Hearts on Fire: Romance Multi-Author Box Set Anthology

by Violet Vaughn

  While his band was still climbing the charts, Davis had been able to laugh at his father’s warning. But lately he couldn’t deny that his dad might have been right all along.

  It must be great to have a family that supports you, he thought, hiding this new misery in a bite of asparagus and mushrooms—which really were incredible.

  But the sudden intrusion of thoughts about his unsupportive parents had opened up another vista of despair inside him. Suddenly there was nothing he wanted more than to shut out every dark thought that plagued him with the best, most reliable shield he knew: music. The louder, the better.

  When the amazing dinner was finished, Davis offered to help with the cleaning-up. But Jordan shook her head. “You’re not here to work. Relax. Enjoy what’s left of the sunset, and leave all the rough stuff to us. Besides, the galley’s small and you’ll only get in the way.”

  Davis claimed one of the folding deck chairs and stared at the colors fading from the sky while the crew busied themselves below. He had never been troubled by his wealth before—it had seemed the natural outcome of his hard work and talent, his just reward for following his dreams despite his parents’ objections. But now he felt a gulf between himself and the crew of the Coriolis. He had to spend the next nine days with these people—his only company, if Tyler got his way—yet they were all business, and to them he was just a job to be done.

  A terrible stab of loneliness ripped through him, an ache he hadn’t allowed himself to feel since the debacle with Christine. That jagged pain left him feeling hollow, disconnected, like some insignificant speck drifting on a wide, uncaring sea.

  That’s not me, he told himself. I’m Davis fucking Steen. I’m not insignificant; I’m a star.

  Tyler’s words from that morning came back to him. You’re going to come back to Seattle and tell me exactly who Davis Steen is and where his career is going.

  Davis’s breath caught in his throat. “I’m a star” isn’t enough of an identity. He knew that answer wouldn’t satisfy Tyler and Sky Records… and it didn’t satisfy Davis, either. What did it even mean, to be a star? He tipped his head back and stared up at the sky. The last wisp of orange had faded, and a night of dense, velvety purple was descending. This early in the night, only one star had emerged, sparkling silver-white. But it was alone in the sky, surrounded by an endless stretch of soft, violet nothingness.

  Emily giggled below and Storm’s laughter joined hers. The sound of it echoed faintly over the harbor, rebounding lightly from the night-blackened hills of Stuart Island. There was no other sound out here—nothing but the light patter of tiny waves against the Coriolis’s hull.

  God, Davis wondered, how do these Griffin Bay people stand this kind of isolation? How did they manage to live all the way out here in the San Juans, clinging to their rocky islands with the rest of the world—the real world—so far away? There was no sound of any freeway or roar of jets in the sky. There was no bump of music in the streets—there were no streets at all, save for the mysterious lanes that traced through dark water—routes only Jordan and her crew knew how to navigate.

  I can’t do this, Davis realized, his heart lurching with sudden panic. I can’t be alone. Fuck Tyler and his forced vacation.

  If he remained alone with his thoughts—with his fears, the repetitive scolding voice of his father, the memory of Christine in his arms—Davis was sure he’d go crazy.

  He jumped up from of his deck chair and hurried down the ladder into the heart of the Coriolis. Inside, the cheery glow of a few small lamps made the burnished teak wood of the boat’s interior glisten with warm light. Jordan and her friends stopped mid-laugh to stare at Davis as he pushed past them, moving quickly along the main cabin’s narrow corridor toward his own private quarters. He fumbled with the door’s tricky latch, but finally it popped open and he reached over the wide, richly made-up bed to where Storm had stowed his duffel bag in an wooden locker.

  Inside the bag, Davis found his iPod and its two powerful little speakers. He cradled them against his chest as if they were some life-giving token, some magical elixir—and then he headed back to the ladder.

  “What do you have there?” Jordan asked as he passed the galley. She was elbow-deep in a sudsy sink, washing the dinner dishes.

  “Music,” Davis said, and hurried back up to the boat’s deck before she could stop him.

  Somebody had turned on a small light affixed to the Coriolis’s rear mast. In the circle of its amber glow, Davis set up his speakers and flipped through his playlists until he found just the right music: classic rock with a heavy, confident beat and howling vocals—a sound that might as well have been his own half-lost, still-determined soul crying its defiance to the world. He let hips, knees, and shoulders swing loosely as the speakers blared, let the driving bass thump through him.

  It thumped through the Coriolis, too. Jordan popped up from belowdecks, frowning at him sternly.

  “Turn that off!” she said.

  Davis cupped a hand to his ear as if he couldn’t hear her. It was The Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin; he sang along with the wordless, high-pitched vocal intro.

  “Waaah-waaaaah-waaaah!”

  “Oh my God!” Jordan scrambled the rest of the way up the ladder and rushed toward he speakers.

  Davis—his eyes on the wiggle of her hips as she ran, the enticement of her cleavage when she bent to seize his iPod—moved in close. He danced at her, circled her, surrounded her with the closeness of his body and the rhythm of his hips as they thrust at her subtly, in time with the music.

  “Waaah-waaaaah-waaaah!” he sang again.

  Jordan pulled the plug on his iPod; Davis’s last loud howl belted out across the water lone, without the accompaniment of Led Zeppelin. His voice and the final echo of the music rang loudly from the near-vertical walls of Stuart Island and filled the long, narrow bowl of the harbor.

  A voice from one of the boats anchored at the harbor’s end shouted back a faint response. “Shut up, jackass!”

  “What are you doing?” Jordan demanded.

  Davis kept dancing around her even though the music was gone. He moved even closer, his body swinging in time to the beat he heard inside his head. He held her dark brown eyes with his own, and though her glare spoke plainly of her irritation, she didn’t look away.

  “I’m dancing,” Davis said softly, so close to her now that he practically whispered the words in her ear.

  In the orange glow of the deck light, Davis thought he saw her cheeks color. But instead of giving him the sign he was craving—a melting smile, a sarcastic but flirtatious comment—anything to tell him he was winning her over—Jordan braced her hands on her hips. Her scowl only grew more stern.

  “Listen, Davis. You’re a client, and I take a professional approach to my business. I want to make your vacation a pleasant experience, but I’m the captain of this boat. You do what I say—that’s the rule of sailing. Got it?”

  All the dance drained out of Davis’s body. “Yeah, yeah. Jeez, I got it.”

  “Your manager sent you to me so you could relax, not so you could party. My boat isn’t a floating bar-room!”

  Davis heard a soft sound from the cockpit. Emily was there; she had gently cleared her throat, and Jordan rounded on her with a sharp, “What?!”

  “Can I speak to you for a moment, please?” Emily said.

  Jordan fixed Davis with one last glare of warning, then stalked across the deck to Emily’s side. As the two women put their heads together in quiet conversation, Davis bent to wrap up the cords of his speakers and iPod. He felt like an idiot. He’d made a total fool of himself, and pissed off the other boaters on the harbor, too.

  But it had been worth it, to get so close to Jordan. He’d practically been able to feel the heat of her skin—or maybe it was the heat of her anger. It didn’t matter which; Davis had enjoyed it. He bit his lip hard to stifle a victorious laugh.

  Soft footsteps crossed the deck toward him. He looked up to see Emily s
tanding over him, smiling self-consciously while she shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

  “Hey,” Davis said.

  “Hey. Uh… listen, I want to apologize to you for being such an idiot when you first got here.”

  Davis straightened, speakers in hand. “It’s all right. Seriously, it’s fine. I’ve dealt with way worse before, believe me.”

  “I was just talking to Jordan, and I think I might have convinced her that a little music would be a good thing tonight.”

  “I don’t know,” Davis said, glancing over his shoulder toward the distant lights of the other anchored boats. “You and I might be alone out here in our appreciation for music.”

  “Jordan said it would be okay… as long as it’s quiet. And acoustic.”

  “Aha.” Davis chuckled. “You guys want a private concert—is that it?”

  Emily blushed. “I didn’t mean…. We don’t want to impose. And of course you can say no. But maybe playing your guitar instead of playing your iPod would be a little… tamer? A little more chill.”

  He smiled at her. “Don’t count on that. I can shred pretty hard, even on an acoustic.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But it won’t carry as far, so the captain won’t have any reason to go into cardiac arrest.” She leaned toward him and whispered with a conspiratory air, “Plus, I’ve convinced Jordan to make a peace offering.”

  Jordan came up the ladder bearing a resigned air and four wine glasses, clutched by their stems in one hand. She held an opened bottle of wine in the other. Davis watched a she set the bottle carefully on one of the cockpit’s bench seats, then arranged the glasses in a neat row.

  He approached carefully. “I thought your boat wasn’t a floating bar-room.”

  She looked up at him with a level stare that said, Watch it, buddy. But a moment later those full lips twitched with the barest hint of a smile.

  “Emily can be very convincing sometimes.” She poured the dark wine into the glasses.

  A few minutes later, Davis sat with his guitar resting on his knee while the crew of the Coriolis huddled around him. The night had grown chilly, but the wine—an excellent, full-bodied red—took some of the edge off. Davis did his best to keep the volume down for Jordan’s sake. He coaxed soft chords from the strings, playing first one gentle, slow song, and then another.

  Perhaps it was to Emily’s disappointment that Davis didn’t play a single Local Youths song. His band’s stuff was just too harsh for this easy, quiet moment, too lively for the close proximity they all shared and the mellow taste of the wine on his tongue. Davis played through one ballad after another—other people’s songs, singing sweet and low. He gave a welcoming grin when Emily and Storm joined in—though nobody was brave enough to try until they’d finished a second glass of wine. The crew of the Coriolis wasn’t bad with a harmony—Davis had to hand it to them.

  Jordan never sang. She sat wrapped in a wool blanket with her knees pulled up to her chest, watching Davis across the span of the cockpit as he played, her eyes serious and assessing. But now and then as her friends sang along, a gentle smile did play on her lips. She was even more beautiful when she allowed happiness to shine through her hard exterior.

  Davis finished the last chords of a love song and reached for the bottle of wine. There was just enough left for one more glass. He reached out to top Jordan off, but she covered the glass with her hand.

  “One’s the limit for the captain. Even at anchor.”

  “You really take this captain stuff seriously, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” she said. She glanced quickly at Emily and Storm, then resolutely away from her friends. Her voice thickened with some intense emotion Davis couldn’t identify. “Sailing is my whole life.”

  “I think that’s really cool,” he told her. He wasn’t turning on the charm now—not trying to win her over. He meant every word. “I mean, you’re not as old as I am, but you’ve found your thing—your path through life.”

  Jordan gave a short, bitter laugh and stared down at the deck. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  What had he said wrong? Davis watched Jordan’s face in the silvery starlight, but her thoughts seemed a thousand miles away. He poured the last of the wine into his own glass and sipped it, welcoming the warm tingle of alcohol along his veins.

  He began to gently strum the opening chords of another song.

  “Time for me to turn in,” Jordan said abruptly, rising and bundling up the blanket in her arms. “Have a good night, everybody, and my crew had better not stay up too late. We’re pulling anchor at eight a.m. sharp.”

  Davis kept playing automatically, his hands moving smoothly through the chord progression. But his eyes and his thoughts followed Jordan as she disappeared below. Her absence from the cockpit—from their small, intimate gathering—felt like a huge, shocking thing. Midway through the song’s intro, he stopped—his hand froze on the fretboard, ignoring his will to continue. Instead he switched to a more melancholy tune. Somehow the tone of this new song seemed to fit his mood better, now that Jordan had gone.

  But when he looked up at the sky, the lone star he’d seen before had been joined by hundreds more—thousands more. Davis’s fingers faltered again on the guitar strings. In all his tours through the world’s biggest cities, he had never seen a sky so bright with stars. Not a single point of light was lonely or isolated up in that vast, black curve of sky. And that made Davis feel just a little bit better.

  7

  The fourth day of the sailing trip dawned misty and damp—a far more typical Northwest morning than any they’d enjoyed since leaving Griffin Bay. The Coriolis glided through the pearl-gray fog into the mouth of Fisherman Bay. Jordan would have preferred clearer visibility for her entry into the bay, but getting in required the navigation of a tricky, narrow underwater channel. It was too easy to stick the boat’s keel in the mud or even damage the hull on the maze of hidden shoals. The tide was high early that morning, so that was when she had to enter the bay.

  Storm stood at the prow, holding to the staysail’s rigging as he peered down into the water, on the lookout for any logs or other heavy objects which Jordan might have to steer around. Emily kept her eyes on the fathometer, calling out the water’s depth below the keel foot by foot as the Coriolis crawled under engine power toward its destination. It was delicate work. Jordan welcomed the quiet of morning as she handled the helm with an expert touch. The misty silence allowed her to concentrate on not running her boat aground.

  That was when the thumping bass of Davis’s portable speakers started up below-decks.

  “Oh… my God,” Jordan whispered tensely. “Does he never stop with the loud music?”

  Emily stifled a laugh. It fought its way out as an undignified snort. “He is a rock star. What do you expect?”

  “Quiet! That’s what I expect! Who comes to the San Juan Islands and mopes around in the cabin the whole time, blasting music into his own face when there’s so much out here to see and experience?”

  “He hasn’t been in his cabin the whole time,” Emily said.

  That was true. Over the past three days, while Jordan sailed the Coriolis through some of the most stirring, spectacular maritime vistas known to man, Davis had remained mostly in his cabin, wrapped in the filthy blanket of his disturbingly loud music. But to his credit he did emerge whenever it was time to eat. Once or twice he’d even come up to check out the scenery—for no more than fifteen minutes at a time—and then, with some dismissive comment that was carefully calculated to prove how cool he was, he vanished again to pound on Jordan’s nerves with his music.

  As irritating as she found Davis’s total disregard for the sailing experience, Jordan had to admit to herself that she was just a little bit glad Davis kept mostly out of sight. Her body seemed to be in total rebellion against her common sense and good judgment, because whenever Davis did appear, he was the only thing Jordan could look at.

  Often she found herself staring at him in disgu
sted fury, wondering how any person could remain so unmoved by the beauty through which they traveled. But the moment he’d speak in that dark, velvety voice, or the moment he’d move in his loose, casually graceful style, a tight knot would form in Jordan’s stomach. She didn’t know whether it was hatred or desire.

  And God help Jordan if Davis came close enough for her to catch a whiff of his smell. A couple of times he’d settled down in the cockpit for a few minutes, gazing unmoved at the islands as they passed… and the prevailing breeze had bombarded Jordan’s senses with an over-awareness of his presence. Once, while in that pathetic state, she had let a line slip right through her hands and the mainsail had flapped like the wings of a startled bird—and once she’d lost track of where she was going and steered the Coriolis entirely off course.

  Worse than her Davis-induced blunders was the sneaking suspicion Jordan had that he knew exactly what he was doing to her. He would linger around Jordan for a few minutes, and as soon as she slipped up somehow—as soon as she betrayed her distraction, her temptation—he fixed her with his slow, curling smile and those piercing blue eyes. Got you, those smoldering looks seemed to say. Then he headed back down to his cabin, leaving his lingering scent behind, along with the unspoken promise that he’d be back to shake Jordan up again, and twist up her mind with fury and longing, just as soon as she settled herself and began to sail straight again.

  But that damn music never seemed to stop thumping and blaring from his cabin. It was almost as if Davis had some sort of peace-induced phobia.

  “I can’t stand him,” Jordan muttered to Emily. “He’s so much worse than I thought he’d be.”

  Emily glanced up from the fathometer with a skeptical smirk. “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah, really. Six more days and I’ll be free of him for good. I’ll never have to see or talk to or think about Davis Steen again. I can’t wait.”

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth she felt an uncomfortable twinge in her chest. That’s a good thing, right? To never see him again?