Chapter Seven Lucky
Chapter Seven
Lucky
Captain Carl reached over and took the shirt out of my hands. “What happened?”
It would be so easy to throw Emilie under the bus. She was the one responsible, after all. But when I saw the stricken look on her face, I remembered what the captain always told us—the buck stopped with me. I was her department head and it was my job to train her.
If she didn’t listen, unfortunately, that was on me as well.
“That’s my fault. I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll order you a new one.”
He gave me a disapproving look, one saying that I had let him down.
My anxiety spiked, jangling my nerves, and I started envisioning exactly what he would say when he fired me, as he was so obviously going to do now.
But all he said was, “Let me know when the new one arrives.”
I let out a sigh of relief. “I will. Thank you. And it won’t happen again.”
The captain nodded and headed toward the galley.
Emilie said, “I so owe you one.”
“Just be sure to always check the pockets from now on,” I reminded her. My adrenaline began to dissipate, causing my limbs to feel hollow but jittery. I tried to focus on some deep breathing so that I could calm down.
It didn’t work well but I still held out hope that someday I’d become a breathing expert and would be able to prevent myself from getting so wound up and upset.
“I will,” she promised. “I will always check the pockets. And I’ll get some more laundry going.”
Hopefully fear of her uncle would help get Emilie in line. It also occurred to me that I had something I could hold over her head now. While I didn’t know all the details of why she had joined the Mio Tesoro , I knew she was worried her family would cut her off financially. Working for Captain Carl was her last chance.
I’d never much liked rich people but technically Emilie was poor now so I could make an exception.
I dug through the piles of clean laundry on the countertops until I found Hunter’s handkerchief. I needed to return it to him.
Even though part of me was urging me to keep it as some kind of weird souvenir.
That made it more imperative for me to give it back.
The few hours we had left flew by in a haze of cleaning and prepping. A new shirt for the captain arrived at the dock. There was going to be a hefty surcharge but I was grateful it had arrived. As soon as I gave it to him, he radioed the rest of the crew to tell everyone to change into our whites, or our formal white dress uniform shirts. The men would put on dark slacks and the women would wear black skorts.
I stopped by Emilie’s room to tell her that I needed her to prepare a tray of champagne for the Carmines and their guests. Still eager to please after this morning’s incident, she assured me she would take care of it.
When I got to my own cabin, I realized that I needed to shave my legs. My dark hair grew so quickly and was very noticeable against my fair skin. I went into the bathroom and grabbed a razor and shaving cream and put my leg into the sink.
I lathered up my left leg and had shaved about half of it when the bathroom door suddenly swung open, nearly hitting me.
Hunter stood there and his gaze quickly settled on my leg, following the line from ankle to knee.
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. I didn’t realize you were in here.”
That tension was back, the one that made me feel like the air around us was electrified and I was waiting for the moment I would get zapped. “I should have locked it.”
He continued to look at my leg and then shook his head, as if remembering himself. “Right. Sorry.”
Then he closed the door.
I stood there with my razor pointed up in the air. Had that just happened? There was no mistaking where his eyes had lingered. But had that just been from his surprise at finding me that way? He saw my legs all the time. Our skorts were very short.
Why would this be any different?
There didn’t seem to be any other alternative but to chalk it up to my heated imagination. I couldn’t let myself get caught up in such flights of fancy, like that Hunter had been overcome by his lust at the mere sight of my half-shaved leg and was doing all he could to restrain himself.
Ridiculous.
When I finished up and came out into the cabin, he was gone. I noted that his bed had been made, while my covers were still wadded up at the foot of my bunk, like always. I quickly changed my uniform top and grabbed a scrunchie for my hair.
I had taken a bit longer to get ready than I’d anticipated and had to hurry out to the deck to welcome our guests. I ran past Emilie, who was at the bar in the main salon getting the champagne flutes ready. I was pleased that she was doing what I’d asked her to do.
When I got onto the deck, I went to stand in the line that had already formed. Hunter had been between Pieter and Kai but he came over to stand right next to me.
My heart beat rapidly in response. There was nothing preventing him from being next to me other than the exterior crew usually stood together, as did the interior. There wasn’t a rule I could specifically point to and tell him to go back to his fellow deckhands.
Plus, I liked having him next to me.
“You have more stripes than I do,” he said, looking at my shoulders.
“I outrank you,” I told him.
“I’m not sure how my fragile masculine ego feels about that.”
He was teasing and again I found a smile popping up. “I have a feeling that it will survive.”
“I don’t know. I may not recover.”
I would happily play nurse, my overeager hormones said, and I was so glad I didn’t say the words out loud. “I think you’d find a way.”
“That’s true. I do like a bossy woman.”
Flirting? Statement of fact? There was no way to be sure. I took the scrunchie off my wrist and gathered it around my hair. I couldn’t see my reflection but I knew how bad it looked, especially in comparison to Georgia. She looked stylish and cute with her low ponytail while I resembled ...
“It must be nice to put your hair in a ponytail and not look like a founding father,” I grumbled.
Hunter raised his eyebrows at me. “You do not look like a founding father.”
“I know that I do.”
He leaned his head in slightly. “I’d pledge allegiance to you.”
Okay, that was definitely flirting, right? It had been so very long I could no longer tell. I probably shouldn’t automatically assume that nice compliments had flirtatious overtones.
“I’m not a flag,” I responded, trying to quash my own hopes. “Or a country.”
He shrugged. “I think Lucksylvania sounds like a wonderful place to visit.”
I tugged on my hair in response, grimacing. I was not going to answer about my fervent desire to spend my next vacation in Hunternesia.
“Why do you do your hair that way if you don’t like it?” he asked.
“Protocol for the stews.”
“Aren’t you the chief stew now? Can’t you change it?”
Huh. I absolutely could change things. That had been Marika’s rule. “You’re right.”
I took the scrunchie out and pulled my hair up high and immediately felt better.
I’d been so worried about the responsibilities of my new job that I’d forgotten about some of the perks beyond just the money.
The universe gave me approximately half a second to enjoy that realization before bringing it all crashing down.
Emilie walked onto the deck and immediately dropped the tray of full champagne flutes. There was a long moment of shocked silence and then I immediately started calling out directions.
“Georgia, go grab a container to put these shards in. Thomas, we’re going to need rags.” Did champagne stain teak? I couldn’t remember. “Maybe the spot cleaner, too. Emilie, go back inside and get another tray ready. The guests will be here soon.”
Everybody sprang into action and I bent down and started picking up shards of glass. The one thing I had going for me right now was that Captain Carl hadn’t come down yet. This would displease him greatly.
Hunter was next to me, helping me gather the glass. I briefly noticed just how large and strong his hands were.
“What do you need from me?” he asked.
“To keep doing what you’re doing.”
“You have a cool head in a crisis,” he said in an admiring tone.
“On the outside, but internally I’m panicking and considering every possible way things could go wrong. Like a guest stepping onto a shard we missed with their bare foot and bleeding all over the deck which would not be good for the guest or the wood and then what if the wound is bad and they sue us or worse, don’t leave a tip, and then all my dreams go poof and the captain fires me and ...” I let my voice trail off, exhausted by my own fears.
“Have you tried not overthinking everything?”
He was teasing me but I answered him seriously. “I have anxiety. I don’t have any other kind of thinking available to me.”
“My therapist would say to use a positive affirmation to stave off negative thoughts.”
Hunter didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would see a therapist, even though I knew that wasn’t a fair judgment to make. People had a lot more going on under the surface than they let the rest of the world see.
He’d already told me that he’d lost his sister—I didn’t know what other kind of trauma he might have dealt with.
“Something positive?” I asked. “Well, it could have been worse. It could have been red wine.”
“That’s not quite what either I or my therapist had in mind.”
Georgia returned then and helped us pick up the rest of the pieces. She also brought out cleaning putty, which we could use to make sure we hadn’t missed any tiny bits of glass.
We quickly got everything dried and cleaned and swept up. I heard Captain Carl’s footsteps heading toward us. Georgia stowed all our supplies under the outdoor bar and lined up next to me.
Emilie walked out with the tray of champagne flutes just as the captain arrived. I saw that she was being careful to use her fingers against the bottoms of the flutes to make sure she wouldn’t knock them over again.
The Carmines and their elderly guests arrived at the passerelle, the gangway that led from the dock to the yacht. Pieter had rushed down to instruct them to remove their shoes and place them in the basket we had put there for that purpose.
Hunter whispered to me, “That looks like heaven’s waiting room down there.”
Again I smiled, but when I realized that the captain was looking at me, I pressed my lips into a line. “Shh,” I said. “Just smile and nod. Our first charter is about to begin.”