The Billionaire Bundle

by Michele De Winton

  “Sydney?”

  “Yeah, it’s great over here. You’ve been, haven’t you?” Helen asked.

  “A few years ago now.” It had been wonderful. The long stretch of Bondi Beach so close to the hustle of the city center, the multinational markets with amazing food and incredible flavors. Sydney.

  Sydney! Dylan said he’d been most recently based in Sydney. Maybe his family firm had business there. They might be able to have a long-distance thing, weekends or something that didn’t get in the way of work. “It’s an awfully tempting offer,” Michaela said.

  “I know it’s a little out of the blue, and it’s entirely irregular for me to be offering a position like this, but it’s just the timing. We really need someone right now, and everyone knows what an amazing job you do onboard.”

  Taking a head office job would certainly be a change. A change and a step up. It would fit into her five-year plan. And being with Dylan the past few weeks had shown her life was for living—every moment. Before she could talk herself out of it, Michaela crossed her fingers for luck and blurted out, “Yes. Yes, please.”

  “Wow. Great. I didn’t think you’d decide so quickly. Works for me, though. I’ll e-mail you more details, and we can start getting things rolling.”

  “Sounds good,” Michaela said, thinking about how she’d break the news to Dylan.

  …

  The streets of Auckland seemed drab compared to the bright colors of the Pacific that Dylan had grown used to. As various gray buildings merged into each other through the taxi window, Dylan felt their solidity settle over his heart, making it heavy. He felt old suddenly. If only Michaela were with him…

  No. Drawing her into this chaos wouldn’t be fair.

  Almost in a daze, he paid the cab driver, climbed the steps of the building, and moved through doors and down hallways until he was at his mother’s bedside.

  The future he’d seen onboard was a fanciful dream, just like the glossy cruise pamphlets promised. But it was simply that—a dream. He’d glimpsed what his life might have been like if he’d taken a different path, if dancing had been his profession rather than mergers and acquisitions. A life of travel, of adventure. A life with Michaela in it.

  But that wasn’t his path. His life was here. His responsibilities were here.

  Dylan reached for his mother’s limp hand and sighed. Nothing was more important than this. Nothing.

  “I should never have left,” he said aloud. “Goddamn Brian. The conniving son of a…” Dylan took a deep breath. “I should have known we couldn’t trust him. I’m so sorry, Mom.”

  Lily put a hand on his shoulder as she came over to stand behind him. “It’s good to have you back,” she said.

  Dylan nodded, gritting his teeth so he wouldn’t snap at her. “Maybe you could give us a little time together alone.” He felt Lily tense but didn’t turn to look as she left the room without a word.

  He would deal with one thing at a time, and today that was his mother. He’d already put a stop to Brian’s dodgy hedge-fund domination aspirations. The mess Brian could have made of the business could wait. Lily and the kids could wait. Everything else could wait.

  He wrestled his phone from his pocket while keeping hold of his mother’s hand. Leaving the cruise now was all wrong—exactly what he didn’t want to do—but he had no choice. He hoped Michaela would understand.

  “Sorry,” he whispered as he sent her the same word in a text.

  Chapter Eleven

  As the curtain lifted in the Pacific Empress’s theater, Michaela gave herself a secret hug. She loved to watch Dylan dance.

  The gold curtain rose, and she inhaled along with the rest of the audience, as if she, too, were seeing the set and this theatrical world for the first time. Her breath was shortened even further by thoughts of Dylan. The picture of him coming to her after this performance warmed every part of her body, and she waited, her hands poised to clap for his opening number.

  It never came. Michaela watched all of the male dancers—the two from their previous cruise and another she recognized from his contract on the ship several months ago. There was no Dylan.

  Sorry. The word on her phone had seemed cryptic at the time she received it, but she’d been too busy with the new passengers to worry much about it. With no Dylan performing in the show running in front of her, Michaela understood the text’s meaning very well. Dylan was sorry for not bothering to tell her in person. Sorry he was leaving early, and he wasn’t coming back.

  Michaela watched the rest of the show in a daze, her head a mess of questions. Why hadn’t he called? Where had he gone? Who had he gone with? Why, why, why?

  As the curtain descended, she stumbled backstage, head down, avoiding the eyes of everyone.

  “I’m sorry, darling,” George offered when she found him. “I thought they’d already called you. Head office got me on my mobile and said your Dylan had done a bunk. I guess they figured they’d already sorted it, so they left me to pass on the news. Thank God Richard was in town! He already knew all the numbers for tonight’s show, so it was a perfect solution.”

  “What do you mean, ‘done a bunk’?” Michaela still refused to believe it.

  “He rang them, darling. Said something had come up with his family, and he was going to have to break his contract. He’ll lose out on the rest of his pay, but apparently he didn’t seem to care about that.”

  “Nice for some,” one of the other dancers said. “Maybe he’s actually a billionaire, like a stockbroker or something. I bet he’s loaded.”

  Michaela bit her lip.

  “That is not helping,” George hissed, looking warily at Michaela.

  “Oh, well,” she said, forcing herself to be cheerful in front of her team. “I’m sure it will work out for the best. Thanks for stepping in at such late notice, Richard. I have every confidence you’ll be able to fill in for Dylan. Oh, and you’ll need to pick up his activities tomorrow. That won’t be a problem, will it? You’ve done it all before. Your roster is in the office, if you could collect it at seven tomorrow.” Without even waiting for an answer, she turned and left before her tears could overflow.

  In her stateroom, she couldn’t hold the sobs back any more. Oh, God. How could he have done this to her? It was worse than the end of her relationship with the captain. At least that time, she’d thought no one knew about it and she could lick her wounds in private.

  She sniffed. This is not worse than the time with the captain. You knew what you were getting into this time. Three months, remember? It was going to end soon anyway. At least Dylan had the courtesy to be up front about that.

  Get it together, Michaela. You still have your career.

  Her career. Sydney. She’d followed through on her promise to leave onboard life before she became hollow and hardened by all the hard work, but her time with Dylan had shown her the possibilities of a life where she could have everything—the job and the man. Now he had ended their relationship without giving her a chance to tell him about her new job. They might have been able to…what? He only said he was sometimes in Sydney. He was probably hardly ever there.

  Doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s better. I won’t be distracted. I’ve always wanted to live in Sydney.

  It was true that she had once thought of living in Australia’s entertainment capital, but she’d also thought of living in New York, Paris, Berlin… She’d wanted the world at her feet.

  Michaela straightened. It still was. At least with a job in head office, she had a chance to move up an actual corporate ladder. She might even be able to move sideways into an entirely different industry with the managerial skills she would learn. “This is just the beginning of a whole new life,” she told herself. “A new job, better pay, a real move upward and onward. I’m not going to think about Dylan anymore.”

  By the time she’d finished her pep talk, she was calm, it was late, and she managed to fall asleep without Dylan Johns on her mind.

  …

 
; Surprisingly, the last cruises progressed quickly. In every second Michaela could spare, she went up to the top deck to watch out over the passing ocean, delighting in its immense blueness. Nothing could replicate the feeling of being alone in the middle of all that water. The weight of the sea, fathoms deep below, seemed to connect with her own watery body on a much deeper level than it had before.

  “We’re so small,” she whispered to the wide blue ocean, and she fancied it whispered back with promises of hidden beauty and emerald treasure. “Thank you,” she said, throwing her thoughts out as far as she could make them travel.

  As they powered into port, she stood on deck at each tropical location and tried to absorb the view from the towering height of the ship. The forest trees of Vanuatu she let settle on her skin, but she brushed off any memory of them reflected in Dylan’s eyes. Tropical islands, golden beaches, aqua water—she let these worlds inside to provide strength and food and focus for her new life. This was what she had given to thousands of people—these views, these memories, and hundreds of hours of fun activity. Now she was moving on to provide entertainment for even more people and to book acts and coordinate the entire entertainment program of a fleet of ships, not just this one. It was a good move, a real step up, and if Dylan had decided to stick around—if he’d told her he was planning to stay on the Pacific Empress beyond his three months, as she’d fantasized he would in her weaker moments, rather than run off before his contract was even up—she might have turned it down. He’d done her a favor by disappearing. She held on to that thought as if it were a warm coat on a cold day. It helped keep the tears at bay.

  I’ll be fine. I always have been before.

  Her imminent departure meant she had to bring her deputy up to speed to take over her position, and this made her busier than ever before. She’d been worried about how he’d take her leaving, how the rest of the crew would take it, but rather than being upset and disappointed, everyone seemed excited for her, and her deputy made no secret of the fact that it meant a significant promotion for him—one he’d been coveting for some time.

  There were tears when she said a final goodbye to Felicity, but they were short-lived. She’d made a real friend, and the two women promised to keep in touch.

  The captain provided no such warmth. “Surprised you’re leaving after such a short time onboard. Guess it’s a hard life for a woman, long hours and the like. Probably better suited to a stronger body.”

  She took a breath in and dug deep for her remaining reserves of courage. “You realize I’m only leaving because I’ve gotten a promotion?”

  “Sure. Head office. I guess some people could call it a promotion.”

  Michaela sighed. Was there really any point? The chauvinistic little man—what had she ever seen in him?

  Just then, one of the dancing twins walked by, and Michaela saw the captain give her an unabashed up-and-down appraisal. “Think she’s a bit out of your league,” Michaela said. “It’s great that you’ve been able to withstand the rigors of life onboard so well—as a man, of course. But all these years at sea are starting to take their toll.”

  Captain Atkinson’s face fell.

  A young staffer came up at just that moment, and Michaela walked away, her smile building. After all this time, not only was she well and truly over the captain, but she’d got the last word. She gave herself a little hug. She was actually leaving, and she’d just proved she was ready to take on the world.

  But later, alone in the room she’d called home for so long, she wondered again whether she was doing the right thing.

  “Yes,” she said with a firm jaw. “Yes, I am, and anyway it’s too late now.” Much too late. The next cruise was planned, the staff contracted, and she’d just burned her bridges with the captain. There was no room for her here anymore.

  It’s what you wanted, she reminded herself. And despite her sadness at leaving, a sense of anticipation was starting to build in her stomach.

  …

  Her journey from Auckland to Sydney was a thrill. Travel on planes was no great novelty in itself, but the view over the ocean from so high up offered a sharp contrast to what she was used to, and the team from head office had made sure she was well looked after.

  But once she reached the open-plan office, which stretched over the entire tenth floor of an inner-city Sydney high-rise, she hit the ground running. Michaela was immediately shown to a desk, and Helen, who turned out to be a bright, chirpy woman, went through her duties and responsibilities. “I guess I’m your new boss, so I’ll need you to sign this,” she said, putting a contract in front of Michaela. In a daze, Michaela signed.

  By the end of the day, she was thoroughly exhausted. Not only had she had to work her way through piles of bookings forms and hundreds of e-mails, but she was also in some sort of no-man’s-land time zone where it should have been much earlier than it was in Sydney. She couldn’t work out if it was Fiji time, Vanuatu time, or something completely different.

  “Hi.” Helen came to sit on the edge of Michaela’s desk. “How’s your day been?”

  “Oh, hi,” Michaela replied. ”I think I’m getting there.”

  “Sorry to throw you in like this. Now perhaps you understand why we were so desperate for you to accept the job. We had a candidate start a while ago, but he just had no idea about the actual business of the ships. Then we interviewed a bunch of people, but none of them really got it. Everyone here knows about you, and we decided to try and poach you.”

  “Everyone knows about me?”

  “Heck, yes, the only woman cruise director in the whole fleet? Able to leap stupid captains in a single bound.”

  “That’s very flattering, but…”

  “Glad you think so. It’s great to have another awesome woman join the team.”

  Michaela looked around and for the first time registered that it was almost an entirely woman-staffed operation. Nice.

  “Anyways, the last guy leaving means there’s a backlog. I’ve been trying to get to it, but it’s just been impossible with my job as well. I’m sure you’ll pick it up in no time, though.”

  Michaela wasn’t so sure. Sitting at the desk all day had made her back ache, and the seasickness feeling wasn’t dissipating.

  In her hotel bed that night, Michaela ran through the changes her life had undertaken in these past months. Dylan had swept her off her feet and then just as swiftly disappeared, she’d left the only place she’d known as home for years to come to a strange city, and now she was living in an opulent hotel suite three times the size of her old stateroom. It even had a bathtub.

  “I’m going to enjoy this,” she promised aloud. “I’m going to be the best entertainment bookings manager they’ve ever had.”

  The sigh that followed shouldn’t have been allowed, but it escaped anyway as her hand brushed over the empty side of her large bed. An emptiness somewhere behind her ribs nagged at her.

  You just ticked off a job on your wish list, Michaela Western. You’re happy. You’re grateful. Move on.

  But even with her pep talk in her mind, Michaela feel asleep thinking of Dylan and spent the night chasing him through her dreams.

  …

  Her first week on the job, she charged into her work and was astonished at just how much she could plow through. Needing to be able to change things at the last minute and having to work with incredibly short deadlines onboard really had made her into a perfect candidate for this position. In no time at all, she had learned the systems and gotten rid of the backlog. She also loved her new position more than she’d anticipated.

  “Oh my God. You’re amazing,” Helen said.

  “I aim to please,” Michaela replied, smiling. “I think I could probably make this process even more efficient if there was some way for the ship’s cruise directors to log in directly to our intranet when they got into port.”

  “Don’t let me get in your way,” Helen said. “I’ll set you up a meeting with the IT team tomorrow.”

/>   Michaela sat back in her chair with a smile of satisfaction. She was going to have to be careful—at this rate she’d make herself redundant, or at the very least the position wouldn’t provide enough work to keep her on full-time.

  Well, they did hire me to make the position more efficient. I’m sure if I do that, they’ll just want me to work on their other systems to make them better, too.

  Keeping busy was important, not just so she could prove herself in her new job but also to keep her mind off the memories that swept into her dreams and tugged at the cords she’d tied around her heart.

  The memories of life at sea pulled at her physically, too, and every now and then a wash of nausea would still hit her as if she’d just left the boat.

  After a week, she had to finally admit her seasickness wasn’t going away—and that it might be something else. Something much worse. She made a lunchtime appointment with a doctor near the office.

  “So, you’re not feeling well? Tell me what’s not right,” the doctor said, flicking her long hair out of the way of her note pad.

  “I’ve just come off working on a ship for six years,” Michaela began.

  “Wow, that must be a big change.”

  “Well, yeah, but I just don’t feel right. It’s been well over a week. I should have gotten over any issues with seasickness by now, shouldn’t I? I mean, I’ve had a few bouts with my land legs deserting me in the past, but it’s never lasted more than a day or two.”

  “Hmm, yes. I would have thought you’d be feeling better by now,” the doctor said as she nodded her head.

  “I’m just a bit nervous that I’ve picked up some weird tropical bug. We were always warned about it on board, and there was hand cleanser everywhere to try and stop the spread of any type of germs. You can imagine what it’s like if a stomach bug hits a ship of three thousand people with nowhere to go.”

  “I hate to think. Tell me more about your symptoms.”

  Michaela detailed the jet lag feelings, the nausea, and her general dislocation. But when she’d finished the doctor didn’t look at all perturbed—quite the opposite. She gave Michaela a gentle smile. “I can’t rule out the tropical bug possibility unless we do some tests, but there might be a more simple issue. When was your last cycle?”