn’t a careful kiss. It wasn’t the patient knock-on-the-wall Mira I’d been getting all morning.
It was hungry, and slightly furious, and years of held-back warmth rolling out at once, into one hand fisted in my soaked collar and the other sliding down my waist as my own hands went, without asking permission, to her hips and then up under the wet silk because the wet silk had stopped being a barrier the mont we hit the water.
Her thumb dragged across my side. Mine found the curve of her hips, and she made a low sound against my mouth that I was going to think about for a long ti.
A leg slid between mine under the water. Mine, hers, I genuinely could not tell anymore. I felt the pressure of her against , all of her, and felt her feel
back, and my brain, which had been holding it together pretty well, brown-screened.
She broke the kiss but didn’t pull far. Her forehead rested against mine, our breathing uneven, water lapping quietly around us.
"...Okay." Her voice was a little ragged. "Okay. Okay."
"Yeah."
"That was..."
"Mm."
She quickly said, "We are not going to pretend that didn’t happen, because I am thirty-six years old and I refuse to do the thing where adults pretend."
"Okay." I nodded.
I genuinely had no clue how to proceed from here on, so it was better to see what she thought about it.
"But we’re also not going to have this conversation in a swimming pool with my blouse see-through and your jaw doing whatever it’s doing."
"...What’s my jaw doing?" I was confused.
"The thing. You know the thing." She tried to look at , but blushed faintly.
"I do not know the thing."
"It’s very distracting, Lukas, please stop doing the thing."
I tried to stop doing the thing. I had no idea what the thing was. She let go of my collar and patted my chest twice, very gently, and kicked back to the shallow end with the dignity of a woman who had absolutely not just done what she had just done.
I followed at a respectful and increasingly strategic distance.
We climbed out and were basically dripping on the pool deck. We did not look at each other directly for almost a full minute, and then we both did at the sa ti, and we both started laughing again, and that laugh was lighter and a little embarrassed and a little sothing else that neither of us was going to na today.
She wrung out her hair with both hands.
"I am going to drive ho in this car like this and my driver is going to ask absolutely no questions because he likes his job."
"Right." I smiled. Who was going to question this queen?
"I’ll have soone bring your things from the apartnt tomorrow. The whole apartnt. Anything you don’t want, we’ll donate. You sleep here tonight, sweetheart. The keys are on the counter."
"Aunt—"
She held up one hand, still smiling, and shook her head once.
"Not today, Lukas. We’re not doing today."
"Okay." I nodded.
"I had a very good morning."
"Yeah.
too."
She walked to the back door, then stopped, and looked over her shoulder. The smile on her face was small and a little soft and a little dangerous in a different way than it had been at the club.
"Foodie, my ass."
Then she was gone.
I stood on the lawn of my new house in soaked clothes with the river behind
and the keys to a one point three million dollar place sitting on a counter inside, with the taste of her lipstick still on my mouth and three hundred thousand dollars about to land in an account I didn’t have yet, and I thought, very clearly, just one thing.
’I love it!!!’
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