“Woah,” I said, clutching the sides of my luxury lounge chair. “That was a big one.”
“Fuck—” Delaney had to stop to slap a hand over her mouth.
“Me?” I supplied with a beaming smile.
Delaney groaned miserably and pushed herself back up almost upright. She gripped the railing tightly.
“Your books went that way, I think,” I said. “Is that port? Stern?”
“Starboard, sir,” Benson mumbled with his eyes closed, soaking up the sun like a lizard.
I smiled at Delaney and said, “Your books went starboard.”
“Do you think this shitty fucking shit is funny?” she asked irritably.
I swatted enthusiastically at my oldest friend. “Benson, Benson, new curse alert. Did you hear, Benson? Benson? Benson?”
Benson’s only reply came in the form of a low rumble of a snore. I drummed my fingers in slight disappointment against my sun-warmed abs and then turned to Delaney with a shrug.
“It’s okay. I’ll just tell him later,” I said. “Shoulders back, Ms Evans.”
Delaney’s ankles quivered as she struggled to find her balance with her hand hovering above the railing.
“I hate this,” she complained as she folded forward and then arched back like she was about to fall off a balance beam.
I tsked her as I stretched my arm sneakily across Benson’s sun reflector with the intention of nabbing his poor neglected strawberry daiquiri. I wrongly assumed he was asleep and was punished with a quick slap across my knuckles. Nursing my stinging hand, I sank back against my lounge chair and eyed the wobbling and teetering Delaney.
“We’re all making sacrifices here, love,” I told her.
Delaney managed to straighten out completely only for another wave to send her crumbling like a rag doll to her ass. She slapped the deck in frustration and I quite liked what that did to her tits in her black bikini top.
“Really?” she said. “Really? You’re making sacrifices?”
“Why, yes,” I replied, thumbing over at Benson, who was snoring again. “Do you know how many hookers Benson here normally brings along out on the yacht when a lady in training such as yourself isn’t present?”
“I’m just here for the strawberry daiquiris, Ms Evans,” Benson said.
I glanced over at him. “Still not asleep, eh, pal?”
Delaney gave up trying to get back up onto her stiletto heels and instead flopped backward, long arms and legs extended in a star shape like she was on a field of white about to make a snow angel. I sighed and sat up.
“Ms Evans, if a deer wobbles in front of the lion, the lions eats the deer.”
“You just wanted to see me in a bikini,” Delaney groaned. “Because I have nice fucking tits.”
I grinned. “Well, nobody is denying that. But deportment is an important part of your high society education.”
Delaney pushed herself up onto her elbows. The wind caught strands of her long dark hair and swept them across her face; her eyes still managed not to flinch as she stared across the top deck at me.
“You’re telling me Benson took you out on a yacht, stuffed you into heels and a bikini, and then put books on top of your head?” she asked.
Before I could answer Benson did. “No.”
With an amused arch of my eyebrow, I turned to my butler. “Don’t you work for me?”
Benson’s arm flopped out blindly for his strawberry daquiri. “I’m on vacation.”
I chuckled before rolling my head lazily back toward Delaney. “I did something similar,” I said, dismissing her with a wave of my hand.
Delaney eyed me doubtfully and then stretched down to slip off her heels. She dangled them from her pinkie by the straps as she smiled over at me. I eyed the black Jimmy Choo shoes and frowned at her.
“What?”
“Well, come on then.”
Delaney swung the heels back and forth tauntingly.
“Let’s fucking see it, teach,” she said, her eyes sparkling in the sunshine. “Show this peasant how it’s fucking done.”
I laughed and shook my head. “No, no, I don’t enable my students,” I said.
Delaney tossed a heel and I scrambled back to avoid a sort of sword in the stone kind of situation. The stiletto pierced the fabric of the lounge chair and I gulped.
“If it’s so easy, it shouldn’t be a big deal,” Delaney pressed, the second heel now a weapon in her hand.
I laughed easily and sank back down against the reclined lounge chair. “Not gonna happen, love.”
“Why not?” Delaney asked.
Even Benson laid down his tri-fold sun reflector and pushed down his sunglasses onto the thick white sunscreen over the bridge of his nose to give me the eye.
“Not you, too,” I said, throwing up my hands.
Benson shrugged. “I don’t see why not, sir,” he said. “Talk the talk, walk the walk.”
“Yeah, walk the mother fucking walk,” Delaney repeated.
Benson nodded his head. “A loose translation, I suppose.”
I shook my head. “Nope. Nope. Nope-ity. Nope. Nope. Nope.”
Delaney let the second heel fall miserably beside her and shook her head as she looked at me.
“That’s the problem with all you silver spooners,” she said. “You’ve never, ever been allowed to fail. Mommy and Daddy Dearest would never, ever allow that. Heaven forbid. So you’ve developed this petrifying fear of it and you spend the rest of your life avoiding it at all costs like the plague, even when it comes in the form of a stupid goddamn pair of heels.”
Delaney said all that mostly in jest. Even Benson snorted a bubble or two out of the tangerine straw. But for me it hit a tender spot I kept secret from everyone. It stung and I did what I’d always done to protect myself, to isolate myself: push away, far, far away.
“That’s the problem with all you without silver spoons,” I said, grinning pleasantly to hide how wickedly I intended my words. “You’ll suck anything to get one between your greedy lips.”
Rage darkened Delaney’s light brown eyes as if a storm cloud blotted out the sun. She hurled the second heel at my head. I ducked with a burst of laughter. The heel went clattering against the deck. By the time it had come to a stop by the ladder to the lower deck, Delaney had pushed herself to her feet, swung her legs over the railing, and dove with outstretched arms into the calm water below.
I craned my neck just far enough to see Delaney emerge from the water, her dark hair spreading in a wide curtain as she swam toward the pebble beach nestled amongst the sloped green cliffs.
“Well, we can cross swim lessons off the list of things to teach her,” I said cheerfully, sitting back and grabbing Benson’s strawberry daiquiri. “Two birds, one stone, eh?”
I slurped noisily at the tangerine straw before noticing that Benson was staring at me in a sullen silence. I finally glanced over at him. He was giving me the disappointed father-figure look. I laughed and threw my hands up as if I were as innocent as our beloved Mother Mary herself.
“What?!”
Ronan
I wasn’t very good at sneaking.
Frankly, I’d never had any need for it. I snorted lines of coke on dining room tables and glass displays in fancy art galleries and ladies’ compact mirrors in the back seat of cabs. I introduced escorts to aunts and uncles, business partners and lawyers, priests and heads of state as “Amber, my hooker” or “Cherry, my hooker” or “Velvetina, my very expensive hooker”. My sexual exploits on boats, in public parks, during opera performances were up for grabs by newspapers, gossip sites, and splashed across bedroom walls of lovesick Irish teenagers alike.