“Coffee time, sleepyhead!” she says raising a cardboard container holding two iced coffees. “And you should answer your phone, I could have gone into real labor.” She kisses me on the cheek, stepping inside.
When she does, she tilts her head. Squinting. “What happened?”
I widen my eyes. “What do you mean?”
She purses her lips. “OMG. You totally had sex, didn’t you?”
“How?... What?” I laugh sharply, taking the coffee from her.
She grins. “You had birthday sex, didn’t you?”
I raise an eyebrow. “Do you have a sex-sense or something?”
She nods, walking to the kitchen grabbing a pastry from the box before answering. “Basically.” She shrugs. “I mean, I may be nine months preggo and not exactly bringing sexy back at the moment.” She uses her hands to circle around her very round tummy--which, in my opinion, is actually the cutest pregnant belly of all time. “But I do have four lovers. So, sex is kinda my specialty.”
I shake my head, unable to believe that this woman is so capable of breaking down my walls in five seconds flat. “Well then, sex guru, I have a story for you.”
11
West
The canvas sail is shredded, and the mast is down, but the wind is gentle. A perfect calm after a storm. But damn, my heart’s still racing. I’m catching my breath from the monsoon that nearly overtook this boat. I don’t know what the hell happened. One minute the skies were blue, and then the sea seemed to swell with anger.
I’m sure as fuck glad it passed, but there’s damage to the boat. Still, all four of us are alive and that’s what matters.
But there are no guarantees about Harlow.
I fight to keep my emotions in check. If something happened to her, I’ll fucking lose it. I knew her for just one night, but it felt like an eternity. Like I could give her my forever.
Crazy as hell, sure, but she cast a spell on me. And I don’t want it to break.
Grabbing a bottle of water, I hydrate. I’m doing okay, but not everyone is hanging in there so well. Our muscles are ragged, and our energy spent. It was a hell of a few hours as we did everything within our power to keep ourselves alive.
“You okay?” I cock my head toward Kai who looks worse for wear. “Pretty boy like you can’t handle the rough seas?”
“I can handle plenty,” Kai says with a scowl. He runs a hand through his hair, leaning over the rail of the boat. “But that wasn’t rough waters. It was something else, West.”
I clench my jaw, knowing he is right.
But what the fuck could it have been?
Crew and Eric walk over, eyes filled with exhaustion. Crew shakes his head. “Harlow wasn’t human and that storm wasn’t natural either. I don’t know what’s going on, but something is.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” I say, still pissed at Crew for his half-assed effort when we were trying to salvage the mast as it fell across the deck, damaging the cabin top. The wind-driven rain caused serious damage inside the boat. In short-- we’re fucked.
And Crew didn’t seem to give a shit while we were fighting the storm.
“Dude, I don’t know why you care so much about this boat,” Crew says. “It isn’t ours. The sponsor will pay for the replacement.”
I shake my head. Fucking tired of Crew and his outlook on everything. “You’re sure entitled for a guy who grew up--,”
He cuts me off, raising a fist. “You wanna talk about where I grew up? Fuck you.”
Eric pushes between us. “What the hell? Stop pointing fingers.”
I smirk. “I’m just saying what everyone else was thinking.”
“Enough, West,” Kai says. “Crew’s right. It isn’t our responsibility to fix the boat. We’ll run the engine toward shore, and once we’re in Waikiki, we’ll get a new boat.”
I look out at the water, not understanding these guys. “And what happens when our sponsor just decides to drop us? When they decide they no longer want to invest in a team that isn’t actually on the road to winning anything? We’ve been going who knows where for weeks. Totally off course. I have no idea why we’re even here. And if the sponsor starts asking questions, they’ll want answers. Answers we can’t give. It’s not about the boat--it’s about what is going to happen when we are out of jobs.”
“You really think they’ll drop us?” Crew asks.
I snort. “You think they’ll just keep paying us to crash boats and go wildly off course? Where’s your head, man? Of course, they will.”
That seems to knock some sense into him because he presses a hand to his forehead. “Fuck. I can’t lose this gig.”
I lift my eyebrows. “Now you see why I was so pissed at you for not helping with the fucking mast?”
“Okay, we get it,” Kai says, cutting me off. “But I still don’t understand how we got so off course in the first place.”