Uncomplicated Choices

by Cara Dee

  Funnily enough, I'd always found them safe. Being attracted to that type was safe. Because it was—in general—purely physical. Skin-deep, like their ink. A temporary thrill.

  With my background, I had something wholesome and comfortable in mind for my future. Stability and normal hours, with a lot of focus on family. I needed to create a good home for my daughter so she wouldn’t have to go through what I'd done. Not that I blamed my parents for my fuck-ups, but history was never innocent, and they'd played a part.

  "What do you say, Casey?" Jameson's hand landed on my thigh under the table, causing me to jump slightly.

  "What?" I replied dumbly.

  Madigan chuckled. "We're talking about callin' it a night. You ready to go?"

  Yes and no. It would probably be wise of me to hightail it out of here, except I had a problem. I was half hard in my jeans, and I wasn’t thinking with the head on my shoulders.

  Nevertheless, I nodded and emptied the third beer I'd had since I lost count.

  The head rush hit me like a wrecking ball when I stood up. "Shit." I blinked and gripped the table, my free hand not-so-subtly adjusting my crotch. At least I made the guys laugh. "I need t-to take a leak." Even I heard the slurring in my voice. Jesus. "I'll be right back."

  *

  I stumbled out of the bathroom and dropped the paper towel on the way to the bar. I'd never understood unscented soap. Okay, fine, allergic people, but that place was sort of where you wanted a nice scent the most.

  The bar was clearing out. I closed my tab and didn’t even react to the amount of money I'd wasted on, well, getting wasted. Bleary-eyed and foggy-brained, I walked out and took a deep hit of the fresh sea air. It smelled like rain, and I wanted fries.

  "Where's Madigan?" I joined Jameson on the boardwalk and looked around me. Only the lights from the row of restaurants and bar lit up my closest surroundings. The parking lot was…that'a way…and out of the dozen lamps on the pier, only one worked.

  "I told him to beat it."

  Ruh-roh.

  The thrill was back, and it sent a jolt through my system. "Am I gonna regret something in the morning?"

  He shook his head and slipped his hand into mine. "Come on. Just a short walk."

  Yeah, toward hell.

  Not that I was complaining. I let him take the lead and wasn’t too surprised when we ended up on the pier. It wasn’t windy tonight, which I wasn’t sure was a good thing or bad. Washington weather otherwise had a knack for sobering one up.

  I heard the ocean just fine, though I couldn’t see it. Everything was pitch black except for the lone light that shone farther out on the pier. A shudder rolled through me in a heavy, sluggish way. The alcohol had a tight grip on me, effectively ramping up the lust and pushing down any rational thought.

  "Madigan gave me a big-brother speech about not hurting you," Jameson mentioned.

  "Sweet of him." I considered it and side-eyed him. "I'm not sure you could."

  "Good." With that said, he guided me over to the railing and backed me up against it, his hands gripping the wooden bar to cage me in. My pulse kicked up as he leaned down a little, his hooded eyes intense and gauging my mood. "Goddamn." He cupped my jaw and searched my eyes. When I swallowed, his mouth quirked up in a sensual little smirk. "How the fuck haven't I noticed how gorgeous you are before?"

  I exhaled a shaky laugh. "Booze will do that for you."

  He shook his head and inched close enough to slide his nose along my jaw. "Tell you what, next time we see each other…" He pressed a soft, wet kiss at the corner of my mouth. "If I don't find you just as hot then, I'll run through the Valley naked."

  I grinned. "Now I don’t know what to hope for."

  He chuckled huskily, and a beat later, his mouth covered mine.

  Chapter 6

  "Oh, God…" I moaned and clutched my stomach, strangely torn between nausea and desire. I could sense the sun shining through the window from behind closed eyelids. I was never drinking again. Fucking ever. Though, I might revisit Jameson if he was up for it. He was certainly up for it last night.

  I rolled over and threw a pillow over my head, and of course, that slammed a screaming headache into place.

  Perhaps I was one of those pain-sluts, 'cause my cock was still hard. Despite nausea. Despite headache. In the back of my mind, hazy memories of Jameson and me making out like teenagers kept the lust flowing through me in a steady current. We were at it quite a while, all hands and mouths, and it stayed there. We were good boys.

  "Exactly what I needed tonight," he'd murmured in between two drugging kisses. "Fuck, you can kiss."

  So could he.

  The downside was the forceful reawakening of everything I yearned for. The pain rivaled my headache.

  I touched my lips and sighed, having a feeling I wouldn’t be able to sleep more. I needed to take a leak like whoa, and I itched to shower and brush my teeth.

  With an unhappy grunt, I threw my legs over the edge of the bed and sat up as my feet hit the floor. Soft carpet. Not hardwood. What the…? I cracked one eye open, only to groan in sheer misery. I wasn’t at Lincoln and Ade's, dammit! I'd completely forgotten just how wasted I was last night. After enjoying some kissing and groping with Jameson, I'd said fuck it and decided to crash on Lincoln's yacht. I had the keys, after all. And it'd been so close.

  I scrubbed at my face, then surveyed the room. I suspected I'd landed in the bedroom in the stern of the boat. The area wasn’t…pointy, like the bedroom in the bow. Light, soft carpet and matching walls and bed linen met the contrasts of the bed frame and paneling in cherry wood. It was the design for pretty much everything on the yacht except the third bedroom that Lincoln had specially ordered to make two young girls happy. In there, a rainbow had taken a shit.

  Scratching my arm absently, I hauled myself out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom. Time for a complete scrub-down. Then I was going to hunt down painkillers.

  *

  Half an hour later, I stepped out of the little bathroom along with a wall of steam. My nipples weren't too fond of the temperature drop, so I put on my tee from last night. Securing the towel around my waist, I exited the bedroom and walked down two steps to reach the middle area of the boat. There was a fully stocked kitchen, which struck me as a little odd, but most of all, there was a cupboard reserved for medicine and every lotion necessary for the guaranteed sunburns I got in the sun. Not that I had any plans to put myself through that torture.

  Two painkillers in hand, I opened the fridge and shook my head at the waste. Every shelf was full, and it was gonna go bad before Lincoln and Ade came back home.

  The yacht's soft bobbing on the water was taunting my nausea, so I poured a glass of OJ and downed the painkillers. Then I took a seat in the large booth that was the dining area. It would probably seat all of us, and I eyed the table with suspicion.

  Knowing Lincoln, this spot was already tainted. He would've christened the yacht with Ade here.

  I grimaced and leaned back, my hands landing in my lap. I had nothing planned today, so it was difficult to get my ass in gear. Instead, I stared out the window and waited for the headache to become a face on a milk carton.

  It was a pretty day. The lower deck came fairly close to the water level, and the sun bounced off the dark blue surface. What were those islands, though? I leaned closer and squinted. It couldn’t be the Chinook Islands—wait…why the fuck were these three islands so fucking close? You couldn’t see the Chinooks—of which there were five, by the way—from the goddamn marina when a boat pointed toward them. It was completely the wrong angle.

  I shot up from the table and rushed the fifteen or so feet to the other side, all but plastering my face to the window next to the kitchen area. No boats. Open water. Confusion gave way to the shock that shot through me. Had I drifted—no, that was ridiculous. A sixty-foot yacht didn’t fucking drift out of the marina because it felt like it.

  "What the fuck!" I gripped my hair, panicking. This was h
ow it was going to end for me. Someone had kidnapped me—or stolen the yacht and they were going to kill me to get rid of me. Or it really was a kidnapping, and they were gonna demand a ransom for my freedom. Lincoln was loaded. Come on. Big-time producer and former guitarist in one of the biggest rock bands in the world.

  I was being punished for my friendship with a famous person.

  Fuck my life!

  "What the hell are you doing here, Casey?"

  I spun around at the sound of the angry voice coming from the stairs that led to freedom.

  Ellis!

  "You kidnapped me?" I yelled.

  He did a double take and looked at me incredulously. "I did what? For God's sake, I'm borrowing the boat from Lincoln. You're not supposed to be here."

  "I agree!" I glared, offended by the suspicion in his own glare. Did he think I'd snuck on to the boat to tag along? "So why don't you turn this raft around and take me home—Now."

  He gnashed his teeth together and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  "What're you waiting for?" I threw out my arms.

  "Lower your voice," he snapped. "Why are you shouting?"

  "Because it makes me feel better!" I shouted.

  Except, that kind of deflated me. I scratched my head and glanced around me, half expecting to see life as a little more colorful now that I wasn’t going to sleep with the fishes. But everything was the same. The cream colors with the dark wood, the sun shining outside… No ransom for Casey's life.

  "Why are you pissy?" I asked him. "I'm the one who's hungover and in serious need of a floor that doesn’t move. It's not like I wanted to crash your party."

  Ellis groaned under his breath and switched to rub his temples. "This was the last thing I needed, Casey. You can't even fathom it."

  My brow furrowed. Worry trickled in and grasped on to the cobwebs of my hangover illness. "Did something happen?" I did remember him expressing he wanted to get away. Was this it? Was the yacht his white Bronco?

  Ellis was going to dodge. I could tell. He sighed heavily, and I just knew he was seconds away from glossing over something that should be highlighted. So I put my foot down—figuratively.

  "I'm not giving you an out here. Sit down," I told him. "Tell me what's going on."

  That earned me a glare, though it was weaker than the previous one.

  I took a seat at the Table of Defilement, and he followed, stiff as a stick and with his mouth pressed into a grim line.

  Despite his rigidity, he looked more casual than ever, albeit weary. The suit was gone. Even his standard casual wear of slacks and pullovers was missing. His white tee looked brand-new. Had I ever seen his legs before? In a pair of cargo shorts with pockets on the sides, he was displaying a fine set of calves.

  I had a thing for legs. Thighs, calves, the lines of muscle…

  I shook my head and got my deprived ass back to the topic at hand.

  "I can't stay at home anymore," he said tightly. "There isn't much to say. I need a break, so I called Lincoln and asked if I could borrow the boat for a couple of weeks. He said yes."

  "Yeah, I, uh, I can do the math on that one. You don't strike me as one to steal a yacht."

  "But I strike you as a kidnapper?"

  "Exactly, so let's get back to the part where you can't stay at home." I wasn’t gonna let him derail nothin'. "What's going on, Ellis?"

  Landing his forearms on the table, he slumped his shoulders while he stewed. His jaw clenched, and he cracked his knuckles. I winced even though there was no sound. Nasty habit. Jesse often did that, too.

  "Did you and your wife fight?" I prodded.

  He shook his head minutely. "The opposite, I suppose. I told you about this—how easy it would be to go back." I remembered, and it made me sad. I didn’t believe for one second he should stay in a lifeless marriage because it was easy. "It's so incredibly fake, Casey." He scrubbed at his face and blew out a breath. "I knew from the moment she suggested a nice dinner at home that it was going to be a disaster."

  "Disasters aren't generally easy," I noted.

  "No, and it wasn’t." He shook his head, staring at the table. "I felt suffocated and had to close myself off in a way I've never done before. It was terrible." He paused. "I fled like a coward after dinner. Spent the night in my office, then called Lincoln and made arrangements to get away for a while."

  I nodded slowly, figuring he'd picked up the other set of keys at Lincoln and Ade's house. It was a wonder we hadn't run into each other, and something made me curious.

  "Did you sleep here last night?" I asked.

  He lifted his brows a fraction. "I did. Whiskey knocked me out, but how you slept through several hours of traveling along the coast is a miracle."

  "We're in Canada?" I sort of half shouted. Technically, this wasn’t a big deal. We already lived closer to Vancouver than Seattle, but Christ, another country made it sound so far away from home and, and, and drastic.

  In my defense, twenty minutes ago, I thought I was in the marina.

  The look he gave me said it was possible he thought I had a flair for drama.

  He wasn’t necessarily wrong.

  "I didn’t say I was going north," he replied impatiently. "But, no. We left Port Angeles a while ago. I filled up on fuel there."

  That meant… I squinted at nothing, visualizing a map. He'd gone a little south, and now we were on the way alongside the Olympic Peninsula toward the open sea. This was bad. We were nowhere near the comfort of Camassia and our calm waters. I liked that part of living in an inlet with more islands than I could count. Land was never too far away.

  "All right…" I wrung my hands and looked out the window. We weren't moving at the moment. If we had been, I would've feared he had an accomplice on board. "So, uh—" I cleared my throat. "How are we on the matter of taking me home? Once I know, I can calm my tits and be a better listener."

  It was his turn to clear his throat, and he shifted in his seat. "Problem is, if I see any more of Camassia today, I'm not sure what I'll do. I have a friend outside of Port Renfrew who's letting me spend the night in—"

  "That's in Canada," I interrupted.

  "Gold star for you. It's on Vancouver Island, yes—"

  "But it's Canada," I repeated. "Whole other maple leaf. What's wrong with staying in America?"

  He frowned. "Do you hate Canada or something?"

  "No…" What of cell service, though? "Can I check in with Haley there?"

  His mouth twisted, and something in his eyes grew gentler. "It's Canada, Casey, not outer space. This shouldn’t be news for you. You travel quite a bit with Lincoln and Ade."

  I lifted a shoulder. "I have Haley with me then, and I use the hotel Wi-Fi for blogging."

  "Fair enough, but yes, you'll be able to call Haley. It's only for one night. I need to clear my head. Then I can take you home tomorrow morning. Okay?"

  Well, what choice did I have? I didn’t want to be a dick. He clearly needed the space. Besides, I wanted to know what would have happened if he returned to Camassia today. Would he panic? Get anxious? In which case, I'd honestly like to know why. This was serious shit.

  What plans did I have, anyway? None whatsoever.

  "Okay." I nodded once. I wasn’t going to freak out and admit I wasn’t born with sea legs. It was all good. Twenty-four hours on a yacht in waters so deep that a dozen Loch Ness monsters could have an orgy underneath us and we wouldn’t know.

  Cool.

  *

  As it turned out, I'd slept 'til noon earlier, so we'd been on our merry way for a long time. We still had hours to go before we got to Port Renfrew, and I did my best to sleep through it. Failing horribly. I kept lifting my head off the pillow to look outside and see if I could spot land.

  I couldn’t.

  Ellis was obviously driving, and he'd made it pretty clear he wanted this time to be alone, so I couldn’t bother him with my nervous chitchat.

  If I ever wanted to get away, I'd stay on land.

 
; After tossing and turning a couple hours, I gave up and left the bed. My options on clothes were limited, and I ended up going commando in my jeans from yesterday. My T-shirt smelled all right. Then I went upstairs to the upper deck…and froze.

  Much like in a car, there was a driver's seat and a passenger's seat. Ellis used neither, opting to drive while standing. He gave me a cursory nod and slid his Ray-Bans down from the top of his head, but that wasn’t what made me all but drop my jaw.

  Holy mother of… There was land. I'd stupidly been looking out the window of the wrong side of the boat. Land was everywhere. I'd never been so happy to see Canada. Shit, it was stunning. Mountains and valleys covered in thick forest—not unlike back home—and steep cliffsides, waterfalls… Land.

  I needed to see more. This part of the upper deck had an indoor feel with a large sunroof and tinted windows on the sides. I passed the driver's section and lounge area to sit down on the edge of the massive sunbed. Foamy. I tested the bounce a second.

  There was none.

  Then I was back to staring at the mountains and valleys to my right. It was different seeing land from the ocean. More immense.

  I breathed in the salty air, ignoring the slight chill—and the wind in my hair. Fuck, it was gorgeous. Not a cloud in sight, either.

  We'd slowed down significantly.

  My nausea and headache were gone, and I leaned back, my elbows hitting the soft padding, with the first sigh of contentment for today. Maybe being out here wasn’t too awful. Maybe it would even do me some good.

  The sun on my skin felt nice.

  Movement from Ellis caught my eye, and I frowned when I spotted him leaving the console. With a map in hand, he shifted over to the lounge where he sat down on the large L-shaped sofa and fanned out the map across the table.

  I gaped at him.

  "What the fuck're you doing?" I sat up straight.

  Ellis glanced at me, confused. "Pardon?"

  "We're—" I waved a hand at the wheel, panic rising. "We're going!"