Bring the Heat

by Margot Radcliffe

  Oliver shook his head and then let himself fall beside her, making her giggle as the force of his weight bounced her up. “You’re welcome to share it,” he said, wagging his eyebrows at her lasciviously.

  “Always a flirt,” Molly lamented with a responding smile. “You can’t even help it, can you?”

  Oliver shook his head. He could, of course, but being relentlessly charming was basically his most effective life skill. “I’m afraid it’s a terminal condition,” he said gravely.

  He felt her shoulders shake before her laugh actually started. “Well, Captain, at least we’ll be able to bury you at sea.”

  “A true sailor’s death,” Oliver confirmed wistfully. “I couldn’t ask for more.”

  A small smile still on her face, Molly said, “I think we’re going to have fun this month, Oliver.” Then a big breath in and a sigh. “Lord knows, I need a break. I can’t tell you how much this means to me. Thank you for being such a good friend.”

  Oliver took her hand in his and squeezed. “We’re going to have the best time of our lives, Molly, and by the time we’re done I promise your problems will be only memories.”

  Molly squeezed his hand back, her head turning to his on the mattress. This close he could see the lighter brown streaks in her eyes and wished he could take away all the hurt in them. All he could offer her was a luxury yacht voyage and companionship to let time pass by more easily.

  “I know you’re right,” she told him. Then she looked up at the ceiling and snorted. “I should have known you’d put mirrors on the ceiling.”

  He shrugged, the motion invisible with his shoulders buried in the fluffy duvet. “You know I like looking at myself as I fall asleep. My beautiful face comforts me.”

  Molly pushed lightly at his shoulder. “You’re not as vain as you want people to think.”

  He wasn’t not vain, but she was probably right. There were a lot of things he’d worn as armor in his old life that he hoped to put away while he was on this ship.

  “I’m so pretty it makes my own teeth hurt,” he persisted, jumping off the bed before he did something stupid like touch her. “That’s why I also did this.” Then he pressed a button on the wall and the mirrors went black.

  “Well, aren’t you fancy?” Molly said, sitting up on the bed. “You’ve definitely made this boat your own. I’m proud of you, Oliver.”

  Those simple words so freely given clenched at his insides. Molly gave everything she had away for free and he soaked it up like a dead-inside sponge, so unused to someone offering a compliment without an ulterior motive. Hell, he rarely did it himself.

  He took her through the rest of the boat before they returned to the sky lounge on the top deck and settled in. There was some business to take care of before they hit the open ocean.

  “Oooh,” Molly laughed, wiggling around in the lounge chair, big white sunglasses perched on her nose and the breeze gently blowing a strand of hair over her face, “this chaise is deluxe. I could definitely get used to this.”

  He grinned. “I think you’ll like the chef, too. I’ve heard good things. He worked for a friend in the city so I got to sample some of his dishes and his chicken paillard was the best I’ve had.”

  “I’m really excited about it. You know how I feel about cooking,” she told him, her hands stilling on the tablet in her lap.

  “How could I possibly forget you endlessly burning your grilled cheese?” She’d set off the fire alarm more than once on their first boat together.

  “In my defense, I’m also the person who has to fix something if it goes wrong, so no harm no foul.”

  “It hardly makes it more acceptable,” he pointed out, taking a sip of the tequila on the rocks the chief steward had brought him. “I still don’t understand why you, a woman of science, refuse to believe that cooking something on high is a bad idea.”

  “Things take too long to cook if they’re not on high,” Molly complained.

  “Not if you count the number of times you have to remake everything that you burn to a crisp the first time,” he said blandly.

  Molly laughed, turning her head to meet his eyes where he was sitting at the bar. “Details.”

  He shook his head as she tapped away on the tablet, adding her requests to the provisions list. “What are you putting on there?”

  “Lots of cheese and bread,” she said, a goofy smile on her face.

  He shook his head at her. “We’ll be on the water without a chef for the first couple weeks, so I’ll cook. We’ve also only got a skeleton crew, so only one interior steward and one deck crew person, but I’ll help out where needed obviously.”

  “Sounds good,” Molly nodded, handing him the tablet. “Your turn.”

  Oliver looked down at the list of items she’d requested be ordered from the grocery as well as any last-minute items from department stores they might need for an extended sail that hadn’t fit in their luggage.

  “You literally requested fifteen pounds of various cheeses,” he said, floored. “You do understand how much cheese that is, right?”

  Molly had a mischievous look on her face as she climbed off the chaise and took the seat beside him at the bar, a champagne flute in her hand. “I thought since I’ll have so much free time while you’re driving this ship, this will be the perfect time to experiment with flavors.”

  He shut his eyes and in front of her typed the words, f-i-r-e e-x-t-i-n-g-u-i-s-h-e-r.

  “The boat already has them,” Molly laughed.

  “Not enough.”

  Molly gave him a playful shove, but damn if it didn’t send a little stream of heat over his skin. Maybe he hadn’t thought this trip through, after all. Here was a woman he’d always been attracted to, but due to life, time and distance, whatever relationship they might have had off the boat seven years ago never materialized. In its place, a casual friendship had developed, but now she was here with a broken heart and had never given him any indication that she wanted anything more than friendship. Yet he was having a difficult time remembering that as her light scent drifted over him and her pink lips closed on the delicate rim of the crystal champagne glass.

  Well, he thought grimly, blue balls aside, he’d made worse decisions in his life.

  “So what’s your plan?” Molly asked. “I know you’ve got something up your sleeve and we’re not just taking this puppy out for a vacation spin this month.”

  He quirked an eyebrow. “I don’t want you to do anything else besides keep the boat in working order, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, I’m not suggesting that,” Molly agreed. “But as I understand it, you quit the job your parents insisted you keep.”

  Because people in the Kent family worked, was the refrain, even though Oliver’s yearly salary was eclipsed by the monthly interest he lived on from his grandparents’ trust fund and his own private investments. His father was now CEO of the largest investment firm in the country, a company that used to be owned by his father and so on, which meant Oliver had to work there, was groomed to take over the company when his father was ready to retire.

  But yes, Oliver had quit. He’d walked away from his family legacy and duty. And he wasn’t sorry at all.

  That Molly knew he wasn’t just going to drift around on the yacht indefinitely, that he had plans for something more, was nice. At least someone didn’t think he was an absolute wastrel.

  “I’m going to start a yacht manufacturing company,” he admitted, a little hesitantly, because he’d yet to actually say the words out loud to someone.

  Molly sat up straighter in her chair. “Wow,” she said, mouth open, a little stunned. “That’s awesome.”

  “I don’t know about that, but it’s a lucrative market and after rebuilding this boat I have an idea of what it takes. I know all the players. And I really want to make something, you know?”

 
The job he’d given up was basically just moving money around and he fucking couldn’t stand it. He wanted to explore the world, meet and work with different types of people, build grandiose, magnificent eco-friendly ships that would sail forever. And he wanted to do it on his own instead of riding the coattails of his family.

  Molly’s head tilted as she considered him and gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Like I said, I’m proud of you, bud.”

  “So you won’t mind if we take some detours to tour other boats and talk to some boat makers?”

  “It’ll be my pleasure to help any way I can, Oliver,” she told him.

  Holding up her glass, she said, “To fresh starts.”

  Oliver clinked his glass against hers, meeting her eyes. “To us.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  MOLLY DIDN’T QUITE know what she was doing waking up on a yacht with Oliver Kent, of all people. The bright morning sun was streaming in the windows, and her hand brushed over the silky duvet on her bed as she thought back to when they’d been together. While working on yachts in their early twenties, Molly had fallen hard for Oliver, but even then she’d recognized that his life was far removed from anything she could have fit into once they were off the boat.

  So even if she had been heartbroken that he hadn’t asked her to stay together or offered to come with her to Colorado when yachting season was over, her life had gone on. And, unexpectedly, they’d kept in touch over the years and now that her gutter person of an ex-fiancé was revealed, his offer of a yacht trip felt like a miracle. She could heal after her carefully crafted life imploded.

  And if sometimes she still had flashbacks of walking into her bedroom and finding her fiancé mid-thrust into their neighbor, well, that was why she was here on the water headed for the calm, sparkling blue sea of the Caribbean.

  Luckily, the small team of engineers she worked with had just launched their latest satellite into space, so her current leave of absence wasn’t too much of a burden to her beloved coworkers. Even they had called bullshit on the accusations Max had lobbed at her—that she was too devoted to her job and didn’t have time for him, that she never wanted to hang out with his friends, that she wasn’t open in bed, that she shut him out, ad infinitum. All the flimsy excuses of a man caught and unable to hold himself accountable.

  But she was taking advice from her friends and was not going to start her Caribbean adventure with her ex’s untrue poison in her ear. Now was her time for relaxation and renewal. With Oliver Kent, who was perhaps the single most handsome person she’d seen in real life. So yeah, total heartbreak and devastation aside, she’d definitely traded up.

  Oliver had always been able to make her smile, especially back then when their superlong workdays were taken up by demanding physical labor and endlessly cranky and demanding charter guests. For a girl from a small town in Colorado, she’d been in awe of the yachting world, the interesting jobs of the guests, the exotic locations, not to mention the amount of money people threw around, the likes of which she’d never even imagined.

  But Oliver hadn’t been fazed by the limitless luxury. He’d always been very comfortable around the guests, charming them because he happened to be charming by nature, but also because he was one of them. The fact that he owned this yacht was astonishing. Sure, she’d known he’d been a rich kid, but his boat alone most likely cost at least ten million dollars, an amount of money she couldn’t even imagine having over the course of her lifetime, and yet was merely disposable income to him.

  Molly sighed and snuggled farther into the bed, not ready to start the day yet as memories of her and Oliver reemerged. Mostly good ones. But when she’d told him about her job and he’d simply hugged her congratulations, she’d taken it as a sign that things with him weren’t meant to be, that maybe his reputation as a player had been true all along and she’d been another victim of a transient yacht-season romance. Regardless of what it had been, Molly had loved him fiercely, but she was nothing if not pragmatic so she’d taken the job and, ultimately, been the one to end the relationship. And what she’d known on some level back then, that she’d never truly fit into his world, was glaringly obvious to her now. She was a guest on this boat but it wasn’t hers, and this month might be a fantasy version of reality, but sooner or later she would, in fact, return to her actual reality.

  But until then she was going to enjoy every bit of the fantasy, because today they were setting sail and she was leaving her old life behind for a while.

  Rising from the bed, she hopped into a shower that had been set to heat the water to exactly one hundred degrees before heading to the engine room. She’d given it a thorough examination yesterday and she and Oliver had started the engine without actually going anywhere just so she could get a sense of things before they headed out this morning.

  Compared to the space satellites and aircraft she usually worked on, a motor yacht was somewhat less complicated, but she was responsible for essentially every moving part on the boat, from the kitchen stove to the complex fuel engine, and if the latter stopped working in the middle of the ocean they were screwed. So she didn’t intend to sleep on the job even if this trip was mostly a vacation.

  Satisfied that the engine room was in working order, she headed up to the kitchen to get some breakfast. She found Oliver already at the stove making eggs, the homey scent of toasted bread greeting her.

  “You’re cooking?” she asked, looking over his shoulder at the large skillet of fluffy scrambled eggs.

  “I’d use that word loosely,” he said wryly.

  This morning he was wearing a pair of white linen shorts and a turquoise polo shirt, a pair of reflective silver aviators tucked into the V of his collar. Golden-haired forearms held the wooden handle of a rubber spatula as he gently ran it through a pan of eggs. The flicker of desire at watching his muscles flex and the clean, expensive scent of him wasn’t surprising, but a little unwelcome. Sleeping with an ex on the heels of a breakup was a very terrible idea.

  “Better than me. I would have definitely burned those eggs by now. I go for hard-boiled—less chance of screwing it up.”

  Oliver shook his head at the depths of her cooking ineptitude. “You wanna grab the toast? I cut up some avocado, too.”

  “Ooh,” Molly said happily. “You know, I could really get used to starting my day this way. You might want to rethink it or you’ll be tied to the oven.”

  He flashed her one of those charming smiles, clear green eyes and straight white teeth with a little bit of humor, that should be trademarked as his. “I’ll cook you breakfast anytime, Molly. You just say the word.”

  Molly shook her head at the implication but couldn’t totally beat back the smile forming. Taking a few steps back from him, she opened the fridge. “Can I cut some fruit?”

  “Already done,” he told her, nodding to a bowl beside him on the stainless steel counter. Molly whistled, impressed, as she grabbed a couple pieces of cantaloupe from the bowl. Perking up, she caught his eyes. “Did you put something on this fruit?”

  “Just some lemon juice and sugar.”

  “It’s so good,” she mumbled inelegantly around the food in her mouth, digging in again for a piece of watermelon and then another. “You’re a freaking genius, Oliver.”

  He raised a gold eyebrow at her. “What are you even eating in your normal life that fruit salad is this much of a big deal to you?”

  Molly shrugged. “Mostly nutrition bars and a banana or something for breakfast. You know me, I keep it simple.”

  Oliver shook his head. “You’re barely living, Molly.”

  Laughing, Molly gave him a gentle knock on the shoulder, surprised by the lack of give. “Hey, I live plenty.”

  He looked skeptical. “Thank God I invited you on the boat or you’d never know how good a fruit salad is.”

  “Oh, give me a break,” she laughed. “Besides, I’m sure it’s
one of the many things you’ll introduce me to on this boat.” She’d been speaking to the luxury of the boat, but immediately regretted the words because his eyes darkened before he looked away. Yeah, there was already some sexual tension there, and the memories of what they’d done on a boat very similar to this one in the past weren’t buried far enough in her subconscious right now for her peace of mind. She knew what he was like in bed, inventive and intense, which coupled with this amazing breakfast made him pretty difficult to resist. “You know what I mean, being a guest above deck with all the glamorous people.”

  Oliver met her eyes, his still a little heated but the intensity banked. “I knew what you meant, Molly.” Then his eyes dropped down to her bare legs and back up to meet hers with a cheeky grin to ease the brewing tension. “Concerning the other, I’m sure we’ve both picked up some new tricks over the years we could introduce each other to.”

  Molly swallowed, struggling against the wave of heat flushing her skin. Not having a response, she popped a big piece of pineapple into her mouth, the juice leaking at the side of her mouth, and watched his eyes bore into hers as she licked it off. “Um,” Molly finally managed, wanting to get them back to equilibrium, “so avocado toast?”

  Oliver stared at her for a beat and then started laughing. His eyes were a sparkling green when they returned to hers. “Molly, I’m glad you’re here. Yes, avocado toast. Why don’t you quit poaching from the fruit salad and make yours how you’d like it. I chopped up some pico de gallo if you want to put that on top.”

  Molly nodded and went about making the toast, feeling uncomfortable and comfortable at the same time. Being around Oliver was easy. But the more she had to watch him move, cook, smile... Even with the scent of cooking eggs and the melting cheese he’d crumbled into the pan, it was already challenging.

  Her sex life with Max had been good, at least at the beginning. However, even before she’d caught him cheating, she’d been so distracted by work that at least a month or two had gone by without them having sex. Which meant that she was now even further into a serious dry spell with Oliver, who had appeared back in her life like basically a sex oasis in a desert.