The Mediterranean sun was a blast of white light streaming through the porthole in Tristan’s bedroom on his yacht, and Colleen blinked in the glare as she woke up.
His boat’s name, the Ark Nemesis, still cracked her up. If she’d seen that when she’d first met TwistyTrader, she would’ve taken it as a sign, turned tail, and fled.
When she cranked herself around and braced her body on her elbows to look at Tristan in the bed beside her, his hands were behind his head, and he was staring at the ceiling.
She said, “G’morning.”
He rolled toward her. “I was just thinking a few things over, and I think our plan has finished.”
“Nothing left to do but spend the money,” she said.
He chuckled. “But in the meantime, we should eat. Let me take you to one of my favorite lunch spots today, and then we’ll walk around Monaco. For all that you’ve been here, you’ve seen very little of it.”
Today would be her first day of seeing and doing instead of crouching in her pathetic apartment and never going anywhere. “Sounds like a plan.”
“I told the cabin staff to deliver some coffee and something light. It’s already ten-thirty, so lunch will be soon. This is one of my favorite places to visit in Monaco, and they take great care to present only the finest food as if it’s a labor of love. Make sure you’re hungry.”
Her sundress was hanging in the closet, washed and ironed.
Finding her clothes washed and ironed and hanging in a closet when she hadn’t done it was somewhere between amazingly awesome and creepy, like the fae had done it and now she owed them her firstborn.
She approached Tristan. “You should tell your people that they don’t have to do that.”
He looked at her through the bathroom mirror because she was standing in the closet behind him. He was grooming the edges of his short beard in the mirror. He was shirtless with a towel slung low on his hips, and the bricks of his abs contracted as he leaned over to inspect his work. “Do what?”
“Wash my clothes and stuff. I’m perfectly capable of doing my own laundry. If you’ll just point me toward your washing machine or a laundromat, I can do it.”
Tristan raised one eyebrow at her. “Put your laundry in the bin like a good little.”
An hour later, a black car was waiting for them on the quay at the end of the yacht club, and a chauffeur opened the door to the backseat for Colleen and Tristan.
“Where are we going?” she asked him.
“My favorite place for lunch. You’ll see.”
She knew that smug smile. Tristan was up to something.
No matter what he thought of the nickname, he was twisty.
The chauffeur drove around the streets of Monaco, taking hairpin turns with much more care than the driver had on their way from the heliport, and then he drove straight toward a buttery yellow stone wall.
And he kept driving straight at it.
The wall zoomed toward the car.
“Tristan,” she said. “Do we need to grab the driver?”
Tristan glanced up from where he was perusing his phone. “No, we’re fine.”
“But he’s heading straight for the—Tristan!”
Just before the car slammed into the high block wall, a garage-type door slid upward, and the vehicle careened through.
“Oh, there was a door. I didn’t know there was a door.” Her heart was racing.
Tristan said, “They run a tight ship. They have to.”
The door led to a tunnel, and the tunnel led to an underground parking area. Super sports cars and luxury sedans filled the small lot, which would have surprised Colleen anywhere except Monaco. “Is this like a shopping mall? Or an apartment building?”
“Like an apartment building,” Tristan agreed, and the chauffeur led them to an elevator.
Up they went, several floors, and the elevator doors opened to a long hallway inlaid with white marble. At one end, the hallway opened to a long balcony with doors on one side, and the other side overlooked a central courtyard in the interior of the building.
“Oh! It’s a hotel. Why didn’t you tell me it was a hotel?” she asked.
Tristan led the way, the chauffeur having dropped away at some point. “Because it’s not a hotel. We’re in the Prince’s Palace. We’re having lunch with Maxence and Dree.”
“What?” She backhanded him on the arm. “Dude! I was not prepared for this.”
Tristan kept smiling that smug little smile. “After lunch, we have a private tour of the palace with one of the historians who is in charge of restoration and preservation.”
“Oh, wow. That’s amazing.”
Sovereign Prince Maxence Grimaldi and Princess Dree were lovely human beings. Maxence, while still so unearthly handsome that Colleen had a hard time focusing sometimes, was much more relaxed than when they’d bumped into him at the casino. He and Tristan laughed and talked about people Colleen didn’t know, except when they mentioned Micah, so she primarily talked to Dree.
They talked about Phoenix and the best places to eat, and eventually, they ended up talking about family.
“My maiden name is Clark,” Princess Dree said. “My family owns a sheep farm in southern New Mexico, pretty close to the border of Arizona.”
No matter how vast the world was, it was small. “You don’t mean the Clark Sheep Ranch that’s about four hours south of Albuquerque, do you?”
Princess Dree turned toward Colleen, her eyebrows raised. “Yeah.”
“You don’t mean, like, Bartholomew Clark, do you?”
Princess Dree’s chin dropped. “That’s my dad.”
“Did you ever come with him to Frost Feed and Saddlery over near Winslow in Arizona?”
Dree clapped her hand over her mouth and pointed. “We went there all the time when we went to Winslow to sell sheep! Your hand-made organic sheep dip was the best thing ever. You’re one of those Frosts?”
“Well, I was,” Colleen admitted. “But I’m kind of estranged from my family. They wanted me to work the feed store instead of going off and having a life. They kind of insisted on it, so they don’t talk to me now.”
Dree gathered her in for a hug. “I’m so sorry.”
They chatted and had one of the loveliest lunches Colleen had ever had in her whole life, just enjoying each other’s company while eating the spectacular food. Tristan had not been kidding when he said that it seemed like this staff made the food out of a labor of love, because every dish was exquisitely presented with swirled sauces and perfectly minced herbs as well as tasting freaking delicious.
The tour of the palace afterward was both amusing and informative. The historian who led them around knew the origin and importance of every stick of furniture and rug on the floor, as well as all the stories about the Grimaldi princes and their reigns.
There were, of course, many pictures of stunningly beautiful Princess Grace, the California movie star turned Monegasque Princess.
Tristan elbowed her. “That’s Maxence’s grandmother.”
Colleen nodded. “It shows.”
Outside of the front gate in the courtyard, between the palace and the town of Monaco Ville on the headlands, the docent led them to a statue of an evil-looking monk holding a knife. He said, “May I present Il Malizia, the first Grimaldi ruler of Monaco.”
Colleen stared up at the statue, and she instinctively reached out and grabbed Tristan’s hand. He held on. “He looks kind of mad.”
The docent assured her, “He was not mad, this Italian Lord of Genoa, but he might’ve been a little crazy. His nickname, Il Malizia, means The Malicious One. On the evening of January 8, 1297, Francois Grimaldi disguised himself in the robes of a monk and begged the guards for shelter for the night at the fortress in Monaco. He finally convinced the unwitting guard that he was a poor, humble man of God, and the guard took pity on him and opened the gate.”
Colleen gestured at the statue. “He’s holding a knife.”
“Yes, indeed, and he slaughtered the guards and opened the gates of the fortress for his men, and that was how the Grimaldi conquered Monaco.”
“You always think of conquering as, like, riding into the glorious battle on a white horse.”
The docent chuckled. “Not like slitting the throat of an easily manipulated guard in the dead of night? He is as much a myth as he is a metaphor for Monaco. We are small and few, but we could conquer the world if we wanted to, for we are Il Malizia!”
In the afternoon, Tristan showed Colleen the small “old town” of Monaco Ville, where winding medieval streets were lined with terra-cotta and ochre rowhouses. A park ran around the edge of the cliff that overlooked the harbor.
He said, “You can see why the fortress’s position was so important. From right there,” he gestured back at the palace a few blocks away, “the fortress could use the canons we saw to defend the harbor from any ship that sailed into it. If you held that fortress, you could hold the harbor forever. You can see the gray stone parts of the original fortress that were integrated into the Italian palazzo-style castle they built around it.”
The warm sea breeze tossed Colleen’s hair around her face, and she tried to hold it back with both her hands. “This is all amazing. I’m having such a great time.”
He stepped closer to her and ran his hands down her upper arms. “I’m having a great time, too.”
“When people aren’t trying to kidnap our friends or us, you plan the most amazing dates.”
With that, Tristan grinned and even rolled his eyes so that he looked out on the ocean instead of at her. His grin seemed like more than just happiness, more like she’d given him a gift. “I’m so glad you think so.”
The breeze blew from the sapphire sea, over the rock parapet around the edge of the cliffs, and through the parks and towns where people were chattering and laughing. “This is all just amazing.”
“I have a proposal for you,” he said.
Even though she really liked him, and even though she much more than really liked him, she couldn’t fathom anything like that yet. “Um, Tristan, we’ve only known each other for twelve days.”
He chuckled. “Not that kind of a proposal. It’s more of a proposition.”
She laughed. “Oh, you know I already said yes to your proposition that Saturday night at the Devilhouse almost two weeks ago.”
“It’s more of a business proposition.”
Well, that was new. “I’m all ears.”
“After the dividend went out this morning, I seem to have purchased a rather large amount of GameShack stock.”
“Well, yeah. I’ll bet a bunch of people took you up on that offer.”
“Including my holdings, I now own sixty-three percent of all GameShack stock, which makes me the legal owner with the power to vote anybody I want in or out as the CEO or the board.”
“Okay, that’s cool.”
“You had a lot of good ideas about how to make GameShack a profitable company, and I trust you to implement them ethically rather than just slash and burn and pillage it for whatever profitable parts are left.”
“Well, of course.”
“I don’t know what your plans are, but you can’t start university classes for another six weeks or so for fall semester. Would you like to be the CEO of GameShack and set the company off on a good track? You can do it for just six weeks, or you can take a semester or a year more off from university and take the helm for as long as you want.”
Colleen blinked as her mind fluttered around, trying to process that. “You want me to be the CEO?”
He nodded. “With commensurate salary, stock options, a corporate jet, and golden parachute when you decide to go back to college.”
“Holy crap, Tristan.”
“Of course, you might decide not to finish your business degree, considering that you’re already the CEO of a Fortune 1000 company, but that’s up to you to decide which you want to do. And you can be a CEO for a year or more and then decide that it’s time to finish that degree. Whatever you want.”
Colleen found a stone bench near her and sat down because her legs were flopping. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say yes, if you want to.”
“Don’t you want to be the CEO since you own it?”
Tristan turned his head, looking out to the sea.
On the water that stretched to the horizon, sunlight sparkled on the rippling surface, almost blinding with its brilliance.
He said, “I have a lot of other parts of my business that I’m involved in. I don’t have the time to be the CEO of GameShack. If you don’t want it, I will hire someone else to be the CEO.”
“So you’re not just giving it to me, right? Because you already got me into bed. I don’t need any more bribery.” Colleen had checked her savings account that morning. After the two-thousand-dollar-per share dividend had been deposited, no one could ever bribe her again. She needed to avail herself of the new wealth managers sub-forum on the Sherwood Forest boards because her savings account had seven figures in it.
“I’m not giving you anything. You earned it.”
As the CEO of a vast company, Colleen could be involved in all the facets of the business and really do something great. Because she’d been a clerk, she understood the structural changes necessary to make the company succeed. “Were my ideas actually good, or are you just humoring me?”
“Tristan looked down at her, and his smile was gentle. “They are actually good ideas.”
“Can I hire consultants?”
“Of course, and I’ll still be around. We can always talk about it.”
“Okay,” she said to herself as she mulled over this idea that he’d sprung on her.
She could always quit if it turned out that she sucked at it.
Colleen stood up and said more loudly, “Okay! Okay, I’ll do it.”
“Excellent!” Tristan said, laughing. “Now for your first decision as the CEO of GameShack.”
“Oh, Jesus. What?”
“As the CEO of GameShack, you can live anywhere in the world you want. You can live on a ranch outside of Phoenix, or in a penthouse in New York, or in a high rise in Hong Kong.” Tristan looked out to the Mediterranean Sea again, and he shrugged his shoulders. “Or on a yacht in Monaco.”
Colleen chomped down on her lower lip so she wouldn’t crack up. Oh, that sweet, sweet man with abandonment issues. “Like, what? Like, maybe I should buy a yacht right next to yours?”
His glance back at her was sharp, but he was smiling. “That sounds like such a waste.”
“I know. But what else could we do?” she asked.
Tristan wrapped his arms around her and bent to kiss her temple. “I suppose, if you wanted to, there might be enough space on the Ark Nemesis.”
She snuggled into his arms and squeezed him around his chest. “Well, I suppose.”
Tristan’s hand slid up her back and into her hair as he pressed her face against his chest, and they stood there in the buffeting sea wind and Mediterranean sunshine.
Making sure that it was loud enough for him to hear over the wind flapping their clothes and the red and white Monegasque flags flying in the breeze, Colleen said, “I love you.”
Tristan’s arms tightened around her, and he bowed his head to kiss the top of her head as he murmured, “I love you, too.”
Helicopters took off from the heliport half a mile over the harbor far below, and cars drove by on the road around Monaco Ville.
Tristan bent a little farther and whispered in her ear, his voice low, “Good girl.”