Chapter 2
Quinn Hayworth stepped off the RightPriceTek superyacht and gave the tall, triangular hotel the kind of appreciative down-up gaze he usually reserved for a particularly hot woman. He’d stayed in some damn gorgeous hotels on some damn gorgeous islands, but the Faraway Resort was blowing them all out of the crystal clear water.
Awesome. He wasn’t sold on whether RightPriceTek was worth the investment, but at least this retreat promised to be fun. He’d sit through whatever pitch they had and write whatever check they wanted as long as he could spend a week getting laid, getting drunk, and getting high. He was planning to do more of that in Jamaica before heading off to meet friends in Ibiza, though those stops didn’t require him to listen to sales pitches.
Eh, whatever. It was a few meetings, an investment, and hopefully the thrill of a fat return. If not, well, it wasn’t like he was out much money, and he still had the week of sex and drinking to look forward to, plus the rest of his trip. Could be worse.
He strolled down the marina, which was crowded with people. Staff wrangled luggage through throngs of new arrivals and their entourages. Quinn never quite understood why people needed that much stuff or staff for a weeklong vacation. His own mother had always packed like she was going away for a year or two, and even when it was just a weekend somewhere, she never went anywhere without a whole entourage of employees. That was way too much hassle as far as he was concerned.
Almost everyone coming to the resort right now seemed to be traveling with the same philosophy as his mother, though; they were all followed by parades of security, advisors, assistants, and God knew what else. Quinn hated that shit. He sometimes took a bodyguard with him if he went to a casino. Even that was only because he liked to look the part of the high roller, and the expensive suits, flashy jewelry, and high performance sports car could make him a target for robbery. So, fine, he’d bring along some muscle. Plus the bodyguard added to the whole aesthetic of someone worth robbing, so he could live with it.
The rest of the time, though? Fuck that. He didn’t like someone following him around, and he couldn’t think of anything he’d need an actual person trotting alongside him to do. Schedule? There was an app for that. Security? Overkill unless someone was actually threatening him. Making travel arrangements and shit like that? Not exactly time-consuming, and besides, he liked the challenge of finagling good deals on airfare even when he could afford to buy the whole damn airline.
He’d traveled light as always, and his pair of medium-sized suitcases were safely in the hands of some resort employees. He had his laptop case slung over his shoulder as he continued past the crowd toward the grand courtyard of the towering hotel. There, a sign pointed him toward the restaurant and bar, and why yes, a drink did sound good.
On his way, he looked around at the other people arriving. There were some familiar faces, which he’d expected. It was no secret that RightPriceTek was wooing some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world to fund their newest venture, so he’d fully expected to see some of the billionaires who’d rubbed elbows with his parents when they were still alive.
Seeing their faces now was no surprise, but it did make Quinn suppress an irritated groan. Some of these assholes were insufferable. Alan Robinson and Dan Woolman, men who’d made their fortunes in the coal and petroleum industries, respectively, were pompous windbags who even Quinn’s father had only been able to handle in small doses. That said a lot .
“My assistant has detailed instructions for you,” a familiar female voice snapped at someone. “Make sure everything is arranged in my suite precisely the way I’ve asked.”
Quinn turned toward the voice, and he did a double take as a tall, elegant woman in a wide straw hat strode down the marina in high heels. Holy shit— Elena Simmons was here? But… hadn’t he heard someone saying Charlie Simmons was flying in tonight? They’d both be here?
Whoa. Either they’d miraculously reconciled after the messiest and most expensive divorce of the century, or things were going to get awkward in a hurry.
“Cool.” Quinn chuckled to himself as he continued toward the bar. “I love fireworks.”
The restaurant was starting to fill up, but no one was sitting at the bar yet. Quinn put his laptop case on one barstool and sat in another, and in under a minute, he had a double whiskey on the rocks. The voyage had left him a little seasick, and the cold liquid soothed the lingering nausea. A ginger ale might have been better, but he’d already had about forty of those on the boat, and just thinking about the taste made him want to heave more than the gently rolling waves had. Whiskey it was. If this retreat involved constant schmoozing with some of the assholes who usually came to shit like this, he might have to start ordering by the bottle, but a double would do for now.
From the bar, he had a panoramic view of the courtyard in front of the lobby, as well as the marina. Between people disembarking yachts and the cars pulling in from—he thought he’d heard someone say—the airstrip elsewhere on the island, he could see everyone coming and going.
And Lord, considering this was only supposed to be a meeting for potential investors, it was going to be a who’s who event. Quinn would know; he’d been to more of those than he could count.
Art Keller, president and CEO of pharmaceutical giant Keller & Boggs, had just stepped out of a stretched Land Rover. Naturally, his phone was pressed to his ear while at least half a dozen people tried to talk to him all at once. He waved them away and barked something at whoever was on the phone.
Quinn rolled his eyes. He’d met Art at a couple of charity poker tournaments, and the guy was a pill-popping dickhole. Quinn didn’t even know what the pills were, only that he always saw Art throwing them back and chasing them with highballs when he didn’t think anyone was looking. Dude could drink too, and when he drank, he got loud .
Please tell me his suite is on another floor this time .
Art and his entourage went into the hotel, and moments later, another Land Rover pulled up. This time, two familiar faces emerged. Lynnette Baldwin was an heiress who’d become a political lobbyist. She was well-known for greasing the palms of politicians at the behest of numerous organizations in multiple industries. Quinn had met her several times when she’d been helping his father persuade Congress to vote against policies he didn’t like.
The man walking with her now had inherited his dad’s position on top of a megastore chain that was spreading from coast to coast faster than a flu outbreak. The family name was Valentine, that much Quinn knew, but hell if he could remember the guy’s name.
Shortly after they’d cleared out, Paul O’Connor arrived with a handful of assistants and personal security. Quinn rolled his eyes. Paul was the kind of person who made Quinn understand why his mother had always sneered at “new money.” The jackass was an AI techbro whose generative AI software had exploded onto the market in the last couple of years. In a matter of months, he’d gone from broke college dropout to owning five— five —Koenigsegg cars, and he never missed an opportunity to let people know that a three million dollar car was nothing to him now.
Quinn had met him twice, and both encounters had left him wishing he could carve out the piece of his brain responsible for holding on to that memory. The man may have come from humble beginnings, but there was nothing humble about him now.
And he, like Charlie Simmons and Art Keller, was here this week. Great.
Quinn whistled and picked up his drink. RightPriceTek really had gone looking for the wealthiest of the wealthy in their search for investors. Which made sense, given their ambitious plans for the future. They’d been a little vague about how they intended to accomplish those plans—revolutionizing everything from commercial and industrial to medical processes to be more efficient and profitable, eliminating everything from pollution to poverty—but they’d insisted that more details would be revealed to those willing to consider substantial investments. By the end of this week, according to the invitation, they would all have enough information to decide whether or not an investment in RightPriceTek would be worthwhile.
And even if you decide not to invest, you’ll still have a week to enjoy our resort’s exclusive luxury amenities—on us!
Well, shit. Twist his arm.
Not that he’d have needed his arm twisted anyway. Quinn was on a losing streak that refused to break. One investment after another had played out in the worst possible ways, leaving him with nothing to show for massive amounts of money he’d poured into promising startups. At this point, he was sitting at the blackjack table with a shrinking stack of chips, betting high because it was the only way to win big, but every hand was bust after bust after bust.
He was hardly hurting for money—what he’d inherited from his parents would last him until he was dead—but he didn’t like losing. It fucked with his head and made him depressed, and it made him that much more determined to win. Lately, he’d been losing big and betting bigger, and sooner or later, something would hit. He needed a win. He needed to break this streak.
No pressure, RightPriceTek.
He took a deep swallow of whiskey and kept watching the people arriving at the resort, security detail and entourages in tow. He suspected a lot of these assholes had entourages for the same reason he took a bodyguard to the casino. Not the high-risk-for-robbery part—the aesthetic. Nothing made someone feel important like a flock of armed grunts on their heels.
Right then, a woman strode into the hotel lobby. It took a moment for her face to register, but when it did, he recognized Kit Mason of chemical and pesticide fame—along with, predictably, her army of employees. Seriously, how many people did one person need for a weeklong stay at a resort?
Bringing his glass up for another drink, he rolled his eyes.
“Quinn Hayworth?” A familiar Texas twang turned his head just as Kyle Aimes appeared beside him, hand extended and a smarmy non-smile on his face. “Why am I not surprised to see you here, gambling man?”
“You really think I’d miss an opportunity like this?” Quinn shook Kyle’s hand. “It must be worth it if a stingy son of a bitch like you showed up.”
Kyle chuckled, and paused to flag down a bartender before turning to Quinn again. “I’m not stingy, my friend. I’m cautious.”
“Uh-huh. Well, you know what they say.” Quinn raised his glass. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
“Right.” Kyle smirked. “The corollary is nothing ventured, nothing lost to stupid decisions and excessive optimism.”
“Stupid decisions?” Quinn put a hand to his chest. “That hurts, man. That really hurts.” He meant it as a joke, but it did kind of sting, given his ever-lengthening losing streak.
Kyle clapped his shoulder. “We’ll chalk it up to excessive optimism, then.”
Quinn just laughed. He’d known Kyle for years, though he wouldn’t exactly call them friends, and he maintained that Kyle was a coward when it came to investments. On the other hand, Kyle didn’t need to make investments, risky or otherwise. Thanks to an empire of oil wells across the Southwest, that fucker had been richer than God long before he’d ever been shot out of his daddy’s ball sac.
And to be fair, it wasn’t like Quinn had crawled up from rags to riches. His grandparents had gotten rich through real estate and property development, and his parents had continued the tradition. Quinn found that whole industry boring as hell unless he was the one buying. He preferred the excitement of making a bet and seeing it pay off.
Vegas, Reno, Monte Carlo—those were fun for an evening or two, but even they got boring before long. He could never find tables that let him play the stakes that got his blood pumping.
That was why most of his gambling these days involved startup investments. Investing was a long game. Sometimes it was months or even years before he knew if it was win, lose, or push. But the payouts? The mix of fear and excitement while he waited to see how the chips were going to fall? That was the kind of thrill he lived for.
A startup like RightPriceTek was an opportunity his gambling heart couldn’t resist. Big promises, enormous risk, and a potentially astronomical payout. And what could he say? They had style. Seven days on a tropical island in a luxury hotel, having his ass kissed by the company masterminds? Hell, he’d already made up his mind to invest— give me a win, damn it, give me a win —but if this was how they won people over, and it didn’t turn into something annoying like a timeshare sales pitch, then he didn’t mind playing a little hard to get.
He turned to Kyle, who had just acquired a draft beer. “So what do you think?” He nodded toward the hotel. “Of RightPriceTek?”
“Well.” Kyle chuckled into his glass. “They sure ask nicely. Seems only polite to listen to the sales pitch.”
Quinn laughed. “I mean, the company. You think you’ll invest?”
“Don’t know yet.” Kyle sipped his beer and put the glass back down. “Sounds like an awful lot of pie in the sky to me.”
“Yeah?”
“Well yeah. The way they talk, you’d think they were gonna singlehandedly save the world or trigger a second Industrial Revolution. Now while I certainly appreciate the enthusiasm, I’m gonna need to see more than hats and boots before I call these fellas cowboys.”
“Hear, hear.” Quinn drained his glass and flagged down the bartender.
Kyle looked over his shoulder toward the beach. “Let’s just hope the weather holds out.”
“The—” Quinn eyed him. He waved a hand the clear blue sky, which didn’t have a single cloud anywhere in sight. “Have you looked out there lately?”
“It’s pretty now, but that can change in a hurry.” Kyle faced him, expression serious. “Didn’t you hear about that yacht that got caught up in a storm a while back? Came out of fucking nowhere—caught all them storm predictors completely by surprise. And that boat?” He shook his head. “They never even found the debris, never mind any bodies.”
Quinn sobered. “Of course I heard about it. We had a family friend onboard.”
Kyle stiffened. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Quinn acknowledged it with a nod and a quiet grunt. “Last I heard, the captain of the boat should’ve known there was a storm coming and gone the other way. Hurricanes and shit don’t just spin up out of nowhere.”
“Storms can, though. And they do.”
Quinn was skeptical. There had to have been some indication that a storm like that was going to develop. He wasn’t going to argue with Kyle, though, so he just said, “Well, good thing we’re not out on a boat, then. If there’s a storm, we’ll be safer here than on the water.”
Kyle shuddered. “I think I might skip all the excursions out on the water. They’re probably perfectly fine, but after what happened…”
Normally, Quinn would seize the opportunity to give Kyle hell for always erring on the side of caution. But he had to admit, he wasn’t so thrilled about getting too far from shore right now. Even the boat ride here today from St. Martin had been unnerving. Bob Stevens’s memorial service hadn’t been all that long ago, and the thought of being out on a boat where he couldn’t see land had made Quinn a little uneasy. In fact he was already seriously considering hitching a ride home on someone’s private jet.
So maybe he’d stick to dry land too.
There were, after all, worse things in life than beaches, bars, and bikini-clad women.