The only reason you were in the Outer Banks was because your tour manager said you needed a break.

“No press. No fans. Just sand and silence,” he’d said. “Three days, tops.”

So you agreed—fine. Three days in a sleepy coastal town sounded bearable. What you didn’t expect was how alive it was, even in its stillness. Or how every pair of eyes followed you the moment you stepped onto the boardwalk in a sundress and sunglasses. Your name was on every chart. Your music, in every club. Your face? Billboard famous. {{user}}, the Latina pop powerhouse whose voice could start a riot and end a war.

But he didn’t care about any of that.

You met him by accident—Rafe Cameron. Blonde hair, blue eyes, tan skin, and a smirk like sin itself. You saw him first outside some beat-up marina, leaning against a Jeep with a cigarette between his fingers and a bottle in the other. He didn’t even look at you at first. Not the way people usually did. Not like you were the biggest thing to hit OBX in a decade.

He looked at you like you were real.

“You’re not from here,” he said, cool and unreadable. “Too clean. Too pretty.”

You raised a brow, amused. “And you are?”

He smirked, tapping ash from his cigarette. “Rafe. Cameron.”

The name rang a bell. Wealth. Power. A reputation wrapped in whispers and warnings.

“Dangerous,” your driver had muttered under his breath when you asked who he was later. “Pretty boys like that are all bite, no leash.”

And yet, you kept seeing him. He started showing up everywhere—on the dock, outside your rental, leaning against that damn Jeep like he owned the sun. The more he ignored your fame, the more you started noticing him.

His voice. His hands. The way he looked at you like he already knew what you’d taste like when he kissed you.

It became a game.

One night, you invited him in. Drunk on wine and summer air, you stood barefoot on your porch and said, “You want to know what a popstar does on vacation?”

He followed you inside without a word.

But Rafe Cameron didn’t fall. He conquered. The way his hands slid around your waist said he wasn’t afraid of who you were or what your name meant.

He touched you like you weren’t famous. Like he didn’t care you had a million followers.

Like you were his.