Chapter Sixteen
Isla
I bought the dress.
After a day of shopping, I found the perfect one.
Designer, flowy, curve hugging where I needed it, curve inventing where I was lacking, it had spaghetti straps, and it was in a shade of either fuck-me-red or fuck-you-red.
I hadn’t decided which yet.
I only knew I loved and hated it.
I hated the price tag because it was the cost of my brother not staying.
I loved the way it made me feel.
I’d even painstakingly blown out my hair into silky tresses that highlighted the soft, sun-bleached waves.
Then there were the shoes.
Oh my God, the shoes.
They were definitely fuck-me heels. Strappy, sky-high, with thin leather bands that crisscrossed around my ankles and tied just above them. Sexy didn’t begin to describe the gold Gianvito Rossi stiletto-heel sandals.
I loved them.
Except I’d never keep them. I couldn’t walk in them and carry my backpack at the same time.
But for tonight?
I was giving the stilettos their due with this dress, and I was taking myself out to dinner.
With a quick, last look in the mirror, I ran my hand over my tamed mane of curls and smoothed the section I’d laid purposely over my shoulder. Then I fingered my three gold necklaces, and a moment of melancholy squeezed at my chest.
One necklace was mine. My mother had given it to me on my thirteenth birthday. Lariat style, it had a tiny gold heart at the end.
The second necklace was a box chain. Longer, no charm, simple but beautiful, it’d belonged to my mother, and I’d never seen her without it.
After my brother had buried her, he’d silently given it to me.
Same as he’d given me the third gold chain around my neck.
That one was the longest, a rope chain he said he’d gotten from our mother when he’d turned thirteen.
I’d never thought it’d suited him, but he’d worn it tucked under his shirt until the day he’d turned nineteen.
The same day he’d enlisted in the Navy. Then he’d silently clasped the chain around my neck and left for boot camp.
Three necklaces, three lives, all intertwined in precious metal, but nothing had been golden about them.
I touched the tiny heart.
Then I dismissed the past and smiled demurely at the woman in the mirror who looked like she belonged in Miami Beach.
Picking up the small gold clutch the salesperson had insisted I get when I bought the dress and shoes, I tucked the room card key, my new barrette, my expired passport, and five hundred in cash inside.
The rest of the stash my brother had given me was secured in the hotel room’s safe.
Briefly, I thought about adding the only other item of monetary value that I had.
A small silver-toned bottle that was practically full.
A bottle that I had found out, when I passed a fragrance counter today, cost three hundred dollars.
And I’d stolen it.
Rubbing my thumb over the Tom Ford Grey Vetiver label before uncapping it, I smelled the dry, earthy, citrus and distinctive vetiver scent.
It was fresh and bright but also so intoxicatingly masculine, and I didn’t feel even a second’s worth of guilt for taking it from the owner’s suit of a mega yacht.
The scent transported me to the Mediterranean.
It was summer and the sea. It was leaf-green eyes and a hard jaw. It was the dark gray storm that was on that ostentatious ship. A sexually dominant storm that promised no agency or consent.
My head spun, and my core pulsed.
Rash, I sprayed the scent on the inside of my wrist, rubbed it against the other, then quickly recapped the bottle and shoved it into my backpack.
Restless, drowning in the memory of a hard, muscled arm wrapped around my waist and a deep voice issuing me a warning to not provoke, I ignored the now-empty second bedroom that my brother had slept in last night.
Without a second glance at the modern, luxuriant oceanfront hotel suite, I strutted to the elevator in my fuck-me heels.