Stranded By My Cruise Billionaire Husband (Wives Betrayed #12)

CHAPTER ONE

HAZEL

The party is three decks above me, and I can hear it through the ceiling.

Two hundred people in formalwear toasting a ship with my married name painted on the hull, and I’m sitting on the floor of the family suite in a robe, bouncing a five-month-old who has decided tonight is the night she develops thoughts about sleep.

“You’re your father’s daughter,” I tell Maren. “Allergic to downtime.”

She answers by grabbing a fistful of my hair and yanking. Fair. I’d do the same if someone kept humming the same eight bars of a lullaby at me for forty minutes.

The suite is ridiculous. Christian calls it modest, which tells you everything about the scale my husband now operates on.

There’s a bedroom, a sitting room, a dining area nobody will ever dine in, and a balcony wide enough to land a helicopter on, assuming a very small helicopter.

When the company was still three ferries and a payroll that gave his father ulcers, modest meant a cabin with a porthole and a shared bathroom down the corridor.

I liked that cabin. I liked the man who couldn’t afford better than that cabin.

I like this man too. I keep having to remind both of us that he’s the same person.

I did my hour at the reception, earlier, before Maren’s bedtime made the decision for me. I stood in the dress I bought for the occasion and accepted congratulations from people congratulating me on behalf of my own husband. What a triumph. What a vision. You must be so proud.

They say it to me like I’m the ship’s godmother, and I’ve learned to smile and say thank you instead of what I actually think, which is that I married a man with three aging ferries and a hole in his sweater, and everything since has been a long exercise in watching him get stolen by his own competence. Proud doesn’t cover it.

Maren finally goes heavy in my arms, that sudden slackening that means surrender. I lower her into the travel crib like I’m defusing something, one hand under her head, breath held, and she lets out one small sigh and stays down.

“Thank you,” I whisper. “Your mother’s sanity thanks you.”

The door opens and Christian comes in still wearing his tuxedo, bow tie already undone and hanging, phone in his hand.

He’s handsome in a way that still ambushes me after all these years, dark hair gone silver at the temples sometime in the last two years without my permission, and he crosses the room smiling at me the way he smiled at strangers an hour ago, except for me it’s real.

“She’s asleep,” I say. “Don’t wake her with your charisma.”

He kisses my forehead. “How is she?”

“Furious, then unconscious. The usual.” I nod at the phone. “You promised this one wasn’t going to be a floating office.”

He sets it face down on the dresser. “It isn’t.”

The phone immediately vibrates, loud against the wood. I look at it. “Excellent argument.”

“That’s the ship. It’s allowed to interrupt me. It’s the one employee that outranks me.”

“The ship has hundreds of employees. You’ve got the org chart backwards.”

He grins and picks Maren up, which is against every rule of infant management and which I allow anyway, because he’s home, because he’s here, because I have learned to take the version of him that arrives rather than the version I was promised.

She stirs, considers the situation, and decides the tuxedo is acceptable.

Her whole face softens against his shoulder.

“She’s getting big,” he says.

“She’s getting opinionated. There’s a difference.”

He carries her to the changing table out of pure bravado, because she doesn’t need changing, and I watch him attempt to refasten the diaper he’s just opened for no reason other than wanting to do something with his hands that isn’t email.

The tabs defeat him. He gets one crooked, then the other, then the first one pops loose again.

“I can command a vessel larger than a city block,” he says.

“And yet the tabs on a diaper have defeated you.”

“They’re engineered by someone who hates fathers.”

“They’re engineered for people who read instructions.” I fix the tabs in one pass. He doesn’t take offense. He never does at the small stuff. It’s the big stuff we circle like a reef.

He settles Maren back against his chest and starts the slow sway he does, the one he doesn’t know he does, and for a minute the suite is quiet except for the sea moving under us, low and steady, the sound I’ve slept beside for fifteen years.

People pay thousands a night for that sound.

I got it for free, back when free was all we had.

“Come out on the balcony,” he says.

The night air is warm and the water is black glass in every direction, the running lights of nothing else on the horizon.

We left Miami this afternoon. Tomorrow there are ports and excursions and two hundred people demanding the trip of a lifetime.

Tonight there is just the wake behind us and my husband swaying with our daughter and the bow tie hanging loose around his neck like a man halfway through becoming off duty.

“I want her to grow up loving this,” he says. “The sea. Ships. I want her to know the names of things before she can walk.”

“Then make sure she doesn’t learn it’s the thing that always takes her father away.”

It comes out as sharp as I meant it. Christian looks at me over the top of Maren’s head, and the smile is gone, and what replaces it is the thing I married, the man who listens even when the listening costs him.

“I’m here now,” he says.

“You’re here now,” I agree.

The knock at the door ruins it.

Aubriella Pacheco enters without waiting for an answer, because Aubriella has never waited for an answer in her life.

She’s in a navy dress, tablet in hand, heels clicking across my sitting room with proprietary intent, a woman entirely at home in someone else’s marriage-adjacent space.

She’s beautiful in the precise, intimidating way of women who have never been the least qualified person in a room, and she gives me the nod you give furniture you’ve decided not to object to.

“Christian.” She hands him the tablet. “I fixed the port sequence. The harbormaster was being precious about the berth window, so I moved the tender schedule and gave him the fuel concession. Done.”

“Of course you did,” he says, scanning the screen.

“There’s also a catering shortfall for tomorrow. I’ve handled it.”

“Of course you did.”

She glances at me, and for one second the mask of operations excellence slips and I see the inventory happening underneath. The robe. The baby. The balcony. The husband with his bow tie undone. She files it all somewhere and gives me a smile that has been polished to a professional shine.

“Hazel. You look comfortable.”

“You look like you’re about to fire someone. Congratulations on the port thing.”

“Thank you.” Back to Christian. “Walk me through the fuel numbers when you have a minute?”

“I’ll come down in ten,” he says.

She leaves. The door closes. Maren makes a small sound against Christian’s shoulder, and I wait until he’s looking at me.

“She wants you,” I say.

He laughs, short and genuine. “Aubriella wants every ship to run on time. She’d leave me for a punctual ferry.”

“That wasn’t a denial.”

“I don’t want her.” He says it flat and factual, a weather reading, not a confession. “Hazel. I don’t want her.”

“I know.” And I do know. That’s the maddening part. My husband’s fidelity is a fixed point. Constant, indifferent to my worry. “You always think that solves everything.”

He shifts Maren to his other arm. “What doesn’t it solve?”

“You think because your heart stays home, it doesn’t matter where the rest of you goes.

I watched her inventory my robe, Christian.

She catalogued my motherhood in half a second and found it insufficient.

She doesn’t want to steal you. She wants to be the kind of woman who deserves you, and she’s built an entire career inside your company to prove it. ”

“That’s not what the company is for.”

“It’s what everything is for, for her.”

He looks at the tablet in his hand, then sets it on the dresser beside his phone, screen down, both devices face down, a tiny crime scene of good intentions.

“Ten minutes. I told her ten minutes and I’m telling you now.

Fuel numbers, then I’m done, and tomorrow I’m not a chairman, I’m a guy taking his daughter on a glass-bottom boat. ”

“She’ll sleep through the glass-bottom boat.”

“Then I’ll describe it to her afterward in vivid detail. I’ll do voices. There will be a dramatic fish character.”

“She’s five months old.”

“Developmentally, she desperately needs a dramatic fish character. I’m a good father.”

I laugh despite myself, and he grins, satisfied with the win, and this is the man, this is the whole problem, he’s so easy to love that loving him never runs out of fuel no matter how far he drives on it.

He kisses me, careful not to squash Maren between us, and she smells like milk and warm skin and the ridiculous French soap the suite provides, and I think, hold this. Just hold this exact minute.

The suite’s screen pings. The big wall display, the one that shows deck maps and dinner menus and cheerful announcements about trivia night. A weather band slides across it, red-edged and uncheerful, and Christian is already moving toward it with the baby still on his shoulder.

I watch his face instead of the screen. I’ve had fifteen years of practice reading my husband around weather, and his face does the thing it does when a forecast stops being information and starts being a decision.

I’ve seen that face at dockside, at board meetings, once at a christening when a supply ship ran aground two time zones away and he spent the whole ceremony composing texts behind the champagne tower.

“Storm track shifted,” he says.

“Toward us?”

“Toward the route. It’s a long way out and it might slide past.” He’s already doing the math. I can hear it in the flatness of his voice, the charm draining out, the chairman arriving. “The captain will have seen it before I did.”

Maren fusses, picking up whatever frequencies babies pick up, and he sways without thinking, and his eyes never leave the map.

“Ten minutes,” I say.

“What?”

“You told Aubriella ten minutes. You’re about to be downstairs a lot longer than ten minutes.”

He turns and looks at me, and there’s an apology in his face and a forecast in his eyes, and both of them are true, and that’s been the condition of my marriage since before we had a baby to complicate it.

“I’ll come back up,” he says.

“I know you will. You always come back up.”

He sets Maren in my arms, kisses my forehead, straightens the bow tie he never finished removing, and goes. The door closes behind him and the suite gets quiet, and on the wall display the red-edged band keeps crawling toward our little painted ship.

I look down at Maren, who has gone soft and heavy again, trusting the universe completely, as is her privilege.

“Your father loves us,” I tell her. “That’s never been the problem.”

Outside, the sea stays calm.

For now, it stays calm.