A Change of Plans (7 page)

I slumped against the back of my chair, rubbing at the pain in my temple. Jace gone. At the sound of Dan’s sobbing, I pulled myself together. “What can I do to help?”

“I have to call family. Can you ... call his friends?”

“Yes. I’ll do that,” I whispered. I felt like my insides were exposed, jagged nerves aching and burning with every breath.

The horrible evening had continued as I phoned my family and Elle. She rushed to my apartment and helped with the calls, staying with me through the night. The girl who had been with Jace haunted my dreams, and I roused after a few hours of troubled sleep. I had to see her to understand why she had been with him. Elle went with me to the hospital.

That was when the real nightmare began.

The young woman had regained consciousness during the night. I would always remember the hospital smells: cleaning chemicals, cotton bedding, iodine, even the fragrance of the front desk nurse’s too sweet perfume.

The girl, her head bandaged and one arm in a cast, looked up when Elle and I entered her room.

Elle got right to the point. “We’re so sorry about Jace. How did you know him?”

The girl’s eyes glistened, her bottom lip quivering. “Are you some of his friends? Didn’t he tell you about me?”

Elle shook her head.

“He was my boyfriend.”

As I stood there, playing with the engagement ring on my left hand, the memory of the time Jace had put it there after a day on the ski slopes flashed before me.

“I think he was going to propose last night.” The girl burst into tears, turning her head away from us.

I was suddenly numb, the lack of sensation hitting me so fast it was as if someone had severed my heart from my body. Like I was dead. Elle, her face pale and bleak, took me by the elbow to guide me from the room. I resisted, watching the girl’s grief a moment longer.

As I had watched the sobbing form, Elle pulling on my sleeve, I had debated correcting the girl. But somewhere, as though from behind a thick wall, I had felt compassion for her. I hadn’t been able to do to her what had just been done to me. I had slipped the ring from my finger, allowing it to drop to the floor as I had finally let Elle guide me from the room.

Trust. Elle wanted me to trust. Here. On a ship’s tiny, phony world with its fake relationships. In a couple of days, it would be a year since I had discovered everything I had believed in was a lie.

I lay awake long after Elle fell asleep. I had been devastated
last year, but I had survived. I didn’t think I was bitter. I was simply a realist with a more practical view of people now. Best to keep it that way.

T
HAT SECOND
day at sea established a pattern for the rest of the trip before the ship’s four Hawaiian Island stops. Wes and Ryan joined us for the morning workouts while Jori shared some of his Hapkido techniques and took Jimmy under his wing for special instruction. Maria came for support but just watched. I hoped he realized how caring she was being.

On the fourth day, I passed up a hula class to take advantage of the tour of the engine and control rooms.

Running a little late, I dashed out of the elevator on the deck where the tour group was scheduled to meet and bumped right into Jori.

“Careful there.” He grabbed my arm to keep me from falling as I bounced off him.

“Sorry.” Everyone in the group stared at us.

The ship’s officer began his explanation, and the others gave him their attention.

Jori leaned toward me and whispered, “I didn’t know you were into cutting classes.”

“I didn’t know you were into engines—” I snapped my mouth shut as the officer opened a door and led us down some narrow stairs into a noisy room.

Jori signaled for me to go ahead down the tight, narrow stairs and then joined me at the railing that overlooked the ship’s huge engines. The warm air held a sharp tang of oil and paint, and crewmembers went about their business ignoring their audience.

I glanced at Jori. He held a small notepad in his hands, his pencil making swift strokes on the paper. I leaned over to see what he was drawing—an older man in the tour group—and cast a shadow on his notepad in the process. He flashed me a cross look. I shifted a little and got so caught up watching him sketch that I forgot to listen to the officer’s explanation.

When we moved to the quieter bridge, I whispered, “Are you a natural or have you taken art classes?”

“My electives were all art classes.” He flipped his pad shut and indicated the officer, who had begun speaking again.

The command center for the ship had a sophisticated array of computers to monitor the various aspects of the floating hotel.

Jori seemed entranced by the view, and I asked, “Do you ever draw landscapes?”

“Sometimes.” He flipped open his pad and showed me a couple of sketches of western ranch scenes with cattle and horses. One included a large log and stone ranch house with a huge bank of windows facing a distant mountain.

“Where’s this?”

He chuckled, his tone rueful. “I
hope
it’s Braedon’s family ranch as he’s described it to me.” Jori closed the booklet and shifted his gaze to a group of passengers cavorting by the pool below. “I’ll always prefer to draw people, though.”

In a quiet voice, he asked, “Do you ever wonder what their stories are? Why they came to be where they are, at this time, with these people? What drives them?” He glanced at me. “Is it love? Adventure? Greed?” He faced the windows again and, so softly I almost couldn’t hear, added, “Is it pain?”

The raw agony in Jori’s eyes made me stare at him, and I felt a sudden kinship. What had caused that pain? I regretted
how testy I had been with him after the incident in the gym. He had been true to his word and never made another flirty comment.

“That’s odd,” Jori muttered, the hurt suddenly gone.

I bent forward to see where he pointed his finger, kept down so the others didn’t notice. There was an officer on lookout at the bank of windows. He had raised his binoculars to peer off to the side, looking tense. In the distance, a small craft headed right toward the cruise ship.

The officer snapped a few terse sounding words in another language—I guessed Norwegian since the ship originated from there—and the bridge crew jumped into action. Our tour guide hustled us out of the room. Jori and I tried to hang back. A crew woman stationed at the radio seemed to be trying to make contact with the other vessel as our guide finally pushed us out and shut the door.

CHAPTER 7

“W
HAT THE
....” Jori scowled and looked at me.

Almost as though we had choreographed the movement, Jori and I pushed past the other tour members waiting for the elevator and dashed up the stairs.

We burst through the door onto the running deck. A few passengers had noticed the small vessel but most seemed oblivious. My heart pounded as we leaned over the railing. The boat had come quite close.

As we watched, the smaller vessel stopped. Jori and I stood silently with a handful of other passengers waiting for something to happen.

“Do you think they need help?” asked an elderly woman.

“I’m glad they don’t have trouble with Somali pirates out here,” said her male companion.

“Did they get those hostages back yet?”

The man shook his head.

I shivered at that thought. The rusty vessel seemed dwarfed by the large cruise ship. It was difficult to tell much about the
crew on it. They were partially hidden by bags of some kind stacked around the deck. Could there be men with weapons hidden behind them?

“Do you know what modern pirate ships look like?” I whispered.

Jori snorted. “Do modern pirate ships have a ‘look’?” He leaned farther out and peered more closely. “I wish I had some binoculars.”

A dark-haired, dark-complexioned man on the other ship waved his arms. From above us came the sound of a lowering tender, one of the little lifeboats that doubled as transportation when the ship couldn’t dock. We backed up a little as it dropped by us, and I realized our section of the deck was getting crowded with other curious passengers.

Jori put his mouth to my ear. “He’s got a gun.”

Beside the white-uniformed ship’s officer sat a man with a sidearm at his waist. I was glad to know the cruise line had armed people on the ship—and that they kept it low key. I nudged Jori’s arm. “And that guy has a rifle. Is it just a precaution?”

Once the tender was in the water, I could tell the men on it were tense. Was it because they didn’t know what they were heading into? The man with the rifle took up a defensive position in the tender as the officer and two crewmen climbed aboard the other ship and disappeared from sight.

As the minutes passed, more people crowded into our section. Jori, standing directly behind me, finally took up a rigid stance to keep from being pushed into me. “Sorry. I’m not getting fresh.”

I was about to suggest we find somewhere less crowded when the passengers started murmuring. Our crewmen appeared on the other ship’s deck again and climbed back into the tender.
Once the cruise boat was clear, the ratty old ship sailed away, its crew waving at us.

A woman’s voice from farther down said, “I know who that is. That’s the ship’s doctor.” She pointed toward one of the men on the tender.

The other passengers broke up rather quickly, and Jori moved to my side to watch the tender rise to its dock. The man with the rifle had pushed it out of sight, and they all nodded to us as they went up.

“I don’t get it. Why all the drama if they just needed the doctor?”

An old man with tattoos on his arms was passing and paused. “They were using arm signals because their radio was down.”

“Makes sense.” Jori turned to me. “Where are you headed now?”

“Library.”

“Mind if I come with you?”

“Of course not.” I shook my finger at him. “As long as I’m not one of your subjects.”

Jori exhaled. “Why do you make my life so difficult?”

I nudged him with my shoulder. “Someone has to.”

He opened the door into the ship’s interior and its filtered air, and we walked in silence to the library entrance. Jori paused. I followed his gaze to the piano where Braedon sat playing.

“I just remembered I promised to help Jimmy with ... something.” Jori bowed to me. “I’ll see you later.”

What was he playing at? I stared at Braedon’s back. I had an easy out. All I had to do was walk away.

I almost did. Just as I made the decision to leave, Braedon looked over his shoulder and our eyes met. His slow smile
grew, and he beckoned me to join him. I could have left. I even told myself to turn around and follow Jori, but that’s not the direction my feet took me.

I
SAT WITH
Elle on the sky deck after dinner, and we watched where the guys in her little social group had gathered. It amazed me how quickly they had bonded, and I wondered if some of the friendships would last beyond the cruise.

Braedon said something, and Jori laughed. Odd that two such different men had hit it off so well. Then I thought about Elle and me and decided it wasn’t so strange after all.

Elle sighed and leaned her head back on her lounge chair. “Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”

I peered at her in the too-bright ship lights. “Because you get bored with every guy you date after a couple of months?”

“Yes,” Elle groaned. “Look at Jimmy over there with Maria.” She pointed to the couple who sat on the edge of the group, completely absorbed in each other. “I want someone to be crazy about me like that.”

I would have teased her, but she sounded genuinely sad. “You just haven’t met the right guy yet.”

“Wouldn’t you think that after all the people I have met I’d have connected with
someone
?”

“We both know you don’t want just anyone.” This was a side of Elle I hadn’t seen in a long time, not since I had gotten engaged to Jace. Why was she feeling insecure now? In the distance, Braedon laughed, and I glanced in his direction.