Time in London didn't move in hours; it moved in heartbeats and tangled sheets.
The moment my thrift-store boots hit his marble floor, Julian had called his office and uttered three words that probably sent the British stock exchange into a tailspin: "I'm on vacation." No explanations, no return date.
The shark had decided to stop swimming, content to circle the girl in his bedroom instead.
For three days, we didn't leave the house. We barely left the bed.
It was a new kind of madness. The suffocating, clinical tension of the city penthouse had melted into something... strange. Playful. Almost terrifyingly domestic, if your idea of domestic involves half-naked arguments over the proper way to make tea and sex that left us both too exhausted to remember our own names.
"You're doing it wrong," I muttered, leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen. I was wearing one of his white dress shirts—a classic move, I know, but it was soft and smelled like him, and it pissed him off when I got jam on the cuffs.
Julian was at the stove, looking ridiculous in nothing but silk pajama pants, trying to fry an egg with the same terrifying focus he usually applied to hostile takeovers.
"I am following the instructions, Alina," he snapped, though there was a glint in his eye that hadn't been there before. "The heat is precise. The timing is calculated."
"It's an egg, Julian, not a merger," I said, sidling up to him and poking him in the ribs. "You're overthinking the yolk. Just flip the damn thing."
He turned, catching my wrist and pulling me flush against him. The spatula was still in his hand, but his eyes were fixed on mine with a heat that had nothing to do with the stove.
"I don't like losing," he whispered, his thumb tracing the curve of my hip. "Especially not to a breakfast food."
"You've already lost," I laughed, reaching up to tug on a lock of his hair. "You're a billionaire standing in a kitchen in your underwear, being bullied by a girl. Your reputation is in tatters."
"My reputation is a small price to pay for the view," he murmured, before dipping his head to devour my mouth again.
The egg burned. We didn't care.
The memory of Silas, of the muddy roads, the floral wallpaper, and the crushing weight of that "legacy", was fading like a bad radio signal. It was hard to remember the pain of the ridge when Julian was whispering filthy things in my ear while we ate takeout Thai food on the floor of the library.
He was different now. The cold, sociopathic mask had slipped, revealing a man who was desperately, hungrily in love with the chaos I brought into his life. He didn't try to "fix" me. He just existed with me, matching my crude wit with his sharp, dry humor, until the walls of the townhome felt like the only reality that mattered.
"You know," I said later that night, draped across him as we watched the rain lash against the window. "People would pay a lot of money to see the great Julian Vane like this. Pathetic. Obsessed. Needy."
"Let them watch," Julian said, his fingers idly tracing the line of my spine. "I've spent my whole life being watched. I'd rather be needy with you than powerful with anyone else."
I felt a strange, warm flutter in my chest, not the numb pleasure of the first night, but something real. Something dangerous.
"You're a freak," I whispered, biting his shoulder.
"And you're a brat," he replied, pulling the duvet over us. "My favorite kind."
As the London fog settled over the streets outside, I realized I hadn't thought about the mountain once in seventy-two hours. The shark hadn't just taken me; he'd swallowed me whole. And for the first time in my life, I wasn't looking for a way out.