“Jessica likes the chocolate, but Mark likes the pistachio. It’s a nut.”

“Right. How ya doing?” Riley signaled Sawyer to ease Annika away, distracted the couple with small talk until they wandered off.

“They were very nice, but I don’t know whether to listen to Jessica or to Mark. And oh, there are so many pretty colors.”

“Pick two,” Sawyer suggested, and her eyes went wide.

“I can have two?”

“Two scoops in a cone.”

“Two scoops in a cone,” she repeated. “Which do you pick?”

“You pick first. You’re not going to go wrong.”

“I think . . . the pink, and this green? They’ll look nice together. Like a flower.”

“Strawberry and mint. Nice combo. It’s on me,” he told the rest.

When, even after he’d paid, Annika just admired her cone, he demonstrated on his own. “You want to eat it.”

She took one delicate lick, then another. “Oh! It’s like eating joy!”

Weird, Sawyer thought as they hiked with packs, bags, and cones, but she made him feel like a hero for giving her her first taste of eating joy.

Because of it, the hike back went easy.

They scattered on the return, and as Sawyer moved faster, he snagged the shower ahead of Doyle. He washed off the salt, the sea, the sweat, felt fully human again as he drank half his first beer in the shower.

When he got out, he heard laughter from the kitchen. Female laughter. And though it appealed, he thought it wise to take a little time, a little distance from Annika.

His lust quotient there kept rising, no matter how studiously he tried to suppress it.

He took the rest of his beer outside, pulled a lounge chair into a patch of shade, and settled in with his tablet. He needed to email home, update his family. Maybe he’d read a chapter or two of one of the books he’d downloaded.

He dashed off the emails, promised pictures to follow. Told himself he could take an hour off, to read, or doze, or whatever the hell, then he’d do some research.

Riley was the queen there, but he had lines to tug as well.

Then she walked out, the mermaid in one of her floaty, filmy dresses, her hair loose, waving a little from its time in a braid. She carried a tray of flutes filled with frothy peach-colored liquid.

“Riley says it’s Bellini time.” She set the tray on the table, picked up two flutes. “She made them, and we had sips—Sasha and I.” She handed him a flute, sat on the grass with those incredible legs folded. “The gelato was eating joy, and this is drinking it.”

He sampled to please her. “Fancy. Good. Good and fancy.”

“Sasha said a monk found—discovered—champagne, and said it was drinking stars.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“Stars are meant to be for beauty and light, and for all the worlds. Nerezza won’t drink them.”

“Damn right, she won’t.” Sawyer shifted, tapped his glass to hers.

“Damn right.”

Sasha and Bran came out, chose another patch of shade with their drinks, Sasha’s sketch pad. Riley settled in the sun with a Bellini and, like Sawyer, a tablet. Doyle came last, gave the Bellinis a look of suspicion, then shrugged, took one. He, too, chose the sun.

“I like when we’re all together,” Annika murmured. “Even apart, like this a little bit, but together. I’ll miss it, miss everyone, once we return the stars to the Island of Glass.”

“We’ll have a reunion.”

“I don’t know that word.”

“It’s like when people who’ve been together, then go separate ways, come back together again to celebrate. For a night, or a couple of days.”

“A reunion.” She thought it would be a new favorite word. “You’d come?”

“Sure. I bet Bran could fix it up, somewhere private, by the sea. We’ll have gelato and Bellinis.”

“And pizza.”

“Pizza goes without saying.” He couldn’t help himself, and stroked his hand down her hair. “We’ll end Nerezza, but that won’t end us.”

CHAPTER FOUR

At midnight, far too intrigued to resist, Malmon studied the house matching the address on the card Nerezza had given him. He’d already had one of his men take photos of it earlier in the day, and had assigned another to find out everything there was to find on the woman.

It both angered and intrigued him when everything to be found was nothing at all.

But the house suited her, to his mind. Even as he studied it now, from the smoked glass of the limo, he could imagine her inside. It held an eerie grace with its old stone, shielding trees, the gargoyles perched on the eaves.

As his did, it stood back from the road, behind a gate. He appreciated the desire for privacy, the power it took to command it.

What would she offer him? He had to know.

When he ordered the driver to pull up to the gate, he found himself unsurprised it opened immediately. Once the driver opened his door, he stepped out, a confident man in a bespoke suit, who believed he’d already seen and done all there was to see and do.

The wide, arched door opened as he approached. A man, pale of face, dark of eye, stood silently.

Malmon stepped into a foyer lit with dozens of candles. In the shifting, shimmering light, the pale man closed the heavy door. And Malmon’s heart beat quickly.