The pilot nods, “Any time, Mr. Lancaster.”
Prince smiles at me, “Shall we?”
“Don’t tell me this is where we’re having dinner?”
“Surprise,” he chuckles. “It’s not too much, is it?” His sarcasm is good-natured.
I give him a good-natured smirk.
“McDonald’s was closed,” he jokes. “This was the only other option.”
“You’re too much,” I smile.
The wind whips across the helicopter deck and blows my little black dress up over my panties. My ass is totally hanging out and that pilot guy is getting a free show.
Prince grabs my dress and yanks it down before I have a chance to react. “You didn’t see anything, did you Nash?”
Nash grins, “No sir. Not a thing.”
I grumble, “We’re not eating outside, are we?”
“No,” Prince says. “This way.”
He leads me inside the yacht and down a fancy curving staircase with dark wood walls and a massive chandelier overhead. We go down two levels and walk along a carpeted hallway before emerging in an intimate dining room walled in by a semicircle of floor-to-ceiling glass. The recessed lights are dim enough that you can see the harbor lights in the distance.
“Wow!” I gasp. “The view is amazing!”
“It is,” Prince mutters.
I turn and see him staring at me.
“Shut up,” I laugh.
“You shut up,” he says like a pouty teenager.
I cackle at that. Prince definitely knows how to be funny when he wants.
“Have a seat.” He pulls out a chair from the little table for two.
I drop into the seat and he pushes me up to the table before sitting next to me.
A waiter wearing white gloves and a tux walks in with a bottle of wine and holds the bottle out like he’s presenting it to Prince. The waiter says, “Sixty-four Chateau Lafite Rothschild, as you requested, sir.”
“Very good,” Prince nods.
The waiter makes an elaborate show of cutting the cap and popping the cork, which he holds under Prince’s nose.
Prince sniffs and nods.
“Would the lady care to give her approval?” the waiter asks, looking at me.
“Who, me?” I giggle.
Prince nods.
“Sure, I guess. I’ll sniff it.”
The waiter frowns.
“Should I not have said sniff?” I ask.
“It’s fine,” Prince chuckles.
The waiter circles the table and wafts the cork under my nose.
“What am I sniffing for?”
“Cork taint,” Prince says.
“What’s that again?”
“You’ll know,” Prince says.
“Erm, I guess it’s fine? Like I said, I’m not sure what I’m smelling for.”
“Does it smell like year-old gym socks or a serial killer’s basement?”
“No,” I laugh. “It smells like wine.”
“Then it’s fine.”
“Very good, sir,” the waiter says and pours a half inch for Prince.
He swirls the dark red wine in the glass, inhaling before taking a sip, which he swishes around before swallowing. “Excellent.”
“Very good, sir.” The waiter pours glasses for me then Prince before stepping back into the shadows where he stands holding the bottle.
Prince lifts his glass. “What should we toast?”
“Erm, is it cool neither of us are old enough to drink?”
“It’s fine,” Prince says. “We’re over international waters.”
“We are?”
He leans close and whispers, “Actually, no. We’re too close to shore. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Okay then,” I smile.
“Make a toast, my fair Marianne.”
I raise my glass, “Um, okay. Here’s to us both acing our finals.”
“You have to toast something better than that,” he chuckles.
“What?! If I don’t ace my finals, I don’t know if I’ll manage a 3.5 GPA this term. If I don’t, it’s back to the hoosegow for me. You know about that, right?”
“I do. I’ll make sure it never happens.”
“What, are you going to tell Ms. Skelter to change my grades?”
“If it comes to that,” he says sincerely.
I almost protest, almost tell him he can’t go around pulling strings for me every time I have the littlest problem, then I realize how I got to Castle Hill in the first place. Running away from Dwight and Shayla. Going to juvi. Fighting Queen LaQueefa. Getting charged with attempted murder because she was trying to kill me. You know what? Screw it. Let Prince rig the system for me. It’s already rigged me plenty.
Then I find myself thinking about Mimi and all the other work-study kids I’ve gotten to know since getting here. Like me, they’re good people who work their asses off every day with the guillotine of their GPAs hanging over their heads. Like me, most of them weren’t doing anything too terribly bad when they got arrested. I know from talking to them. It’s petty stuff. The only real crime any of us committed was having the bad luck of being born with rusty spoons in our mouths instead of silver or gold or platinum or whatever the Fundy kids are born with.
Prince says, “Are we toasting honestly earned good grades then?”
“What if someone else doesn’t make a 3.5 at the end of the semester? I mean other work-study kids. What if they don’t make a 3.5?”
“Do you have someone specific in mind?”
“How about all of them?”
“All?”
“Yeah. All. Do you have any idea how hard it is to work twenty hours a week doing manual labor, and take AP classes, and keep your grades up?”
“I don’t.”
“Can you do it? Help any work-study kids not get kicked out? Not just me?”
He looks around thoughtfully. “I suppose so. I mean, if they haven’t done anything criminal, if it’s just a matter of their GPA slipping a few tenths of a point, sure, why not? I can talk to Ms. Skelter if it comes to that.”
“For everyone?”
“Yes, everyone.”
“I’ll toast to that,” I grin.
“To GPAs,” Prince says, raising his glass. “May they never lead to the expulsion of another work-study kid.”
“Yeah.” I clink his glass and sip my wine.
He does too. “What do you think?”
“I hope you never have to do it, but knowing you can makes me feel a lot better. For me, for Mimi, for every work-study kid.”
“I meant the wine,” he says.
“Oh, uh,” I take another sip and grimace, “It tastes like wine?”
The waiter in the shadows gasps.
Prince arches an eyebrow.
“Sorry!” I laugh, glancing at the waiter. “I don’t know wine! I’m sure it’s really good! It’s the best I’ve ever had! Puts grape juice to shame!”
“I should hope so!” the waiter scoffs. “Sorry, sir. I meant no offense.”
“No worries,” Prince chuckles. “It’s excellent, Jules. Better than that sixty-two you gave me last time.”
“Nothing is better than the sixty-two!” Jules says, offended.
“I beg to differ,” Prince grins. “The finish was a trifle too spicy.”
“There is no such thing!” Jules grumbles humorously.
Prince says to me in a low voice that Jules can obviously hear, “We’ve been arguing about wine ever since I started drinking it.”
“When was that?” I ask.
“When I was eleven? Twelve? Something like that.”
“He’s been your waiter since you were twelve?” I whisper.
“Longer than that. Jules, how long have you been our sommelier?”
“Twenty-seven wonderful years, sir,” Jules says proudly.
“Wow,” I say. “That’s a long time.”
“He’s family,” Prince says casually.
“Thank you, sir,” Jules says.
/> “Pour yourself a glass, why don’t you, Jules?” Prince suggests over his shoulder.
“Never, sir. The wine is yours and the lady’s to enjoy.”
I say, “Have a glass, Jules. Then you can argue with Prince about the finish or whatever.”
“I couldn’t,” Jules chuckles from the shadows.
“Pour one for yourself,” Prince says.
“If you insist, sir.”
“I insist.”
There’s some commotion while Jules fetches another wine glass and pours himself a half glass. He and Prince then argue for five minutes about how good the ’64 is in comparison to the ’62. I’m smiling the entire time, impressed that Prince doesn’t consider himself above Jules. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to have a family wine guy for my entire life, but if I did, I’d treat him like an uncle. How could you not?
Eventually, appetizers, soup, salad, and the entrees arrive. Everything is of course seafood, but it isn’t fishy. It’s buttery and melt-in-your-mouth deliciousness. I can’t describe it, but it certainly isn’t fish sticks, which is the only seafood I’ve ever had before this.
Dessert is chocolate cake, but not just any chocolate cake. There’s nine layers with nine kinds of chocolate from light to dark, from the creamy frosting to fudge sauce to the crisp drizzle lines dried to the plate.
I eat it all. When you work as much as us work-study kids, you’re always hungry.
“That was so good,” I sigh, sitting back in my chair. “I’m not even full.”
“Do you want seconds?”
“Oh, no. I’m good. It’s already almost too much. I just meant I didn’t stuff myself. Everything was so good! I couldn’t stop myself!”
“I’m glad you liked it,” Prince chuckles. “Would you care for a walk around the deck?”
“If it’s not too windy,” I say, thinking of the gust that nearly blew my dress off earlier.
“I think the wind has died down.”
The main deck of the yacht is large enough for actual strolling. We do a few laps and end up at the back, which Prince says is the stern, and we lean on the railing looking at the twinkling harbor lights in the distance.
“It’s so nice out here,” I sigh.
“Whenever I need to relax and get away from it all, I always come out here.”
“I can imagine.”
He reaches into his suit jacket and pulls out a smart phone. “I got you something.”
“A phone? We’re not allowed to have them, you know.”
“I know. It’s not that,” he says. His phone screen flashes an unlocking padlock.
“How’d that happen? I always have to enter my password. You didn’t even touch the screen.”
“Facial recognition,” he says, then thumbs around the screen and pulls up some photos. “Check this out.” He hands me the phone.
“What am I looking at?” I swipe through a series of photos of villagers obviously in a developing country. In each one, they’re standing around this blue jug thing that stands in the dirt in front of a variety of different broken-down buildings, each jug in a different place with an entirely different set of people and foliage in the background. Two things are the same in each photo. One is the blue jug. Each one has a bunch of spouts with pull handles like on a water cooler and people are pouring glasses of water from it. The other thing the same is there’s always someone wearing a blue T-shirt with a logo for Water Of Life somewhere on the shirt.
Prince says, “Remember you asked me to donate the money from my fresh flowers for clean water?”
“To Save the Children?” I say with excitement.
“I found another non-profit that only does clean water called Water Of Life. That’s their specialty and they have great ratings. They go around the globe donating water purifiers to communities in need. The purifiers are called LifeStraws and they’re World Health Organization approved, some of the best on the market.”
I’m still swiping through photos, each one unique. “How many did you buy?”
“A hundred.”
“What did that cost?” I gawk.
“Less than a year’s worth of fresh flowers, though I think training was extra.”
“Training?”
“You need to pay people from the non-profit to transport the purifier to the village and teach them how to use it properly.”
“You paid for that too?”
“What’s the point of giving them a purifier if they don’t know how to use it?”
“Shut up,” I laugh.
“They say the filters make enough water for a hundred people for three to five years. I already paid to make sure someone changes them out when the times comes.”
My jaw drops when I get to the last photo.
Prince is in it, he’s wearing a Water Of Life T-shirt and he’s drinking a glass of clean water standing in front of a bunch of villagers.
“Is that you?” I gasp.
“Yeah,” he nods. “I only had time to fly out and see one village. You know how busy school is.”
“Is that where you went a couple weekends ago?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Oh, I,” I trail off, tittering.
“What?”
“It’s stupid.”
“Tell me.”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Of course I do.”
“This is going to sound really insecure,” I groan and slouch pathetically. “I thought you were in Fiji surfing or whatever.” By whatever, I mean hooking up with every gorgeous girl who was interested, which with his looks, is all of them.
“Why is that insecure? Big wave surfing is dangerous. People do get killed.”
“Yeah, that,” I smile guiltily. I’m so not telling him what I was really thinking.
“Not to worry,” he grins. “I was just helping set up that water purifier in Honduras.”
“Is that where you were?”
“Now that place is dangerous. Everyone on the trip had to dress down so we didn’t attract too much attention. Even the security detail.”
“Security detail?!”
“Of course,” he snorts. “I’m not going to Central America without armed guards. Do you know how many people get kidnapped abroad? Especially rich people?”
“Don’t tell me that!” I slap his arm. “Now you’re worrying me!”
“Don’t. I’m right here. Didn’t get kidnapped,” he grins confidently and puts his arm around my shoulder and pulls me close.
What a perfect evening. And it’s just getting started.
He says, “We should probably be getting back.”
“What?!”
“You said you have to work tomorrow. I don’t want to keep you up too late.”
“Oh, right,” I say, hiding my immense disappointment. We haven’t even kissed yet! After the water purifier thing, I was thinking I’d let him do more than kiss me if he wanted. I mean, we’re on an effing yacht! Who doesn’t want to sleep on a yacht?! And other things that aren’t sleeping?
He checks his Bugatti watch. “If we leave now, we’ll be back at the penthouse before midnight, as promised.”
I’m dumbfounded. Most guys I’ve known, if they flew you to their yacht in a helicopter and bought a hundred water purifiers for villagers for you, and hand delivered them, they would expect a lifetime of blowjobs and then some. Prince isn’t even asking for a kiss! Can you say perfect gentleman?
I whine, “Can’t we stay a few more minutes?” So we can at least kiss like crazy for an hour? I don’t say that.
“Nash has to fly our helicopter somewhere tomorrow morning for a family thing. He needs to rest up for that. Pilots need their beauty sleep too,” he winks.
“Oh, right.”
Prince smiles, “Besides, we wouldn’t want the helicopter turning into a pumpkin while we’re in the air over the water, would we?”
“No,” I say plainly disappointed but not wanting anything as drastic as that to happen. Then a
gain, if the helicopter did turn into a giant pumpkin and fall out of the air and land in the water with us inside, me and Prince could carve it out and make a boat out of it and paddle to a dessert island. Yes, Dessert Island, a storybook island made of every kind of dessert you can imagine, including nine-layer chocolate cake mountains with chocolate waterfalls, and me and Prince would live there forever. Or we could just fly his helicopter back to the academy so I can scrub floors and toilets tomorrow. Sigh.
He says, “We should go.”
“If we must,” I mumble.
Shortly after midnight, I’m lying alone in the guest bedroom, completely frustrated. That settles it. If Prince wants to sleep with me after the winter formal, I’m letting him. If he doesn’t ask, I’ll offer.
Stupid work-study work!
Ruined a perfectly good romantic evening on a yacht!
Chapter 39
The penthouse is empty Saturday when I finish my work-study duties at noon. Hungry and not wanting to eat alone, I change out of my French maid outfit into my street clothes. Leather jacket, band shirt, jeans, Docs. So far, nobody has told me I can’t dress down on weekends, so I’m always doing it.
I head to the Convent to find Mimi and see if she’s gone to eat yet. If she has, I’ll look for her in the Cave. When I step out of the West Wing’s elevator and cross the Palace quadrangle, I see Rob in his navy coveralls wheeling a mop bucket along near the wall.
I so don’t want to see him. I speed up my walk and ignore him.
Squeaking wheels speed up and aim for me.
Squeaka, squeaka, squeaka!
I drop my walk into second gear and crank the throttle on my legs, speeding toward the exit doors that lead out of the Palace proper and into campus.
“Mary, wait!” Rob calls out. There’s a clack which I assume is his mop stick hitting the ground, then boots thudding, him jogging after me.
I know how fast Rob can run. I saw it the night we met. Werewolf fast. I groan and slow to a stop just inside the Palace’s exit doors.
“What?” I grumble.
“I need to show you something,” he says, his voice the same husky baritone that sang for me when he was onstage with Outlaw Merriment on Thanksgiving.
“Show it,” I say tersely.
“It’s not here. I need to take you someplace.”
“Let me guess. The lacrosse bleachers. I’ve seen those.”
Rich Boys vs. Poor Boys (The Cruel Kings of Castle Hill Academy, Book 1) by Devon Hartford kd103 Page 35