Chapter Twenty-Three Lucky
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lucky
“Does the captain really need to see me?” Hunter asked when we entered the main salon.
“No. It looked like you were in danger.”
He shook his head. “You don’t have to keep rescuing me. I can take care of myself.”
“I don’t doubt that for a second,” I said. “But it’s better to keep you out of the way than to make you stay in a situation where you have to somehow extract yourself while also not offending the guests. Besides, it’s fun playing the white knight for once.”
He smiled at me, then handed me the bride’s dress. “Sasha wanted this to be put in the washing machine. She spilled something on it. Then she asked me to bring it back to her cabin when it’s done.”
Hmph. I bet she did. “This isn’t machine washable.”
“I’m guessing anything’s machine washable if you don’t care about it enough.”
“Unfortunately, we have to care. I’ll hand-wash it and figure out how to get the red wine out without ruining the dress.” I might have seen this as a fun challenge and not just aggravating if the dress had belonged to anyone else.
“You can radio me when you’re finished with it and I’ll bring it to her.”
Nope. “Let me handle this,” I said.
He gave me a half smile. “Are you still in white-knight mode?”
I nodded. I was. He deserved to be protected from the ravenous horde upstairs. “Unless you want to go back out there and see what they have in store for you,” I said.
The look of panic on his face made me laugh. “No, thank you.”
“All those wealthy women? Does this mean you aren’t a fortune Hunter?”
“Lucky! That was puntastic.”
We couldn’t just stand here grinning at each other. This dress needed to be cleaned and I needed to stop awkwardly flirting, so I headed to the laundry room. Instead of going back to whatever he’d been doing before, he followed me. When we arrived I started pulling supplies to clean the dress and get the stain out.
There was a crashing sound and Thomas calmly called out, “Lucky? The guests have gone aggro and are slapping each other around. They’ve knocked the centerpieces off the table.”
Had they broken anything? I hoped not. “Georgia?”
“On it!” she called back.
She would be able to sort this out and maybe even convince them to go to their cabins and sleep it off. Cabins that I hoped Emilie had finally finished cleaning.
“Can you imagine spending a quarter of a million dollars just to fight with your best friends for a week straight?” I asked.
“I cannot,” Hunter said, jumping up onto the counter and watching me work. The buttons on his polo shirt strained, as if they could barely contain the muscles underneath. “So what else is going on? Besides the guests being terrible? It seems like something is bothering you.”
Other than the fact that I wanted him to shut the laundry room door, throw me up onto the counter, and kiss me senseless? I had to rack my brain for a second to remember the other reasons why I was in a not-great mood. “Oh. Emilie is up to her old tricks again. Spending all her time on her phone and not cleaning the guest cabins.”
“I’ve seen how much extra time you’ve had to spend following behind her to make sure things are done right.”
He paid close enough attention to me to realize that? I wasn’t sure how to take what he’d said.
“You shouldn’t have to be doing practically everything by yourself,” he added. “You should be able to delegate. I know you don’t like doing that because of how independent you are.”
That was true. “Georgia’s been a big help.”
“Do you have the power to fire Emilie?”
I briefly let myself fantasize about what it would be like if I did. “Only the captain can fire people. Chief stews can make recommendations but he has all the authority. They’re family, so I can’t replace her. I’m supposed to be helping rehabilitate her.”
“She doesn’t seem to want to be rehabilitated.” Then, with a shake of his head, he said, “I don’t like it when people take advantage of you.”
I wouldn’t mind if you took advantage of me. I pressed my lips together so that those words wouldn’t come out accidentally.
Despite the fact that all the washing machines and dryers were running, we heard yelling in the hallway. I stuck my head out of the laundry room and heard the guests screaming at each other. Thomas and Kai had gone upstairs to deal with it. Hopefully they’d escort everyone to their cabins.
Good. Maybe they’d finally fall asleep. Just as I was headed back into the room, Hunter came bounding out to see what was going on and I nearly smacked into him.
He had to put his hands on my shoulders to steady me. “Careful!”
But his touch didn’t help my balancing situation. If anything it left me even more off-kilter. We stood there for several beats, staring at each other, my pulse ricocheting around inside my wrists.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Just a bit . . . lightheaded.”
“Seasick?”
I couldn’t tell him the actual reason why I was suddenly dizzy, so I just nodded.
He let out a little laugh and gazed at me like he thought I was adorable. “Working on a yacht when you get seasick is like being afraid of heights and becoming a pilot.”
Then he released me and I fanned my face with my hand, trying to cool down. Why was I not used to him yet? Why did my face flush every time he touched me?
“Is it bad to say I feel sorry for the groom?” he asked over his shoulder, unaware of my predicament. “I’m pretty sure she’s going to wipe him out in the inevitable divorce. Maybe we should start a GoFundMe for his legal fees.”
“This is supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime event, and it’s sad that the bridal party isn’t going to have any good memories from this trip.”
“Once in a lifetime? Statistics disagree,” he said.
I shook my head at his joke. “When the world elects me as the Supreme Leader, I’m going to outlaw weddings because they turn normal people into frothing psychopaths.”
He came back into the laundry room. “You don’t want to get married?”
“I don’t know if I can see myself doing it. My parents and my grandparents had really happy marriages, so I know it’s possible, but it seems like this mythical thing that only a few people actually get to experience. I only fall for men who have an allergy to it. I think I might consider it if I did meet the right person, but it seems like it only happens to a lucky few.”
“Then I guess it’s a good thing you have the name that you do. Like I said, it only takes once.”
I sucked in a deep breath, wanting to ignore what it seemed like he was insinuating. “What about you?” I asked in a too-bright voice.
“‘Commitment’ is not a four-letter word in my family. I come from a long line of disgustingly happy and in-love couples, and so yeah, I imagine I’ll get married. Someday.”
It felt surreal to be having this conversation with him. Especially because my brain was frantically envisioning a beach wedding with him starring as the groom.
Hunter turned to shut the door behind him. Alarmed, I started toward him. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do but I had to keep him from seeing the list.
But I wasn’t fast enough.
“What’s this?” he asked.
I ran through various untruths in my head but realized two things simultaneously—the first, that it wouldn’t do me any good because it was self-explanatory and the almost lawyer would figure it out, and second, and probably more importantly, I didn’t want to lie to him.
“It’s a competition. To see who can kiss slash hook up slash fool around with the most crewmembers,” I said.
It was the first time I’d seen the list since I’d initially found it. There were various handwritten points listed next to everyone’s names.
Even Francois’s. Ew. Which one of them had kissed him?
The word stripper had been written in, crossed out, and rewritten again probably a dozen times.
But there were absolutely zero points next to Hunter’s name.
“Are you a part of this?” he asked, sounding highly suspicious.
“No!” Had I said that too forcefully? I modulated my voice. “I mean, no. I’m not. This is just Georgia and Emilie’s thing.”
He looked relieved.
Why would he be relieved by that?
“You know, Kai mentioned some competition. I just didn’t realize it was like this. And I’m part of it?”
“They’re both pretty determined to score from you.”
“That won’t happen.”
“Oh?” That was far too hopeful. I didn’t repeat it in a more uninterested tone, as I decided that would draw too much attention to it.
“You’re not the only one who needs to follow the rules.”
He had joked in Saint-Tropez that he was an international man of mystery, and I was believing it. There was something he was leaving unspoken, and it felt important. I wanted to solve the puzzle he’d just dangled so temptingly in front of me.
Before I could ask him about it, he continued on, “Plus, I’m not interested in either one of them.”
“Oh?” Now my voice was shaking, I was repeating myself, and so I forced myself to go back over to the dress so that I would have something else to focus my energy on.
Because I was giddy. Utterly giddy that he wasn’t interested in either one of my stews.
He might not be interested in you, either.
I brushed that annoying voice of mine away. I was going to live in glorious denial until he said something to the contrary.
Not that we could act on it, but just the fact that there was some small glimmer of hope was enough to make me feel like I was being lit up by 1.21 gigawatts of electricity.
Then I went and found a way to destroy that feeling. “But you made a face.”
His quizzical expression told me that he had no idea what I was talking about. “I what?”
“When Kai and Emilie kissed in the taxi. You made a face. I thought it was because you liked her.”
“It was because I didn’t think it was okay for them to be doing that in front of the rest of the crew. We were all given the same rules by the captain. They put all of us in an awkward position. Nobody wants to snitch on them but they made us their accomplices.”
The fact that he was a rule follower made him even more attractive. Bad boys had never held much appeal for me.
He folded his arms and continued his TED Talk, gesturing toward the list. “You’ve said that Georgia is your friend. But if she was, she wouldn’t be doing stuff like this. Putting you in a precarious position.”
“She is my friend. But yachting makes relationships different. It’s a ‘let’s be friends until one of us quits or gets fired’ sort of situation. Everything in our lives is temporary. You might keep in touch on social media, but it’s never the same as when you worked together.”
“So you make friends thinking that things will always end?” he asked.
“They do end. The impermanence is why the captain’s rule is a good one. Nobody here is going to wind up with a happily ever after. I mean, you do hear about it happening, and those people go off and work on yachts together as a couple, but that is more the exception than the rule. Relationships are usually short lived.”
“But not always.”
“Not always,” I agreed.
“That seems . . . sad.”
Realizing that I was neglecting Sasha’s dress, I started dabbing at the stain. “It’s our life here. We have to live in the present and enjoy our days the best we can because we never know when it might all change.”
“That’s true of life in general,” he said, taking his spot on the counter again. “It kind of sounds like college. You have these friends and roommates you see every day and then college is over and everything changes. It was a strange adjustment.”
I ran lukewarm water in the sink to wash the dress, grabbing a mild detergent. “I wouldn’t know. I didn’t go to college. I wanted to, but obviously there wasn’t any money for it.”
“College hasn’t gone anywhere. You could still go. You’d do amazing.”
I liked the way he talked. Like the world was still full of possibilities for me. Where I saw doors that had been shut, he saw a way to open them up again.
He made me feel like I could say the things I felt and he wouldn’t turn away from me. That he would listen and understand.
My heart began to pound as I thought of telling him how much I liked being with him.
That I didn’t want our situation to be impermanent. How a piece of my soul hoped that our friendship would last long past our time on this yacht.
That maybe we could be something more. Someday.
“Hunter, there’s something that I—”