Holy God. I can’t stop staring at him. He’s exactly like James in the muscular chest department. He catches me staring but I don’t look away and neither does he. “I’m not bad, eh? You’re not so hard to look at yourself. But”—he eyes my body in the one-piece suit—“I’d rather you wore the bikinis when we’re on our private beach.”

“Our beach?” I smirk at him. “You’re getting ahead of yourself, don’t you think?”

And then he’s on top of me, forcing my body back into the hot sand, his chest pushing against my breasts, his mouth dipping closer and closer to mine as each second passes. “This is your beach, Harper. This is your home. I am your future, not James. And all you’d need to see this is to allow me one night. Tonight. Just give me one night to show you I’m the perfect man for you.”

I can only stare at him. He’s not pressing down hard enough to affect my breathing, but he’s affecting my breathing all the same. “I can’t,” I finally manage.

“You can,” he whispers back. His legs part so he can straddle my thighs. “You can, Harper. All you have to do is give me permission.”

“Permission for what?”

“To kiss you for one.”

“You’ve already kissed me.”

“I stole those. The next one needs to be a gift. Because I want to kiss you like I mean it. And I can’t steal one of those. I don’t want it to be a surprise or something that catches you off guard. I want it to be purposeful, and welcomed, and returned.” We stare at each other for a few more seconds and then he rolls off me and sits up and stretches his legs out on the hot sand now. He leans back on his arms and looks up at the sky. “Take your time, though. I can wait.”

And then he jumps up to his feet and runs down the beach and dives into the waves. I sit up so I can see him. So I can watch that beautifully athletic body as he dips under a wave and disappears.

He is so much like James. He’s nicer than James, in fact. He’s patient and he wants permission.

James took. He took me the way he wanted and never asked me anything. He just assumed I was his because… because he thought my father gave me away to him as a little girl.

Vincent pops up out of the waves and starts swimming out to sea. He’s a strong swimmer, I decide. He’s strong because open sea swimming is not something everyone can do and James does it—

Wait. Not James. Vincent. Vincent does it effortlessly. Good God, I’m starting to mix them up.

I watch him swim and when he comes back there is no more mention of kissing. We eat the picnic food he packed and watch the sun set on the ocean. Vincent chats through it and thinking back on it now, sitting in bed trying to remember the things that make me belong to James and not Vincent, that’s one of them.

The sunsets.

James owns my sunsets.

Chapter Twenty-One

Harper

I go to the beach alone the next day. Vincent is busy with… whatever. I’m not really sure what he does, but he left a note on the bedside table saying he would not be around and I should feel free to amuse myself today.

No restrictions. No guidelines. No rules.

Weird.

So I’m at the marina staring out at the sea. There’s a boat way out there, but from experience, I know what it is. A megayacht. I can tell by the top side that there’s a helipad, so I’m guessing that’s the yacht we came in on.

I look over at the boats docked in neat little rows. There are not a lot of them, it’s a small marina. Before I know it, I’m on my feet walking. The dock is metal and my feet pound as I walk the length of it looking at each boat. I know what a tender looks like. I mean, they come in all shapes and sizes, but I do remember what the tender looked like that we took from my father’s yacht to Vincent’s. It was large. One that held a lot of people. And it had a cabin for the helmsman.

My eyes scan the available boats until they rest on one at the end of the dock. I walk up to it and read the name. Illegal Tender. Cute. But very telling. It’s a tender boat all right. And that means it belongs to the yacht anchored offshore. I step inside and take it in. My eyes immediately go to the control panel. To the ignition. To the lockbox built into the side of the boat. I open it and there’s the key. Or at least, one key. That’s where we keep our keys when we’re docked somewhere private. So I guess whoever this person is out on that ship has something in common with my own family.

Besides me, of course.

I look back at the beach and then up to the tip of the mansion’s roof that is just barely visible from this low angle. I sit in the helmsman’s chair and start the boat.

She purrs.

I smile.

God, I have missed the water. The beach is not the same. I jump up, untie the boat, and then take my seat and ease her away from the dock. The Pacific is strong and the waves are looming, but I’m not in a rush. So I take it slow. Just casually meander my way towards the yacht. It takes a good while for me to get close enough to see her name—Barely Legal, another very telling sign that these are Company people—and then a few minutes later I can see a crew member waiting for me in the garage.

Megayachts always have a tender boat. It’s a limousine used to shuttle passengers to the shore. Our yachts actually have two, but the sailing ship, the one I escaped from last year, only had one. A quick look inside the garage tells me this one has space for two, but none are here at the moment.

The crewman says nothing to me as he secures the vessel, and I ignore him as well. I’ve grown up around servants and I learned to ignore most of them very early. Not because I was snooty, just because it was a rule. I was not allowed to talk to people, status in life notwithstanding, and that was something I took very seriously. James didn’t even know my name until I told him that morning under the pier. He asked me on the beach back when we become Six, but I kept that secret like I was supposed to.

Actually—my mind wanders as I make my way through the garage and towards the entrance into the main part of the ship—Nick saw me drawing pictures in the sand. I was trying to give James a hint so I drew all the instruments I could remember from an orchestra. The last one was a harp and I had been hoping he would guess my name when he looked down at it.

But Nick came, calling me sister, which meant he was mad. And then he ushered me away from James and back to the ship.