𝒆𝒍𝒚 @wonluvzu - Tumblr Blog

THE HILLS

₊˚⊹♡ A solo business trip to Lake Como sounded like the perfect escape, and after a night of bar hopping, you meet a stranger who catches your eye. Deciding to have a little fun, you spend the night with him, only to wake up the next morning in an unfamiliar luxury hotel room. Realizing you're about to miss your flight back to Singapore, you quickly write an apology note, leave some money behind, and slip out before he wakes up, convinced you'll never see him again. But the moment you get home, your father announces that, for the sake of the family business, you've been arranged to marry the heir of another powerful company. With no way to refuse, you reluctantly agree to meet him. Less than 3 weeks after leaving Lake Como behind, you're sitting at dinner with your parents, waiting for your future fiancé to arrive... until a man takes the seat across from you. It's him... the stranger you disappeared on in Lake Como. Oh, this is gonna be a fun ride... isn't it?

𝙖𝙧𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙚𝙙 𝙝𝙪𝙨𝙗𝙖𝙣𝙙! 𝙟𝙖𝙮 𝙭 𝙛𝙚𝙢! 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙚𝙧 Arranged marriage, one night stand, enemies to lovers, forced proximity, billionaire romance, slow burn, banter, jealousy, angst, fluff, luxury lifestyle, corporate politics, family drama, mature themes, happy ending. WARNINGS: Explicit Sexual Content, Strangers to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Jealousy, Possessive Behavior, Angry Sex, Dirty Talk, Light Spanking, Hair Pulling, Light Choking, Overstimulation, Creampie, Oral Sex, Fingering, Strong Language, Alcohol Use, Family Pressure wc: 17,920 Songs 🎧: The Hills- The Weeknd, Or Nah - The Weeknd, Wiz Khalifa, & Mustard, Despacito - Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee, There's Nothing Holdin' Me Back - Shawn Mendes, Mercy - Shawn Mendes, Here- Alessia Cara, Siren Sounds (bonus)- Tate McRae, In the Name of Love- Martin Garrix & Bebe Rexha

CHAPTER 1: LATE NIGHTS IN LAKE COMO

I didn't come to Lake Como to fall into bed with a stranger. I came because my father's company was closing a deal with an Italian textile group and someone with a Singaporean passport and a decent grasp of contract law needed to sit in on the meetings, and that someone was me. Three days of negotiations, translators, and men twice my age calling me "young lady" instead of my actual title, and by the third night I was so done being professional.

"One night," my colleague Minji had said, clinking her glass against mine while we were on a terrace that overlooked the water so still it looked like it was painted on. "One night where you're not Mr. Song's daughter. Just you."

I'd laughed her off at first. And then I'd had a second glass of wine, and a third. Somewhere between the second bar and the third… a place with string lights and a DJ who clearly thought hip hop was a personality, Minji had gone off with some guy she just met at the last bar we were at. So I'd found myself alone at the counter, spinning the handle of my glass between two fingers, when a voice beside me said, in heavily accented but confident English…

"You're doing that thing where you're thinking too hard for someone on vacation."

I'd turned, ready to deliver the practiced brush off I gave every man who tried his luck with me in a bar, but the words had evaporated somewhere in my throat.

He was… objectively, impersonally, in the most detached way I could manage while I was literally half drunk… the best looking man I'd seen in person in my entire adult life. Dark hair pushed back like he'd run a hand through it and wasn't bothered to fix it, a jaw I could've used as a straightedge, and eyes that held a kind of lazy, unbothered amusement, like he found the whole world a little bit funny and had decided I was the funniest part of it tonight.

"I'm not on vacation," I said. "I'm working."

"In a bar. At eleven at night."

"It's a very demanding job."

He'd smiled then… slow, crooked, entirely too aware of its own effect, and ordered us both something with too much rum in it, and by midnight I'd learned nothing true about him. Not his last name, not what he did, not which hotel he was staying at, only that his name was Jay, that he laughed like he meant it, and that he had a way of looking at me that made me forget I'd sworn off men in suits after my last two relationships had both ended over a damn spreadsheet.

"You're trouble," I told him, somewhere around my fourth bar, when his hand had found the small of my back and left it there like it belonged.

"I get that a lot," he said. "You gonna do something about it, or just complain?"

Somewhere between bar three and bar four, I'd made him guess my job, "finance," he'd said immediately, squinting at me like he could read a balance sheet off my face, "no, wait… something in law, you argue like someone who's used to winning," and I'd neither confirmed nor denied it, just let him keep guessing, delighted by how genuinely invested he seemed in being right. He, in turn, had refused directly to tell me what he did, only that it involved "a lot of boring meetings and even more boring men," which had made me laugh so hard I'd nearly knocked my drink into a total stranger's lap.

"You're avoiding the question," I'd told him, jabbing a finger into his chest.

"I'm creating mystery," he'd corrected. "It's a strategy."

"It's evasive."

"It's working, isn't it? You're still here."

I couldn't argue with that. By the fourth bar, the DJ had switched to something with a Latin beat that made the whole floor move as one body, and Jay had pulled me into it without asking, hand at my waist, hips finding the rhythm like it was something he did often, and I'd stopped pretending, even to myself, that I had any intention of going back to my hotel alone that night.

"For someone who does boring meetings," I'd shouted over the music, "you dance like you do this professionally."

"Hidden talents," he'd said against my ear, and I'd felt the words more than heard them, warm and low, and something in my chest had done a slow, dangerous flip that I chose, deliberately, not to examine.

I should have called it a night right there. I didn't.

The walk back to his hotel blurred into a memory I'd revisit more than I'd ever admit… the lake at my left catching the moon, his jacket over my shoulders because I'd complained once about the wind, his mouth against my temple at a red light because apparently he couldn't wait until we were inside. The lobby of his hotel was the kind of quietly obscene luxury that told me he wasn't just some backpacker with a nice face… marble floors, a chandelier that had probably cost more than my apartment, a night staff that greeted him by name with the particular deference reserved for people who paid for entire floors.

I noticed. I filed it away. I didn't ask.

Neither of us were interested in talking anymore anyway.

I didn’t even make it past the doorstep of his suite before he had me pinned against the door, his mouth claiming mine in a kiss that stole every last bit of breath from my lungs.

The click of the lock was barely audible over the pounding of my heart. His body pressed flush against mine… hard chest, strong thighs, the unmistakable bulge of his erection already straining against my hip. One of his hands tangled in my hair, tilting my head exactly how he wanted while the other gripped my waist, fingers digging in like he was afraid I might disappear.

“God, you taste even better than I imagined,” he growled against my lips, tongue sweeping in to taste me deeper. The kiss was messy, urgent, all teeth and tongue and raw hunger. I moaned into his mouth, hands fisting the front of his shirt, pulling him impossibly closer.

When he finally broke away, both of us gasping, his lips trailed hot, open mouthed kisses down my neck. He sucked hard at my pulse point, then soothed it with his tongue. “Been thinking about this since the second I saw you at that bar,” he murmured, voice low and rough. “Wondering how you’d sound when I finally get my mouth on you.”

My dress was already riding up from how I wrapped my legs around him earlier on the dance floor. Jay’s hand slid under the hem, palming my ass, squeezing. “So fucking soft. I can’t wait to taste every inch.”

He lifted me effortlessly, my legs locking around his waist as he carried me toward the massive king bed. The suite’s floor to ceiling windows overlooked the moonlit lake, but neither of us spared it a glance. He laid me down gently, but the look in his eyes was anything but… dark, predatory, starving.

Jay knelt between my spread thighs, pushing my dress higher. “Let me see you.” His fingers hooked onto my lace panties, dragging them down slowly, teasingly. Once they were off, he spread my legs wider, eyes locked on my glistening pussy. “Look at you. Already so wet for me. Such a pretty little cunt.”

I whimpered at his words, hips shifting restlessly. He leaned in, blowing cool air over my heated flesh before his tongue licked a slow, broad stripe from my entrance up to my clit. The sensation made my back arch off the bed.

“Fuck—Jay—”

“Mmm, say my name again,” he demanded, then sealed his mouth over my clit, sucking gently while his tongue flicked rapidly. Two thick fingers pushed inside me without warning, curling to stroke that spongy spot that made you see stars. The wet, obscene sounds of his mouth and fingers filled the room.

He ate me out like a man possessed… long, hungry licks, tight circles around my clit, then sucking hard while his fingers pumped faster. “Tastes so fucking good,” he groaned against me, the vibrations shooting pleasure through my core. “Sweet and creamy. I could stay down here all night.”

My hands flew to his hair, gripping tight as my thighs started to tremble. He added a third finger, stretching me deliciously, scissoring them while his tongue worked my clit relentlessly.

“Come for me, baby. Let me feel this pussy squeeze my fingers.”

The orgasm hit me like a wave, crashing over me hard. I cried out his name, hips bucking against his face as he licked me through every pulse, drinking down every drop.

But he didn’t stop. He kept licking, gentler now, until the overstimulation turned back into building pleasure. Only then did he pull back, lips shiny with my arousal, and crawl up my body.

He kissed me deeply, letting me taste myself on his tongue. “See how good you taste? I’m going to make you come on my tongue again before I fuck you.”

I reached for his belt, desperate to feel him. He helped me strip him, his cock springing free… heavy, thick, veined, the head already glistening with precum. I wrapped my hand around him, stroking slowly.

“Fuck, your hand feels amazing,” he hissed. “But I need your mouth first.”

He guided me up, sitting back against the headboard. I settled between his thighs, looking up at him as I licked up the underside of his cock. Jay’s head fell back with a groan.

“That’s it… just like that. Take your time, baby. Worship it.”

I swirled my tongue around the head, tasting the precum, then sucked him into my mouth. He was big… stretching my lips wide. I bobbed my head, taking more each time, using my hand on what I couldn’t fit.

“Shit—your mouth is perfect. So warm and wet. Suck harder—yeah, just like that.”

His hand rested lightly on my head, not forcing, just guiding. I relaxed my throat and took him deeper, humming around him. Jay cursed, hips twitching.

“Gonna come if you keep that up,” he warned, but I didn’t stop. I wanted to push him over the edge.

When he finally pulled me off, his eyes were wild. “Not yet. I want to be inside you when I come the first time.”

He rolled on a condom quickly, then positioned himself between my thighs. “Ready?”

“Yes—please, Jay.”

He pushed in slowly, letting me feel every thick inch stretching me open. When he bottomed out, he stayed there, grinding deep. “So tight. Taking me so well. This pussy was made for my cock.”

Then he started moving… long, deep strokes that built steadily. I wrapped my legs around him, nails raking down his back. He leaned down to suck on my nipples, alternating between them while he fucked me.

The pace quickened. Skin slapped against skin. He reached between me to rub my clit in tight circles.

“Come again for me. I want to feel you milking my cock.”

I shattered around him, clenching hard. Jay groaned, thrusting through my orgasm before pulling out.

“On your hands and knees,” he ordered.

I obeyed, ass up. He spread my cheeks, licking from my clit all the way up, teasing my other hole briefly with his tongue before diving back into my pussy.

“Fucking delicious,” he muttered, then slammed back inside me from behind. The new angle was devastating. He fucked me hard, one hand in my hair, the other reaching around to rub my clit.

“Tell me how much you love my cock,” he demanded between thrusts.

“I love it—fuck—so deep—don’t stop—”

He reached around and pinched my clit, sending me over again. This time he followed, burying himself deep and coming with a guttural moan of my name.

"Gosh, y/n"

We collapsed together, but the night was far from over.

After a short breather, he pulled me into the shower. Under the hot spray, he dropped to his knees again, water falling over both of us as he ate me out against the glass wall… tongue fucking into me, fingers everywhere, until I came screaming.

Then I returned the favor, sucking him off on my knees until he spilled down my throat with a hoarse shout.

Back in bed, he took me slow and deep in, whispering filthy praises the whole time, “Look at how well you take me… your pussy is so greedy for my cock… gonna fill you up again soon…”

I rode him next, grinding down, his hands guiding my hips while he sucked marks into my breasts.

By the time the sky started to lighten, I'd lost count of how many times he’d made me come… on his tongue, on his fingers, on his cock. The room smelled of sex and sweat. Jay held me close afterward, kissing my temple, both of us boneless and satisfied.

But even as sleep pulled at me, I knew I’d have to leave soon.

CHAPTER 2: THE NOTE

I woke up to sunlight shining gold across a bed that wasn't mine, in a room the size of my childhood living room, with an arm slung heavy and warm over my waist and my flight… my flight… leaving in three hours.

For one forgiving, traitorous second, I let myself lie there. Let myself feel the solid heat of him at my back, the slow rhythm of his breathing, the absolute stupidity of how good it had felt to be someone else's for one night, no expectations, no last names, no Song Corporation trailing behind me like a shadow with a balance sheet.

Then my phone, buried somewhere in my discarded clothes, buzzed with a reminder, and reality slapped me awake.

I slid out from under his arm with the sneakiness of someone who had, in a past life, definitely been a cat burglar. He stirred, murmured something impossible to understand, and rolled onto his front, and I froze mid motion for a full ten seconds before he settled again.

Dressing in the dark… or rather, dressing in far too much golden Italian sunlight while trying to be quiet about it… was its own special kind of chaos. I found my dress inside out on an armchair, one shoe by the door and the other, mysteriously, on the balcony. I did not investigate how it got there.

I should have just left. That would have been the smart thing. The clean thing. I had done this before… not this exact scenario, not a man who made my pulse skip just by saying my overthinking out loud, but the general shape of it, the one night stand that ended at sunrise with no numbers exchanged and no promises made. I was good at leaving. I'd built an entire adult life around being good at leaving before anyone got the chance to leave me first.

So why did my hand shake, just slightly, reaching for the hotel notepad.

I told myself it was the time pressure. The flight. The three hours narrowing by the minute while I stood in a stranger's hotel room debating the ethics of a goodbye note like it was a legal document requiring careful drafting. I told myself it had nothing to do with the way he'd said my name… just my first name, I realized with a small, absurd jolt, because I'd never told him last name, nothing to do with Song, just hey, you, careful, murmured against my hair sometime after midnight in a way that had felt, in the moment, more intimate than anything a stranger's name had a right to feel.

Instead I found a hotel notepad by a bowl of fruit no one had touched, and a pen with the hotel's logo engraved in gold, and I stood there chewing my lip, staring at a man whose last name I didn't know, feeling something uncomfortably close to guilt.

Had to run… flight I can't miss. Last night was fun. Sorry for ghosting, it's not you, it's timing. Left some money for the minibar since I definitely helped myself. Take care of yourself, stranger.

I looked at it, cringed, and added a folded stack of euros on top… not much, just enough to make the note read as a joke instead of what it actually was, which was panic dressed up as nonchalance. Then I slipped my shoes on in the hallway, and I left.

I did not look back at the bed. I told myself that later, on the plane, somewhere over the Arabian Sea with a complimentary champagne I didn't taste, three separate times, and I did not believe myself even once.

CHAPTER 3: THE ANNOUNCEMENT

Jay woke up to an empty bed, a note that made his jaw tighten in a way he didn't examine too closely, and a stack of euros that felt, more than anything else that morning, like an insult.

Money for the minibar. Like he was a service she'd paid for and rated four stars. Like he was forgettable.

He wasn't used to forgettable. He wasn't used to being forgotten, not by women who'd looked at him the way she had… like he was the punchline to a joke only she knew, like she'd already decided he was fun but temporary before he'd even opened his mouth. He'd let a stranger walk into his hotel room, into his night, into apparently his head, and she'd left him folded currency like a tip.

He didn't know her last name. He didn't have her number. He had a room that still smelled like her perfume and a bruised ego he was going to pretend, for the sake of his own dignity, that he didn't have.

Fine, he thought, staring at the note until the words blurred. Fun while it lasted.

He had no idea, standing there in a hotel bathrobe at nine in the morning with wounded pride and lake view sunlight in his eyes, that the universe had already decided this was very much not over.

…

Three weeks after returning from Lake Como, I'd almost convinced myself the whole thing had been nothing more than a reckless business-trip mistake. I landed back into my routine feeling like myself again...… jet-lagged, sunburned in one uneven stripe across my shoulder, but myself, the version of me that answered emails and knew her own last name and hadn't spent a night pretending to be someone with no responsibilities. I told myself the whole flight home that Lake Como had been a bracket I was closing. Nothing that would follow me home.

My family had built Song Corporation from a single shipping route between Busan and Singapore three decades ago, back when my grandfather first left Korea with nothing but a cargo plan and a stubborn streak my father had inherited in full. I'd grown up between two languages and two sets of expectations… the quiet formality of my parents' generation, still rooted in Seoul even after thirty years abroad, and the faster, blunter world I'd built for myself in Singapore. Dinners at my parents' house still opened with a bow to my grandmother's photo on the mantel. My father still switched to Korean the second he was truly angry, which was usually the only warning I got before bad news landed.

My father was waiting for me at the dining table that evening, which was never a good sign. My father did not wait for people. People waited for him. The fact that he'd cleared his calendar to be sitting there with my mother, both of them wearing the particular stillness of people about to deliver news they'd already decided I would accept, made my stomach drop before he'd said a single word.

"Sit," he said. Not unkind. Just certain.

I sat.

"The Park deal," he began, and I already hated where this was going, because my father only used that tone… measured, deliberate, like he was reading from a contract instead of speaking to his daughter, for things he knew I wouldn't like. "Chairman Park and I have been in discussion for the last several months. Song Corporation and Park Industries merging our shipping and logistics divisions would put us in a position no one in this region could touch."

"Okay," I said slowly. "That's… good news? Why do you look like you're about to tell me someone died."

"Because," my mother said gently, reaching for my hand, "the merger comes with a condition. A marriage. Between you and Chairman Park's son."

The room tilted slightly. I laughed… an actual, disbelieving bark of a laugh, because surely, surely this was a joke, the kind my father sometimes attempted and always failed to land. "I'm sorry, what?"

"It secures the partnership for a generation," my father said, unmoved by my reaction, already reciting the argument he'd clearly rehearsed for this exact response. "It's not unusual in either of our families' histories. You know that."

"I know it's not unusual for it to happen to other people," I snapped. "I didn't think it would be me. I have a life, I have a job, I have… I don't even know this man!"

"You'll meet him tomorrow night. Dinner, here, informal. Chairman Park's son has agreed to the arrangement." My father's voice didn't so much as waver. "His name is Jay. I'm told he's reasonable. Personable. You could do far worse." Common name, right?

"And if I say no?" I hated how small my voice sounded, even to my own ears. "What happens then?"

My father set down his fork with the deliberate care of a man choosing his next words carefully. "Then the merger falls through. Ten years of negotiations, gone. Six thousand jobs across both companies put at risk over your reluctance to have dinner with a man you haven't even met." He softened, marginally, seeing something in my face he hadn't intended to put there. "I'm not asking you to marry a stranger tomorrow. I'm asking you to give this a chance. If, after time, you genuinely cannot stand him, we will find another solution. I promise you that. But I need you to try."

"That's not a real choice, father, and you know it."

"No," he admitted, quietly, which was somehow worse than if he'd simply argued. "It isn't. I'm sorry for that. But I built this company for you to inherit one day, and I need it to still exist by the time that day comes."

I wanted to scream. I wanted to slam my palms on the table and demand to know since when my entire future got decided over a boardroom handshake while I was out of the country closing a completely different deal for this same family. But I'd grown up in this house, under this roof, with this particular brand of love that came wrapped in obligation, and I knew… the way I knew the tide would come in, the way I knew the sun would set, that there was no version of tonight where I won this argument.

"Fine," I said, because it was the only word left that didn't come out as a scream. "Fine. I'll meet him. But I'm not promising anything beyond dinner."

My father, for the first time all evening, allowed himself something like a smile. "That's all I'm asking."

I went to bed that night thinking of Lake Como. Of a stranger's mouth against my temple, of a note I'd left folded on a hotel pillow, of the particular freedom of one night where nobody expected anything of me at all.

I had no idea how badly the universe was about to collapse those two lives into one.

CHAPTER 4: THE MAN ACROSS THE TABLE

I spent the following day in a fog somewhere between denial and minor panic, which was, in thinking back, an appropriate emotional state for what was coming.

My mother had chosen the restaurant… a private dining room in one of the hotels my family half owned, all dark wood and candlelight and a view of the skyline that was supposed to make everyone feel expansive and hopeful about the future. I wore the green dress my mother liked, the one that made me look, in her words, "like someone a Chairman's son would be lucky to marry," which was possibly the least comforting compliment I'd ever received.

I sat between my parents, watching the door, running through every version of this conversation in my head. Hello, nice to meet you, I hear we're being sold to each other for a logistics contract. I'd decided, somewhere around my second glass of water, that I would be polite. Cool. Unbothered. I would give this man exactly as much warmth as the situation legally required and not one degree more.

Then the door opened, and every rehearsed line I had died in my throat at once.

He walked in like he owned the room… because, I would later learn, in a very literal sense, he frequently did… dressed in a black suit that fit him with the kind of precision that only exists on men who've never had to wonder if they could afford tailoring. Dark hair, pushed back. A jaw I would recognize with my eyes closed, in a pitch black room, from memory alone, because I'd spent an embarrassing amount of a transatlantic flight trying not to think about that exact jaw.

He stopped mid stride. His eyes found mine, and for one full second, the easy, practiced charm on his face cracked straight down the middle into something like disbelief.

Him.

The stranger from Lake Como. The one I'd left a note and a stack of euros for. The one whose bed I'd slipped out of eighteen hours ago like a thief in the night, convinced… convinced… I would never see him again.

He recovered faster than I did. Of course he did. He slid into the seat across from me, straightened his jacket, and looked at me with an expression that was, if I had to name it, delighted… the specific delight of a predator that had just realized its dinner walked directly into the trap.

"Jay," my father said, standing to shake his hand, oblivious to the silent war being waged across his dining table. "This is my daughter."

"We've met," Jay said, eyes never leaving mine, mouth curling into a smile with teeth in it. "Haven't we?"

I picked up my water glass and drank the entire thing to keep from saying something that would get me disowned.

"Briefly," I managed. "In passing."

"That's not really how I'd describe it," Jay said, settling back in his chair with the unbothered ease of a man who had just been handed the single best piece of leverage of his entire life. "But sure. In passing."

My mother, blessedly, missed the hidden meaning entirely and launched into some pleasantry about the wine list. My father asked Jay about his flight in from Lake Como… of course he'd been in Lake Como, of course the business trip that ruined my life and the business trip that arranged my marriage were the exact same trip… and I sat there, spine locked straight, silently calculating how many ways I could disappear from this table without causing an international incident.

Jay answered every question my parents asked with the polished, charming ease of someone raised for exactly this kind of performance. And every few sentences, without fail, his eyes would slide back to me… amused, sharp, unmistakably promising that this conversation was very much not over.

Under the table, his knee brushed mine. Deliberately. I yanked my leg back like I'd been burned.

"So," he said, once dessert had arrived and my parents had drifted into a side conversation about the merger's logistics, low enough that only I could hear him. "Fun while it lasted, huh?"

My stomach dropped straight through the floor. "You read the note."

"I read the note." His voice was pleasant. Terrifyingly pleasant. "Money for the minibar was a nice touch. Very classy."

"I panicked," I hissed. "I had a flight to catch."

"You could've woken me up."

"I didn't want to wake you up. That was rather the point of leaving quietly."

"Right." He leaned back, studying me the way I imagine a shark studies a swimmer it hasn't decided whether to eat yet. "Because I'm just some guy you paid for room service and left behind. Except now it turns out I'm the guy your father wants you to marry. Small world, huh, Ms. Song?"

I hated how good my last name sounded coming out of his mouth like a threat. "This isn't funny."

"I think it's a little funny."

"Jay—"

"Relax." He picked up his wine glass, and something flickered behind his eyes that wasn't amusement at all… something colder, sharper, a decision being made in real time. "I'm not going to tell them. Wouldn't want to embarrass you in front of your parents. But you and I—" he tilted his glass toward me, the picture of civility, "…we're going to have a lot to talk about."

I had never, in my entire adult life, wanted to disappear so badly.

"This isn't a punishment," I said. "For me. Whatever you're thinking. I don't owe you an apology for leaving."

"Didn't say you did." His smile turned into something private, something I didn't trust at all. "But you left before I got the chance to make an impression. Seems only fair I get a second shot. We're going to be married, after all." He said the word married like he was trying it out for size, testing its weight, and something about the way it landed in his mouth made my whole body go warm and furious at once. "Might as well make it interesting."

He's going to make me pay, I thought, watching him raise his glass toward my parents in a toast neither of us had agreed to. This is a man who is going to make me pay for that note for the rest of my life.

I had absolutely no idea, yet, how right I was… or how much I'd eventually come to regret ever wanting it any other way.

…

Jay walked me to my car after dinner, which I was fairly certain was less about being a gentleman and more about getting me alone long enough to finish the conversation my parents hadn't been allowed to overhear.

"You could've said something," I hissed, the second the valet was out of earshot. "At the table. You let me sit there thinking I was about to meet a total stranger."

"And what would you have preferred? Me standing up mid appetizer announcing, 'Actually, we've met, she left me for dead in a hotel room in Lake Como after we did it'? Your mother would've had a heart attack into the bread basket."

"This isn't funny, Jay."

"I told you, I think it's a little funny." He leaned against the hood of my car, entirely too relaxed for a man whose entire future had just been decided over dessert. "Here's what I don't get. You looked at me tonight like I was a problem to be managed. But less than three weeks ago you looked at me like—"

"Don't."

"…like you couldn't get enough," he finished anyway, watching my face for a reaction he clearly enjoyed getting. "What changed? Besides the small detail of our fathers turning it into a business contract."

"Everything changed," I said. "That night was supposed to be nothing. A story I'd tell at parties. Not a… a lifetime commitment."

"Scared?"

"Furious," I corrected. "There's a difference."

"Is there?" He straightened off the car, close enough now that I had to tip my chin up to hold his gaze, and something in his voice dropped, lower, more serious than the teasing he'd kept up all night. "For what it's worth, I didn't ask for this either. I found out about the arrangement two days ago, same as you probably found out today. It's not like I knew it was you either… only to discover tonight it's the lady who decided I wasn't worth a proper goodbye."

That landed harder than I expected. "I told you. I panicked."

"I know." Something in his expression softened, just slightly, before the familiar smirk slid back into place like armor. "Doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy watching you squirm about it for a while."

"You are the worst person I have ever met."

"You said something very different 3 weeks ago," he said, opening my car door for me with an exaggerated little bow. "Goodnight, Ms. Song. See you at the engagement shoot."

"The what—"

He was already walking away, hands in his pockets, whistling something I was fairly sure was deliberately, infuriatingly cheerful, and I sat in my car for a full five minutes after he'd disappeared around the corner before I trusted myself to drive.

…

The engagement shoot, as it turned out, was very real, and very public, and scheduled for exactly six days later… a joint press release for two companies merging their shipping empires needed a photogenic couple to sell it, and apparently Jay and I were now, officially, that couple. A stylist tumbled in my apartment with three racks of clothing. A photographer with an assistant who called him "genius" without a trace of irony spent two hours arranging us against a backdrop of the harbor, murmuring instructions like closer, a little closer, now look at each other like you mean it.

"We're supposed to look like we mean it," Jay murmured, tilting my chin up with two fingers, entirely for the camera, entirely too gentle for a gesture that was supposed to be fake. "Think you can manage that?"

"I've been managing it all week," I muttered back, aware of how thin the line had become between performing something and actually feeling it.

The photos ran three days later… me in cream, Jay in navy, his hand at my waist and my head tipped back mid laugh at something he'd actually said, not scripted, a genuine reaction the photographer had caught by accident and declared "the shot." My mother framed it. Chairman Park used it for the official press release. Half my social circle sent me messages about how happy we two looked, how natural, and I sat there scrolling through the comments feeling something uncomfortably close to guilt, because the photo wasn't a lie, exactly. It just wasn't the whole truth either.

CHAPTER 5: ENGAGED, APPARENTLY

The engagement was announced within the week, because apparently when two companies decide to merge their shipping divisions, nobody sees the point in a long engagement. There was a press release. There was a photo… me in a dress that cost more than my first car I bought for myself, Jay's hand at the small of my back in the exact same place it had been in a bar in Lake Como, except this time there were cameras, and this time it meant something entirely different.

"Smile," Jay murmured through his teeth as the photographers called for one more shot. "You look like you're being arrested."

"I am being arrested," I muttered back, teeth also gritted, smile also plastered on. "Just with better lighting."

"Careful," he said, low enough that only I could hear. "People might start thinking you don't like me."

"People would be correct."

"That hurts," he said, sounding not remotely hurt. "Especially considering how much you liked me a few week ago in a hotel room with a view of the lake. While you moaned my name—"

I stomped, discreetly, on his foot. He didn't even flinch, just smiled wider for the cameras, and I hated… hated… how much I wanted to laugh.

…

Jay and I were, by both families' decision, to move into a penthouse together ahead of the wedding… "to get comfortable with each other," my mother said, with the specific confidence of a woman who had clearly never had to share a bathroom counter with a man she was furious at. The penthouse was Park property, forty floors up, all glass and steel and a view of the harbor that would've been romantic under literally any other circumstances.

It had two bedrooms. Thank goodness…

The first month was a war led almost entirely through passive aggression and pointed silences. Jay left his shoes in the hallway specifically, I was convinced, because he knew it drove me insane. I reacted back by rearranging his entire closet by color instead of by season, which he discovered at seven in the morning while trying to find a specific navy suit and instead found himself surrounded by a rainbow of confusion.

"You're a menace," he told me over breakfast, hair still damp from a shower, tie hanging undone around his neck because he hadn't had time to finish it.

"I'm efficient," I said, not looking up from my coffee. "Color coding is a perfectly reasonable system."

"It's an act of war."

"Tie your tie, Jay, you have a board meeting."

He glared at me. I didn't look up. He tied the tie badly out of spite, and we both knew it, and neither of us said another word about it, and somehow that felt like the closest thing to a truce either of us had managed in weeks.

…

The banter was constant, and it was, if I was being honest with myself… which I tried very hard not to be… the best part of my day. He teased me about my coffee order (too complicated, he said, for someone who claimed to hate complications). I teased him about the fact that he talked to his car like it could hear him. He'd catch me smiling at something he said and immediately point it out, "Was that a laugh? Did I just make Ms. Song laugh?" and I'd immediately stop, purely on principle, which only made him laugh harder.

It would have been easy, dangerously easy, to enjoy it. I reminded myself, nightly, in the privacy of my own bedroom with the door locked, that this was a business arrangement wearing the costume of a relationship, and that the man three doors down had made it very clear, that first dinner, that he intended to make me pay for leaving him in Lake Como. I didn't trust charm that came with a motive. I'd learned that the hard way, long before Jay Park ever existed.

So I kept my walls up. Mostly.

It was easier some days than others.

…

RULES

Two weeks into this, I'd decided the situation required structure, so I'd drafted… because of course I had, I was my father's daughter whether I liked it or not… an actual list of household rules and taped it to the refrigerator.

Jay found it while looking for orange juice.

"'Rule one,'" he read aloud, deadpan, holding his glass of juice like a prop, "'No shoes in the hallway.' Sweetheart, this is a shared home, not a monastery."

"Rule one exists because you have never once, not a single time, taken your shoes off before the front door."

"'Rule two: knock before entering shared spaces if the other person is, and I quote, "visibly stressed."'" He looked up at me over the side of the paper. "How am I supposed to gauge 'visibly stressed' from outside a closed door?"

"You'll know."

"'Rule three—'" he squinted, "'… do not, under any circumstances, refer to this arrangement as "cute" in front of either family.' Why would I call this cute?"

"Because you called it cute to my mother yesterday and she looked ready to start planning nursery colors."

"It was cute. You made me a cup of coffee without me asking. That's basically a marriage proposal in this household."

"It was leftover coffee. I was being economical."

"Sure." He folded the list in half, tucked it into his back pocket like a souvenir instead of leaving it on the fridge, and I decided, very firmly, not to comment on that either.

Jay and I fell, without either of us quite agreeing to it, into a rhythm that felt almost domestic… he made appalling instant noodles at midnight and somehow always made a second bowl without being asked, I learned, against my will, the exact way he liked his coffee, dark, no sugar, one useless ice cube "for the aesthetic," his words, not mine. We argued about the thermostat. We argued about whose turn it was to deal with the dry cleaning. We argued, once, for a full twenty minutes, about whether pineapple belonged on pizza, an argument Jay won not through logic but through the sheer, relentless force of ordering one anyway and watching me eat three slices while insisting I hated it.

It didn't feel like an arrangement most days. It felt, terrifyingly, like something closer to a life.

I still wasn't ready to call it that. Not yet.

…

My mother had opinions about wedding dresses the way my father had opinions about shipping contracts… extensive, firm, delivered with total confidence regardless of whether anyone had asked. I stood on a small pedestal in a boutique that smelled like tea and money while a worker pinned fabric at my hips and my mother circled me like she was appraising livestock.

"This one," she declared, for the third dress in a row. "No… wait. The last one. Definitely the last one."

"You said that about the first one too."

"I have many opinions ." She adjusted a stray pin. "You seem distracted, darling. Everything alright with Jay?"

I hesitated a beat too long, and my mother, who missed almost nothing when it came to my moods, caught it instantly.

"Everything's fine," I said. "It's just… a lot. All of it happening so fast."

"You've been happier since Lake Como," she said gently, not unkindly, folding a swatch of lace over her arm. "Whatever's between the two of you, real or not, I've watched you smile at your phone more in the last two months than you did in the entire two years you dated that awful man from the shipping conference."

"His name was Nick, and he wasn't awful, he was just—"

"He once corrected your grammar during your own birthday toast. He was awful." My mother fixed me with a look I recognized from childhood, the one that meant she already knew the answer and simply wanted me to say it out loud. "I know this didn't start the way either of you wanted. But I've been married to your father for thirty one years, and I promise you, some of the best marriages start as arrangements. It's not how it begins that matters. It's what you both decide to make of it."

I didn't have an answer for that, not one I trusted myself to say without my voice cracking, so I just let the worker finish pinning the dress and hoped my mother would mistake the shine in my eyes for exhaustion instead of what it actually was.

CHAPTER 6: BACK TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

Six weeks before the wedding, the Park-Song merger required one final round of negotiations … in person, in Lake Como, with the same Italian business I'd first met with the night I'd met Jay. My father, delighted by what he assumed was budding chemistry between his daughter and her fiancé, insisted we both attend together.

"Absolutely not," I said, the second I found out.

"It's one trip," Jay said, entirely too pleased with himself, lounging in the penthouse's kitchen doorway with his arms crossed. "Besides, you love it there. You told me so yourself. Very memorably, actually."

"I will end you."

"Promises, promises."

…

The flight over was, against my best efforts, almost pleasant… Jay stole my armrest for the entire eleven hours and somehow made it feel less like an act of war and more like an invitation, and by the time we landed I'd watched two mediocre romantic comedies with him, argued about which one was worse, and split a truly ill advised amount of the airline's complimentary chocolate.

The negotiations themselves ran two full days, and I found myself, for the first time since this entire arrangement began, genuinely impressed by him… not by the practiced charm he displayed at dinner parties, but by the sharp, unglamorous capability he brought to a boardroom. He caught a clause in the shipping contract that would've cost both companies millions if it had gone unnoticed, argued the business's lead counsel into a corner without ever raising his voice, and did it all with the same easy confidence he'd used to talk me into a second drink the very first night I met him.

"You're staring," he murmured, leaning close under the act of reviewing a document, during a break in the second day's session.

"I'm reviewing your work," I said. "It's a legitimate business function."

"Sure it is." His mouth twitched. "For what it's worth, you're better at this than half the men in this room. Your father should let you run point on these negotiations instead of just sitting in on them."

I blinked, thrown by the sincerity of it, the total absence of teasing. "That's—" I fumbled for a second, "…actually a genuinely nice thing to say."

"Don't get used to it," he said, already back to his usual smirk, though something warmer lingered behind it that neither of us acknowledged out loud.

…

With the negotiations wrapped early that afternoon, we found ourselves with a rare, unscheduled block of hours before the celebratory dinner… no meetings, no families, no reason to be anywhere but exactly where we wanted to be. Jay suggested, with the particular casualness of a man trying very hard not to sound like he cared about the answer, that we take the hotel boat out onto the lake.

"That sounds suspiciously romantic for a business trip," I said.

"It's efficient sightseeing," he said. "You've been to Lake Como twice now and seen nothing but hotel lobbies and a boardroom. That's practically criminal."

I went. The lake in the afternoon light was almost romantic in its beauty… pastel villages stacked along the hills, the water so clear I could see straight through to the rocks below, mountains still capped faintly with snow despite the season. Jay, it turned out, was a genuinely terrible boat driver, and I spent a solid twenty minutes laughing at him trying to dock at a small café along the shore, nearly clipping a much nicer boat belonging to a very unimpressed elderly Italian man.

"In my defense," Jay said, mortified, as we both scrambled onto the dock, "boats are unreasonable vehicles."

"You almost took out a man's entire summer."

"He'll live." He handed me out of the boat with more grace than his docking had suggested he possessed, and didn't let go of my hand once I was steady on solid ground. Neither of us commented on it. Neither of us let go, either.

We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering a village whose name I never quite caught, eating gelato that Jay insisted, with total confidence and zero evidence, was "objectively the best in Italy," and browsing a tiny shop that sold hand painted ceramics, where Jay bought a small blue bowl for no reason he'd admit to and I caught him, later, packing it carefully into his suitcase like it mattered.

"For the penthouse," he said, when he caught me watching. "Somewhere in that place we could use a little color that isn't gray and glass."

"That sounds suspiciously like nesting, Jay."

"It's interior design. Don't read into it." He absolutely wanted me to read into it. I absolutely did.

By the time the sun started dipping toward the hills, gold spilling across the water in a way that made the whole afternoon feel like something out of a memory I hadn't made yet, I'd stopped keeping track of how many times he'd made me laugh, or how many times I'd caught myself wishing this particular afternoon didn't have to end.

That night, with the contracts finally settled and one more signing ceremony scheduled for the following week, the business's lead partner insisted on a celebratory dinner… the same terrace, coincidentally or not, where I'd first found Jay leaning against the bar with a drink in his hand and a comment about my overthinking. I wore red. He noticed. He didn't bother pretending he hadn't.

"This feels like déjà vu," I said, watching the same lake catch the same moonlight it had the night we first met, a lifetime ago, back when I still thought I'd never see this man again.

"Good déjà vu or bad déjà vu?" he asked.

"Ask me tomorrow," I said, though we both already suspected we knew the answer.

The hotel… a different one this time, a relief, at least, though not by much… had, thanks to some administrative mix up that I was fairly certain Jay had personally engineered, booked the two of us into a single suite. One suite. One bed.

I stood in the doorway, staring at it, then at Jay, who was already unbuttoning his cuffs like this was the most natural thing in the world.

"No," I said.

"There's a couch," he said, gesturing vaguely at a chaise longue that was approximately five feet long and shaped like a crescent moon, entirely unsuited to the human spine.

"You take the couch."

"I'm six foot."

"That sounds like a you problem."

He grinned, infuriatingly. "We've shared a bed before. I don't remember you complaining."

Heat crawled up my neck, fast and unwelcome. "That was different."

"How, exactly?"

"That was one night with a stranger. This is—" I gestured helplessly between the two of us, "…this. Whatever this is."

"Fiancés," he supplied, far too casually, sitting on the edge of the bed like he already owned it, which, technically, given his family's stake in the hotel chain, he might have. "That's the word you're looking for."

"I know what the word is, Jay."

"Then use it. Might make the whole thing easier." Something flickered behind his eyes when he said it… not quite a challenge, not quite something softer. I didn't examine it too closely.

I ended up sharing the bed. I told myself it was purely logistical… a strict, enforced border down the middle of the mattress, a wall of decorative pillows stacked between us like the Berlin Wall reincarnated as home decor. Jay found the entire arrangement hilarious and said so, repeatedly, until I threatened to relocate him to the crescent-moon couch by force.

I woke up at 3 a.m. tangled against his chest, his arm slung over my waist exactly the way it had been the first time, in a different hotel, a different life, and I lay there in the dark for a long, unbearable minute, listening to him breathe, hating how much it felt like coming home.

I didn't move. Not right away.

When I finally did, careful, silent, he caught my wrist in the dark.

"Stay," he said, voice thick with sleep, and there was none of the usual bite in it. Just something quiet. Something real.

I stayed. I told myself, the next morning, that it hadn't meant anything. Neither of us brought it up again.

CHAPTER 7: JEALOUSY… WAS IT?

The closing gala for the merger was held on the terrace of the same hotel where the Italian business had first courted my father's business, string lights, a jazz trio, champagne that flowed like the lake itself had been bottled and served. I wore navy. Jay wore black. We'd agreed, wordlessly, over breakfast, to be civil for the cameras, which had somehow, without either of us fully noticing, evolved into being civil in general.

For the first hour, it was almost easy. Jay kept a hand at the small of my back as he introduced me to a rotating different executives and their spouses, and I found myself falling into an easy rhythm with him… finishing his sentences when he got bored of a conversation, catching his eye across the terrace when someone said something particularly absurd, sharing the kind of silent, private laughter that made me forget, for whole stretches of time, that any of this had started as a contract instead of a courtship. My father caught the two of us mid laugh at one point and looked, for a moment, so un-embarrassingly pleased with himself that I almost forgave him for the entire arrangement on the spot.

"You're enjoying yourself," Jay murmured, refilling my glass. "Careful. Someone might think you actually like me."

"Don't get used to it," I said, echoing his own line back at him, and he grinned like I'd handed him a gift.

That lasted exactly until Karina Yu showed up.

Karina was the business's newest assistant, stunning, sharp tongued, and, I gathered within about four minutes of watching her operate, extremely aware of exactly how good she looked with her hand resting on Jay's forearm while she laughed at something he'd said. I told myself I didn't care. I told myself this several times, with increasing insincerity, while I held a glass of champagne on the other side of the terrace and watched Jay throw his head back and laugh… an actual laugh, not the polished business one… at whatever Karina had just said.

So when Yeonjun Choi, a family friend from Singapore who happened to also be at the gala for reasons that felt suspiciously well timed, walked up beside me with two fresh glasses of champagne and an easy smile, I let myself lean into it. Just a little. Just enough.

"You look like you could use better company," Yeonjun said.

"You have no idea," I said, and let him make me laugh… genuinely, loudly, at a joke that wasn't even that funny… specifically angled so it would carry across the terrace.

I felt it the second Jay noticed. The air seemed to change temperature. I didn't dare look over, but I could feel the exact moment his attention snapped away from Karina Yu and landed, heavy and distinctively, on me and Yeonjun and the two inches of space between our shoulders that Yeonjun had very deliberately closed.

Ten minutes later, Jay's hand found the small of my back.

"Having fun?" he asked, voice pleasant, smile fixed, eyes doing absolutely none of the smiling.

"Loads," I said sweetly. "Yeonjun was just telling me about his new venture. Weren't you, Yeonjun?"

"I was," Yeonjun said, entirely oblivious to the fact that he had just become a casualty in a war he didn't know was being fought. "Actually, I was going to ask if you'd want to—"

"She'd love to," Jay cut in smoothly, "catch up with you later. Right now I need to steal my fiancée for a dance."

He didn't wait for my answer. His hand slid from my back to my waist, and he was already pulling me toward the small cleared space where a few other couples swayed under the lights, and I went, because making a scene in front of half of Lake Como's business elite was not on my evening's agenda.

"That was rude," I said, once we were close enough that only he could hear.

"That was necessary."

"He was being friendly."

"He was flirting with you." Jay's jaw was tight, his hand at my waist gripping just a little too firmly to be casual. "In front of me. At our engagement gala."

"And you were doing what, exactly, with Karina Yu for the last half hour? Discussing shipping tariffs?"

"That's different."

"How is that different?"

"Because I wasn't trying to make you jealous," he said, and then, a beat too late, the muscle in his jaw ticking, "Were you? Trying to make me jealous?"

I didn't answer. Which was, in itself, an answer, and we both knew it.

"You were," he said, something dark and satisfied slipping into his voice even through the anger. "You wanted me to see that."

"Don't flatter yourself."

"I'm not flattering myself. I'm reading the room. And the room says you didn't like watching me talk to another woman any more than I liked watching you flirt with Yeonjun Choi's Rolex collection."

"I don't care who you talk to."

"Liar," he said, low, and pulled me a fraction closer, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off him through two layers of expensive fabric. "You've been glaring at Karina Yu's dress since she walked in."

"It's a hideous dress."

"It's a Valentino."

"It's a hideous Valentino."

Something in his expression cracked then… not quite a smile, something rawer than that, something that looked almost like relief that I was finally, finally saying something true. The song ended. Neither of us stepped back.

"We're going back to the hotel," Jay said. It wasn't a question.

I didn't argue.

CHAPTER 8: CRASH… HEHE

The elevator ride back to the penthouse floor was silent in the way that meant it wasn't silent at all… every inch of space between us charged, both of us staring straight ahead at the doors like the reflection there might explain what exactly we were doing.

The second the door clicked shut behind us, it all came out at once.

"You embarrassed me out there," I said, rounding on him, heels forgotten by the door, adrenaline and champagne and something far more dangerous humming under my skin. "Pulling me away like I'm a possession you needed to reclaim—"

"I embarrassed you?" Jay's jacket was already off, tossed over the back of a chair, tie loosened like he couldn't get it off fast enough. "You spent an hour hanging off Yeonjun Choi's arm—"

"I did not hang off his arm—"

"…laughing at everything he said like it was the funniest thing you'd ever heard—"

"Because it's more fun than watching you and Karina Yu practically undress each other with your eyes across the terrace!"

"There it is." He turned to face me fully, and the look on his face wasn't the charming, lazy amusement I'd grown used to… it was something sharper, hungrier, months of banter and almost truths finally boiling over into something neither of us could pretend was just anger anymore. "That's what this is about. You don't get to be jealous of me, sweetheart. Not after Lake Como. Not after you left me a note like I was room service."

"I'm not jealous."

"You're jealous." He took a step closer. I didn't step back. "You've been jealous since the second she put her hand on my arm, and you know what? So was I. Watching Yeonjun Choi look at you like that. Like he had any right to."

"Maybe he does," I said, breathless, reckless, the words leaving my mouth before my brain could stop them. "Maybe I'm tired of being handed off to a man who's spent the last two months trying to make me pay for one night I don't even regret."

Something in his face went dangerously still. "You don't regret it."

"No," I said. "I don't. And that terrifies me. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

The distance between us disappeared.

In a crash of mouths and hands. Jay’s kiss wasn’t gentle… it was a claim, teeth clashing, tongue demanding entry as he backed me against the nearest wall with enough force that a framed picture rattled. I bit his lower lip hard enough to taste the faint metallic tang of blood, and he growled into my mouth, the sound vibrating straight down to my core.

“You think I don’t know what you were doing?” he rasped, one large hand fisting in my hair and yanking my head back so he could bite down the side of my throat. “Parading Yeonjun in front of me like I wouldn’t lose my fucking mind?”

“I wasn’t—” My words cut off in a gasp as he sucked hard on my pulse point, hard enough to leave a mark I’d have to hide tomorrow.

“Bullshit.” His other hand shoved the hem of my navy dress up roughly, fingers digging into the soft flesh of my thigh. “You wanted me jealous. Mission accomplished, baby.”

He spun me around suddenly, pressing my front to the cool wall, his chest hot and solid against my back. The zipper of my dress gave way under impatient hands, the fabric pooling at my feet in a whisper of expensive silk. I was left in nothing but lace panties and heels. Jay’s palm slapped against my ass… sharp, possessive, before he kneaded the sting away.

“Mine,” he snarled against my ear, teeth grazing the shell. “Say it.”

“Fuck you,” I shot back, even as I pushed my hips back against the hard line of his cock straining through his trousers.

He laughed, low and dangerous. “That’s the plan.”

He dropped to his knees behind me without warning, yanking my panties down my legs and tossing them aside. Strong hands spread my cheeks, and then his mouth was on me… hot, wet, relentless. His tongue dragged from my clit all the way up, circling the tight ring of my ass before diving back down to lap at my dripping pussy. I cried out, forehead pressed to the wall, fingers scrabbling for purchase.

“Jay—fuck—”

He ate me like a man starved, like he could erase every second I’d spent smiling at Yeonjun by devouring me instead. Long, broad licks that made my thighs shake, then tight, focused suction on my clit while two thick fingers plunged inside me, curling viciously against that spot that made stars burst behind my eyes. The wet, obscene sounds filled the room… his groans vibrating against my folds, my own broken moans echoing off marble.

“You taste so fucking good when you’re jealous,” he muttered, pulling back just enough to speak before spitting on my pussy and diving back in. A third finger joined the first two, stretching me open as his tongue flicked rapidly over my clit. “Gonna make this pretty cunt remember who it belongs to.”

I came hard, suddenly, thighs clamping around his head as my walls pulsed around his fingers. He didn’t stop… kept licking me through it, gentler then rougher again, until I was whimpering and trying to twist away from the overstimulation.

He stood, spinning me to face him. His mouth was shiny with my arousal, eyes dark with lust and something fiercer. He kissed me again, letting me taste myself on his tongue while he stripped off his shirt and trousers. His cock sprang free… thick, heavy, already leaking at the tip. I reached for it, but he caught my wrist.

“Not yet.” He lifted me effortlessly, my legs wrapping around his waist as he carried me to the massive bed. He dropped me onto it and followed immediately, crawling over me like a predator.

His mouth latched onto one nipple, sucking hard while his hand pinched and rolled the other. I arched into him, nails raking down his back hard enough to leave marks. He hissed in pleasure, grinding his cock against my thigh.

“These tits,” he groaned, switching sides, biting down gently before soothing with his tongue. “Been thinking about them all night while that asshole flirted with you.”

He worked his way down my body with single minded focus… kissing, licking, biting every inch of skin he could reach. Over my ribs, across my stomach, dipping into my navel, then lower. He settled between my thighs again, pushing them wide apart until I was completely exposed.

“Look at this greedy little pussy,” he murmured, spreading my folds with his thumbs. “Still dripping for me even after you came on my tongue.” He leaned in and licked a slow stripe up my slit, eyes locked on mine. “Tell me you don’t want anyone else tasting this.”

“I don’t,” I gasped, hips bucking. “Just you—fuck, Jay—”

He rewarded me by sucking my clit into his mouth while two fingers pumped steadily inside me. The pressure built again, fast and overwhelming. He added a third finger, scissoring them, stretching me as his tongue worked magic. When I was right on the edge, he pulled back, ignoring my whine of protest.

“Not yet. You don’t come again until I say so.”

He moved up my body and straddled my chest, knees on either side of my shoulders. His heavy cock bobbed in front of my face, glistening. He tapped the head against my lips.

“Open.”

I did, eagerly. He pushed in slowly at first, letting me swirl my tongue around the head, tasting the precum. Then he gripped my hair and thrust deeper, fucking my mouth with controlled rolls of his hips.

“Fuck, your mouth y/n…always so perfect.” He groaned as I hollowed my cheeks and took him deeper, relaxing my throat. “Suck it like you mean it, sweetheart. Show me how sorry you are for teasing me tonight.”

I hummed around him, the vibration making his thighs tense. Saliva dripped down my chin as he used my mouth, not rough enough to choke but deep enough that my eyes watered. I loved it… the weight of him on my tongue, the way his abs flexed above me, the filthy praises falling from his lips.

He pulled out suddenly, breathing hard, and flipped me onto my stomach. He hauled my hips up so I was on my knees, ass in the air, face pressed into the sheets.

“Gonna fuck you so deep you forget Yeonjun’s name,” he growled, lining himself up and slamming in with one brutal thrust.

I screamed into the mattress, the stretch bordering on too much after his fingers. He didn’t give me time to adjust… just pulled back and drove in again, setting a punishing rhythm. Skin slapped against skin, his balls hitting my clit with every thrust. One hand fisted my hair, the other gripped my hip hard enough to bruise.

“Whose pussy is this?” he demanded, angling his hips to hit that perfect spot.

“Yours—fuck—yours, Jay!”

“That’s right.” He reached around to rub my clit in tight, fast circles. “Come on my cock like a good girl. Let me feel you.”

The orgasm ripped through me, walls clenching around his thick length as I shook and moaned. He rode me through it, thrusts growing erratic, then pulled out and flipped me onto my back again.

He buried his face between my thighs once more, licking up every drop of my release with long, hungry strokes. “Can’t get enough of this taste,” he muttered against my folds. “Could eat you for hours.”

I was oversensitive, trembling, but he didn’t stop until I was whimpering and pushing at his head. Only then did he crawl up and kiss me deeply, sharing my flavor.

“On top,” he ordered, lying back and pulling me over him. “Ride me. Show me how much you need my cock.”

I straddled him, sinking down slowly, savoring the way he filled me completely. His hands gripped my ass, guiding me as I started to move… rolling my hips, grinding down so my clit rubbed against his pelvis with every motion.

“Fuck, look at you,” he groaned, eyes hooded as he watched his cock disappear inside me. “So fucking beautiful taking every inch.”

He sat up suddenly, wrapping his arms around me, mouth latching onto my breasts again as I rode him harder. I threaded my fingers through his hair, tugging as I bounced on his cock. He met me thrust for thrust, one hand sliding between us to rub my clit.

The angle was devastating. I came again, clenching around him, and he flipped us so he was on top once more, pounding into me through the aftershocks.

He pulled out and moved down my body again, this time pushing my thighs up toward my chest, folding me in half. His tongue attacked my pussy and ass with renewed passion… licking, sucking, probing, while two fingers fucked into me and his thumb pressed against my clit. I was a mess of sobs and pleas, overstimulated and desperate for more.

“Please—Jay—I need you inside me again—”

He rose up and slammed back into me in one smooth motion, the new position letting him hit impossibly deep. His hand wrapped around my throat… not squeezing hard, just holding me there, possessive.

“Mine,” he repeated with every thrust. “No one else gets to see you like this. No one else gets to make you come like this.”

I clawed at his back, legs locked around his waist as another orgasm built. He leaned down, biting my shoulder, then soothing it with his tongue. His pace became brutal, hips snapping against mine, sweat slick skin sliding together.

“Come with me,” he growled. “Now.”

We shattered together. He buried himself to the hilt, pulsing deep inside me as my walls milked him through wave after wave of pleasure. His groan of my name… raw, broken, sent fresh aftershocks through me.

"Oh gosh—y/n fuck!"

We stayed locked together for long moments, breathing hard. Then he pulled out slowly, watching his cum drip from my pussy with dark satisfaction. He gathered some on his fingers and brought them to my lips. I sucked them clean without hesitation.

But he wasn’t done.

He slid down my body again, gentle this time, and began licking me clea… soft, deep strokes of his tongue that had me twitching and sighing. He paid attention to every sensitive inch, my clit, my entrance, even pressing soft kisses to my inner thighs where faint marks from his grip were already forming.

When he finally moved back up, he pulled me into his arms, my head on his chest. His hand stroked down my back in long, soothing lines.

“I hated seeing you with him,” he admitted quietly, the roughness gone from his voice, replaced by something vulnerable. “Even knowing it was just to piss me off.”

“I hated seeing her touch you,” I whispered back, pressing a kiss to his collarbone.

He tilted my chin up and kissed me… slow, deep, thorough. “No more games like that.”

“No more,” I agreed.

But even as we lay tangled together, bodies sated and hearts still racing, I knew the fire between us was far from extinguished. If anything, the jealousy had only stoked it higher.

He rolled us so I was beneath him again, already hardening against my thigh.

“Round two?” he murmured, lips brushing mine.

I smiled, wicked and wanting. “Make me forget every other name but yours.”

And he did… thoroughly, roughly, with his mouth and hands and cock worshipping every inch of me until the sky outside began to lighten and all that remained was the two of us, breathless and undeniably bound.

…

He lay awake long after I'd fallen asleep against his chest, staring at the ceiling of a hotel room in the one city on earth that seemed determined to keep rewriting the terms of his life without asking his permission first.

He'd meant what he said, in the heat of the argument, about making me pay for Lake Como… he'd meant it that first dinner, watching me go pale across the table as I recognized him, some petty, wounded part of him lighting up at the thought of finally getting to watch me squirm the way he'd squirmed reading that note. He'd built an entire plan around it, in the weeks after the engagement was announced. Charm her. Get close. Make her want him the way she'd wanted him in Lake Como, and then, at the last possible second, be the one who walked away first.

It hadn't survived the second week. It hadn't survived me falling asleep on his shoulder during a boring merger briefing, or the ridiculous, genuine way I argued about pineapple pizza like my life depended on it, or the morning I'd stayed in his bed instead of running, hand in his under the sheets, no note, no euros, no goodbye.

He looked down at me now, curled against him, and felt something settle in his chest that had nothing to do with revenge at all.

So much for making her pay, he thought, and pressed a kiss to the top of my head, careful not to wake me. Guess the joke's on me.

CHAPTER 9: THE MORNING AFTER THE MORNING AFTER

I woke up tangled in sheets that smelled like him, sunlight cutting gold across the same kind of luxury bed I'd woken up in months ago in a different hotel, in a different life, except this time there was no flight to catch, no note to write, no reason at all to leave.

Jay was already awake, propped on one elbow, watching me with an expression I didn't have a name for… something quieter than the smugness I'd come to expect, something that looked almost unguarded.

"No note this time?" he asked, but there was no real bite in it. Just a question, testing the ground.

"No note," I said. "I'm still here."

"You are." He reached out, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, and the gentleness of it undid me more than anything he'd said in the heat of the night before. "I keep waiting for you to run."

"I keep waiting for you to actually let me stay," I said, quieter than I meant to. "You've spent two months telling me you were going to make me pay for Lake Como."

"I know." His jaw tightened, something like guilt flickering across his face. "I meant it, at first. I wanted to. You made me feel like—" he stopped, exhaled, started again. "You made me feel like something I wasn't used to feeling, and then you left like it didn't matter, and I didn't know what to do with that except be angry about it."

"And now?"

"Now I don't know what I'm angrier about," he admitted. "That you left. Or how much I don't want you to leave again."

"For what it's worth," I said, tracing an absent pattern against his chest, "I thought about you. After Lake Como. More than I wanted to. I told myself it was because you were a mystery I hadn't solved. Turns out it was just because I liked you, and I didn't know what to do with that, either."

"You could've texted."

"I didn't have your number. That was rather the design flaw in my whole escape plan."

He huffed a laugh, low and real, pressing it into my hair. "I looked you up, you know. After the note. Took me two days and an embarrassing amount of Google searches involving 'Singaporean businesswoman' and 'Lake Como' before I gave up entirely."

"You didn't."

"I absolutely did. My assistant thought I'd lost my mind." He tipped my chin up with two fingers, the same gesture from the engagement photoshoot, except there was no camera now, no performance, just the two of us and the quiet. "Turns out I didn't need Google. I just needed my father to have terrible timing and worse business instincts."

"Remind me to thank him," I murmured, "right after I finish being furious at him."

I didn't know what to say to that. So I didn't say anything. I just reached for his hand under the sheets and let the silence be its own answer, and for one suspended, golden morning, it was almost enough to believe none of the rest of it… the merger, the arrangement, the families watching my every move like a stock ticker… mattered at all.

It wouldn't last. It never did, not for people like me.

…

I called Minji the second I landed back in Singapore, because if I didn't say any of this out loud to someone, I was fairly certain my own head was going to implode from the sheer volume of unprocessed feelings rattling around inside it.

"So," Minji said, the second she picked up, "you disappear on a stranger in Lake Como, said stranger turns out to be your arranged fiancé, and now you're calling me at nine in the morning sounding like you just ran a marathon. Catch me up."

"I think I like him," I said, miserable. "For real. Not in the fake engagement, keep up appearances way. In the actual, terrifying, can't-stop-thinking-about-him way."

There was a pause on the other end, and then Minji, ever helpful, burst out laughing. "You're just now figuring this out? I could've told you that the second you texted me a full paragraph about the way he tied his tie badly on purpose."

"That's not… that was an observation, not a—"

"It was absolutely a symptom." I could hear Minji grinning through the phone. "So what's the problem? You like him, presumably he likes you, considering the man rearranged an entire hotel's booking system to get you both in one bed—"

"The problem," I said, "is that this whole thing started because our fathers wanted a shipping contract. What if none of this is real? What if I fall for him for real and it turns out I'm just… convenient? The easiest option? The daughter who happened to be in the right hotel room at the right time?"

"Do you actually believe that," Minji asked, gentler now, "or are you just scared?"

I didn't answer right away, because I didn't have a good one. "Both, maybe."

"For what it's worth," Minji said, "I watched that man's face when you walked into that gala in navy. He did not look like a guy fulfilling a business obligation. He looked like a guy who forgot how to use words." A beat. "Stop trying to find the exit before you even know if you want one. That's the same thing you did in Lake Como the first time, and look how well that turned out."

I hung up feeling more unsettled than before I'd called, which I supposed was the entire point of calling Minji in the first place.

CHAPTER 10: THE FIGHT THAT ACTUALLY MATTERED…

The trouble with almost truths is that they don't survive daylight for long, and by the time Jay and I were both back in Singapore, back in the penthouse, back under the weight of two families and a merger worth more than either of our lives combined, the softness of Lake Como had curdled, slowly, into something more complicated.

It wasn't any one thing at first. It was the wedding planning eating into every spare hour of both our schedules, endless calls with caterers and venue coordinators and a florist who seemed personally offended by every choice I made. It was Jay's schedule filling up with calls from the conglomerate's Singapore office as the merger moved into its implementation phase, calls that ran later and later into the evening. It was the two of us, still learning how to be honest about wanting each other without immediately following it with a joke to soften the admission, slowly running out of jokes to hide behind and not yet having anything solid to replace them with.

It started, as these things always did, over something small. A dinner Jay canceled at the last minute for a call with Karina Yu's firm… purely business, he swore, and I believed him, mostly, except believing him didn't stop the old, ugly voice in my head from whispering that I was, at the end of the day, a business arrangement he could deprioritize whenever something more important came along.

"You could have told me sooner," I said, standing in the kitchen while he shrugged his jacket back on for the second time that night.

"I told you the second I knew."

"You told me twenty minutes before we were supposed to leave, Jay."

"It's work. This merger doesn't run itself just because we had a nice morning in Lake Como."

The words landed harder than he probably meant them to. A nice morning. Like that was all it had been. Like I hadn't spent the last week turning it over in my head, wondering if it meant what I desperately, quietly hoped it meant.

"Right," I said, voice gone flat. "Of course. Wouldn't want the merger to suffer because you spent an evening with your fiancée."

"That's not what I—"

"It's fine." It wasn't fine. We both knew it wasn't fine. "Go to your call."

He didn't go, not right away. He stood there in the kitchen doorway, jacket half on, looking at me like he wanted to say something and couldn't find the shape of it. "I'm scared," he finally said, so quietly I almost missed it. "Of how much I want this to be real. And every time I get close to saying that out loud, I remember it started because our fathers wanted a shipping contract, and I don't know how to trust that any of this is actually about us."

The anger drained out of me at once, replaced by something far more exposed. "I'm scared of the exact same thing," I admitted. "That's why I left Lake Como the first time. Not because of you. Because of how much I already didn't want to."

He crossed the kitchen in three steps and kissed me like he was trying to prove something to both of us at once, and when he pulled back, forehead resting against mine, he said, "Cancel your evening. I'll cancel the call. Let's just… figure this out. Together. No merger. No fathers. Just us."

We canceled the call together. Neither of us brought up Karina or Yeonjun again.

…

It didn't stay easy. I hadn't expected it to… nothing about the two of us had ever been easy, not from the very first night in a bar with too much rum in the drinks… but the fight that came three weeks later still managed to knock the wind out of me in a way none of the others had.

It was over something stupid, in looking into the past. Jay had made a decision about the wedding venue without consulting me… a favor to both fathers, he said, a way to smooth over a disagreement about vendor contracts that had nothing to do with either of us and everything to do with two companies trying to look good in front of shareholders. I'd found out from my mother, not from him, and something about hearing it secondhand had cracked open every insecurity I'd been quietly protecting since the day this arrangement started.

"You didn't think to ask me," I said, voice tight, "because at the end of the day, this is still a business decision to you. I'm still a line item."

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it? You made a decision about my wedding to smooth over a contract dispute, Jay. Tell me how that's not exactly what I was afraid of from the beginning."

"I did it because I was trying to protect you from getting dragged into another negotiation," he snapped, temper flaring to match mine. "I didn't think you'd rather sit through another four-hour meeting about seating charts and vendor exclusivity clauses just to prove a point."

"I'd rather you asked me. That's it. That's the whole point. You don't get to decide what I can handle."

"Maybe I overstepped." His voice cracked, just slightly, on the word. "But don't stand there and tell me this is still just business to me, because I have spent the last four months falling in love with a woman I met in a bar and then spent every day since terrified she was going to wake up one morning and leave another note."

The room went very quiet.

"That's not fair either," I said, softer now, the fight draining out of me as fast as it had risen. "Using that against me."

"I'm not using it against you. I'm telling you the truth, because I'm so far past pretending this is manageable that I don't know what else to do except be honest and hope it doesn't scare you off." He dragged a hand through his hair, the picture of a man who had clearly rehearsed a calmer version of this speech and abandoned it entirely under pressure. "I love you. I've loved you probably since the hotel room I woke up alone in. And I am so sick of both of us treating that like a liability instead of just… saying it."

I stood there, heart hammering, every practiced defense I'd built over the last four months suddenly useless in my hands. "You've never said that before."

"I'm saying it now." He looked, for the first time since I'd met him, genuinely unguarded… no charm, no smugness, nothing performative left in him at all. "I love you. And if you walk out that door right now, I'm not going to chase you, because I'm done being someone you run from. But I'd really, really rather you stayed."

I didn't walk out the door.

I crossed the room instead, and kissed him, and neither of us brought up seating charts again for the rest of the night.

…

Two days later, I came home to find the penthouse dark except for a trail of candles leading from the front door to the balcony, which was, I thought, either the most romantic thing Jay had ever attempted or a genuine fire hazard, possibly both.

"If you set off the smoke alarm," I called out, toeing off my heels, "I will never let you live it down."

"Just come outside," his voice floated back, suspiciously nervous for a man who negotiated multi-million-dollar contracts for a living without breaking a sweat.

I found him on the balcony in the same suit he'd worn the night of the engagement announcement, the harbor spread out gold and glittering behind him, and something in his posture… hands shoved in his pockets, weight shifting like he couldn't decide where to put himself… made my chest go tight before he'd said a single word.

"We're already engaged," I said slowly, eyeing the candles, the suit, the unmistakable set dressing of a moment he'd clearly planned. "This is either extremely romantic or you're about to tell me something has gone horribly wrong with the merger."

"Neither." He huffed a laugh, more nerves than humor in it, and pulled a small velvet box from his pocket… not the ring our families had already selected together for the official engagement, the one that had been photographed and press released and worn on my hand for months now, but a different one entirely, simpler, clearly chosen by him and no one else. "The first ring was picked by a committee. Our fathers, a jeweler, a PR team who wanted something 'photogenic for the press release.' I didn't get a say in it, and I don't think you did either. This one, I picked myself."

I stared at him, throat suddenly too tight to speak.

"I know we're already getting married," he continued, dropping to one knee anyway, the picture of a man determined to do this properly no matter how backwards the order of operations had gotten. "I know the contracts are signed and the venue's booked and my father's already started planning the honeymoon like it's his own. But none of that was ever really us choosing this. So I wanted to ask you myself. Not because a merger needs it. Because I do." He opened the box… a simple band, understated, nothing like the statement piece on my hand already. "Will you Marry me, y/n? For real this time. Not because of Lake Como, or the contract, or the note, or any of the reasons this started. Just because I love you, and I'd choose you even if none of the rest of it had ever happened."

"You're an idiot," I said, laughing and crying at once, dropping to my knees on the balcony floor to be level with him because I couldn't stand to have him below me for this. "You already had me. You've had me since the boat, or the pizza argument, or possibly since the very first night, I genuinely can't tell anymore."

"Is that a yes?"

"That's a yes." I kissed him before he could say anything else insufferably charming, and somewhere behind me, entirely unnoticed until this exact moment, I registered that he'd set up a small speaker quietly playing something slow and warm, the kind of song that made the whole ridiculous, candlelit, slightly hazardous scene feel like something out of a life I never would have predicted for myself a year ago and wouldn't trade now for anything.

"For the record," Jay said, sliding the second ring onto my finger beside the first, "I'm keeping both rings on you. One for the contract our fathers wanted. One for the choice we actually made."

"Sentimental," I accused.

"Only for you," he said, and meant it.

CHAPTER 11: FULL CIRCLE

The final signing ceremony for the merger was scheduled, fittingly, for Lake Como… the same business, the same lake, the same string light terraces where this entire impossible chain of events had started. My father called it poetic. I called it the universe having an extremely specific sense of humor.

This time, there was no confusion about the hotel booking. Jay booked the suite himself, one bed, no crescent moon couch in sight, and when I raised an eyebrow at him over the reservation confirmation, he just shrugged, entirely unbothered.

"Figured we'd save everyone the trouble of pretending," he said.

The signing went smoothly… my father practically glowing with the kind of pride that came from watching two companies and two children merge into one very profitable future. Chairman Park shook my hand with real warmth, told me Jay had been, in his words, "unbearable to live with" in the weeks after Lake Como the first time, and that he was glad to see I'd apparently cured that particular ailment. I'd laughed, genuinely, and looked over to find Jay watching me with an expression that had nothing to do with business at all.

That night, after the papers were signed and the champagne toasts made and the last of the business's executives had finally, mercifully, gone home, I found myself back on the same terrace where I'd first met him… string lights, dark water, a version of myself that had walked into this exact spot months ago convinced she'd never see this man again.

"You know," Jay said, coming to stand beside me at the railing, his tie long gone, sleeves rolled to his forearms, "I used to think about what I'd say to you. If I ever saw you again. I had this whole speech planned. Very cutting. Very devastating."

"What happened to it?"

"You showed up at my dinner table three weeks later and I forgot every word of it." He turned to face me fully, and whatever careful distance he usually kept even now, even after everything, was entirely gone from his eyes. "I don't want to make you pay for Lake Como anymore. I just want Lake Como. Again. With you. For real this time… not a stranger's name, not a note on a hotel notepad. All of it. If you'll let me."

My throat tightened. "I was so sure I'd never see you again," I admitted. "I left because staying scared me more than leaving did. I didn't know how to want something that wasn't part of a plan I'd already made for my life."

"And now?"

"Now the plan includes you," I said. "Which terrifies me a little less every day."

He reached for my hand, threading his fingers through mine, and I let him pull me back toward the suite with none of the panic of that first morning, none of the urgency to run before the sun came up. This time, I wanted to stay for the sunrise.

We walked the short distance to our suite. The moment the door closed, the rest of the world fell away. Jay turned to me under the soft glow of the bedside lamps, the moonlit Lake Como sparkling beyond the windows like a painting made just for us. No rush. No games. Only the quiet weight of everything we had finally admitted.

He cupped my face with both hands and kissed me deeply… slow, soulful, like he was pouring every unsaid feeling into the press of his lips. His thumbs stroked my cheeks as his tongue gently explored my mouth, tempting soft sighs from me. I melted against him, hands sliding up his chest to loosen his tie and work open the buttons of his shirt.

“I love you,” he breathed between kisses, voice low and thick with emotion. “Not because of the merger, or our families, or Lake Como. Just you. The woman who argues with me about pineapple on pizza and rearranges my closet to drive me crazy.”

Tears pricked at my eyes as I smiled against his mouth. “I love you too. I think I have for a long time… I was just too scared to stay.”

He kissed the corner of my eye, then my temple, then the sensitive spot beneath my ear. With soft hands, he eased the zipper of my dress down my spine, following the path with his lips… pressing open mouthed kisses along my shoulders and the nape of my neck. The fabric slid to the floor in a whisper. He unclasped my bra and let it fall away, then hooked his fingers into my panties and drew them down my legs, dropping to one knee to kiss my thighs, my knees, the delicate skin just above my ankles as he helped me step out.

When I stood completely bare before him, he rose slowly, eyes dark with desire but softened by something far deeper. I finished undressing him with the same care… pushing his shirt off his broad shoulders, tracing the lines of muscle in his chest and abdomen, unbuckling his belt and sliding his trousers and boxers down until he was as bare as I was.

Jay lifted me effortlessly and laid me in the center of the large bed. He followed, covering my body with his, but keeping most of his weight on his forearms so I felt surrounded, protected, cherished. He kissed me for a long time… deep, slow kisses that left me breathless… before trailing his mouth downward.

He lavished attention on my breasts, sucking one nipple into his mouth while rolling the other between his fingers, switching sides with unhurried devotion until I was arching and whimpering. Lower still, he kissed every inch of my stomach, my hips, the tops of my thighs. Then he settled between my spread legs, spreading me open with gentle hands.

“Look at you,” he murmured, voice full of awe. “So beautiful. So mine.”

His tongue traced a slow, broad stripe from my entrance to my clit, then circled the swollen bud with patient, loving strokes. He took his time, exploring every fold, savoring my taste with soft hums of pleasure that vibrated through me. Two thick fingers eased inside me, curling gently against that perfect spot while his mouth sealed over my clit, sucking with tender rhythm. The pleasure built gradually, like a wave rolling in from far away, growing deeper and warmer until it crashed over me in a long, shuddering orgasm. I cried out his name softly, thighs trembling around his head as he licked me through every pulse, gentle and devoted.

He kissed his way back up my body, settling between my thighs. His cock… thick, heavy, and leaking at the tip… nudged against my slick entrance. Our eyes locked as he pushed in slowly, letting me feel every inch as he stretched and filled me completely. When he bottomed out, he stayed there, buried deep, forehead pressed to mine.

“Feel us,” he whispered. “This is real.”

We moved together in a slow, rocking rhythm. Long, deep strokes that dragged pleasure through every nerve ending. His hips rolled against mine in a sensual grind, hitting that spot inside me with each thrust. I wrapped my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck, holding him as close as physically possible. Our breaths mingled, soft moans and whispered “I love you" filling the space between kisses.

Jay slipped a hand between us, fingers finding my clit and circling it with perfect, gentle pressure. The pace stayed tender but grew more intense… deeper, more intentional thrusts as pleasure coiled tighter inside me. I came again with a broken moan, walls fluttering and clenching around him, pulling him deeper. He followed moments later, burying himself to the hilt with a low, guttural groan of my name as he spilled inside me, pulsing hot and deep.

Even after, he stayed buried within me, holding me close while we caught our breath. He rolled us onto our sides, facing each other, still connected. His hand stroked down my back in long, soothing lines, fingers tracing my spine, my hips, the curve of my waist. I pressed soft kisses to his chest, his collarbone, the hollow of his throat.

“No more running,” he said quietly, tilting my chin up to kiss me again… slow and sweet.

“No more notes,” I replied, smiling against his lips. “Just us. Every morning. Every night.”

We stayed like that for a long while, trading lazy kisses and touches, bodies still joined, hearts finally in perfect sync. Eventually he pulled out gently, cleaned us both with a warm cloth from the bathroom, then pulled me back into his arms. I fell asleep with my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat, the same lake outside the window that had once watched me slip away now witnessing me stay… willingly, completely, forever.

The universe had brought us full circle. This time, we were exactly where we belonged.

CHAPTER 12: THE HILLS, REPRISE

Minji threw me a bachelorette dinner two nights before the wedding… small, just a handful of close friends on a rooftop bar overlooking the exact stretch of harbor I could see from the penthouse, which Minji swore was a coincidence and I was fairly sure was not.

"To the world's most chaotic love story," Minji said, raising her glass. "One night stand, arranged marriage, at least one shouting match that the building's security definitely heard—"

"That happened one time—"

"… and somehow, against every possible odd, an actual, real, sickeningly cute relationship. I still can't believe you almost didn't recognize him at that dinner."

"I recognized him immediately," I admitted. "I was just praying I was wrong."

"And now?"

I looked out at the water, dark and glittering, not so different from the lake that had started all of this, and felt something settle in my chest that had taken the better part of a year to arrive. "Now I can't imagine having prayed for anything else."

Across town, in a considerably less sentimental gathering, Jay was enduring a bachelor party that mostly consisted of his closest friends ribbing him mercilessly about the note.

"Money for the minibar," one of them said, for what had to be the fortieth time that week, raising a glass in mock tribute. "A toast… to the greatest insult ever survived by a Park heir."

"I've moved past it," Jay said, entirely unconvincingly.

"You named your dog after the hotel."

"That's… unrelated."

It was not, in fact, unrelated, and everyone at the table knew it, and Jay let them have the joke because some jokes you'd earned by now, and because in two days none of it was going to matter anyway. He was going to marry the woman who'd left that note, and somewhere between the fury and the note and the year that followed, he'd stopped thinking of it as something to make her pay for and started thinking of it as the first sentence of a story he was, against every prediction he'd have made about his own life, deeply grateful to be living.

…

The Ceremony…

The wedding, when it finally came, was nothing like the dinner where it had all started… no stiff formality, no families sizing each other up across a table like it was a negotiation. Just our two families, genuinely joined this time instead of merely merged, and Jay at the end of the aisle wearing the same crooked, unguarded smile he'd worn the night he first bought me a drink with too much rum in it and told me that I looked like I was thinking too hard for someone on vacation.

"You're doing that thing again," he murmured, when I finally reached him, voice pitched for only me to hear. "Thinking too hard."

"I'm just wondering," I whispered back, "if you're going to make me regret leaving that note for the rest of our lives."

"Every single day," he said, grinning. "But mostly because it's the reason I got to fall in love with you twice."

When it came time for vows, Jay went first, and the room, which had been politely rustling with the low murmur of two hundred guests, went entirely still.

"I had a whole speech written," he admitted, pulling a folded card from his jacket pocket and then, after a beat of consideration, tucking it away again unread. "My assistant helped me write it. It had a quote from a poet I've never actually read in it, to sound sophisticated. But I think you'd know if I was reading someone else's words instead of mine, so… here's the truth instead. I met a woman in a bar who told me she was working, at eleven at night, in a bar, and I thought that was the funniest, most transparent lie I'd ever heard, and I decided right then I wanted to know everything else she wasn't telling me. It took me a lot longer than I'd like to admit to realize that the version of myself I like best is the one that exists around you… the one that argues about pizza toppings and loses fights about thermostats and gets absurdly, embarrassingly jealous over nothing. I promise to keep choosing that version of myself, and to keep choosing you, for every single day we get, starting today and not stopping for a very long time."

My own vows came out shakier than I'd rehearsed them in the mirror that morning, but I got through them anyway. "I left you a note once," I said, and heard the ripple of laughter move through the crowd, most of whom had heard some version of that story by now. "I told you it wasn't you, it was timing. I have never told a bigger lie in my entire life. It was absolutely you. You were the first person who ever made me want to stay somewhere I hadn't planned on staying, and I've spent the year since trying to figure out how to say that without sounding as terrified as I actually was. I'm not scared anymore. I choose this… I choose you… not because of a contract, or our fathers, or a shipping deal neither of us fully understood at the time, but because somewhere between a bar in Lake Como and this exact terrace, you stopped being an arrangement and started being home."

Minji, somewhere in the crowd, would later swear she heard me laugh mid vow, which was, everyone agreed, entirely on brand.

Chairman Park gave a toast at the reception that started as a speech about shipping tariffs and ended, somewhere around his third glass of champagne, in genuine tears about how he'd never seen his son smile the way he smiled around me, contract or no contract. My father, not to be outdone, stood up next and admitted… publicly, in front of two hundred guests… that he'd fully expected me to hate the arrangement forever, and that watching me dance at my own wedding like I'd chosen this myself was the best business decision he'd ever made and he intended to take full credit for it at every future shareholder meeting.

"He's never going to let this go, is he," Jay murmured against my ear, swaying with me under string lights that looked, deliberately, unmistakably, like the ones from a terrace in Lake Como.

"Never," I agreed. "You're stuck being his favorite success story for the rest of your life."

"Worse things to be stuck with," he said, and spun me once, easy and sure, the same way he had the very first night, except this time there was no mystery left between us at all… no last name withheld, no hotel notepad, no note to write in a panic before a flight. Just the two of us, exactly where we'd both, somewhere along the way, decided we wanted to be.

Later, much later, when the guests had thinned and the band had switched to something slower, Jay pulled me toward the edge of the terrace, away from the noise, and pressed his forehead to mine the way he had the night everything finally cracked open between us.

"No regrets?" he asked. "Even with everything it took to get here?"

"None," I said. "Although I do think you owe me for two months of insufferable jealousy and a color coded closet war."

"I owe you," he agreed, "for a lot more than that. I'll be paying it off for the rest of our lives. I'm looking forward to it."

…

Years later…

Somewhere over the years that followed… the arguments that still happened, because two people that stubborn were never going to stop clashing entirely, and the jealousy that occasionally flared, more playful now than desperate, and the quiet mornings that mattered more than either of us had expected an arranged marriage to ever produce… I'd think back, sometimes, to a stranger in a bar in Lake Como who told me that I looked like trouble.

He'd been right. He usually was, though I'd never admit that to his face.

There would be more trips to Lake Como over the years… anniversaries, mostly, an unspoken tradition neither of us had planned but both of us protected fiercely, the same terrace, the same string lights, a standing reservation at a hotel that still, to this day, kept a bowl of untouched fruit in every suite because Jay had once complained, half joking, that nobody ever ate it. There would be a dog, badly named, exactly as his friends had predicted. There would be, eventually, a nursery my mother had been quietly hoping for since the night of that very first engagement announcement, though that particular chapter belonged to a different story entirely.

I wouldn't have changed a single second of it. Not the note. Not the running. Not the fights, or the jealousy, or the year it took the two of us to stop being afraid of wanting something that started as an arrangement and ended up as the realest thing either of us had ever had.

Some things, it turned out, were worth staying for.

THE END

I hope you guys like this fic! I didn't get to proofread it properly, so hopefully everything makes sense! I lowkey teared up writing the end of it. I really like this storyline so I hope I delivered it well! If you have any suggestion what who or what I can write next please drop a comment!

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