The third day started with rain. Not the soft kind. The tropical kind that came down in sheets, turning the world gray and loud. The ocean roared below the villa like it was pissed off, waves slamming the rocks hard enough to rattle the windows.
Ella woke up to it—thunder rolling in the distance, water drumming on the roof like someone was trying to break in. She lay there for a while, listening, sheets tangled around her legs. The room smelled like salt and last night's sunscreen. Her skin still remembered his hands—slow. deliberate, the way his thumbs had pressed into her lower back like he was marking territory. She squeezed her thighs together at the memory and immediately hater herself for it.
She got up, threw on a thin cotton dress that clung in the humidity, and wandered into th
