Chương 2
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
The ordinary exchange steadied her.
Her supervisor appeared in the salon doorway.
Lena Ortiz was forty-six, compact, immaculate, and normally capable of recognizing a guest’s empty glass from twenty feet away. Tonight her eyes went first to Adrian on the sofa, then to the vacant wheelchair, then to Maya.
That sequence told Maya exactly how much of the incident she had missed.
“Is everything all right?”
Vanessa laughed once.
It was not amusement.
“Apparently I’m the only person aboard who didn’t know my fiancé could walk.”
Adrian looked at her.
“I didn’t know until yesterday how far I could walk.”
“You stood up like nothing was wrong.”
His jaw tightened.
Maya looked toward the window.
No one in the room needed another witness to the way that sentence landed.
Adrian rubbed his right thigh through his tuxedo pants.
“Nothing is an interesting description.”
Vanessa folded her arms.
“You let me believe—”
“I let you believe my doctors.”
“No. You let me believe this was permanent.”
Adrian’s gaze sharpened.
“I don’t know what’s permanent.”
That shut the room down again.
Rain struck the glass in a hard diagonal sheet.
Grant shifted his weight.
Lena cleared her throat softly. “Perhaps everyone would be more comfortable if we—”
Vanessa swung toward her.
“I’m perfectly comfortable.”
No one believed her.
She removed the engagement ring from her left hand.
The diamond caught one amber pendant light, then another.
Maya expected Vanessa to throw it.
That would have fit the room, the storm, the humiliation. It would have been theatrical enough for the kind of evening people later described inaccurately.
Instead Vanessa walked to the champagne table and placed the ring carefully beside an untouched glass.
That was worse.
“I need air.”
“You’re not going on deck in this weather,” Lena said immediately.
Vanessa looked at her as if this were one final insult.
“Then find me somewhere on this floating hotel where I don’t have to look at him.”
Grant set down his drink.
“I’ll go with you.”
Adrian’s eyes moved to Grant.
Grant paused.
Whatever friendship existed between the two men had just entered uncertain territory.
“I mean to make sure she doesn’t do something stupid,” Grant said.
Vanessa gave him a cold look.
“I’m still in the room.”
“I noticed.”
For the first time that night, Maya almost smiled.
Vanessa did not.
She walked toward the brass staircase. Grant followed after a hesitation long enough for Adrian to notice.
When they were gone, the observation salon seemed larger.
Lena waited three seconds.
Then she turned to Maya.
“Pantry. Now.”
Maya’s stomach dropped.
Adrian said, “She didn’t do anything wrong.”
Lena’s eyes stayed on Maya.
“Mr. Cole, I need to speak with my staff member privately.”
“She defended me.”
“I gathered that.”
Maya straightened.
“It’s okay.”
It wasn’t.
But making Adrian intervene now would only turn a bad professional decision into a worse one.
Lena gestured toward the service corridor.
Maya followed.
Behind her, she heard Adrian try to stand again.
Then the soft click of the wheelchair brakes.
He had chosen the chair.
That detail stayed with her.
The pantry was barely wide enough for two people to stand without turning sideways around the steel shelving. Bottles knocked faintly against one another as the yacht rolled.
Lena shut the door.
“What were you thinking?”
Maya looked at the floor for a moment.
“That she had just shoved him.”
“I saw the end of it.”
“She used his chair against him.”
“I understand what happened.”
“Then—”
“No.” Lena held up a hand. “You do not get to ‘then’ me. You are crew. She is a charter guest.”
“He’s a charter guest too.”
“And he did not ask you to intervene.”
Maya pressed her lips together.
That part was true.
Lena lowered her voice.
“I am not saying you were wrong as a person.”
“That sounds like what people say right before telling you that you were wrong as an employee.”
“Yes.”
Maya looked away.
A bottle of tonic water slid a fraction of an inch against the rubberized shelf liner and stopped.
Lena leaned against the counter.
“You know how this works.”
“I know how it’s supposed to work.”
“That woman’s family books three charters a year with this management company. She complains, and I get a call. I get a call, and the captain gets a call. The captain gets a call, and suddenly everyone wants to know why a hospitality attendant was participating in a guest’s relationship dispute.”
“She pushed a wheelchair.”
“I know.”
“She could have tipped him.”
“I know.”
“I wasn’t participating in their relationship.”
“You told one half of an engaged couple to walk away from the other half.”
Maya closed her eyes.
“That part may have been over the line.”
Lena almost smiled.
It vanished quickly.
“You think?”
“Possibly.”
“Maya.”
“I’m sorry.”
Lena exhaled.
“No, you’re not.”
“Not entirely.”
“That is the problem.”
Maya leaned against the opposite shelf.
She had worked aboard the Meridian for fourteen months. She knew how to polish brass without leaving oil marks. She could open champagne quietly, identify five kinds of caviar she would never willingly pay for, and remember sixteen breakfast orders without writing them down. She had once spent forty minutes finding an allergy-safe chocolate bar for a twelve-year-old whose parents tipped less than the couple who complained because the napkins were folded wrong.
She was good at the work.
She needed the work.
The yacht’s schedule gave her weeks of brutal hours followed by stretches off long enough to help her mother in Savannah and keep up with the online accounting courses she had repeatedly considered abandoning.
She had not planned to risk any of that over a man she did not know.
Lena rubbed her forehead.
“Go to your cabin.”
“Am I suspended?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That usually means yes.”
“It means I don’t know yet.”
Maya nodded.
May you like
Lena opened the door, then stopped her.
“For what it’s worth, I would have wanted to say worse.”
