Blissful Summer: Make You Mine AgainUnraveled

by Cheris Hodges

  She was about to snap another picture, when she received a text message. “Well, it’s time to meet your destiny,” Shelby exclaimed. “They’re ready for us.”

  Jansen’s knees shivered. She was actually getting married to Bradley Stephens. When she paused, Shelby shot her friend a questioning look. “You’re not having cold feet are you?”

  “No. Let’s do this,” she said, then linked arms with her girls and headed for the beach.

  * * *

  Bradley watched his future dressed in white silk and lace coming his way. Jansen was stunning as she walked into his arms on the shores of the beach. He didn’t wait until they were pronounced husband and wife to kiss her.

  “Too soon, bro, too soon,” Kenyon whispered as he tugged at his brother’s arm. Everyone laughed.

  “I see that this needs to be a quick service,” the pastor said.

  “This has been a long time coming,” Bradley said as he took Jansen’s hands in his. They faced each other and the sun cast a halo around them.

  “Yes, it has,” she replied.

  “Everything happens in God’s time,” the pastor said. “And what a day the Lord has made as two souls become one. Bradley Stephens, do you take Jansen Douglas to be your lawfully wedded wife?”

  “I do,” Bradley replied, then kissed her palm.

  The pastor focused on Jansen. “Now, Jansen Douglas, do you take Bradley Stephens to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

  She closed her eyes and a smile spread across her lips. “I do.”

  “Then, by the power vested in me, I quickly pronounce you husband and wife.” Before the words you may kiss the bride escaped the pastor’s lips, Bradley had his mouth on top of Jansen’s, savoring the sweetness of her kiss and knowing that she would be his for the rest of their lives.

  “I love you,” he said. “Don’t ever doubt that for a second.”

  “I never will again,” she said.

  Bradley scooped his wife into his arms and kissed her slow and deep. “Mrs. Stephens,” he said when they broke the kiss, “are you ready to start our forever?”

  “Mr. Stephens, I am so ready,” Jansen said, stroking his smooth cheek.

  * * * * *

  UNRAVELED

  Lisa Marie Perry

  For Tara Gavin—

  I appreciate every moment of working with you.

  Thanks for seeing my strength and potential when I couldn’t. I dedicate Unraveled’s quirky, beautiful, kick-ass heroine to you.

  Dear Reader,

  Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Have you ever said this to someone? Do you really know what you would or wouldn’t do? I’ve said this quite often to friends when it comes to men, but I never meant “Be cautious” or “Mind your morals.” Instead, I meant “Be brave. Be sweet. Be naughty. Because that’s what I would do.” At least, that’s what I thought before

  I wrote Unraveled.

  When I crafted Ona Tracy, I stranded her on an erotic-themed cruise ship. I put myself in her stilettos, listed the things I’d never do—and let Ona do those things. As this volatile character took shape, I realized that I’m not as brave, sweet or naughty as I thought. So when Ona experienced a carnal awakening at the hands of rough-hewn ex-marine Riker Ewan, I experienced an awakening of my own.

  And I figured I’m overdue for a cruise…

  XOXO

  Lisa Marie Perry

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 1

  She needed a drink. She needed it tall, she needed it straight and she needed it to go down hard and wear off slowly.

  It was the only proper way to give her career a send-off. Ona Tracy knew that her shiny new gig as an event planner had already departed on its maiden voyage to hell. And it wouldn’t be coming back.

  To think she’d maxed out her platinum American Express card, straightened her hair to perfection and redeemed all of her airfare rewards points for a flight from New York to Miami for this. In Cartier Paris sunglasses, a gold-belted dark blue pinhole button-down dress and scarlet snakeskin pumps, clutching designer luggage from a Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus binge she would be regretting had she not been backstabbed out of a cushiony advertising firm, she would at least look good when they crucified her.

  The extravagant ship before her wasn’t the cruise liner she’d booked for her high school glee club’s ten-year reunion. And any moment now, the sixteen wealthy and entitled former Philadelphia Academy of Arts and Culture students and eight plus-ones due to arrive on the pier would know it.

  Most likely to succeed, my ass. Ten years ago she’d taken pride in the yearbook superlative, had even been shallowly touched that the majority of over a hundred students had agreed that if anyone in their graduating class had a shot at taking what they wanted out of life, it was Ona.

  Why not, anyway? The Tracys had a strange way of conquering the odds. In one spectacular year she’d gone from being a Fishtown working-class kid living on a predominately black street in Philly to being the only Fishtown working-class kid—and the only black girl—enrolled at PAAC, one of the most elite private high schools in the East. Vocals that might make angels ugly-cry and a dare to jump into a park fountain and belt out a show tune had led to the scholarship that had opened the golden doors of her education.

  But she’d locked herself out the back exit by dropping out of Juilliard, declining the chance to understudy in a West End production and passing up a touring cast role in one of Broadway’s longest-running shows. No one had told her to trade all her dreams for a man. No one had told her to believe in love.

  No one had told her to repeat her mistakes over and over until she’d come to the point of falling from grace, dusting off her ass and persuading her alma mater to hire her to coordinate PAAC’s glee club reunion.

  Okay...she wasn’t exactly the übersuccessful answer-to-your-prayers event planner she’d sold to school administrators. Technically she had zero professional experience. There was the dinner party she’d helped her ex-boyfriend host at his Park Avenue penthouse, but she hadn’t gotten compensated—unless you counted thank-you sex so boring that she’d faked moans to hide yawns and had been relieved to be interrupted by his ringing business cell, which he’d had the audacity to answer before pulling out. Prior to that she’d arranged a Hamptons weekend baby shower for a Mommyzilla friend who’d dismissed her from the festivities after discovering the silk Ona had used to decorate the seven-tier diaper cake was Oxford blue, not periwinkle.

  To say she had any genuine, concrete event planning experience, she had to go back—way back—to her days at PAAC. A moth among butterflies, she’d joined every committee she could in efforts to impress college admission committees while blending in with the Joneses. She’d made herself indispensable, a go-to person who tap-danced across the fine line between satisfying PAAC’s precise expectations and secretly giving the students what they wanted. Unlike the rest of her high school colleagues, she hadn’t been sheltered. She’d become the after-party girl—the one with the Philly connections and street smarts to shepherd her classmates to nightly off-campus freedom they wouldn’t get under the control of a tyrannical headmaster and a council of wannabe puritans.

  In a stroke of kooky Tracy luck, the powers-that-be had remembered her as a shining gold star student, but hadn’t been brought up to speed on her musical theater crash and burn, nor her disastrous misadventures in cobbling together a career in advertising.

  Not knowing that Ona Tracy had almost been a Broadway sweetheart, had almost ended up an advertising somebody, had almost been engaged and was an event planning virgin, PAAC had become her first real client.

>   And somehow, despite dressing the part and acting the part, she’d botched this, too. Making the most of the school’s budget and sky-high expectations, she had cherry-picked The Lore, one of the Stewart-Russ Cruise Line’s family-friendly vessels, for a weeklong trip to the Bahamas.

  “The Lore, this ain’t,” she whispered to her designer suitcases full of secrets. What good would sexy lingerie and an economy-size bottle of lube be now when this trip and what she’d quietly hoped to reap from it were all but dead in the glistening green-brushed blue water?

  The Lore, a classy and elegant ship she’d virtually toured on her do-it-all smartphone, was the smallest of the company’s other general crafts. There was The Legend and The Myth and others she couldn’t remember now as her heart palpitated, but she certainly hadn’t reserved a specialty ship that boasted the image of a mystical tit-baring sea seductress.

  Carved into the side of the gleaming gold-trimmed eggshell-white vessel were the words The Lure, followed by Omnia Vincit Amor.

  No, no, no. A vowel mix-up couldn’t possibly be the difference between a successful new career and yet another flop.

  “Omnia Vincit Amor.”

  Arousal strapped itself to Ona. Nick. Nicholas Callaghan. Dark-haired, green-eyed perfection.

  “‘Love conquers all,’” she translated with a huskiness that wasn’t so much sexy as it was raw.

  “You know Latin, Ona?” Nick asked.

  “I read The Canterbury Tales, same as you.” Chaucer was an institution at PAAC. She’d spent more energy daydreaming about Nicholas during AP English than translating text, but this, like her Christmas through New Year’s weight gain, a girl kept on the hush-hush.

  “Right.” When his hand settled on her hip with a familiarity and gentle possessiveness that gave Ona naughty chills through her extremities, she pretended to concentrate on jostling her carry-on luggage in her arms to brace herself for the one-on-one reunion she’d been fantasizing about since finding his name on PAAC’s glee club call list.

  Beyond sharing an English class and the club, and exchanging perhaps a few sentences of small talk in all their time in high school, Ona and Nick had been strangers. In spite of her giving the ol’ college try to fitting in, they’d existed on different planes. He was the descendant of a wealthy Irish family that owned the brewery that cranked out Ona’s favorite beer. Ona’s father drove delivery trucks and her mother taught piano. Had it not been for the gas-station everything-on-it hot dog and lucky lottery ticket Pa had bought while waiting for his rig’s tank to fill one afternoon, the Tracys might still be rooted in Fishtown. Nick dated blondes and redheads. An African-American, Ona was as brunette as they came.

  But she’d wanted him anyway—in unreachable, limitless ways she hadn’t quite understood until she’d discovered the yummy “depravity” of unscrambled adult TV programming. Every sex act she’d viewed, every shock and thrill that did funny things to her adrenaline, she wanted to mimic with Nicholas. Not that she’d ever, ever let him know what was up. It was a risk she had never let herself attempt, and it had felt safe. After graduation she’d pushed the teenage crush way down deep, had continued to walk on the safe side of life by stepping out of the spotlight of unpredictable showbiz and stepping into the shadows of relationships with men who claimed to love her but were in actuality threatened by her potential for success.

  Now Nick was twenty-eight and single, and so was she, and the want was stirring awake after a ten-year slumber.

  Seducing Nick was supposed to be Ona’s biggest risk—her wildest dare since launching herself into a Philadelphia park fountain and tearing into “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.”

  If the tricks in her suitcases—lingerie and bikinis that looked like lingerie—failed to stoke his interest, she was prepared to trigger his jealousy by allowing Matthew “Matty” Grillo, her best friend in high school and the only soul who’d known of her nasty schoolgirl crush, to pretend to be her man. It’d been Matty’s suggestion when she’d reached his name on the glee club call list and, after years of no contact, they’d talked as though they hadn’t skipped a beat since getting wild in the school auditorium and getting hot in the costume closet.

  I think you should go for it. Take a chance on him. Hold nothing back. If Nick’s crazy enough to not take the ticket you’re selling, and it means that much to you, I’ll screw you. That’s a promise, Matty had said in that casual, sardonic way she’d come to miss over the past decade.

  You don’t make promises, she’d pointed out, smiling because even from Alaska where he’d given up singing for bush flying, Matty Grillo could make her smile.

  Not the ones I don’t plan to keep.

  Silly thing was, it wouldn’t happen. Sex wasn’t an aspect of their friendship they couldn’t pick up as though rediscovering a once-cherished toy in the attic. It wasn’t something they could resume without skipping a beat.

  Even though Ona had lost various virginities to Matty throughout high school, and sex had been a great perk to their friendship, clearly they were meant to be no more than friends. But she loved Matty, and she needed a reunion with him as much as she needed one with Nicholas.

  “Ona,” Nicholas said, drawing out the second syllable as his hand went lax on her hip, “this isn’t the ship on the reservations.”

  “What gave it away? The o and u thing?”

  “No, the naked mermaid. Are we at the right pier?”

  “Yes—”

  “Then the wrong ship is in front of us!” interrupted Regan Waltz, prying them apart with her bold summery perfume and the crack of her skinny high heels on the pier. Brandishing her phone, she continued, “I just did some fast research, and guess what? The Lure is a luxury ship. A special type of luxury ship.”

  By now others had flocked to the pier, following Regan as many had in high school. Like Nicholas’s good-boy attractiveness and Matty’s ability to put Ona at ease, some things hadn’t changed.

  “I realize that,” Ona said calmly to Regan.

  “Tell everyone exactly what it is, then.”

  Oh, hell naw. Ona had dealt with enough divas in musical theater to not buckle under one of Regan’s tantrums. Addressing the gathering, she said, “Most of the Stewart-Russ Cruise Line’s crafts serve a standard purpose...but this one is, um, it’s a bit unique. It’s called a specialty ship. It’s...well, it’s an erotic-themed ship, in case any of you couldn’t figure that out by the sexed-up bare-breasted mermaid painted on the side.”

  “PAAC’s not going to stand for this.” Regan scowled at Ona. “I took vacation time for this event and it’s ruined. We voted you Most Likely to Succeed. Should’ve been Most Likely to Screw Up Reunion. Figures, the nouveau riche are typically victims of mediocrity. You can take the girl out of Fishtown...”

  “I thought you should’ve been voted Most Likely to Screw Her Way to the Top, but life’s unfair like that,” Ona snapped. As the apples of Regan’s pale cheeks blossomed pink and she snapped glares at the chuckling crowd, Ona began to muscle her luggage toward The Lure. “Everyone hasn’t arrived yet. If you’ll all just wait here, I’ll try my damnedest to correct this. I’m sure the ship’s concierge staff can help us find a solution.”

  Such confidence, but inside Ona was miserable. Putting Regan Waltz in check had been a necessary move, but with the woman gunning for her, she had no chance of getting out of this unscathed. In high school, Regan had been half of every power couple, had unofficially reigned over their class. She had a take-charge presence that Ona had envied but accepted, just as she’d accepted that the others could see only what they wanted from Ona without actually seeing her.

  She’d been Miss At-Your-Beck-and-Call, and as she hurried to the ship before the group could get on a conference call with PAAC, it dawned that she remained at their beck and call. Ten years hadn’t changed the dynamics. They were still succe
ssful and entitled. In clothes she couldn’t afford and no career to return to in New York, she was still a pretender.

  Catching wind of the complaints swirling in the sultry April air, a pier staff member escorted Ona aboard the ship. Reservations and ID examined, luggage scrutinized, she was rushed to Guest Services. On the way, she fell momentarily speechless. Exotic extravagance swallowed her. Polished marble, touches of gold and platinum blended into the architecture and decor, spiral staircases embellished with crystal, intoxicatingly fragrant flowers—it all carried her into a reality that was almost magical compared to the crowded pier full of travel-weary and pissed off former private school classmates awaiting her.

  “Welcome aboard The Lure,” the man said belatedly. “I’m certain Guest Services will resolve your complaint, but I should tell you that the shipboard staff and the pier staff have communicated extensively and reviewed every accommodation in anticipation of your party.”

  “But this isn’t the ship I reserved,” she said through tightly locked teeth. “There’s no logical way that my budget paid for all this. I browsed this ship online. It’s quintessential luxury. And it’s an erotic ship. Why would a private school okay an erotic reunion cruise for its glee club?”

  “If you’d like,” he said patiently, “I can request complimentary refreshments for your guests while we wait for a boarding decision.”

  “By ‘refreshments,’ do you mean liquor?”

  “Our finest.”

  “Excellent. Do that.” It wouldn’t completely remedy the situation, but in her experience, if anything could pacify the wealthy and influential it was being reminded that they were wealthy and influential.

  Inside the guest services manager’s office suite, Ona was offered her own fine refreshment in a champagne flute and invited to relax on a sensual red tufted chaise and explain her dilemma.

  It was supposed to be the Stewart-Russ Cruise Line’s dilemma, but the shipboard staff weren’t quite registering this.