Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The party was in full swing when we ascended the staircase to the sun deck.

It was evening, the sky twirling with shades of orange and pink as the summer sun stretched its last rays over the water and the coast of Italy. It stole my breath when it all came into view at the top, and I paused, soaking it in, reveling in the moment that reminded me just how insane it was to be here.

When I stopped gawking at the sunset, I realized every single pair of eyes was on me.

It was like a DJ record scratch, the way the crew stopped mid-drink to look at where the three of us had just entered. I tried to convince myself it was Ivy and Celeste who had everyone staring, but one sweep of my gaze around the boat and there was no contesting it was me their focus was on.

Claude and Adeline were fussing over the appetizers on the bar, but they’d stopped, staring at me and muttering something to each other in French. The engineers were seated on the edge of the pool with Wayland, and I heard one of them whistle under their breath while Wayland gave me a knowing grin and shook his head in awe.

Joel was in the hot tub with a drink in his hand, and Ace hooted and hollered, clapping him on the shoulders with a goofy grin while he stared at me slack-jawed. Emma was already rushing over to me, her fingers touching my hair and the thin straps of the “swimsuit” that barely covered me. It was a triangle top with a half-circle bar of silver that sat in the center of my chest. The way it fit, it pulled what little cleavage I had front and center, up and tight. The bottoms looked like they were straight out of the 80s, high-waisted with the thighs cut out just as high, so that the fabric created a deep V from my hips down to my pelvis.

Thank God I shaved , I thought when I first put it on.

Emma was going on and on, but I couldn’t hear a word. Everything sounded fuzzy and distant, like Charlie Brown’s teacher, because all around the pool, people I barely knew were staring at parts of me I’d never shown in public before.

And all the way across the deck, behind the bar, in the shadows, almost completely out of sight… was Theo.

Unlike everyone else, he wasn’t in swim attire, but rather a perfectly fitted beige suit with a navy tie that made the dark specs of blue in his eyes pop. His blond hair curled a little where he’d gelled it, and the stubble on his chin looked freshly trimmed. He held a drink just like Joel, but where Joel’s jaw was open in a goofy grin of shock, Theo’s lips were flattened in a hard line, his jaw tense, and even from this far away I saw the muscles of it tick as he watched me make my entrance.

“ I told you you’d be a showstopper,” Celeste murmured under her breath, and it was the first sentence that I heard clearly. Her words snapped me into the present like a taut rubber band.

“I’ll say!” Emma chimed in, still inspecting me. “Girl, I had no idea you had a body like this hiding under those clothes. Look at this little ab line!” she said, poking my stomach as I shied away from the touch.

“Joel, you going to come kiss your girl or let one of the other guys beat you to it?” Ivy called in a tease, and then Joel popped up out of the hot tub, padding his way over.

I wrapped my arms around myself as much as I could, wishing I had a cover up. My cheeks were on fire, and all I wanted was for everyone to go back to what they were doing before we all walked in.

“I think it’s too much,” I whispered to the girls.

“You look hot,” Ivy argued, and then as if on cue, Joel swept me into his arms and kissed me hard and long in front of everyone to seal the sentiment.

There were distant cheers, laughter and atta boys , but I pressed against his chest to stop the public display of affection.

“Holy shit, babe,” he breathed, holding me in his arms as he pulled back to take it all in. “You’re a bombshell.”

“Can I borrow your shirt?”

He chuckled like I was joking, pulling me into his chest with a kiss to my forehead before he started walking me toward the pool. “Alright, alright,” he called. “Enough gawking over my girl. Let’s get back to the party!”

That earned another round of cheers, and then the music blasted once again, and blessedly, all eyes were off me.

Well — all eyes except for two very intense ones behind the bar.

Joel walked me right in Theo’s direction, and I felt the weight of his stare like an anvil on my chest. My feet were heavy lead, dragging behind me as I fought the dizziness a look like that brought on.

“What do you want to drink?” Joel asked me when we made it to the bar. He winked at Theo. “Boss man is actually serving us tonight, if you can believe it.”

I didn’t know how long I was quiet, how long I stood there pinned by Theo’s gaze. His eyes didn’t move from mine, didn’t trace my body, didn’t take in the swimsuit or my body.

And still, I felt naked as the day I was born.

“Babe?” Joel asked.

I shook my head, croaking out water as best I could.

Joel chuckled, throwing his arm around me as he faced Theo. “She doesn’t drink,” he explained. “Never has. My little good girl.” He kissed my cheek. Then, someone called his name from the pool. “Come join us in the pool once you’ve got your water, yeah?”

I think I nodded, because he patted my butt below the bar where Theo couldn’t see and scampered off toward the pool. I heard a big splash and a chorus of cheers a moment later, but I just stood still, watching Theo watching me.

His nose flared. “Sparkling or still, Miss Dawn?”

Those words seemed to snap me from the spell, and I shook my head a bit, dusting off the remnants. “Still,” I said, surprised at how steady my voice was.

Theo reached into the cooler below the deck for a bottle of water and poured it into a cocktail glass over ice. Then, he added a sprig of mint and a couple raspberries before sliding it across the bar.

“Thank you.”

He nodded, watching me as I took my first sip. I turned toward the pool, watching Joel and Ace play some sort of game that involved a lot of thrashing and wrestling. Instinctively, I positioned myself behind the corner of the bar, crossing my arms over my middle.

“I have to admit,” I said after a moment, not taking my eyes off the scene in the pool. “I’m surprised by all this.”

I hoped the comment landed in the easygoing, I-totally-didn’t-notice-you-had-a-hard-on-the-last-time-I-talked-to-you zone.

“By the party?”

I nodded. “You’re a billionaire, and you hired these people to work for you for the summer. Dealing with guests and difficult circumstances is part of their job. And yet, here you are, rewarding them for what they were hired to do.” I arched a brow when I finally looked at him. “And serving them alcohol to boot.”

The corner of Theo’s lips tilted. “My father taught me a lot of things when I was younger, especially when I first started Envizion. And one thing that always stuck with me was that you should treat every employee, regardless of position, like a guest in your home.”

“That’s a really kind and generous way of looking at things.”

Theo shrugged. “He always said running a business should be similar to being the head of the family. You work hard as a team, you go through hardships as a team, and you celebrate as a team. You have each other’s backs — always.”

“It sounds like you two are close.”

Theo swallowed, busying his hands with one of the bottles behind the bar. “He’s my role model. Always has been.”

I felt the urge to inquire more, to ask question after question until he told me everything about himself. But before I could, Theo’s eyes found mine, and this time, the intensity with which he watched me walk in with was back.

“You know, you aren’t the only one surprised tonight.”

I cocked my head.

He gestured to where I was hiding behind the corner of the bar. “You look radiant.”

Theo’s words were soft, subtle, his eyes genuine where they watched me. I looked away on a blush, smiling and shaking my head in disagreement. “It’s just the makeup. And the suit. Neither of which are mine.”

“I disagree.”

I rolled my eyes, turning to face him, but when I saw the way he was watching me, my attempt at playfulness slipped.

“It’s you,” he said. “No matter what you wear.”

I swallowed, my neck burning like a hot iron.

He made his way over to me, leaning his elbows on the bar until his face was just inches from mine. He lowered his voice, the bass of it echoing through my chest like a kick drum.

“However, if you were mine?” His eyes traced their way over my collarbones, down the line of my cleavage, to my waist, my hips, my thighs, and back up again. “You wouldn’t have even made it to that top stair before I was dragging you back to the room for my eyes only.”

My lips parted of their own accord, shock buzzing low in my stomach at his forwardness. “Theo…”

“Don’t say my name like that, Aspen,” he warned, his eyes flicking to where I’d pinned my bottom lip with my teeth. “Not unless you want to unleash a part of me you haven’t seen yet.” His jaw tensed. “A part of me I can’t tame once it’s loose.”

All those warning bells I’d silenced over the last few weeks rang in tandem, dinging and screaming inside my mind as I tried to convince myself he couldn’t have possibly just said what I thought he did.

But before I could respond or digest it further, Joel called my name, and then a chorus of Aspen, Aspen rang out, and I had no choice but to follow the coax.

Theo leaned back with a grin, tipping an imaginary hat toward me like we’d just been having a casual, light conversation.

And with my water in hand, I joined the rest of the crew at the pool just as the sun set, ushering in a hellish night that would change everything.

***

The later it got, the more the alcohol flowed.

And the more the alcohol flowed, the more I wished I’d never left the stateroom.

What started out as nice cocktails by the pool turned quickly into lines of shots. The crew went from lounging around and chatting to cannonballing into the pool and playing drinking games that seemed so ridiculously out of place on a multi-million-dollar yacht that my lip visibly curled at the sight.

Theo had taken leave of his offer to serve us, but he sat at the bar, watching the antics with a curious smile permanently on his face. Every now and then, he’d even indulge the crew in taking a shot with them. Somewhere around eleven, he excused himself with Wayland to go check on Captain Chuck, who was the only one of us still working, and the crew partied on in their absence.

I’d asked Joel if we could head out over an hour ago, but he’d pretended like he didn’t even hear me at all. And I wanted him to have fun, I did — but I knew him well enough to know he was teetering on the edge of cute drunk and messy drunk, and I did not want to deal with the latter.

Contrary to the fact that I wanted to leave now, I had been enjoying myself. It was fun, being in a pool on the top deck of a yacht in the Tyrrhenian Sea. I got to chat with Emma more, hear stories about Wayland’s time growing up in Jamaica, and Joel was being flirty and cute and fun.

The problem was — he wasn’t being flirty and cute and fun with only me.

I sipped my water, watching him and Ace in the pool. They were speaking in hushed tones, and then suddenly, they slid through the water quietly, depositing their drinks on the edge of the pool before they lifted themselves out.

I saw what was happening before Ivy and Celeste did.

The poor girls were dancing to the playlist Claude had put on, their hips swaying this way and that, when Ace and Joel snuck up behind them. They wrapped their arms around them, dragging them kicking and screaming toward the pool. The girls had put their feet in and gone waist deep, but had avoided getting their hair wet.

Until now.

Joel and Ace launched themselves into the pool with the girls wrapped up in their arms, and when they all emerged, it was to squeals and curses and both girls swatting at them as they laughed.

I chuckled, shaking my head at the show, but then Ivy shoved Joel over to the far edge of the pool. She muttered something for only them to hear — something that made Joel smile wickedly — and then, in front of me and God and everyone else, he grabbed both her tits in his hands and squeezed.

It wasn’t a sexual advance, more like a playful boob squeeze that reminded me of something my sister would do to a friend. But it didn’t matter. Regardless of intent, he’d grabbed her somewhere he never should have, and he’d done it in front of everyone.

Ivy laughed and shoved him away, and then her hands disappeared under the water, and he bit his lip at something before wiggling out of her grasp.

Another laugh left Ivy’s lips as she made her way out of the pool, and Joel slapped her ass on her ascent.

That did it.

I wasn’t one for confrontation. In fact, even now, as I stormed over to the pool, everything inside me was screaming for me to just walk right past all of them and go downstairs, go to my room, go to bed. It was fine. He was just drunk. They were just playing.

But something had clicked inside of me.

All summer, I’d felt it niggling, a little prickle of something tickling my chest, my throat, wiggling its way into my body and soul. I was afloat, and in that state, I was susceptible to doing and saying things I never would normally.

Apparently, that included stomping right over to Joel and calling him out in front of the entire crew.

“Hey, babe,” Joel said with a goofy smile when I hit the edge of the pool.

“Did you forget I was here?”

My words were cold and harsh, and I crossed my arms as everyone turned to look at us.

Joel frowned. “What?”

“I said, did you forget I was here? Or did you want me to see you fondling another girl like I don’t exist?”

Joel’s mouth popped open, but I saw anger slip in quickly, replacing the shock. “You’re being ridiculous. We were just messing around.”

“Yeah?” I asked, popping a hip. “Well, maybe I should find someone to mess around with, too.”

I stormed off just as a chorus of ooooh’s broke out, along with a light cloud of laughter.

Emma was coming up the stairs as I stomped toward them, and when she saw me, her eyebrows knitted together. “Hey, are you okay? What happened?”

I shook her off when she reached for me, still fuming so much I couldn’t even answer her.

I was rounding the railing of the stairs when Joel’s arm caught my elbow, whipping me around to face him. Emma gave him a look before her eyes met mine, and I softly nodded, letting her know I was okay. She didn’t seem convinced when she left us, but she gave us the space to talk.

“What’s your problem?” Joel asked.

Everyone had gone back to partying, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think they weren’t still watching us.

“ My problem?” I asked incredulously. “You just grabbed Ivy’s tits in front of me, Joel. In front of everyone. And then you smacked her ass!”

“I was playing . We’re just friends, we joke around like that sometimes.”

“So you’d be fine if I jokingly grabbed a guy between the legs? How about Ace, or Wayland, or Theo?”

I didn’t know why I said that last name, but I held my chin high, eyes narrowed in the challenge — and Joel folded, his jaw tensing.

“I know it’s hard for you to understand, but this is how it is on the boats. Okay? We’re all playful with each other. Yes, sometimes it can get a little flirty, but it’s innocent. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means something to me .”

“Ivy is literally the reason I have this job, Aspen,” Joel said, shaking his head as he watched me like I was the villain. “Stop being jealous.”

“I’m not being jealous ! Why are you making me feel like it’s ridiculous that watching my boyfriend grope another girl made me upset?”

“You aren’t even supposed to be here!”

My head snapped back at those words, and I found I had nothing to say back to them. They hung like barbed wire between us, prickly and dangerous.

Joel sighed, running his hands through his hair as he looked back at the pool and then to me again.

But he didn’t take it back.

My eyes watered, nose stinging as hurt made its way past the anger in my chest. “We should go to our room and talk.”

“I don’t want to leave.”

“Joel,” I pleaded, tears welling in my eyes.

“If you want to go, go. But I’m having fun.”

And with those words, he turned his back on me, leaving me at the top of the stairs while he got back to the party like everything was fine. Ivy, Celeste, and Ace welcomed him back to the pool, but Emma watched me with sad eyes. She started to get out of her chair but I shook my head, stopping her short.

Then, I dashed down the stairs like the top deck was on fire.