Before Nathan, I’d had dreams of moving up, running my own restaurant in San Francisco and really making something of myself. Now, I felt as if I was doing well if I just got through each voyage and collected my pay. I’d closed myself off and shut myself down—not just my lust but any dream of love. A snappy comeback turned out to be a pretty good defense against guys that approached me in bars and the more I did it, the easier it got. In the rolling sitcom that was our shared apartment, I became the hot-headed, sarcastic big girl. But each time I pushed a guy away, another layer of ice froze around my heart. It was so thick now that it felt as if nothing could reach me.
Shoulders aching, I swam back to the boat and started to climb up the steps. As my head peeked over the side, two green, slitted eyes gazed back at me.
“Mmmrrp?” asked the cat.
I stared back at it. “Where did you come from?” I asked.
Two huge, tanned hands scooped the ginger tom up and lifted him into the air. “He’s mine,” said Adam. “I’m keeping him below, mostly, but I thought he needed some air. But he’s dumb enough to jump overboard if he sees his first real live fish, so I’m keeping an eye on him. His name’s Ozzy.”
I tried to wrap my head around beer-drinking, arrogant Adam being a cat person, like me. Weren’t all billionaire’s dog people? Didn’t that go with the whole alpha male thing?
Adam dumped the cat on the deck. The cat scowled at him and immediately jumped onto the top deck, then flopped in the sun. That left Adam and I staring at one another.
More precisely, Adam seemed to be staring at the swell of my boobs. My bathing suit was fairly low cut, and since I was still on the ladder he could gaze straight down at me.
This, again, is where I was meant to blush and cover myself and run and hide. But I’ve been a big girl my whole life, and I know exactly what to do with men who stare. “You’re staring at my breasts,” I said.
There. Now he’d drop his gaze and mumble something and scuttle back below deck, his tail between his legs.
“Yes,” he said. “I am.” And he kept right on staring.
That didn’t go exactly as I’d planned.
“Would you like me to stop?” he asked.
I opened my mouth to say, “Yes, you asshole,” but the words seemed to break and fragment on my tongue, their energy soaking down through my body and turning to deep, dark heat. It should have felt wrong but...it didn’t. It didn’t feel like a lascivious, degrading stare. It felt appreciative. Flattering. I’d never had a stare make me feel that way before.
It hit me that I could end this easily by just climbing up the ladder, and wondered why I didn’t. “It’s inappropriate,” I said.
“Most things I do are,” he said. “But I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable.”
Now I did climb up the ladder, but much more slowly than I normally would have. Maybe I didn’t want to break the spell of whatever was going on, or maybe...was I putting on a show for him?! I looked down at the water cascading down my body, my tan skin gleaming gold and red in the early morning light, and I decided that yes, I was, a little bit.
“Am I making you uncomfortable?” he asked.
It hit me that I wasn’t saying much. I was just gazing back at those big, glittering blue eyes and thinking about how amazing those warm palms would feel on my wet skin if he grabbed me and pulled me to him. Snap out of it, Hannah!
I’d brought a towel with me from my cabin. He picked it up and draped it around my shoulders. His hands themselves never touched me, but I realized with a guilty shock that I’d been hoping that they would. We stared at each other for another moment and then he opened his mouth to speak—
“I’d better start breakfast,” I said quickly, and pushed past him to the stairs. When my shoulder glanced against his chest, I went heady at how warm and solid he felt—I might as well have knocked against a rhino. I felt his eyes on my back all the way down the stairs.
Back in my cabin, I leaned against the door and wondered what the hell that had been. For just a moment, I’d let myself be...what? Examined? Lusted after? Scoped out for a one night stand?
We were anchored close enough to one of the large islands that I could still get a signal on my cell phone, if I held it precariously out of the porthole. I startled Googling. I needed to know more about him. I needed to know what had happened, just before this trip. What had Eddie fixed for him?
It wasn’t hard to find.
Adam had been pulled over by the cops doing a hundred and eighty miles an hour in his multi-million dollar Bugatii Veyron, somewhere in Mexico. There were photos of his mug shot, still gorgeous despite the haggard look. That was less than a week ago. Eddie must have pulled strings to have the charges dropped and get Adam out of Mexico, then sent him on a holiday. But was it just about the arrest? Or had something else happened first?
I kept looking, but I couldn’t find anything else relating to the last week. Maybe it was something Eddie had kept quiet, something internal to the band. But I did find plenty of other stuff. Adam spending $50,000 in one night in a strip club. Adam going on a four day binge while on tour in London and allegedly sleeping with not one but two members of a popular girl band. Adam in an on/off/on/they’re-getting married/they’re-just-friends thing with rising starlet Laura Pagonetti. And it seemed as if things had been getting crazier and crazier over the last few months. More drinking binges. More talk of drugs. And an endless string of women breathlessly describing their one night stands with him to the press.
What was wrong with me? Of course he wasn’t interested in me—not except as a quick fling, another notch on his bedpost. His world was a million miles away from mine and if we did bridge the gap it would be for a fleeting moment…and the next day there’d be regrets and tears and….
And I couldn’t go through that. Not again.
Chapter 4
That afternoon, I was tidying the galley when I felt him staring at me from the doorway. I took a breath before turning around. Don’t engage. Nod and smile and be polite, and get rid of him.
“Sir?” I asked, flashing him a smile that didn’t extend to my eyes.
He had his arms folded, studying me. “Could I have,” he asked carefully, “some...toast?”
Toast. Fine. I could handle toast. I started holding up loaves. “White? Whole-wheat? Pumpkin seed bread?”
“White, please. Got any honey?”
Instantly, I was back in my bunk, legs open, and his head between them. I felt myself start to blush, and I never blush. “Honey?” I croaked.
“Yeah.” He came closer. “From bees?”
His tongue, on and in me. His palms, firm and warm on my inner thighs as he opens me—
With shaking hands, I dropped two slices of bread into the toaster and cranked the dial down to the fastest toast time possible.
“Everything alright?” Adam asked. He was leaning forward, not so very far away, now, from where he’d been when he’d tried to kiss me.
“Fine, sir. Great. Butter? I have some organic unsalted already out of the fridge—it should spread well.” Spread. Like he spread your thighs apart in your fantasy—
“Thanks.” And then there was nothing else to say and we just stared at each other, my face growing hotter and hotter until, with a blessed twang of springs, the toaster ejected his toast. I had it onto a plate, spread and under his nose in ten seconds flat.
“This is barely toasted,” he said, touching a crust. “It’s just warm bread.”
“It’s the latest thing,” I told him quickly. “Semi-toasted. Improves the taste.”
He gave me another long look, nodded and then backed out of the room. When he got to the corridor, he looked at me again and then shook his head, with a return of that puzzled expression. A look that said I don’t understand you at all.
Which made sense because, right then, I didn’t really understand myself.
***
Evening again, and this time Adam insisted on shepherd’s pie
for dinner, along with warm English beer. After I’d tidied the galley yet again (kitchen work is at least fifty percent tidying. A small kitchen feels like double that) I stood out by the rail to watch the sun go down. We were way out to sea, now, somewhere out past even the smaller, uninhabited islands, and heading further out with each passing minute. I could see storm clouds on the horizon, but they were far enough away that it would be easy for the captain to avoid them.
The rail creaked next to me and I snapped my head round. Adam was there, leaning against it with a beer in his hand. “Sorry,” he said. “I was trying to do that quietly.”
Why? So you could stand there watching me? It wasn’t as if I was in anything sexy. Just my chef’s whites again, the sunset turning the cloth to bronze and crimson.
“You’re a hard person to get to know,” he told me, and took a pull on his beer.
Why do you even want to get to know me? He had about a million actresses and pop stars and debutantes throwing themselves at him back in the US. If he couldn’t even go two weeks without bedding someone, there was always Simone, who was far better than me at kissing up to him, or Yvonne, the blonde maid, who had legs up to her armpits. Why me? Because I’d resisted?
I looked away. “I just cook the food, sir.”
It occurred to me that he hadn’t asked me to stop calling him sir yet. I wondered if he would, or if he secretly liked it. Was it bad if he liked it? Was it bad if I liked that he liked it?
He changed tack. “You know it’s my birthday, today.”
I did know, because I’d checked the date with Simone and baked him a three-layer birthday cake. Chocolate sponge with a filling made from Seville oranges, coated in a chocolate ganache and topped with fresh cream and a lattice of super-dark Swiss chocolate. Apparently, there was going to be some sort of party that night, with the rest of the band coming aboard, although I didn’t see how it was going to be much of an event with just the three of them, or four with Eddie. “Happy Birthday, sir,” I said. I gave him a smile, but something in my voice gave me away.
“What?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“What?”
I took a deep breath and turned to face him. “Don’t you want to be spending it ashore? With lots of people?”
He smirked…guiltily. “I threw a thing a few weeks back. Sort of impromptu, to celebrate us getting an award. We had a big hotel suite in New York.”
“What happened?” I prompted.
“Well, I told everyone I’d organize it, and I did. But I kept thinking it was going to be dull, because Eddie had invited all these record company blokes. So that afternoon, I booked some people to liven it up. You know, a contortionist, a comedian, a horse—”
“You hired a horse?”
“Technically I hired a Lone Ranger impersonator, but let’s be honest: you’re paying for the horse. And then I was sitting there, in the middle of the afternoon, on the floor of this big hotel suite—you know, drinking—and I think, it’s going to be almost empty. And I’d seen this burlesque show where the dancers dressed as mermaids, so I got on the phone and hired twenty of them, and a big tank full of water for them to flop around in, and some fire breathers—”
“Fire breathers? Wait, inside a hotel suite?”
“Yeah. With hindsight…anyway, everyone shows up and it’s a good time, but it’s dull, so I bring out my backup plan, which is a tray of brownies.”
I blinked. That sounded surprisingly tame. I liked brownies. Then I caught Adam’s eye.
“Oh…..”
“Yeah. Special brownies. And by this time, I’m like…you know. Quietly drunk, maybe edging into noisily drunk. So I put the brownies down for a minute to get another drink, and that’s when it all went wrong.” He looked mournful.
I waited.
“The horse ate the brownies,” he said at last. “And it went mental. It panicked the fire breather, who set fire to the comedian, who goes running about the place, only he trips over the contortionist who’s folded herself up like a pretzel. And then the horse sees the mermaids and thinks they’re sharks or something, and kicks the tank and it shatters.”
I winced.
“….although the water did put out the comedian, so that was something.” He frowned. “He sued, too, the bastard. You would have thought he’d be able to see the funny side.” He leaned back from the rail and stretched. “So…yeah. For my birthday, I’m out here where I can’t cause any trouble. And also….”
I waited.
But Adam shook his head, thinking better of it. “Nah. Nothing.”
I frowned—at myself, more than at him. Crazily, I actually felt sorry for him. On the one hand, he was the sort of rich idiot who threw his money around and partied too hard. On the other...I got the impression something was genuinely wrong. Why had Eddie and the others sent him away like this? It felt like more had gone wrong than just an out-of-control party. Was this tied in with why he’d been in Mexico?
I looked at the beer in his hand. I couldn’t fix whatever was going wrong in his rock star world, but there was one thing I could give him for this birthday. “Wait here,” I told him.
When I returned, it was with a tray containing six glasses of wine, a glass of water and a sheet of paper with a list on. I’d scrawled a number on the base of each glass with a marker.
“I don’t drink wine,” he said, confused.
“I know,” I said. “That’s what we’re going to fix.”
He blinked at me, managing to look both annoyed and impressed at once. “Who says I want to fix it?”
“You’re missing out. And you don’t strike me as a guy who wants to miss out. You strike me as a guy who likes to try new things—”
I broke off. I’d meant that perfectly innocently, but as soon as it was out of my mouth, it sounded flirty. I coughed and held up the tray. The sunlight shone through the wine, casting moving patterns on the wall beside us. “Six tastes, all different. You’ll like one of them, maybe more. Once I know which, I can suggest more stuff.”
“Like Netflix,” he said. “You’re my Netflix of wine.”
“Something like that.” I offered the tray and, for just a second, he was looking across the rims of the glasses, right into my eyes. What are you doing, Hannah? What happened to staying away from him?
“Do I have to start with number one?” he asked.
“Start with whichever one you want.”
He picked four, sipped it and shuddered. Number one got a shudder as well. But number five didn’t. He gave it a hesitant sip, then another.
“That’s a Chardonnay from Beaune, from 2006. Like it?”
Watching him, I was reminded of a bear carefully sniffing at a picnic hamper, wary of a trap. “...yeah,” he said at last. He took another sip, then a gulp. “Bloody Hell. I never thought…wow.”
We continued. He liked two out of the six and one of them he liked a lot. He kept the glass to finish, although he kept his beloved beer as well. “This is nice,” he told me as he stood at the rail, wine in one hand and beer in the other, the sunset lighting up his face.
Something stirred, deep inside me. Something that had been asleep for a long time. The throbbing, twisting heat was there, down between my thighs, but this was higher up, in my chest. Higher up, and much more dangerous.
And then I remembered why I’d frozen out that part of me. I could feel my barriers automatically slamming up. “My pleasure, sir,” I said.
“Don’t do that.”
My heart skipped a beat. He’d noticed?! “Don’t do what?”
“Don’t go back to chef mode. We were having a moment.”
I was flustered, now. “Were we?”
“Weren’t we?”
Someone cleared her throat, a little way down the deck. We turned to see Simone standing there. “Mr. Sykes? The rest of the band will be here soon.”
Adam grinned good-naturedly and headed off towards his stateroom, still with wine in one hand and beer in the other. I heade
d back to the galley, but Simone stepped in front of me.
“I want you to stay in your cabin tonight,” she told me. “We have a party organized.”
“I know. I made the cake, remember?” And part of me wanted to be there when they presented it to him. And what sort of a party was it going to be with just four guys?
Simone leaned closer. “There are women coming,” she told me. “Women who specialize in parties.”
Oh. That sort of party. I nodded and slunk back to the galley.
I felt like an idiot. He was a rock star. He dropped thousands of dollars in strip clubs. I’d even heard Eddie mention girls. Of course he had strippers—or, more likely, hookers—coming for his birthday. What had I expected? That I’d teach him about wine and he’d...what? Scoop me up into his arms and carry me off somewhere, just like Nathan had? Break my heart all over again?
I sighed. Lucky. Lucky escape.
Chapter 5
I felt the slight bump as the two boats docked. Then there were voices up above deck, and footsteps coming down the corridor. First the heavy boots of Magnus, then the almost silent, ninja-like approach of Midnight. Eddie’s handmade leather shoes were next. And finally a small army of high heels clattered down the corridor. I inched my door open just a little and saw a sea of sequin dresses, perspex platform stripper heels and tanned, over-inflated breasts. I drew back as a cloud of cheap perfume hit me in the face.
I closed my door and flopped on my bed. A few moments later, a thumping rock track started up. My mind started to fill with what might be going on in there.
Well, fine. Let him have his birthday treat. Let the women shove their boobs in his face or whatever they did. Let them—
Would he actually fuck him? Were they strippers, or escorts?
What did I care?
I rolled over on my bed, facing away from the door. I’d kept the porthole curtain open, as always, and the moonlight flooded across my face.
They deserve each other, I thought. He’s used to throwing money around, and they’re used to being paid. But if it was right, why did it feel so wrong?
Shipwrecked with the Billionaire Rock Star Page 3