Page 20 of Devoured By You
“Thanks so much.” I showed her out and closed the door. Wafting the cards in front of my face, I grinned. “Girls, get ready to party.”
Chapter 8
Blaize
Well, I’ll be damned.
One of the proudest moments of my life was standing on the balcony of the owner’s suite and looking down to deck six, where scores of excited passengers streamed onto my cruise liner. There had been many times over the last year in particular where I’d wondered if this day would ever come. And while my stress levels would remain high until the cruise was over and the last happy customer left the ship, I took momentary comfort because, so far, things appeared to be going okay.
The damn leak was fixed, the badge system hadn’t had any more outages, and my team seemed to be handling any other snags without involving me, which meant they were minor inconveniences rather than anything that a customer might have cause to complain about.
Opening my phone to the welcome speech I’d written for tonight’s VIP reception, I read it over one last time. Making speeches came naturally to me, but somehow, this one felt different. Was different. This cruise ship was my baby, my vision, my fucking neck on the line. I’d never shied away from responsibility in my life, and I didn’t intend to start now. But Christ, I wished I could fast-forward the next two weeks and know everything had gone according to plan.
Someone knocked on my door. Probably Nolen. I put my phone down on the glass coffee table and crossed the suite to answer it.
“Ta-da!”
My cousin Aspen planted a kiss on my cheek and waltzed inside, her dyed purple ponytail swinging as she hauled two suitcases behind her. My jaw dropped. “What the hell are you doing here?”
As far as I knew, Aspen was not on the ship’s roster. One of my team would have told me if she was. Which meant that somehow she’d slipped through security with no one noticing, and also meant that I had a big fucking problem less than four hours before we were due to set sail. If security was this lax, I’d have to scrub the whole cruise, unless I could find the source of the problem. Fast.
“Charmed, I’m sure.”
“It’s not funny, Aspen. You don’t have a ticket, which means you don’t have a wristband.” Everyone had to have a ticket and a wristband. Including me.
“Yes, I do.” She shook her hand in the air. Sure enough, there it was, a black wristband.
“How… what… who?”
“Where, when, why.” She giggled. “Chillax, Blaize. It’s totes legitimate.”
“If that’s true, how come I don’t know about it?”
“Because we wanted it to be a surprise.” She wrapped her arms around my waist, and I automatically drew her to me. As the only female child out of nine in the family, Aspen was special.
“Who’s we?”
“Nolen.”
I ground my teeth. Might have known. He hadn’t said a goddamn word at dinner last night. Aspen disentangled herself from my hold and shook her finger at me.
“I know that face. Don’t be mad at him. It was my idea. I haven’t seen you in ages. That’s all. And I wanted to tell you how proud I am of you.”
Adoration blossomed in my chest. Aspen might be Roman and London’s sister rather than mine, but I loved her just as much as they did. We all loved her, as annoying as she could be sometimes. “You nearly gave me a fucking heart attack. I thought you’d bypassed security.”
“Are you joking? Your security guys almost strip-searched me before they let me on board.”
I arched an eyebrow. “I see you’re still prone to overexaggeration. Don’t you think twenty-eight is too old for that?”
“Oh, shush. Give me another hug.” She tucked her arms underneath mine and squeezed. “I’ve missed you.”
I kissed the top of her head. “Missed you, too.”
“Good. Because I’m bunking with you.”
A laugh rumbled through my chest. “And what if I’d planned to invite a woman along?”
“First, so what? There are two bedrooms, and I have earplugs to drown out the noise of the headboard rattling the wall. And second, that would mean you’re dating, and we all know you don’t date.”