“No, I don’t,” Reid said. “But apparently that one over there thinks you can’t handle it.”
“I never said she couldn’t handle it,” Ezra retorted.
“So why in the hell did you kick me under the table?”
“Can we please move on to another subject?” Monica asked.
“Please,” her husband chimed in.
Harrison, who had remained quiet throughout the exchange, signaled the table attendant for another beer.
The head table attendant introduced himself and welcomed the family to the cruise ship. As he presented his team of servers who would be attending to the needs of the entire party for the duration of the cruise, Griffin studied Indina’s profile, searching for any sign that talk of her ex-boyfriend had affected her more than she was letting on. He saw none. Maybe she really didn’t care that her ex was getting married.
Griffin considered how he would feel if he found out his ex-wife was engaged. He would offer to help pay for the damn wedding.
The attendant gave a rundown of tonight’s menu. When Reid learned that he wasn’t limited in what he could order, he proceeded to order one of every appetizer on the menu.
“What?” Reid asked as the rest of the people at the table stared at him. “I went up on the top deck and played some basketball this afternoon. I worked up an appetite.”
“As if you wouldn’t have ordered the same thing even if you’d been ‘napping’ like those two,” Monica said, pointing to Indina and Griffin.
Griffin cleared his throat. Indina was a grown woman, but that didn’t mean he was comfortable with innuendoes about them sleeping together being bandied about at the dinner table, especially with her three extremely large brothers listening to every word.
Thankfully, the conversation switched to the stage show several of them had watched in the huge theater right before dinner. Within minutes, an army of servers showed up with their appetizers and everyone settled in for the meal.
As they ate, Indina pointed out the people Griffin hadn’t met yet. Her niece and nephew, fifteen-year-old Liliana and eight-year-old Athens, sat at the table with Eli and Monica’s twins, Finnegan and Fawn, and Alex Holmes’s kids, Sebastian and Jasmine. There wasn’t a chance in hell that he could ever remember all the names she rattled off.
During the salad course, Alex’s wife, Renee, moved over to the kids’ table, because Sebastian wouldn’t stop fighting with his older sister. Their squabble reminded Griffin of how his own niece and nephew would fight at the dinner table. It brought on a smile that was swiftly replaced by a frown. A heavy ache settled in his gut.
Being here in the midst of the Holmeses, seeing how well they all got along—despite Indina’s good-natured bickering with her brothers—was a stark reminder of just how much he missed spending time with his own family. Griffin knew it would only take a phone call. A simple call and he could have this again. He could sit across the table from his only sibling. He could enjoy learning about what was going on in his niece and nephew, Desiree and Garland, Jr’s, lives. If only he could bring himself to make that one simple phone call.
But it wasn’t making the phone call that was stopping him. It’s what he’d have to say once his brother picked up the other line.
I’m sorry.
You were right.
I was wrong.
Yeah, that wasn’t happening anytime soon.
He would have to be content with hanging out on the fringes of Indina’s family, soaking in as much of this special bonding time as possible. Maybe he was a mooch. He was mooching off her family’s closeness.
He quietly observed them as they progressed through the rest of the meal, until her brother, Ezra, brought Griffin into a discussion about New Orleans’s local sports team, trying to get him to break up a tie. Half of the table thought the local NBA franchise would be the next one to bring a national championship to the city, while the others at the table banked on it being the Saints.
“Well, being a football fan, I’d have to go with the Saints,” Griffin said.
Ezra shook his head. “I thought maybe we could be friends, but I see that shit won’t happen.” Then he grinned. “I’m just messing with you.”
“Speaking of friends.” Indina looked over at Ezra. “I have a message to you from Mackenna. Leave her alone.”
“Mackenna Arnold?” Harrison asked. “Where’s she been? I haven’t seen her in a while.”
“Except when she’s on the news going toe-to-toe with a reporter about some decision the city council has made,” Eli said.
“Yeah, well these days she’s being hounded by a certain journalist,” Indina said, staring pointedly at her brother.
Ezra held up his hands. “I’m just doing my job.”
“You’re being a pain in the ass. I don’t know what kind of juicy story you think you’re going to find, but you’re looking in the wrong place. Mack is one of the most honest people I know.”
“She’s a politician,” Ezra replied, as if that said it all.
“I mean it, Ezra. Knock it off.”
Her brother looked at Indina over his wineglass, but didn’t comment further.
Griffin would have never pegged him as a journalist. He looked as if he belonged on a construction site with Alex and Reid, or laying guys out on a football field, instead of working behind a desk.
After scraping up the last of the sauce from his plate of duck a l’orange, Griffin set his fork down and took a deep breath. “Now I see why people choose to live on a cruise ship. If this is the way you get to eat every night, why would you ever want to cook for yourself again?”
“Tell me about it,” Indina said. “I already decided that I can eat nothing but kale and air next week.”
“Just get in a little exercise. You’ll be fine.”
Her right brow lifted in the sexiest arch. In a slightly lowered voice, she said, “You do realize my main workouts involve you, right? You think you can handle more?”
Holy. Shit.
Griffin had to take another sizable breath after that one. And now all he could think about was his and Indina’s own brand of working out.
The waiter had just taken their desserts when a tall guy who looked vaguely familiar walked up to the table with a gorgeous, honey-toned beauty tucked to his side.
“Evening everyone. Sorry we’re a little late,” the guy said.
“A little late? Try an hour,” Toby called from the other table.
“Sorry about that. We were busy,” the guy said.
“I guess they were ‘napping’ too,” Monica said with a snort.
Indina leaned over and whispered in Griffin’s ear, “That’s Jonathan Campbell. A friend of the family.”
The name instantly registered. Jonathan owned a high-end sports bar in the city.
“I’m not sure who the woman is,” she continued. “His newest flavor of the month, I guess.”
He heard the hint of disgust in her tone. “I’m guessing you don’t approve?”
Indina shrugged. “I was rooting for someone else. It’s a long story.”
Jonathan came over to where they were sitting and placed a kiss on Indina’s cheek. “Been a long time since I’ve seen you,” he told her. He stuck a hand out to Griffin, introducing himself.
“Nice to meet you,” Griffin said. “I’ve been to your sports bar a few times. It’s one of my favorite spots in the city.”
“I appreciate it,” he said. “You can thank this lady right here for the decor.”
He turned to Indina. “You decorated The Hard Court?”
She nodded. “It was my first foray into something other than residential interior design.”
“Speaking of nightclubs, I hear the adults are planning to hit the club here on the ship,” Harrison said.
“Except for the pregnant adult, who is planning to hit the sheets,” Sienna called from the table next to theirs.
“Well, there’s free babysitting until one a.m. on this boat, so I’m defi
nitely hitting the club,” Monica said. “I can count on one hand the number of times Eli and I have had a night out dancing since the twins were born.”
Indina looked over at him. “What do you say? You up for some dancing?”
Griffin hesitated. “I’m not much of a dancer.”
“Neither am I, but this is supposed to be vacation, remember?”
He grinned. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The ship’s onboard discotheque was as cheesy and outdated as one would expect a discotheque aboard a cruise ship to be, but for Indina it only added to the charm. Just as the first bars of the Bee Gees’s “Stayin’ Alive” began, several spotlights zeroed in on the gaudy disco ball above the dance floor. Members of the cruise’s entertainment crew came out of a side door, all dressed in 1970s garb. They congregated underneath the glittery ball and struck the John Travolta pose from Saturday Night Fever.
The crowd went wild.
The dancers broke apart and came for the crowd, encouraging passengers to join them. When one of the crewmembers dragged Ezra to the middle of the dance floor and started doing The Bump, Indina laughed so hard her knees started to buckle. She and Monica had to hold each other up to prevent themselves from collapsing. Her poor brother looked like an injured crane as he tried to keep up with the dancer, who didn’t fare much better.
She laughed even harder when Griffin became the dancer’s next victim. He was so bad he made Ezra look like a top contender on Dancing With The Stars.
“I can’t…take this,” Indina said. “Every…time I try…to catch my breath…I start laughing again.”
“I’m gonna piss my pants,” Monica said, which set off even more laughs.
By the time Griffin managed to free himself from the dancer, Indina could barely stand. She held onto her side.
“When you said you weren’t much of a dancer, I thought you meant you just didn’t like to dance, not that you don’t know how to dance. That was painful.”
“Hey, at least I tried,” he said. “I don’t see you out there.”
Indina took a step back and sized him up. “Is that a challenge?”
He looked her up and down. “Either you get out there and shake that fine ass, or admit that you don’t know how to dance either.”
“Oh, it’s on.” She grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him back onto the dance floor as the deejay started a string of KC and The Sunshine Band hits. By the time “That’s the Way I Like It” ended, Indina thought she would pass out from exhaustion.
Just as she was about to suggest taking a breather, the crowd formed a Soul Train line. Monica and Eli went first, dancing to Chic’s “Le Freak.” She and Griffin were up next. Indina knew she looked like a fool, but she didn’t care. It had been so damn long since she’d had this kind of fun. The entire Holmes clan seemed to be having a good time, with the exception of Harrison, who sat with his elbows on the bar and a blank expression on his face.
The flicker of unease she’d felt at dinner over Harrison’s cool dismissal of Willow’s headache returned. Indina wasn’t sure what to make of it.
The disco’s theme segued from ’70’s to ’80’s music—the music of her childhood. She jammed to The Gap Band, DeBarge and Teena Marie. The deejay played a stretch of Michael Jackson hits, and the room went wild yet again. Indina was convinced the boat’s rocking was no longer due to the waves, but to all the people on the dance floor.
“Oh, my God,” Indina said as she and Griffin finally made their way to one of the tables. “I don’t have to worry about counting calories anymore. I just burned enough of them to eat whatever I want for the rest of this cruise.”
He put his lips to her ear. “But we can still work out later tonight, right?”
His seductively whispered words went straight to her nipples.
“Definitely,” she answered. “You ready to go right now?”
The grin that stretched across his handsome face was much too sexy. “You don’t think it’s too early to turn in?”
Indina didn’t answer. Instead, she grabbed him by the wrist again and tugged.
“It’s not even nine thirty yet,” Griffin said once they entered the hallway.
“I didn’t say I was ready to head back to the room, but my bones can’t take any more dancing. I can already tell that my knees will hurt like a bitch tomorrow.”
Griffin chuckled. “You sound like you’re eighty years old.”
“I was a runner for a long time. It’s hard on the knees.”
His head reared back slightly. “Really? I didn’t know you were a runner.”
She nodded. “I’ve been running for years, but I started cutting back after my twentieth marathon. Like I said, too hard on the knees. These days I stop after about five miles.”
As they approached the midship elevators, Griffin continued to stare at her, an astonished expression blanketing his face.
“What?” Indina asked.
“After all this time, how am I just discovering that you and I have this in common?”
“You run too?”
“I’ve finished in the top five hundred of the Crescent City Classic for the last three years in a row.”
“You run the CCC?”
He nodded. “I’ve participated every single year since I moved to New Orleans.”
And she’d participated since she finished college. Very few things induced more pride than her collection of T-shirts from the Crescent City Classic races she’d run over the years. Funny that they’d both participated in the same race, yet had no idea that the other enjoyed the sport.
“So, the top five hundred, huh?” Indina asked as she boarded the elevator. “That’s pretty impressive, especially when there’s at least twenty thousand runners who take part every year. That means you must run, what, a seven-minute mile?”
“Six and a half, if I train properly and lay off the potato chips.”
Her brows rose. “Impressive indeed. Maybe we should go running together sometime.”
The minute the words left her mouth, Indina wanted to snatch them back.
No. No. No!
Invitations to go running together didn’t fit into this thing she had going with Griffin. There was no room for shared interests outside of work and his bed. It tiptoed too close to the edge of a relationship. She was not going there again. She was done with those battle scars.
Maybe you should have thought about that before inviting him on this cruise.
It was far too late for recriminations over the cruise invite, but just because they were on this ship together, it didn’t mean they were spiraling headfirst into relationship territory. She still had time to bring this thing back to friendly coworkers who just so happened to hook up on a regular basis.
“We should finish our tour,” Indina said as the elevator dinged their arrival on the fourth deck. “I haven’t seen the bow of the ship yet. I want to recreate my favorite scene from Titanic.” She spread her arms out as if she were getting ready to fly.
“You’re not balancing on the front of the ship,” Griffin said.
“Don’t spoil my fun,” Indina said with a laugh. But when they arrived at the bow, she discovered there was no way to get to the ship’s pointy front.
“Guess I won’t be recreating my favorite scene.”
“Thank God,” Griffin said after releasing an exaggerated sigh of relief.
Indina stuck her tongue out at him like a petulant child, wrenching out a laugh from him. He backed up against the polished wood railing and crossed his arms over his chest.
“So, what are some of your other favorites?” he asked.
She tilted her head to the side in question.
Griffin shrugged. “It occurred to me tonight that I don’t really know much about you outside of work.”
Which is exactly the way she wanted it. Her unease must have shown on her face, because he put his hands up and said, “I’m not asking you to pour out all your deepest, darkest secrets. Just share a
little…stuff.”
“What kind of stuff? What is there to know?”
“Well, I didn’t know that you like to dance, or that you have such bad taste in movies.”
Indina gasped. “I do not.”
“Titanic? I’ve tried to watch that twice. Fell asleep both times.”
“That means you’re the one with bad taste in movies.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t hold it against you,” he said with a devilish grin that made her stomach flip in extremely interesting ways.
Shit. She did not want this. Stomach flips and those little flutters she’d experienced several times today were not a part of the deal. She needed things to return to how they were before they’d boarded this ship.
What she had going with Griffin was safe. She could detach her head and her heart from it and just focus on the mutual pleasure they brought to each other. Emotion played no part in it.
But how could she stand here and ignore his request, especially after he’d joined her on this cruise at the last minute? It wasn’t the ultimate sacrifice, by any means, but he still didn’t have to be here. She owed it to him to play along.
“What exactly do you want to know?” Indina asked.
He folded his arms over his chest again. “I want to know if you’re making other bad choices, like using Tabasco instead of Sriracha.”
“I’m a Louisiana native. I only use Crystal Hot Sauce.”
“See, I didn’t know that.”
Indina chuckled. “Really, Griffin, what’s this all about?”
“I’m curious about you. Is that so hard to believe?”
“So, we’ve been doing this thing for eight months, yet you’re all of a sudden curious about the kind of hot sauce I use?”
“It’s not all of a sudden,” he said. “I’ve been curious about you for a while. But you’ve never given me the chance to get to know you better. As soon as we’re done in bed, you run away.” He gestured to the open water. “There’s nowhere for you to run now.”
Indina did her best to ignore the panic that slashed through her. This was fine. There was no need to panic. Sharing a few harmless tidbits about herself didn’t equate to a lifelong commitment. It wasn’t as if Griffin could turn around and hurt her with anything she told him tonight.
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