“Will you miss it?”

“I’m sure I will. There aren’t many beaches in New York, are there?” I ask, changing the subject.

“Not in the city, no. But there are other parts of the state that can be nice.”

“Where did you grow up?” I’m eager to learn more about his background.

“Brooklyn.”

“Was it nice?”

“Growing up? No, I’m not sure I would call it ‘nice.’ But it made me who I am today.”

“And now? What’s your life like? Things must be different.”

“Money doesn’t buy everything.”

Spoken like someone who has an ample supply of it.

“Doesn’t it, though?” I ask.

“It doesn’t buy you a good name.”

“It bought you a society wife.”

The gleam in his eye is more affection than avarice. “It did.”

“Albeit a tarnished one,” I joke.

“You’re not tarnished to me.”

The intensity in his voice surprises me.

“It’s a tradition of sorts in my family, you know,” I say, attempting to lighten his mood.

“Is it?”

“The first known Perez ancestor won himself a title and a wife in his bid for respectability.”

“Was he a disreputable sort?”

“Allegedly.”

“What manner of sins was he guilty of?”

“Women. Piracy.”

Anthony smiles. “I would have liked him, then.”

I laugh. Very few people are so accepting of their flaws, but then again, a great deal of power affords you such privileges.

“And his bride?” Anthony asks.

“A lady whose family had fallen on desperate times. She boarded a ship and sailed halfway across the world to do her duty.”

“So it was duty between them?”

“Legend has it they loved each other, but who can be certain? Who really knows what goes on in a marriage besides the people inside it?”

“She must have been scared,” he muses, and I have an inkling that we aren’t merely talking about the corsair and his wife.

“She likely was, but she did her duty anyway. We women are made of stern stuff.”

I gesture to the necklace around my neck, the family heirloom my father gifted to me on my wedding day.

“The corsair gave her this.”

For luck, my father said.

“May I?” Anthony asks.

I nod.

He lifts the necklace, rubbing his fingers against the gold heart, the red stone. He releases it without comment, grazing my skin.

He doesn’t back away.

I’m so nervous I can scarcely remember to breathe.

Our first kiss was at our wedding—simple and chaste, given the audience—and we’re about to experience our second.

Anthony leans down, erasing the distance between us, his lips brushing against mine, softly, a featherlight caress.

A tremor fills me.

I suck in a deep breath, my heart thundering in my chest, and he deepens the kiss.

The ocean swells around us, the wind whipping my hair around my face. His kiss is brash, confident, seductive.

Exactly like him.

I know enough from talking to my cousins and friends to recognize that he wants me, can feel the desire in the tension in his body, the way his hands move over my clothes, gripping the fabric of my bathing suit, clutching me toward him as though he’s desperate for me.

No one has ever kissed me like this.

Anthony releases me with a gleam in his eyes.

I raise my fingers to my mouth, my lips swollen to the touch.

He smiles. “We’ll do just fine.”

I wish I were so sure.

* * *

—

Dinner is a feast of locally caught seafood, the conch and snapper the best I’ve ever tasted. I’m too nervous and tired to eat much, but Anthony had a crate of champagne sent down from New York, and he toasts our marriage in an extravagant fashion. After dinner, we separate, and Anthony decamps to the library with a cigar while I go upstairs to prepare for bed.

I dab perfume at my wrists and neck after I bathe in the house’s round tub and choose the most elegant nightgown from my trousseau.

The bedroom was transformed by an unseen member of the staff while I bathed, candles lit around the room, white petals scattered about the bed and the floor, matching the snowy bedspread.

I walk over to the bed and grip the post, nerves dancing in my stomach.

A novel sits on the nightstand Anthony seems to have claimed for his own—Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat.

So much for separate rooms.

I flip through the pages, a bookmark indicating his progress halfway through the book.

I can’t resist the urge to snoop. A pocket case of the cigars Anthony smokes sits inside a drawer in the nightstand, the tobacco a familiar odor—clearly, in this, too, he prefers Cubans. Beside the cigars are stacks of cash, the amount of it staggering. Back in Cuba, my father kept money in a safe for emergencies. The fact that Anthony sees no need to secure it speaks to both his arrogance and his wealth, and perhaps the security of his position. If he’s as connected to the mob as he appeared to be in Cuba, many must fear him too much to steal from him.

There’s a handkerchief; I lift it to my nostrils, the scent of Anthony’s cologne hitting me instantly. I glance down. In the back of the drawer—

Cold black metal stares back at me.

I slam the drawer shut.

I shouldn’t be surprised a man like Anthony has a gun, but there’s a difference between all the things that keep you up with worry at night and seeing the reality with your own two eyes.

The bedroom door opens.

Anthony has removed his vest in addition to his jacket, unbuttoned the first two buttons of his white shirt.

I swallow.

He’s no longer the man I kissed on the beach hours earlier; the sight of the gun, of that part of his life, has brought the old fears crashing through me.

Can he be a good man, a kind man, and live with violence as such a part of his daily life?

“You’re beautiful.” Anthony’s voice is a low whisper. “Hell, ‘beautiful’ doesn’t do you justice.”