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Waiting for an answer. My mind spun as I tried to make sense of what he’d been asking in that sinful, dark chocolate voice.
“That’s what you are, isn’t it? A fortune-hunting honey trap? You chase wealthy alphas often?” He ran a finger along my neckline. “Or are you going to pretend this is your first time?”
My blood turned to ice.He was calling me an opportunist, at best. Maybe even a whore.
“No,” I replied evenly, my lust evaporating. “I do not chase alphas.”
He blinked, obviously surprised at my answer. His hand moved to my cheek, as gentle as his words had been cutting, and he murmured something that sounded like, “No blush now.”
I ducked under his arm. “Please leave me alone, Mr. Grantham. I have a job to do.” I looked around. “Where is Sylvia?”
His eyes were practically drilling holes through me, but he eventually answered. “Safe. I left her in her cabin. You should go there. Her name’s on the door.”
I blinked. “Which direction?” This wasn’t a cruise liner, but there were dozens of cabins and staterooms on the yacht, and I didn’t want to wander for an hour knocking on every door.
“Port side, aft.” He nodded curtly, then turned to go before I could reveal I had no idea what aft and port meant. “Miss Fairweather? Please dressappropriatelyfor dinner. And make sure my niece does as well.”
A small, molten ball of anger began to churn in my gut. “Appropriately. And whatpreciselydoes that mean?”
His gaze slid over my dress. “Whatever the nicest thing you have to wear is. Just… cover yourself.” With one last frown, he was gone, greeting the couple by the pool with a wave before he vanished through a door.
Cover myself?Like I was dressed in a thong bikini? I glanced around. Half the people on deck were wearing just that, and no one blinked.
I wanted to chase him down and punch him in his perfect face. Tell him to stick his chauvinistic, alphahole attitude right up his portside aft.Instead, I went straight to my room and screamed into a pillow so loud that a crewmember passing by knocked to make sure I wasn’t being murdered.
Once she left, I washed my face, texted Rain and Candy, and replaced my underwear before going in search of my charge. For a boat that supposedly had eighty wedding guests, ten “guest employees” like me, and forty crewmembers on it, there was a decided lack of people to ask which direction aft was. I returned to the pool.
The smile I shot the other au pairs as I approached them must have been more bared teeth and less good humor, since they both recoiled slightly. “I’m Soleil Fairweather,” I said, holding out a hand to the taller one, though both women had at least five inches on me. They were elegant, dark-haired twenty-somethings who could easily have pursued professional modeling.
Of course, before I knew what I was saying, I’d told them both that. “You may be the most beautiful women I've ever seen,” I blurted out, my mouth still going. “Please tell me you're not also med students, or PhD candidates in aerospace engineering or something?”
I fidgeted as they glanced around. Possibly looking for my keeper.
“May we help you?” one of them asked after a long moment, her accent every bit as gorgeous as her face.
Naturally, I told her that, too.They both laughed out loud then, drawing the attention of everyone on deck, because of course their laughter was also beautiful. “I promise I’m not crazy, I’m just lost. It’s my first betasitting gig on a boat. Firstanythingon a boat. Can you help me?”
The taller one, whose name was Clotilde, and who was in fact a graduate student in biochemistry when she wasn’t nannying, gave me directions to the “aft” of the ship, which just meant the back, and told me the port side meant the left. The other one, Veronika, who came from Hungary and wanted to be a pastry chef, warned me away from one of the hallways, where the highly strung wedding coordinator had her rooms, and was known to be a “bitch of iron.”
In five minutes, I was standing outside a door withSylvia Grantham-Standishengraved on a brass plaque. The last name made me pause. An actor named Simon Standish had passed away two years before, while working on a superhero movie. Had he been her father?
My heart aching for her, I knocked on Sylvia’s door. A few seconds later, the lock slid, and I pushed the unusually heavy door open. When it closed behind me, the sounds from the ship were muffled, almost like there was soundproofing.
Of course there was.Billionaire, Soleil. He can afford anything.
“You do know you say a lot of stuff out loud,” Sylvia remarked from the bed, where she sat cross-legged next to an old-fashioned sewing basket, in a pile of colorful fabric scraps. She had a pair of silver scissors in one hand, snipping pieces from a swath of pink silk into thick streamers.
“I do not,” I argued, even though I knew it was true.
A tiny smile peeked out. “You do. And you can’t lie to save yourself.” She held up a scrap of fabric. “Same color as your face right now.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. “Okay, you got me. I can’t lie. But I figure, why bother? Lies always come back to bite you in the butt, don’t they?”
She just raised one dark eyebrow and handed me another pair of scissors from the basket. “Can you help me?”
“What are you making?” I asked as she handed me a length of butter-yellow fabric. I started cutting it into long strips like she was. It was surprisingly therapeutic.
“Yes, it was my therapist who suggested sewing as a way to channel my aggression and depression into something positive.” Her mouth twitched again, almost into a smile when I groaned. “You said that out loud, too.”We cut for a while, then she said, “So, tell me about yourself. How did a woman like you get hired as a betasitter?”
