Blissful Summer: Make You Mine AgainUnraveled

by Cheris Hodges

  The same thing she’d craved when she saw the ship and recognized her event planning career had capsized. “A drink. It’s not too early for a rough drink.”

  “There’s a bar near the lower deck. Take a moment to look at the virtual tour screens. There are several posted throughout the ship, and they’re touch screen.”

  “No paper brochures?”

  “Paper brochures are available, but I’m obligated to mention the new digital-age-friendly features. Take a chance on them.”

  “Take a chance?” Her mouth flattened and gravity and sorrow tugged the corners downward. “A friend of mine said something similar.”

  “Smart friend.”

  He should’ve been a smarter pilot, a safer man... He should be here to see a deck full of naked strangers and say something wry for her ears only, because they were once tight like that. He should be here to remind her that she’d survived PAAC and could survive this, too. He should just be, damn it.

  Ona turned on her red snakeskin heel, edged aside as a couple she recognized from the staircase approached to access the clothing-unlikely deck. She tried to picture herself with the gall to strip and strut around where strangers could stare their fill, but all she got was empty space.

  She’d had men before, and if she put her mind to it she could probably achieve most of the positions in the Kama Sutra, but she handled her body with care. For her, safe sex was about more than condoms—it was about sharing it with safe men.

  The “safe” men she’d had serious relationships with in the past had fooled her. One had convinced her to drop out of Broadway because he predicted she’d cheat on him while on tour. The next had talked a big talk about marrying her, but his only true motive had been to wreck her career.

  Nicholas Callaghan, a Rhodes scholar and a Forbes-featured millionaire, had all the right moves. He volunteered at a children’s hospital and published a cookbook for diabetics. That degree of solidness, the transparency of his strong character, made him more appealing than any of the men in Ona’s past. He wouldn’t ask her to give up Broadway just because fame threatened his pride. He wouldn’t tease her with engagement talk while he plotted to double-cross her out of one of Manhattan’s top advertising firms. And he wouldn’t move to Alaska and let ten years pass without hearing her voice. That was how safe Nicholas was, and Ona’s determination to have him a little closer was as unyielding as cement.

  A knight in spotless Armani. She’d take it. Because if she and Nicholas hooked up, then Cole Stanwyck would be an afterthought, not some uncontained threat short-circuiting her comfort.

  Only, she hadn’t expected interference in the form of a shipload of sexually jump-started guests. The chances of another woman capturing Nicholas’s attention had grown exponentially. Her seduction plans had unraveled to nothing but a scatter of loose threads, and damn if she didn’t deserve that drink.

  Taking the same staircase down two flights, she roamed through rooms that looked like art galleries, pausing at a door ominously roped off with a pedestal before it that displayed in crisp, golden print VIP. Shaking off the impulse to court trouble, she located a tour guide screen mounted in a thick glass tower and sidled up to it with the intent of setting her course for the nearest bar.

  Figuring this could take a minute, she stepped out of one high heel, then the other, and wiggled her toes before she fell into a slow, light dance of balancing her weight from foot to foot. Vaguely she was aware of a pair of denim-clad male legs on the opposite side of the tower, but she was so single-minded in her search that she didn’t absorb the man’s presence until she noticed that he was standing stock-still.

  On instinct, she snapped her eyes straight ahead but found an interactive map on the LED screen. She glanced down again. His silver-buckled black belt down to his shoes, and heaven-sent denim in between, was all Ona could see. His feet were planted apart, his muscle-wrapped thighs encased in denim that was just snug enough to showcase a very male crotch.

  That she couldn’t take him in all at once intrigued her. She appreciated these drawn-out moments to consider the impression of the rod resting along his right thigh.

  “Why did you stop moving?”

  The question startled her, his voice so gruffly inviting that Ona tasted his words before she heard them. “Why are you standing there to begin with?” she asked, not breaking their pseudo-anonymity.

  “There’s a screen on this side of the tower, too.”

  “Why haven’t you moved since you walked up to this tower?”

  “You’re hopping around in the middle of a hall...”

  “And? There’s an and floating here between us. A glass tower and an and.”

  “And your feet are the sexiest things I’ve seen on this ship.”

  Arousal rang through her—little bitty bells of horniness jingling throughout her body. She could get addicted to that voice. The dropped r, the touch of swagger in each syllable, gave him up as a Boston product, but his accent seemed residual, as though time away from the city had chipped at it.

  “Sexier than the erotic wall murals and the crowd of naked folks on the upper deck?” Teasing him, she stepped into her shoes.

  “You took my fun away.”

  Gentle yet serious, the comment turned her teasing into something darker. Blind to the rules, she oughn’t play this game, but...

  “I could give you something else.” As she spoke, her fingers curled against the hem of her dress. The fabric rose, tickling her skin as it revealed her, slow inch by slow inch. At the tops of her thighs, the journey ended and she held the dress tight against her crotch.

  What am I doing?

  If she was going to show her goods to a stranger, why hadn’t she done it in a designated, controlled environment on the upper deck?

  In the middle of a busy hall, and for a man whose face she couldn’t see, she was dragging the dress up farther and revolving in a circle.

  “Black panties,” he said.

  “Yes. Basic, boring—”

  “Classic.” Still, he stood as if frozen solid, except... Was there tension at the front of his jeans that hadn’t been there a few minutes ago? “Now take them off.”

  “Off?”

  “Off. Are you going to give me that, too?”

  Feverish, throat tight, fingers jittery, Ona tried to think...tried to breathe...tried to make herself back away from this. Failing, defying herself, she felt the panties scrape along her skin. Glancing down, she saw her ankles loosely bound in the fabric.

  She’d literally dropped her panties for a stranger.

  “Gonna ask if I like what you’re showing me?”

  She inhaled in a ragged gulp, touching his fly with her gaze. “If you said you didn’t, I’d know you’re lying. You’re hard. That’s all the answer I need.”

  “Put down your dress now.”

  “More than you can handle,” she diagnosed, yanking the underwear up.

  “Wrong about that, ’cause I do want to see more, but not from behind glass.”

  “You didn’t answer the question,” she countered, instead of dropping the dress as he’d asked and going about her afternoon as she should.

  “From panties down you’re much sexier than the erotic art.” Now he moved, in easy, sure steps to the side, and Ona decided she would let him come to her. Facing the tower, she waited, listening to his Boston baritone grow closer and more intimate with each word. “Can’t say much about the naked folks on the upper deck, seeing as I’m more of a lower deck kind of man.”

  “I’m a lower deck kind of woman.” She let the dress go, and as the hem brushed her knees, she turned her back to the glass tower and her breath caught.

  Seven days for seven capital sins, she thought again. Today’s sin was most definitely lust.

  In a practical sense, he wasn’t
handsome. It was easy, euphoric to look at a handsome man. But this guy... There was coldness, meanness in his energy, in his stance, but if it was meant to scare her away, it failed. It was what she couldn’t identify that drew her. Ona felt nervous, as if she’d been shoved, yet he hadn’t touched her.

  He had a sexiness that struck without warning or remorse—and a granite-solid body that probably did the same. His height made her feel extremely aware of her shortness—which was crazy, since no one would accuse her of being short. At six-one, she had to limit herself to four-inch heels to avoid feeling like a fairy-tale giant.

  The finer points of his attractiveness fell into place fast. The silky-looking dark blond hair was cut short, but there was plenty to twist around her fingers if the urge struck. The arrogant chin and hard, whiskered jaw hinted at harshness she wasn’t bucking for. His silver-blue eyes were quicksand, selfishly taking her down deep.

  Would it be fair to call him dangerous? Would it be a mistake to call him safe? If he were equal parts good and bad, would it be too risky to straddle him, taking on the good and the bad? Her sense of perception was weak, and unable to judge him, she couldn’t decide which she wanted him to be. Breathlessly, brokenly turned on, she did want him inside her while she made up her mind. And she was okay with that.

  Look who’s on the fast track to skankdom. First you flash yourself, now you can’t stop staring. Ah, yes, a functioning brain, just in time to save her from herself.

  Taking a chance meant charming her high school crush, not surrendering to lust at first sight with the first stranger to call her feet the sexiest things he’d seen on a multimillion-dollar luxury ship.

  A stranger didn’t fit into her plans. Matty did, but he was gone and she was on her own. Still on her own. No support system had commiserated with her when she’d second-guessed her snap decision to give up the stage to nurse a man’s insecurities. There had been no one to love her through the despair of finding herself out of an ad exec job because of a duplicitous coworker who was screwing her by night and screwing her over by day.

  “I felt protected when this tower was between us.”

  “Now that it’s not?” he challenged, his silver-blue perusal scraping across her face and down the trail of buttons on her dress. “What are you feeling?”

  Exposed. Lost. And no, a virtual map can’t help me find my way. Ona brushed a finger over her bangs, motioned to tap her glasses, but she wasn’t wearing any. Not the sunglasses, nor the retro midnight-blue-framed eyeglasses she normally wore. Contact lenses were her saviors, rescuing her from colliding with an erotic mural or playing out a number of other klutz fails. “Uh,” she stammered, and losing eye contact, she lost ground. Stumbling while standing totally still, she flailed for a moment before regaining her balance.

  Was this flustered? She didn’t do flustered. If only he would stop staring as if he could carve through her facade and see her dirtiest truths, she could get herself together. “I should...” She flapped a hand at the screen. “You probably have somewhere to be.”

  Bestowing on her a Boston “Yeah” that licked parts of her anatomy long overdue for a nice, thorough licking, the man took off in a gunslinger’s stride down the hall in his blue jeans and dark green T-shirt, and Ona had no shame in leaning past the glass tower to study his ass until a line of shipboard crew cut off her view.

  Confronting the virtual guide again and its 3D animation and pleasant, sensual audio track, she identified the Sirens’ Song Lounge and murmured, “I’m point A. Sirens’ Song is point B. Connect us, or else I’ll ignore all technology for the duration of this trip.”

  Futile words. Unplugging wasn’t an option for the reunion coordinator, particularly when she was responsible for her group vacationing on an erotic ship. Her smartphone might’ve vibrated her into a coma had she not Do-Not-Disturbed it after stepping on board. When she did take a moment to deal with it, she’d no doubt find her voice mail filled with her classmates’ demands.

  Retracting her threat to the guide, she hurried to catch one of the crew members before they turned in unison toward a pair of double doors marked Staff Only and asked for the quickest route to Sirens’ Song, traveling by stilettos.

  Vanity took a backseat as she passed a corridor announcing gentlemen’s and ladies’ rest suites. Hanging in a smooth sheet partway down her back, her flatironed hair had fought the good fight against the New York drizzle and Miami humidity, but not even her sultry Carnal Rush gloss could survive her neurotic nibbling habit. Her lips, the inside of her cheek—they weren’t safe from her busy teeth.

  A drink in Sirens’ Song, a few minutes to orient herself with her stateroom, and then Ona would be in full reunion coordinator mode. Well, full reunion-coordinator-slash-sly-seductress mode.

  At an unexpected disadvantage, she’d need to brew their chemistry fast to connect with Nicholas before an upper deck kind of woman jonesing for a cruise fix outdrew her.

  Ona gave herself to Sirens’ Song, gawking at the leather stools, mirrored bar and pops of soft gold and electric pink light spearing through the darkened lounge. Jazzy music rang out from corner to corner. The waitresses in cocktail dresses and tiaras and waiters in suits and ties looked as though they’d been collected from a fashion magazine and given blinged-out staff pins. Bodies clogged the dance floor, traced the bar and scissored through the air on fancy black swings.

  She counted four swings with strands of ribbon trailing from the seats. The woman swinging gracefully above Ona held on with one hand and blew confetti from the other.

  Specks rained down on Ona and, plucking them from her hair, she gasped at what she held. Money. Crinkled bits of actual US bills.

  Touch-screen virtual maps were impressive and crystal staircases splendid, but Ona encountered a hard stop at needlessly destroying money. There’d never seemed to be enough of it in the Tracy household when she’d been a kid. Though her parents had become “nouveau riche” when Ona was in high school, they’d been pissed at her decision to drop out of Juilliard and she’d been made to fund her own survival.

  Ona was no finance guru, but shredding money for confetti was mindlessly wasteful. She couldn’t justify doing such a thing, couldn’t imagine enjoying a drink as others committed what was sacrilege for a Fishtown Philly girl like her.

  Deciding to skip the drink altogether, she began to squeeze out of the lounge, but a waitress materialized in front of her.

  “Ona Tracy, with the reunion group?”

  Ona nodded slowly. “That’s me.”

  “First, welcome. Guest Services asked us to keep an eye out for you and offer a drink of our newest acquisition. Join me at the bar.”

  Confused—since the guest services manager had taken zero responsibility for the reservations mix-up and had been completely inflexible—Ona figured a decent gesture was better late than never. “Thanks.” She glanced from the ceiling to the bar, where it was standing-room only. Seeing that she wouldn’t be in the trajectory of shredded cash, she followed the waitress to the mirrored bar and was immediately given a linen napkin.

  “A glass of Diamond V, compliments of The Lure,” the waitress said.

  “Diamond V? Interesting name.”

  “Diamond vodka. We call it that because it’s filtered through diamonds. We serve this straight. Are you fine with that?”

  “Absolutely. I’m not a lightweight.”

  The waitress smiled admirably, poured the vodka into a glass tumbler and set it on the napkin. “Shoot, sip, whichever’s your preference. It doesn’t burn the palate, yet it has excellent impact. Cheers.”

  “Cheers.” Ona decided to shoot, and found the drink pleasantly smooth and shockingly perfect. Could diamond-filtered vodka be anything but perfection? It was almost too luxurious for her taste buds.

  What kind of world was this?

  After the waitress topped off
the glass, Ona started to sip, wanting to savor what must be one of the most expensive drinks to pass her lips. But when her gaze snagged on the stranger from the hallway sitting on a leather stool like a human gargoyle, she almost dropped the damn tumbler.

  A wave of vodka splashed her chin, cruised down her cleavage and sank into her dress.

  “Oh!” The waitress tossed another few napkins across the bar. “Diamond V’s fab and all, but it’s not exactly a fashion accessory.”

  Ona laughed. “Clumsy fingers.”

  “Call up the shipboard laundry. There’s a directory in every cabin. They’ll pick up and deliver, and they do excellent work.”

  Dabbing at the mess, Ona drank what was left in the glass and approached the man. “I... I don’t usually do that.”

  “Splash alcohol on yourself?”

  “Actually, that’s happened before.” Her throat suddenly went dry, parched as if she hadn’t just swallowed down vodka that was likely six figures a bottle. Casually he got off the stool, and though common sense insisted he’d only wrinkle her plans to seduce Nicholas, she took his offer. “I was referencing the, uh, the show-and-tell at the tower. Am I going to be getting a visit from an angry girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “As in, you’re single? As in, you do have a girlfriend but she’s okay with sharing?”

  “I’m single.”

  “I thought you had someplace to be.”

  “Yeah. In front of a cold beer.” He turned up a bottle of MGD, and she was pretty certain his Adam’s apple hit on her.

  “Me, too. I mean, not a beer, per se, but I was looking to have a drink away from the nudie deck.” She hesitated. The plan was to take a chance on seducing Nicholas Callaghan, not take a chance on striking up a conversation with a guy who knew what color panties she had on but didn’t know her name.

  “This place’s out of your realm.”

  “Quite an assumption from someone who doesn’t know me.”

  “Know you, as in the standard stuff? Age, name, how many siblings you have, why you’re on this ship, how important you are to have this place pouring you complimentary drinks to spill all over yourself?” He set down the beer, leaned forward and put his hands on the edge of the bar on either side of her, boxing her in. “I can understand you without knowing you. Prefer it, even.”