Colleen trotted to the rear of the yacht, where Anjali was reclining next to Jian in deck chairs on the shaded top deck in the late afternoon sun, holding his hand. Her laptop rested on her knees.
Dang, those two were just so sweet.
Colleen asked her, “Has the brouhaha started yet?”
Anjali glanced up at her, her enormous dark eyes amused. Her head bobbled on her neck like she was dancing. “Of course. The Killer Whale who calls themself Triple-X-Lehman-Bros is hinting in the comments that the dip is a buying opportunity for the minnows. Those assholes. They’re probably selling every last scrap of GameShack stock they own and trying to prop up the price with disinformation so they can offload it. I hate how they take advantage of the little guys.”
Colleen nodded. “The stock market is nothing but a Ponzi scheme. Let’s protect those minnows and sea bass from buying too early.”
She settled down beside them on a deck chair and started locking comments and pushing back on the bad advice the Killer Whales were doling out to the smaller investors. They didn’t delete the comments because that might have tipped the Killer Whales off that the moderators were watching too closely.
Anjali, as PikachuMod, typed in the secret moderators’ group chat, The Killer Whales are hunting today. We need to push back and keep them from eating all the minnows and sea bass, or at least their money.
Colleen typed back as QueenMod, Those jerks. They’re liquidating their positions and telling the small fish to buy to prop up the price.
Anjali looked at Colleen over the top of her phone. “That was what I said.”
“And you were right.”
Anjali scoffed.
In the group chat, several moderators were incensed that the Killer Whales were once again chewing up the minnows, but ScholarMod asked, @QueenMod, don’t you work at GameShack?
She wrote back, I got fired last week, but I can absolutely tell you that there is no way that GameShack is divesting itself of its streaming service or filing for bankruptcy. They have oodles of liquid cash and real estate as collateral for any loan.
Those weren’t the only assets over at GameShack, of course. That massive stash of their cryptocurrency CurieCoins, which were stored in the virtual vault that Tristan and Colleen had discovered, far exceeded the value of their streaming service and real estate.
Colleen still thought it was weird that GameShack was hoarding CurieCoins.
Anyway, she and Anjali kept the little fishies calm in the main chat rooms and told them to wait and see.
Wait.
Because the minnows should hold onto their money.
They shouldn’t buy the dip yet.
They worked through the day, Tristan trading in his bat cave of computer monitors, and Anjali and Colleen on laptops and phones lying on the deck of the yacht. Colleen was soaking up the sun while Anjali lay right beside her under the shade of an awning, and they waved to the rich people strolling along the pier to their yachts.
Anjali asked her, “Do you think Tristan can get us into the yacht club over there? They have a pool.”
From their vantage on the top deck three stories above the waterline, they could see over the lower yachts to the building on the shore. Members wearing white slacks or skirts with blue blazers despite the July warmth strolled into the building, while servants in black suits did their bidding. People wearing swimsuits hung over the wall around the roof on one level, laughing and drinking fruity-looking drinks.
Colleen told her, “I’ll see what I can do.” She hesitated, but she asked, “Are you and Jian still engaged?”
Anjali threw her a friendly scowl like Colleen must have lost her mind. “Of course.”
“Oh. Okay. Cool.”
The New York Stock Exchange closed at four o’clock Eastern Time, which was ten o’clock at night in Monaco. Anjali and Colleen had moved into Tristan’s computer cave because the heat was getting stronger.
Colleen set her laptop aside from where she was sitting at the end of Tristan’s magnificent computer desk, the screens blasting blue light down on them. Three of the graphs scrolling over the screens froze as New York and Chicago ceased stock trading for the day.
Tristan stretched his heavily muscled arms overhead and folded them behind his neck, bowing farther backward in his computer chair. “Done. Nothing more to do for a few hours. Supper?”
Supper at his favorite restaurant and a peek into his life here in Monaco, where he called home? “Yes, please.”
Anjali and Jian had their own plans to stay on the boat that night. Colleen refrained from teasing her friend about them making the beast with two backs.
Jian was still recovering from broken ribs and having been beaten up just two days before, and he mentioned something about needing to tell the story to the other staff on the yacht.
Colleen managed to find a sundress among the few clothes she had left, and Tristan emerged from his closet wearing a midnight blue three-piece suit tailored close to his athletic body that caught the blue in his eyes and made them all the more startling.
Hot damn.
Colleen and Tristan walked along the quay in the warm summer night, a raised sidewalk built on landfill running around the harbor. The streets around the port were even named with the word quay instead of street or avenue: Quai Albert 1er, Quai l’Hirondelle, and Quai Rainier 1er.
Monegasques and tourists crowded the sidewalks as tightly as the New York sidewalks that Colleen had seen on television, while supercars screamed by on the narrow, winding street just inches away. The occasional déclassé Maserati zoomed past, but it was at the back of the bunch.
Despite how built-up Monaco was, once one turned off the main streets, backstreet restaurants and shops occupied the ground floors of shorter buildings just a few stories high, while people lived in apartments on the upper floors.
Tristan’s favorite restaurant was at one of these cozy, non-touristy cafés. Tristan showed Colleen inside, shook the maître d’s hand, and was shown to a table.
The menu was all in French, and it didn’t have prices.
Colleen felt very much like a desert-dwelling hick. She laid the menu on her plate that was flanked with too much silverware. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
Tristan glanced at her over his menu, his intense blue eyes curving at the corners as he smiled. “We’ll go over the menu together. I want you to enjoy tonight and thoroughly experience it, princess.”
Colleen ended up getting a creamy dish that she couldn’t pronounce and didn’t know what was in it, but it was absolutely delicious.
Afterward, she pointed to her scraped-clean plate. “You can see I hated it.”
Tristan smiled. “Let’s take a walk. I want to show you Monaco.”
The Monte Carlo casino was built like a palace, an exquisite showcase of wealth and beauty, and nothing like the tacky flashbulb-covered casinos that Colleen had seen, again, in movies and on TV because she’d never actually been there.
She’d never actually been anywhere.
When she got back to Phoenix, whenever that was going to be, she needed to see more of the United States, too. She needed to see the real things, not just generic stock footage on TV.
Colleen had lived in Arizona her whole life, and she’d never seen the Grand Canyon, or Meteor Crater, or the Petrified Forest, or the sky islands of southern Arizona. She’d only seen pictures when her friends had gone there. That, she needed to rectify.
In a gilded blue-and-white room of the Monte Carlo casino, Tristan laid a few chips on red at a roulette table, and Colleen snuggled up against his side like a Bond girl. Slot machines rang in other rooms while the gamblers laughed and chattered over the roulette wheels and poker tables.
Over at one of the doors leading in, the crowd bubbled like they were fermenting, and the tenor of their voices rose with excitement.
Tristan glanced over the heads of the crowd in the direction of the fracas, smiled and waved, and then went back to watching the roulette wheel.
Colleen elbowed him. “What’s the commotion?”
Tristan smiled down at her. “A friend of mine from high school just arrived. He’s coming this way, so take a deep breath and prepare yourself. No matter what happens, he’s a nice guy, and his wife is a feisty little sweetheart. As a matter of fact, I helped him rescue her from kidnappers just a few months ago. It doesn’t look like she’s with him, though.”
She fixed him with a stare. “That seems to be going around, and you seem to always be around when it happens.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny anything. Here, he is.”
Another extremely tall guy pushed his way out of the crowd, and Colleen glanced up at him.
Several unusually burly guys just happened to be standing nearby. They turned their backs to the new guy and surveyed the people pressing closer to them. The three bodyguards wore earpieces in their ears, mics clipped to their lapels, and sunglasses even though they were inside a casino at night.
The new guy, however, was the type of gorgeous male that made Colleen stumble backward a step. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed, and his sculpted bone structure was the natural ideal that plastic surgeons envied but could never really copy. He was a movie star and a model and a demigod, and he was somehow standing next to her.
Tristan extended his hand. “Maxence, old chap! Good to see you.”
The man smiled, and the heavens parted, and the angels sang. Jesus, her knees actually trembled. He said, “Tristan, always a pleasure. You haven’t come round the palace for weeks. How have you been?”
Palace? Colleen’s brain stuttered so much that she barely noted the new guy’s British accent that was identical to Tristan’s.
Oddly identical.
Tristan had said that he knew the new guy, evidently named Maxence, from high school, so the often-discussed English teacher must’ve had a hand in Maxence’s accent, too.
“Can’t complain,” Tristan said. “Max, may I present my girlfriend, Colleen Frost, originally from Arizona.”
Girlfriend?
Before Colleen even had a chance to process that, the divinely perfect specimen of a man gazed down at Colleen, and a delighted smile spread over his face.
Her brain fizzed like a shorted-out motherboard.
Maxence said, “A pleasure to meet you. My wife is from New Mexico and worked as a nurse in Phoenix.”
Colleen leaped at the easy conversation opportunity because nothing good was going to happen in her head. “That’s great! Which hospital?”
“Good Samaritan,” Maxence said.
“That’s a great hospital. I sprained my ankle really badly my freshman year of college and ended up in their emergency department, and they took x-rays there to make sure it wasn’t broken. Great hospital.”
The demigod’s smile seemed easy. “Where do you live in Phoenix?”
“I live in Tempe, over near Southwestern State University.”
“That’s quite a university.”
Yeah, he knew about it. “Oh, you betcha. It makes Playboy’s top ten list of party schools every year.”
“An excellent course of study for living in Monaco. How do you like it here?”
The people surrounding the three of them had turned inward to watch the new guy talking to Colleen.
Well, of course people were watching. New guy Maxence was so unearthly beautiful that he almost appeared angelic. There was something of the old-time movie stars about him, a classic, sophisticated handsomeness that couldn’t be bought or learned.
Even Colleen was a little smitten, though a part of her mind was hopping up and down and telling her to remember who she came there with.
One of the bodyguards, for that was who those burly guys surrounding him obviously were, leaned toward the new guy and whispered something.
Maxence blinked and looked at the ground, and then he looked back at Tristan and Colleen. “I am late to tonight’s function, so I’m afraid I must depart.” He shook Tristan’s hand again. “Bring her around the palace soon. I’m sure Colleen and Dree would have much to talk about.”
The three bodyguards and two more security guys who stepped out of the crowd formed a phalanx around Maxence, and they spearheaded his way toward and through one of the doors to leave.
The crowd that had gathered around them started talking in flustered excitement and began to disperse.
Colleen covered her mouth with her fingers as she asked Tristan, “So, who was that guy, and why is everybody acting so weird?”
He chuckled and whispered to her, “That was His Serene Highness, Prince Maxence, the Sovereign Prince of Monaco, who literally owns the land you’re standing on and the air you’re breathing.”
“Oh.” Her chest fluttered, and the vibrations shook her brain. “He was royalty?”
“Mm-hmm.”
Horror. “I made an idiot of myself, talking about how Southwestern State is a party school.”
Tristan laughed. “Max liked you. He’s kind of reserved with people because he is who he is, especially after his older brother died and he accidentally got the throne shoved at him, but inviting you to meet his wife was huge. He’s overprotective as hell of Dree. He hovers around her like a psychotic daddy eagle. You did great.”
She didn’t believe him at all. “Right.”
The unreality of it assailed her.
Two weeks before, Colleen had been a college-dropout clerk working in a struggling computer-gaming chain store, and now she was hanging out on yachts and at the Monte Carlo casino in Monaco and chatting up royalty.
She slipped her fingers into Tristan’s hand. “I’m having a great time.”
He hugged her against his side and pressed his lips against her temple. “That’s all I want.”
The dealer announced, “Rouge! Red wins.”
Tristan collected his money and whispered into her hair, “Let’s get out of here.”
In bed that night, when Colleen was sated and sore and Tristan was wrapped around her, he murmured, “Whatever happens, tonight was the best night of my life. If it all had to happen to lead up to this day with you, it was worth it to me.”
Colleen clung to him more tightly. “Me, too.” She thought about it. “Except Jian and Anjali getting kidnapped. To hell with the Butorins.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, to hell with them. I want you to have something, just in case.”
That seemed morbid. “No, you don’t have to do that.”
“Yeah, I do. I haven’t had a spare minute to dodge out and buy you something because I didn’t want to spend those minutes away from you.”
“Dude, you gave me a bank account full of money. I checked it. That was a lot more than we agreed on. Like, ten times more. Did you make a typo? I was going to bring it up.”
“Don’t bring it up, and it wasn’t a typo. No matter what happens, I want you to be taken care of, at least enough to get through school.”
“That’s tuition, books, and dorm for me and twenty of my most intimate friends.”
He nodded. “Good. Start a business when you get out. Or take a trip around the world. I just hope I’m there to see you do it.”
The weight of it became too much, and she hung her head. “Don’t talk like that. I want to see things with you. I want you to tell me what’s on the menu and what I should eat. I want to go to casinos and other things with you. Speaking of going places, there’s that yacht club at the end of the pier—”
Tristan clasped her chin and lifted her face, and then he slid his warm palm over her cheek. “I want to. I’ll try. But I want you to have something. It’s the most valuable thing I own that Mary Varvara Bell won’t get, or at least, she can’t take it away from you.”
“You’re giving me your yacht?”
“Nope. Better.” Tristan opened the nightstand drawer and pulled out a small, portable hard drive, which he placed in her palms. “Here. In a year or two, you can buy your own yacht.”
“What’s this? Your vacation pictures with other women so I won’t mourn you?”
“It’s my Superman program, the one that arbitrages stock market futures and squeezes pennies out of every stock market in the world. Just in case I survive, and just in case we go our separate ways at some point, I tweaked the code to keep our two serpents from fighting each other. That’s if I make it out of this. If I don’t, then you’ll have the only copy. If something happens to me and I don’t log into my beast for two weeks, the kill switch will activate, and it will wither and die. I didn’t want it running up the score if there’s no one to take the money. Oh, and I called yours Supergirl.”
“Please don’t talk like that,” she said, and her chest felt funny. Bad-funny, not good-funny.
“This one, though, I’ve already hand-coded your bank accounts into it. All you have to do is plug that USB into a computer and upload it into any website to set it free. I was going to do that for you, but it seemed like something we should do together or that you should do when you want to. It also has a kill switch and a rudimentary dashboard for the login, but I didn’t write it for casuals. If you want to change your bank accounts, you’ll have to go into the code.”
The shiny black box, the size of a pack of cigarettes, seemed to weigh like lead in her hands. “Is this illegal?”
“No. It’s completely legal, though a little devious. If anything, syncing the prices at the markets is a social good, and they’re essentially paying you to do it. It’s not illegal like what we’re doing with GameShack is.”
“Oh, yeah. I know. But you don’t have to give me this. This is, like, money for the rest of my life without working.”
“Exactly.”
“It seems excessive.”
Tristan kissed her forehead. “No matter what, I want to take care of you. If I can’t show you the world, at least I’ll know that you’ll get to see it. Just remember me when you do.”
“Always,” she said. “These last ten days have been the best of my life, except for the kidnapping of Anjali and Jian thing. But, you know. I’ve never been so happy.” Colleen took a deep breath, and a warm streak traced from her eye to her chin. “I don’t want this to end.”
Tristan rubbed his thumb over her cheekbone, wiping away the tear. “Neither do I. As soon as everything is stable, we can talk more.” He took both her hands. “I know we just met in person ten days ago, but we’ve packed a lifetime into those ten days. We’ve seen each other when we’re happy, when we’re stressed, when we had a moral decision to make, when we were in danger, and when our worlds were falling apart. It feels like it’s been longer because it was.”
“In the casino, you introduced me as your girlfriend.”
“I hope you didn’t mind.”
“I don’t. It seems like it should be too soon, way too soon, but it doesn’t feel like it is.”
Tristan paused, searching her eyes. “It feels too soon to say this, too, and I don’t want you to say anything back. Nothing. Don’t say anything at all. But I love you. My heart beats for you. I turn into a spotlight when you’re around, and I search for you to hold you in my light, and you’re the only person who exists for me in this dark world. Don’t say anything. I know it’s too soon. I know it’s too much. And I don’t want you to say anything back at all. It feels like coercion if you say something now, and I almost didn’t say anything because I don’t want you to mourn this, too. But I love you, and we’ll see what Wednesday brings before we say anything else.”