Hearts on Fire: Romance Multi-Author Box Set Anthology

by Violet Vaughn

  Jordan could feel the man’s cockiness rolling off him in palpable waves. She turned to give Emily an “I told you so” look, but Emily was staring fixedly at the client. The closer he came—Jordan could hear his ratty All-Stars scraping softly along the planks of the pier—the wider Emily’s eyes grew.

  “Holy shit,” Emily said, somewhere between a squeak and a whisper. “Jordan, do you know who that is?”

  The man stopped in front of Jordan and paused. She couldn’t see anything in his shades but the reflection of Griffin Bay and her own distorted face, yet still she had the distinct feeling that his eyes were scanning her slowly, moving up and down her body in a leisurely appraisal.

  “Hey,” he finally said.

  His voice was deep and smooth, with just a hint of gravel to it. It raised a strange, tickling sensation in her stomach, which Jordan ruthlessly ignored. She deliberately avoided looking at his arms—though they seemed to fill her peripheral vision with their firm definition, their moderate bulk that spoke of a naturally powerful frame. He took in a deep breath, as if savoring the clean sea air, and Jordan turned her eyes away from his blocky chest, the way the two slabs of muscle showed clearly through the thin fabric of his t-shirt.

  He was not hot, Jordan told herself firmly. He was the worst. She wouldn’t let herself forget that. She would do her job and make it through the next ten days with this dark-haired, slow-walking, velvet-voiced jerk if it killed her. And then she would be done.

  She forced herself to stick out her hand. “I’m Jordan Griffin.”

  The man set his guitar case down and took her hand in his own. His grip was warm, and he squeezed her fingers with startling boldness—a confidence that she herself did not feel. As they shook, she felt the rough scratch of hardened skin on his fingertips, and that roughness against her own skin, the way his big hand almost swallowed up her own, left her faintly disoriented.

  “Sea Wolf Charters, right?” he said.

  “Yep, you’re in the right place.” Jordan’s voice was unaccountably croaky. “Like I said, I’m Jordan, your captain. And this is Emily, and up on the boat is Storm. They’re my crew.”

  “Great… great,” he said in those long, slow tones, gazing coolly around. “Guess I should introduce myself, too. I’m—”

  “You’re Davis Steen,” Emily blurted. She clapped a hand over her mouth and cast an apologetic glance at Jordan. Then she said calmly, matter-of-factly, “You’re the lead singer for The Local Youths.”

  Davis laughed, a deep, rumbling sound that felt like a whisper in Jordan’s ear. “Yeah, that’s right. So I guess my shades weren’t much use as a disguise.”

  “I’m just a really big fan, that’s all,” Emily said rapidly. “I would have recognized you anywhere.”

  “Uh, Emily,” Jordan said, “why don’t you and Storm go make sure everything in the cabin is stowed?”

  “We already did.”

  “Double-check.” Jordan narrowed her eyes at Emily, who bit her lip to stifle another squeak and scrambled for the ladder.

  Storm made his way along the stanchions and reached out a hand. “Hey, Davis,” he called down. “Nice to meet you. Hand me your stuff and we’ll get it stowed down below.”

  Davis, occupied with passing his bag and guitar up to Storm, missed the show as Emily snapped her head around to goggle at Jordan. Oh. My. GOD!, she mouthed silently. Then she vanished into the depths of the cabin.

  Jordan turned back to Davis. “I’m sorry about that. Emily’s a great sailor. I rely on her a lot. But she gets a little over-enthusiastic sometimes.”

  Davis smiled. The way one side of his mouth curved up higher than the other sent a little shiver through Jordan’s middle. “It’s okay. She seems like a sweet girl. As long as she’s not as big a fan of Can’t Never as she is of The Local Youths, I think I can put up with her.”

  “All the same, I’ll keep her under control. I want you to enjoy your time on the Coriolis. I understand you’ve been prescribed a little down time by your record label.”

  “So Tyler filled you in on my predicament, huh?”

  “He was very… insistent that I take good care of you.” Insistent to the tune of a hundred-fifty-thousand bucks. “So if there’s anything you need, any way I can help you enjoy yourself, just let me know.”

  Davis swept off his shades and fixed Jordan with his cocky half-smile. His eyes were a startling shade of blue, as brilliant as the harbor on a summer morning. The faintest suggestion of laugh lines crinkled at their corners.

  “That’s quite an offer.”

  Jordan swallowed hard; her cheeks flamed. “That’s not what I meant. I mean… I…” Suddenly she felt cold and exposed in her tank top. She hugged her own arms, cursing her fumbling tongue. She mentally hexed Davis, too, for pushing her so completely off her guard with one stupid grin. Who the hell does he think he is?

  Davis laughed softly, and again the deep, plush rumble of his voice seemed to fill her head, teasing up a shiver along her spine. “Don’t worry, Jordan. I’m just here to have a good time. To cut loose and enjoy myself.”

  He moved past her, so close that the cuff of his t-shirt grazed her bare arm. She could feel a momentary flash of heat emanating from his body, and the harbor breeze lifted his smell, warm and spicy with a faint musk that set her heart to pounding.

  Davis climbed the ladder and made a few tentative steps across the deck of the Coriolis. He moved with the slightly hunched posture of one who’d never been on a boat before. Unused to the slight rocking and the hollow sound of the teak planks beneath his feet, all of Davis’s arrogant bearing vanished. He looked uncertain, maybe even a little nervous.

  Jordan seized her opportunity. She stepped up the ladder with all the natural command of the captain she was. The Coriolis was her domain, and no cocky rock star was going to put her out of her element. Not even if his voice was smooth as black silk and the smell of his hard, toned body made her knees weak.

  She was in charge here—of the boat, the crew, her future and her fate. Davis Steen had better remember that.

  4

  In the first hour of his sailing adventure, Davis had already picked up so much boat lingo that he felt like an old salt. The two big, wooden poles sticking up from the middle of the boat were called masts—but of course he knew that from his pre-seafaring existence. Only a perfect idiot would have made it to his thirties without knowing what a mast was. But as Jordan Griffin and her two-person crew worked the ropes and sails like a well-oiled machine—Jordan calling out orders as she minded the ship’s big, spoked steering wheel—his nautical vocabulary expanded.

  No, those weren’t ropes. They were lines. And the wheel was apparently called the helm. Gaff and stay, rudder and keel, he savored the enchanting language of sailing as Jordan, Storm, and Emily went about their business with brisk efficiency. There was a rhythm to this language that Davis, as a lifelong musician, couldn’t help but appreciate. There was a rhythm, too, to sailing itself—the timing and grace with which the crew angled the huge white sails, catching the wind just so; the perfect, mathematic intervals of bobbing waves, as steady as a metronome’s beat.

  Of course, he was still a total newbie. And if he was perfectly honest with himself, he found this whole sailing thing a little intimidating. There was a lot of water below the boat, stretching down to depths he couldn’t imagine. The thought of what might be lurking below the surface gave him a mild case of the creeps. He tried to ignore all the unknown possibilities.

  “We’ve got a nice following wind,” Jordan called to her crew.

  “Wooo!” Storm shouted in reply from the front of the boat.

  The wiry, tousled young crewman stood far from Davis’s perch in the sunken cockpit, not far from Jordan and the helm. Davis was trying his best kick back with an unconcerned expression, but even though he found the boat’s gentle up-down motion soothing as it breasted across the low waves—and even though he was picking up the lingo—he was still painfully aware that
he was out of his element. Way, way out.

  Storm, on the other hand, darted along the boat’s impressive eighty-five-foot length with the confidence and inborn aptitude of a squirrel leaping from tree branch to tree branch. Davis watched Storm fiddle with some sort of line running from the front-most mast.

  “Let’s raise the mainsail,” Jordan called.

  Storm joined Emily where she stood beside an orderly collection of lines locked in metal cleats. “Ready?” he asked, and the blonde girl nodded.

  As each began to haul on their lines, the long pole connected horizontally to the mast—the boom, as Jordan called it—began to wiggle loosely.

  “Keep your head down,” Jordan said to Davis. “This thing is going to fly right over you, and believe me, it’s no fun getting hit.”

  Davis gave Jordan a dry look from behind his shades. God, she was hot—slim and leggy, and her tight blue tank top revealed plenty of sun-kissed, perfectly smooth skin. It revealed some cleavage, too, between those cute, round little breasts. Her coffee-brown hair was done up in a wind-tangled ponytail, pulled out through the rear loop of a black ball cap that read Griffin Bay, WA in hot-pink embroidery. Davis had noticed her graceful, athletic body the moment he’d stepped off the float plane. Jordan’s hotness had been a welcome treat, the only thing to brighten his mood since he had woken up to Tyler’s obnoxious buzzing at his condo door that morning.

  And when he’d checked her out at close range… Wow. Her long face with its delicate features and her level, dark-eyed stare gave Jordan a serious expression that teetered on the edge of “stodgy librarian,” but the sternness was totally undone by the scattering of freckles across her cheeks and nose. And her full, pink lips—they lent Jordan a totally different look. Once the boat was underway, Davis had found himself staring at her mouth more times than he could count. He was far more captivated by her lips than by the beauty of the San Juan Islands. He couldn’t stop wondering what they would feel like pressed against his own mouth—or in a variety of other places.

  But sexy as Jordan was, she was all business on her boat. Maybe she was all business everywhere; Davis had no way of knowing. All he could say for sure was that something about her no-nonsense, hard-nosed demeanor annoyed him—almost as much as her beauty attracted him. Maybe Jordan’s businesslike manner simply reminded him of Tyler. God knows, Tyler is enough to annoy anybody. Davis tapped his toes against the boat’s wooden deck, giving in to a nervous rhythm as he got a little more honest with himself. Just maybe, he felt the same envy for Jordan Griffin as he felt for his manager. After all, this young woman was hardly more than a girl—she couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, tops—and here she was, the captain of her own boat, running her own business, at the whim of neither manager nor record label.

  Or maybe his vague sense of irritation stemmed from something else entirely. Save for that one moment on the dock, when Davis had tripped her up with his stupid insinuation and sent her stammering, Jordan had completely ignored him, save for the few times when professional courtesy demanded she speak to him. Not so long ago, Davis would have had a girl like Jordan falling into his lap—and his bed. If there was one thing Davis could do better than making music, it was making a woman wet. But for all the desire Jordan showed for him, Davis might as well have been a bucket of fish heads.

  Maybe I’m losing my edge with women, too. Maybe Tyler’s right, and I’ve aged out of this lifestyle.

  The thought depressed him. Suddenly he wanted to be anywhere else but in Jordan’s proximity. Thinking to check out the view from the front of the Coriolis, he stood—totally forgetting the captain’s warning.

  “Look out!” Jordan shouted.

  She dodged away from the helm and grabbed Davis by the back of the neck. For one heartbeat he thought, Yes! My edge is back! And he felt a cocky grin spread across his face. Then Jordan wrenched him down with all her strength, just in time for the boom to miss both their heads by mere inches. The breeze of its passage tugged at Davis’s hair, and in its ponderous movement he could sense its incredible weight.

  “Shit!” he gasped. Then he chided himself. Remarkably uncool.

  “Oh my God!” Emily shrieked. “Davis, are you okay?”

  “He’s fine,” Storm said. “Focus! Get the gaff up!”

  The crew continued hauling on their lines until the four-cornered sail raised. It caught the wind with a thump as resonant as a bass drum and the Coriolis leaned with the powerful new propulsion.

  Shaking—and trying desperately to hide his shaking—Davis sank back into his seat.

  “Don’t do something like that again,” Jordan said, returning to the helm. “You almost got your head split open.”

  Davis was too rattled to come up with an effortlessly cool retort. “I know,” he muttered.

  “You have to listen to me. I’m the captain. That means something on a boat, you know.”

  “Aye aye,” Davis said, smirking.

  Jordan stared at him fiercely over the rim of her shades. Then he caught just a flash of a smile in her brown eyes. It was fleeting, and quickly suppressed… but it was definitely there.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” Jordan said, calm and collected now, the thin, toned muscle in her arm jumping as she held the helm’s wheel firmly in place. Those lush lips twitched again in an effort to hide her smile. She called out to Storm: “Let it out more.”

  The crewman responded by loosening one of his lines; the boom swung farther out until the mainsail was almost perpendicular to the mast. Its reach was impressive; it blocked the sun, casting the cockpit—and Jordan—in soft, blue-green shade.

  Something about Jordan in that moment stabbed Davis with a painful, fleeting memory of Christine. Maybe it was the way she looked, so confident and totally in her element. Maybe it was the cool-colored light on her skin, reminiscent of the lights of the stage. Davis recalled how Christine would wait backstage at every concert, the curves of her body oddly, ethereally lit by the spots and footlights. The whole time he played, as the crowd screamed his name, he was conscious only of Christine standing in the wing of the stage, watching him, waiting for him…

  Only she wasn’t waiting for him after all. And these days she smiled at Mark while the news sites hailed the meteoric rise of Can’t Never, and The Local Youths faded out of the light.

  Ever since that terrible night two years ago when Davis had let himself into Christine’s apartment and heard the unmistakable sound of her crying out in ecstasy—ever since that moment when he’d found her plunging and gasping over another man’s body—and since that terrible, red-hot, hateful moment when that man had sat up in a panic and revealed himself as Mark, one of the few people in this world whom Davis considered a friend…

  Christine hadn’t left Davis in peace since that night. He had broken it off with her then and there, of course, and cut Mark out of the band. But his every waking thought was plagued by Christine. Like a ghost—like that half-seen vision backstage—she had haunted his mind, his music, those quiet moments when Davis had tried to escape his pain. Christine was there every night in his dreams, mocking him with her presence, presenting to him that body he could never touch or hold again.

  Christine had hung at the edge of Davis’s thoughts with every breath, every heartbeat. Every moment… until he met Jordan Griffin. Until he set foot on this boat.

  And that tiny smile Jordan worked so hard to conceal… Davis was doing something good to Jordan, too, even if she was resisting it.

  So I haven’t lost my edge—not with women, anyway. Not yet. As far as Jordan was concerned, Davis was still a sexy rock star with a hot body and irresistible charm. Music might be another matter—it remained to be seen whether he had lost his edge where his career was concerned. But if this foxy little sea captain thought he was worth one of those tiny, almost-not-there smiles, then maybe there was hope for Davis after all.

  I’ll win you over, Captain, he thought as he watched Jordan test the resistance of the helm. Smi
ling with satisfaction, she took her hands off the wheel. The helm didn’t budge. The Coriolis, tilted on its white hull, sailed straight and true with the cooperative breeze. I’ll win you over and make you admit just how bad you want me. I’ll prove I’ve still got what it takes—just see if I don’t. Davis Steen isn’t finished yet. Not by a long shot.

  5

  They made it to Stuart Island just as the sun was mellowing, sinking in a comfortable, orange-and-pink glow toward the west. The Coriolis, sails furled, coasted through the narrow mouth of Reid Harbor and slowed about halfway down the long, skinny length of the bay. At Jordan’s signal, Storm kicked on the engine, then made his way to the bow to manage the anchor. The anchor splashed down and the Coriolis casually reversed, drawing gently backward until the anchor chain was taut and secure.

  “Well, here we are,” Jordan said to Davis. “Home sweet home for the night.”

  The rock star stood up rather hesitantly. Jordan suspected he was still wary of the boom, even though the mainsail had long since been furled and the boom and gaff secured. She could read his uncertainty in his tense shoulders and darting glances, but she couldn’t help but admire his persistent air of unconcern. He was determined to make the whole crew think he felt right at home on the water.