Page 50 of Accidental Vegas Vows

That doesn’t make sense. “Then let me have the spare and share the bigger one with Noah.”

He shook his head. “There’s plenty of space for me and Noah in the smaller room. Plus, yours has more privacy in case you just want to be on your own for a bit. Take it, Liv. It’s yours.”

I stepped backward on the lowest deck, the lack of a railing stressing me out with the rocking of the boat, and watched as Damien stepped across the divide easily. I wanted to fight back on it, wanted to ensure that he and Noah would have the best time they possibly could, but he didn’t seem like the kind to budge on something like this.

————

It was odd how little the unmatched speed of the boat affected my stability on it.

I couldn’t remember exactly how fast Damien said we were going, but the goal was to travel quickly throughout the day so we could keep the speed lower while we slept. The wind and the quickness of the water passing below us were the only real giveaway. It didn’t feel like I was being rocked around, or like I couldn’t walk from point A to point B easily.

Noah spent most of the day playing in the pool — the one I hadn’t noticed from the ground, situated at the very back of the middle deck. Damien had watched him like a hawk, nervous that he’d fling himself over the glass edge of it and inevitably fall onto the lower deck without the railing, and then into the waters below. I’d been nervous about it, too, and had found it increasingly difficult to keep my attention on the book in my lap.

Around six in the evening, one of the staff delivered a plate of chicken nuggets and a side of raw carrots for Noah’s dinner. Damien asked me to watch him, that same usual pleading look on his face despite that literally being a part of my job now, before stifling himself indoors to make some calls.

An hour later Damien returned, the crease between his brows deeper and his shoulders stiff. He picked up an exhausted, sleeping Noah from the lounger beside me. “Dinner is in thirty,” he said quietly, his eyes meeting mine. “You’re welcome to eat wherever you’d like. But I’d prefer it if you joined me.”

I closed my book. I’d finally had the chance to get to the most interesting part with Noah zonked out beside me, but when it was Damien interrupting me, when he looked the way he did in his stupid fucking linens and the breeze whipping his hair, I didn’t care. “Where are you eating?”

————

Pulling my legs up cross-legged onto the plush white cushion, I sat at the pristinely polished table at the back of the top deck, trying not to pay too much attention to the wine in the ice bucket or the setting sun beside me as I waited for Damien to get back.

Sarah, the woman who had caught Noah on the dock this morning, dropped off a plate of cocktail shrimp and various dipping sauces. I nervously picked at them, my eyes lingering on the only entrance to the secluded little space. This wouldn’t be the first time we’d eaten together since I temporarily moved in, but it wasn't exactly a normal thing, either.

I didn’t know what to expect from him. He’d looked stressed when he’d come back after his phone calls, but now that Noah was asleep and less of a danger to himself, there had to be a bit of calm. I almost craved it — a small sense of normalcy despite the intensely abnormal thing we were doing.

Damien’s eyes were glued to the watch around his wrist as he stepped through the entryway, but quicker than he’d appeared, he looked at me instead. And he froze.

“Hey,” he said, the word so quiet it almost didn’t reach me over the sound of the wind and the engine. Glass walls connected the sides of the deck to the roof around us, and only the very back where I sat now had open walls looking over the back of the boat. My hair, tied up in a bun with little waves falling around my cheeks, blew gently in the small breeze, but he was unaffected that far in.

“Hi.”

He swallowed as he came back to life, stepping across the sleek wooden floor and stopping at the edge of the table. “You look lovely.”

I snorted as I glanced down at myself. The too-big shirt, the elastic shorts, the rattiest pair of flip-flops I owned… I did not look like I belonged on a mega yacht. I’d barely had time to put on mascara before we’d left this morning. “I look exactly the same as I did twenty minutes ago.”

“You don’t,” he said, shaking his head as he slid onto the cushions that wrapped the length of the table. He shimmied down until he was beside me, close enough to reach out and touch, but far enough that it wouldn’t feel like an imposition. He’d seemed to have mastered that. “I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s because Noah’s down, maybe it’s because you got to the good part in your book.”

I narrowed my gaze at him.

“You think it wasn’t obvious?” he laughed. “Your legs were crossing when I came back out. Your lip was between your teeth. What’s in that thing, anyway?”

My cheeks heated as I tore my gaze from him. There was no way I was that obvious. Surely.

“I’m not judging you, for what it’s worth,” he chuckled. “It’s good to give your mind a break occasionally.”

I leaned back and pulled my knees up to my chest as I popped another cocktail shrimp into my mouth. “You say that like I’m always turned on.”

Wide blue eyes met mine so quickly that it made me pause.

Oh fuck. Oh no. Wrong word. “I—I meant switched on. Switched on. Like with work.” Even the passing breeze wasn’t enough to cool the intensity of the heat in my face.

He brushed it off as if it hadn’t even happened, clearing his throat and proceeding. “Well, you are, really. When you’ve not been focusing on Noah, you’ve been burying yourself in work. I think you needed this just as much as I did.”

I swallowed the shrimp around the lump in my throat. “Yeah. Maybe.”

Damien leaned forward and plucked the bottle of wine from the ice bucket. He fiddled with the wiring around the cork, expertly releasing each one, and I couldn’t stop myself from watching, couldn’t stop myself from taking in the way his tendons in the back of his hand flexed with each little movement, couldn’t stop myself from imagining them doing what I’d read about minutes ago.

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