“Owning a boat is basically standing in a cold shower, tearing up hundreds and watching them go down the drain.”
Max Collins
“You have a boat?” I might have squeaked. Yes, it was entirely possible that I had squeaked like an excited little mouse about to get batted around by a sadistic cat.
“I do.” He looked pleased at my reaction, so I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Sail or power?”
He sighed. “I’m not significant enough to have a sailboat, sadly.”
“Define significant,” I snapped back to cover my giddiness at meeting a Disney prince with a boat.
He got in the driver’s seat and turned to me before he started the classic body Land Cruiser, about which I had serious car envy. “Motor boats require no particular skill to operate,” he said wryly.
“Owning any boat is like standing in a cold shower tearing up hundred-dollar bills, my dad always said. That’s pretty significant.”
He started the truck and pulled away from the curb to cover a smirk, but I still saw it. “So, you’ll join me?” His phone took a second to sync up to a bluetooth speaker and then something that sounded like a soundtrack came on. It was haunting and lovely, and I just barely resisted changing topics completely.
“Can we take the boat out?” I seriously tried not to bounce in my seat like a five-year-old who had to pee, but I’m pretty sure I failed.
He chuckled. “Yes, we can take it out.”
My self-preservation instinct had clearly taken a major backseat to the giant one I had for adventure. “Okay, good. Now first, what is this music, and second define significant.”
He drove smoothly with one hand on the top of the steering wheel. “This is my favorite song from the soundtrack of Aashiqui 2.” He stole a quick glance at me to see if I knew the movie, and I shook my head. “It’s a Bollywood romance with more than a passing resemblance to A Star is Born.”
“A Star is Born isn’t a romance,” I said firmly. “It ends badly.”
He nodded. “Fair enough. It’s a romantic musical, then.”
“Wait, you agree?” I stared at him.
He smiled slightly as he made the turn into the Diversey Harbor parking lot. “I generally find that picking fights about things for which I don’t have strong opinions makes little sense. I tend to save my bullets for things that matter.”
“Hmm. You’ve answered my first question, but added a third,” with the kind of grammar that makes your education sound expensive, I thought. The music had shifted to a punky cover of “Sweet Dreams” (Are Made of This), and I held up my fingers. “So number two is still define significant, and number three is, what matters?”
“Those are fairly existential questions, aren’t they?” Darius Masoud navigated his truck into a parking spot in the nearly empty lot and turned it off.
“Are Disney princes incapable of existential thought?” I was having way too much fun with this conversation to attempt to filter more than was absolutely necessary, preferring to save my own self-control bullets for things like not blowing my alibi.
He looked startled for exactly one second, then smirked. “I suppose it depends on the Disney prince. I mean, Aladdin and Beast might have a slightly better shot at existential thought than Prince Charming, for example, considering that he’s the man who thought finding a woman by her shoe size was a reasonable course of action.”
I laughed as I grabbed my stuff before exiting the truck. “You do realize that being able to discuss Disney princes with any degree of fluency is grounds for man-card removal.”
He shrugged. “An acceptable risk when my membership is already tenuous at best.”
“Because you’re not a man?” I asked with a grin.
“Define man,” he said with an answering smirk, as he unlocked a gate and held it open for me to precede him down the dock.
My heart did a little happy dance in my chest. It was a rare person who could play Disney prince with good grammar with me and not run away screaming. “You first. What makes a person significant, and what matters?”
We had arrived at a slip where a gorgeous 1950s wooden yacht – probably about thirty-five feet long, with a gleaming deck that looked freshly varnished – was moored. “Never mind,” I said as he hopped on the deck and held out his hand to help me onboard. “It may or may not matter, but I officially have significant boat envy.”
He chuckled as I took his hand. I admit it was just for the excuse to touch him, and his fingers were crazy warm when they wrapped around mine. Sparks shot out from our palms like mini fireworks and tendrils of dragon’s tongue wrapped around our wrists, binding us together.
Until he let go. I flexed my hand to dispel the leftover sparks, and I saw him wipe his palm on his jeans. I hoped it was residual sparks for him too, and not a hand-slime reaction. Hand-slime was a chemical reaction produced by contact between two people who had no business touching, usually because one of them was a disaster. Like me.
I prowled around the deck to cover my nerves, then dropped down into the cabin. Below deck was a comfortable space with a small galley kitchen, a built-in table with bench seats, and a forward hold with a tiny toilet room and a fairly large triangle-shaped bed. The bed was designed to fill every inch of the bow of the boat, with built-in shelves on either side that were overflowing with battered paperbacks.
I was aware he was watching me silently as I scanned the titles quickly – everything from non-fiction adventure stories to historical romance. I didn’t see a lot of sci-fi or fantasy, which actually surprised me more than the historical romance did. “See anything you like?” He sounded amused, and I suddenly realized I’d plopped myself on the man’s bed to look at his books.
I looked back to catch his eyes, and just barely stopped the words now I do before they tumbled out. “Have you read all of these?” I asked instead.
“These are my re-readers. Most of my library is on my phone,” he said in a way that made all the breath leave my body. Or maybe it wasn’t the saying of the words, it was the words themselves. A man who read actual books, and then read them again. It was almost as sexy as … well, nothing, because nothing was sexier than a man who read.
Except a man who read naked. Out loud. With chocolate.
“Come up,” he said, “and let’s take her out while the water’s still calm.”
I jumped up and almost cracked him on the chin in my hurry to escape the mental image that had begun to form. “Oooh, sorry. Can I cast off from the dock?”
He laughed and stepped back to let me out of his bedroom. “The mooring lines are all yours.”
Colette and I had sailed a lot with our uncle in Boston when we were younger, and I was always in charge of untying the boat and casting the lines in to coil on the deck. I loved pushing it out of the slip and then timing my jump onto the deck for the last possible moment before it got too far from the dock.
Darius went to work pulling slip covers off the wheel and priming the engine, while I leapt onto the dock and began coiling lines to toss onboard. It really was a beautiful boat, and the name, Ashti, was painted in Arabic-style calligraphy. The engine rumbled like a contented cat, and I walked the cruiser out of its slip and jumped aboard as if I’d always done it. Darius looked approving.
“You’ve handled boats before.”
“One of my uncles had a sailboat, and I was always the first mate.” I bit down on the second part of that sentence – as opposed to my sister, who felt it was her duty to stand on the bowsprit like a beautiful masthead.
“My parents got this boat when we moved here from Iran. I bought it from them a few years ago, and now I live on it.” Darius stood like the captain of his world at the wheel, and I envied the wind as it ruffled his thick brown hair. Wait, what? I didn’t have thoughts like that. Not when I had things to hide and people to hide them from. “So, what’d you want to talk about?” I asked, because I was determined to slip on the verbal diarrhea that was sure to come out of my mouth.
He navigated past the breakwater and out onto Lake Michigan. The day was sunny and bright, and the breeze on the lake was brisk. I finished coiling the last of the mooring lines and perched on the roof of the cabin to watch Darius while he steered the boat.
He sighed, which I took as a bad sign. “I have to ask you about Sterling Gray.”
I twitched involuntarily, and I realized it might have looked like I wrinkled my nose. Maybe because I actually did. “What about him?” I tried for casual, but to my own ears I sounded too bright. Kind of pastel, actually. I hated pastels.
“A painting was stolen from his panic room last night, and I saw you discover the door.” He sounded tired, like this wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have. Good. Neither did I.
“Really?” I asked. Sometimes less was more.
“Was the painting really stolen, or did I really see you?” His sighing tone was gone.
I held his gaze and shrugged. It was a technique I used to great effect with the bounties who demanded to know what they’d done wrong. People who didn’t like the spaces between questions and answers filled them with all kinds of incriminating words. I didn’t mind the spaces, because I usually just filled them with corgi puppies and their butts.
One corner of his mouth quirked up, and I almost asked him if he saw a corgi butt too. But he didn’t. “I work for Cipher Security, and the Gray mansion security system was my design.”
“Bummer.”
It probably sounded snarky, but it actually was a bummer. In the course of planning a crime, the thieves generally don’t consider the consequences to the designer of the security system. I mean, it makes sense that the guy’s professional reputation was on the line, so he was maybe going to look into what happened. I didn’t like the thought that I’d caused Darius Masoud a professional discourtesy.
Next, his left eyebrow quirked up. “Indeed. I’m sure you didn’t imagine that your discovery of the panic room behind the bookcase, or footage of your late night visit to the Gray mansion, would be observed.”
Actually, I counted on it, my mind fairly yelled while I shaped my mouth into saying something less incriminating. “Hidden rooms behind bookcases are like catnip to me. I can never resist – especially when there’s a clever book pull.” My eyes narrowed. “The entry system was your design?”
He smirked. “Sterling didn’t see the genius of using Moby Dick.”
“He wouldn’t,” I said, trying very hard not to elaborate on my feelings about Sterling Gray.
Darius wore a proper smile. “Your re-arrangement was brilliant, by the way. I don’t usually think of Octavia Butler as a feminist.”
“What we don’t see, we assume can’t be,” I quoted, and he quirked his head at me. “You’re awfully quirky, aren’t you?” I said, because he quirked like a champion quirker.
“I would say the same about you. Not many people of my acquaintance can quote dead science fiction authors,” he said, with what I hoped was an admiring glance my way.
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” I gave him my own half-quirk smile. I could do this all day.
He burst into laughter, and a butterfly broke away from the rest and began fluttering around in my chest. I tried to push it back down with my hand, but the little bastard ignored me.
“Everything okay?” the fricking Disney prince asked with a concerned look on his face.
“You laugh and the sweaty butterflies go crazy. Knock it off.”
He pressed his lips together while his damn eyes kept shining, as though a torrent of laughter was going to stream out of him at any moment.
“Besides,” I continued, “you don’t have any sci-fi books on your shelves. How do you know enough to recognize quotes?”
“My sci-fi books sleep under the covers with me,” he said without blinking.
“Really?” I definitely squeaked this time.
He laughed. “No. My little brother came through like a locust and stole them all.”
“I would totally sleep with my favorite books, except I read on an iPad, and it keeps conking me in the head when I fall asleep holding it.”
Darius didn’t miss a beat at that, and we spent the next hour talking about books. All kinds of books. But as one does when talking about books, we weren’t just talking about the words on the pages. Little bits of ourselves kept escaping into the conversation – like his obsession with historical novels and the real truths that inspired them, and mine with travel stories and the secret places no tourist would think to visit.
He told me he was born in Tehran, and spoke no English when his parents moved to the U.K. when he was seven, and then to the U.S. a year later. He had listened to the first four Harry Potter audiobooks back to back, so it was Jim Dale’s fault that he occasionally still pronounced words with a British accent.
“Harry-eeee,” I said in a deep voice, trying to sound like the narrator’s Hermione impression.
Darius rolled his eyes. “The one flaw in Dale’s performance, and I can’t seem to access the Stephen Fry narration, even when I’m in England. I try every time I travel.”
“You do?” The idea of this sophisticated, urbane man trying to track down a particular recording of Harry Potter made another butterfly lift off my sternum.
This led to a discussion about the merits of young adult literature, the Vampirism in Lit class he took in college, and the rules of time travel. The sweaty butterflies were taking flight with alarming regularity, until finally, when he took out his phone to make a list of my fantasy book recommendations, the last two launched themselves, and a flush of heat washed over me like a flashover fire. It was unbearable.
I hopped down off the roof of the cabin, dropped my jacket on the floor, then pulled my shirt off over my head.
“Ah, what are you … is everything okay?” Darius’s expression was so odd that it took a second for me to evaluate what he was seeing. Me, standing in the cockpit of his boat, wearing jeans, boots, and a yoga bra, holding the T-shirt I’d just ripped off my body.
“Hmm. Probably requires more explanation than you’re going to get,” I said, as I kicked off my boots and unbuttoned my jeans.
His eyes were riveted, and if I hadn’t been so suffused with the need to get out of my clothes, I might have paid a bit more attention to what was in his gaze.
I left my jeans behind on the deck of the boat and launched myself off it into the freezing cold lake.