Below Deck

Sliding out from behind the table, I leave Ashley and Marcel alone to discuss the menu, knowing the exact moment when Marcel reads that the guests are requesting a twelve course dinner for one night, each course to be brought out exactly fifteen minutes apart, with no seafood, red meat, or anything with the colors green or red in it. And that isn’t even the strangest request we’ve ever gotten on a charter.

“Va te faire enculer!” Marcel screams, pounding his fist against the top of the table as I hear Ashley try to calm him, and I move faster down the hall to go find Ben and Eddie.

Go fuck yourself. At least I know that string of words from Marcel, because he uses it the most and I made a point of Googling the translation a while back. I have a feeling Marcel and I will be using that phrase a lot over the next ten days.

Him, every time someone has a special food request, and me, every time I have to deal with the hot, but spoiled Mackenzie Armstrong and the rest of her highbrow family.

I have a job to do, and I’m going to do it, end of story. One pretty face isn’t going to distract me from my goals.

CHAPTER 2

Mackenzie

“Ugh, why is so hot? My skin is practically melting and it’s putting wrinkles in my Dolce and Gabbana sundress.”

I roll my eyes as I walk a safe distance down the dock behind my stepsister, Arianna. A safe distance is necessary because if I have to listen to her complain about one more thing on this trip, I’m going to rip the blonde hair extensions, she spent way too much money on, out of her head and toss them into the North Atlantic.

“Aren’t there any clouds in this Godforsaken place? A little shade would be nice,” Allyson, Arianna’s mother and my new stepmonster adds, hooking her elbow around her daughter’s so the two of them can form a human chain of twin, blonde hair extension misery.

I watch their perfect, fake hair swirl around their shoulders and down their backs when the ocean breeze moves through it, stare at their long, smooth and shiny legs fresh from yesterday’s wax at the most high-end spa on St. Thomas, and glare at the matching Hermès Birkin bags dangling off their elbows that aren’t linked together. As if going on this family vacation to celebrate the farce of a marriage between Allyson and my father wasn’t asinine enough, and something my father should not be wasting his money on after my most recent, eye-opening meeting with his corporate attorneys and accountants, Allyson and Arianna have spent every waking moment since we landed here two days ago spending an ungodly amount of money on clothing, shoes, jewelry, and purses.

Things they don’t need. Things they already have tucked away in their huge walk-in-closets back at my father’s house in New York, but insist are “So last season.” Things my father absolutely cannot afford right now.

“Just say the word and I’ll trip one of them. Maybe even add in a swift kick to the gut for good luck.”

I forget about my father’s money troubles for a few seconds when my best friend, Brooke Talbot, leans in and whispers in my ear as we get closer to the end of the dock where the luxury yacht Allyson insisted on chartering for ten days is docked. As soon as my father told me we’d all be going on their honeymoon together, I spent a week trying to convince him that it wasn’t a good idea for him to be spending so much money on a trip like this right now. It was seven days of me wasting my breath. My arguments and insistence that he cancel the trip fell on the deaf ears of a man who’d been single since my mother died when I was ten, and was currently blinded by love and wedded bliss.

Knowing there was nothing I could do to change my father’s mind, I relented and begrudgingly agreed to the trip, but only if I could bring Brooke. There is no way I’d survive this hellish experience if she weren’t by my side. Much to Allyson and Arianna’s horror, since they can’t stand my best friend, my father immediately agreed to my demands and insisted on paying Brooke’s way. I let him go right ahead and add Brooke to our travel arrangements, knowing full well Brooke would never let anyone pay her way for anything, not even my father who loves her like a second daughter and has known her since wet met on our first day of kindergarten. As soon as I told Brooke what we were doing and to cancel all of her plans for the next two weeks, she wrote my father a check for her share of the trip and I immediately deposited it into his account.

“Do Hermès bags sink? If the blonde bimbos fall into the water, would they work like flotation devices or drag them to the bottom of the ocean, never to be seen or heard from again?” Brooke asks as we watch my father move between the two women and do his best to comfort them and get them to stop complaining about the heat for five minutes.

Considering it was Allyson’s idea to come to the U.S. Virgin Islands, and she downright threw a childish hissy fit, complete with foot stomping and screaming when my father suggested something a little less tropical, you’d think she would have realized it might be a little hot in the Caribbean in the middle of the fucking summer.

“Sadly, I believe leather floats. But considering I can see the bottom of the ocean from here and it’s probably not that deep, I don’t think there’s any chance of them drowning,” I inform Brooke as we get to the end of the dock and stare at the giant boat that will be our home for the next ten days.

Brooke whistles as she looks the vessel over and I can’t help but be impressed by it as well, even though I know how much it’s costing my father to privately charter this thing. No one really believes me when I tell them my father and I haven’t been spoiling ourselves with fancy vacations, multiple homes, foreign cars in every color, or anything else that people with more money than they know what to do with seem to do. Sure, my father has a ten thousand square foot apartment in New York’s Upper East Side, but it’s the one and only big thing he’s ever splurged on since my mom died and he sold his first app. For sixteen years we lived comfortably, but modestly, and didn’t spend money on unnecessary or extravagant things.