by R. R. Banks
I had been in the nightclub on one of the high decks when I started running. A bartender that had been trying really hard to flirt with me but was a bit too “cucu-kachoo, Mrs. Robinson” for my taste had just handed my drink to me across the glowing surface of a serpentine black bar that was reminding me of my younger days in a way that I wasn’t sure I appreciated when I glanced over my shoulder and saw the men step into the room. Even through the flashing strobe lights in the dark club I recognized them and my heart sank. The cruelness in their expressions sent chills through me and I knew instantly that Virgil had sent them. I dropped the drink from my hand and started to run, not looking back over my shoulder even as the people around me shouted their protest at the sound of the glass shattering and me forcing my way through the undulating bodies crowding the dancefloor. I had hoped that whoever these men were, they wouldn’t be able to keep up with me in the chaotic lights and dancing masses.
I heard shouting behind me as I burst out of the club and started toward the stairs. The men had obviously seen my escape and weren’t thwarted by any of the people trying to ride out the last gasps of the night locked in a messy tangle of anonymity and hormones. I ducked into the first stairwell and leaned against the wall for a second to pry the shoes from my feet. They were not sprint-friendly and the experiences that I had had in the past with men much like these told me that I wasn’t going to be slowing down again soon. From there I took the stairwells, corridors, and decks in a seemingly nonsensical pattern that had me weaving and backtracking my way through the massive cruise liner without consideration for who might see me or what anyone might think of me. At that point, it didn’t matter to me what I needed to do or who I needed to use to get away. I wasn’t above flinging myself on a stranger for a diversionary make-out session, or taking a tremendously-overdressed dip in the zero-entry pool if I needed to.
Why did it have to be a ship? Why did I have to be stranded out in the middle of the fucking ocean where I couldn’t just disappear into a store or hop out a window and get away?
I saw the door to another stairwell ahead of me and quickened my steps to try to get to it faster. I paused just outside it and leaned close to the door, trying to listen for any indication that they might have chosen that stairwell in their pursuit of me. It was quiet. It seemed that I might have actually confused them enough to get away. At least for now. Satisfied that I was safe for the moment, I pressed the brushed silver bar to open the door and slipped inside. The dizzying flights of steps spiraled up through the decks and then rippled down deeper into the ship, confirming that I hadn’t actually found myself in the bowels of the levels. I let my eyes follow both paths, trying to determine which would be a better choice. The last time I had gone through one of the stairwells I had gone down, so I decided this time I would go up, hoping that I wasn’t just backtracking myself right into their path. The move would make me end up right back to where I had been, but maybe I was going to run out of bad luck for the week.
I started up the steps as fast as I could. Even though I was clinging to the handrail like any good responsible stairwell-user, my feet tangled beneath me and I stumbled onto the stairs ahead of me.
Perfect. I was a dumb blonde from a 50’s horror movie.
Muttering a few creative obscenities, I pushed myself up and continued down the stairs. I ran past three decks before choosing the door that led out of the stairwell. I had taken only a few steps when a massive figure stepped out from a small alcove and reached out for me. I screamed and tried to escape the man's grip, but he turned me around and covered my mouth with one strong hand. Despite my thrashing, he seemed to have no trouble controlling me, and I eventually gave up, not having any energy left in me to fight against his strength. He picked me up off the floor and pulled me backwards into the alcove with him. I felt his mouth come to my ear and the heat of his breath burning on my skin.
"Be quiet," the man hissed.
The voice sounded distantly familiar, but I couldn’t place it. In my life, a familiar voice wasn’t something so completely out of the ordinary and many of the voices that were so familiar didn’t belong to people I would particularly enjoy meeting in a desolate hallway, so it didn’t give me any sense of confidence. I screamed harder against the man’s hand, but his grip tightened.
"Shut up," he demanded into my ear. "Unless you want those guys to find you, I suggest that you quiet down. You’re going to be lucky if every person on this deck hasn’t heard you by now."
I stilled at his words. His grip loosened and he lowered me to my feet again.
"If I take my hand away, are you going to scream again?" he asked.
I shook my head compliantly.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, I'm sure, you motherfu-"
The man pressed his hand against my mouth harder to force me silent.
"That wasn't very convincing, Eleanor. Now, I’m going to let you try that again. Are you going to scream if I take my hand away?"
I shook my head and the man drew his hand slowly away from my mouth. When I didn’t make any noise, he slowly withdrew his arms from my body until I was free of his grip.
"How do you know my name?" I asked, turning to look at him.
As soon as I saw him, my stomach dropped a little further.
Well, shit.
“Hi, Eleanor,” Hunter said.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
I knew that my voice sounded a little icier than it probably should have, but I hadn’t been prepared to see the young, gorgeous man in front of me again, and the circumstances being what they were, I wasn’t feeling exactly friendly.
“I’m assuming the same thing that you are,” he said, appropriately defensive in response to my bitchiness. “Noah and Snow sent me on this cruise as a thank-you celebration after their wedding. Though…” he hesitated, scrutinizing me, “I admit that I don’t really understand why they would send you. I was under the impression that it was just me, Snow’s friends Robin and Fawn, and a couple of Noah’s relatives. I didn’t realize that you and Noah were so close. I know that I’m certainly not that close with my third-grade teacher.”
I forced myself to withhold the grimace that tried to contort my face. That split-second lie had come right on back and bit me in the ass. Of course, that meant that I was going to have to come up with another one. That’s how lies work. They are like potato chips. There’s never just one. You always end up reaching into the bag and coming up with another. Sometimes you have to slather a little dip on it. Since I didn’t really know how to talk myself out of what I had already told him or how to explain in a few seconds what was actually happening, I went for the dip.
“We spent a lot of time together when he was younger,” I said. “I was his teacher, but I was also his babysitter. And my husband was his Cub Scout leader.”
Too far?
Hunter narrowed his eyes at me from behind the glasses that I still hated. This man was in serious need of contacts. His eyes were a gorgeous crystalline green and framed by lashes so long and full they looked like they had come packaged and emblazoned with the name of some celebrity du jour. They didn’t belong behind glasses, particularly not the thick black-rimmed ones that he was wearing.
“Interesting,” he finally said. “I don’t really see Noah as the Cub Scout type.”
“Oh, he was,” I said, swept up in the lie now so that I couldn’t even stop myself even though I knew that I was rapidly falling down a very steep slope. “Making fires. Hiking the trails. Making s’mores. The whole thing.”
“I thought that s’mores were more of a Girl Scout thing.”
I fell silent. I didn’t know where to go from there. I had reached as far as that particular lie would take me.
“S’mores,” I said, nodding.
“Uh-huh,” Hunter said, nodding back at me.
At that moment, we both heard a stairwell door close and he leaned around the entrance to the alcove to look in the direction of the sound. He
suddenly stepped back in, grabbed me by my waist again, and spun me around so that my back pressed to the wall and his mouth crushed down on mine. I was so shocked that I couldn’t even kiss him back. We had been in this position before and it hadn’t ended well for me. I was just getting to a point when I started accepting the kiss when he pulled back and stepped up to the entrance to the alcove again to look both directions. I could hear footsteps running in the opposite direction and I knew exactly what he had just done.
“That actually works?” I asked, knowing that he had just utilized my planned technique of making out with a stranger to divert the attention of the men chasing me.
Of course, Hunter wasn’t a complete stranger. Maybe it only worked when there was some history. Albeit brief, uncomfortable history, but history nonetheless.
“Apparently,” Hunter said. “Now, do you want to explain to me why you are running from three men who look like they should be manning the back door of a skid row strip club?”
I sighed, my shoulders falling slightly.
Dammit. I’ve been caught.
“I think that they were sent by my ex-husband to find me.”
“Why exactly would your husband want to send people like that after you when you are on a cruise after a wedding?” Hunter asked.
“Ex-husband,” I said. “Ex,” I emphasized again. “Like majorly big-old ex.”
“He was your husband just a minute ago when you were talking about the Cub Scouts.”
I glared at him.
“Ex,” I said again.
“Ex-husband,” Hunter relented. “That makes it a little bit clearer why he would be sending someone after you.”
I glared at him through narrowed eyes.
“Thank you so much for that vote of confidence.”
“So, what did you do?”
"I have some information on him that he is pretty adamant about ensuring stays with me rather than finding its way into the wrong hands.”
“Whose hands would those be?”
“FBI. CIA. NSA. The whole alphabet soup would be interested, probably.”
“Government agencies aside, it seems that he is determined to get his hands on you again, and the men he hired to make sure that he does look like they take their jobs very seriously. We need to get you safe. Once we reach the next port, you are getting off this ship."
I wanted to protest. Being told what to do was something that I had been more than happy to leave behind when I finally got up the nerve to leave Virgil, and I wasn’t about to let a younger man I barely even knew step into the role of doing it again. Even if that younger man was beyond gorgeous and had a restrained nerdiness about him that I wanted to peel away piece by piece. At the same time, however, I knew that he was right. As much as I had been looking forward to this cruise, if Virgil knew that I was on it and was determined that this was going to be the time when he got me under his control again, I needed to get off of the ship.
Hunter leaned forward to look both ways down the hallway again and then stepped out of the alcove. He started down the hallway, but I hesitated. My shoes were still lying in the middle of the carpet where I had dropped them when he grabbed me, all plans of using them as a weapon gone in the moment of terror. I stared at them, questioning my next move. Those stilettos had been a shopping coup for me. The limited-edition pair were impractical for virtually everything and several degrees less than comfortable, but they had been the envy of all of the other trophy wives during the days when that was my station in life. They were absolutely nothing like the plain, red, boring, pumps that Virgil had always insisted I wear, especially around others, which was one of the primary reasons that I had chosen them. He had been furious, but even after I had endured his wrath because of them, they still made me happy when I looked at them. They represented me, and I wasn’t going to lose myself again.
I dipped down and scooped my shoes up before following Hunter down the hallway. We moved at a good clip and I stayed as close as I could without actually pressing against him. Whatever had brought him down into that hallway to find me, his presence made me feel safer, and even though I didn't know what he could possibly do to help me, especially considering I was still reaching into the chip bag and not telling him the complete truth about who I was or really why my ex-husband wanted to find me, I was resigned to the fact that he may be my last hope of getting away. If I had known that this was going to be the way that this would all play out, maybe I would have done things differently. Maybe I wouldn’t have approached him across the dancefloor. Maybe I wouldn’t have even gone to the wedding at all. I could have dressed up in my purple satin dress and perched on my davenport to watch a live stream. That way I still would have been able to show Noah that I love him and was thinking about him, but wouldn’t have put myself, or now Hunter, in this type of danger.
Chapter Two
Eleanor
The weekend before….
“I still don’t think that I feel comfortable with this, Auntie,” Noah said.
I straightened the purple satin shawl that I wore over my shoulders and glanced out of the corner of my eye at the huge gilded mirror hanging on the wall. I cringed slightly at my reflection. The salesperson at the formalwear shop had assured me that this dress was nothing short of elegance in purple satin, but somehow the effect was almost painfully nuptial. I had been going for sophisticated, and dare I say, sexy, aunt-of-the-groom and had somehow ended up looking completely mother-of-the-bride. Considering there was no actual MOB in attendance at the wedding, I had spent the entire ceremony feeling as though the people behind me were trying to figure out why I was on the wrong side of the ceremony. When I had first arrived at the ceremony I was pleased to see that Noah and his new bride hadn’t gone for the tacky “Pick a Seat, Not a Side” signs that had become so popular at weddings and that be-tuxedoed ushers were escorting guests down the aisle to ensure that they were sitting in appropriate places. The moment that the young man whose name I couldn’t recall but who looked at me as though we had some long, deep connection, took my arm and started steering me toward Noah’s side of the ceremony, however, was the moment that I decided that getting mixed up in the guests might not be such a bad thing.
As I looked around the ceremony in the brief moments before the traditional music silenced everyone in attendance like the most skilled elementary school teacher in existence, I realized that I recognized approximately three people, two of whom were Noah and his father, my brother. He had asked me to sit in the front row of the chairs with him, but I had respectfully refused. I loved Noah and had spent more years of his life with him than his mother had, but the reality was I was not his mother. I didn’t want to pretend to be, even if it was only the seat that was chosen for me that made it look as though I was trying to take on that role. No, if there was anything that my privileged upbringing had given me, beyond the memory of my own wedding that was attended primarily by people I didn’t know, it was a sense of propriety and etiquette. I might have spent my childhood barefoot eating hotdogs I roasted myself on sticks that I had plucked right off the ground, but that didn’t change that I knew exactly what material and color my shoes should be for any given outfit and occasion, and which fork I should use no matter what obscure course I was eating.
It was that etiquette that ensured I never flaunted my wealth except for my clothing and the occasional piece of jewelry I wore if I was feeling particularly fancy, and that kept me sitting in the third row at the wedding, wanting to be close enough to the ceremony that I could see every tear and hear every word, but not wanting to take a position that I didn’t belong in.
Sitting in that third row meant that I was intermingling with the non-family guests, and that, for the first time in my life, gave me anonymity. I looked around me and realized that no one seemed to know who I was. They didn’t recognize me. Not as Noah’s aunt. Not as my father’s daughter. Not as my brother’s sister. Not as Virgil’s ex-wife, and that was the big one. It was something that I nev
er really had the opportunity to experience. I was accustomed to being one of those women who acquires a different middle name depending on the circumstances. I might have been born Eleanor Elizabeth, but I became Eleanor Oh-You’re-Josiah’s-Sister, or Eleanor This-Is-Stefan’s-Youngest-Daughter, as if I wasn’t the only one, or Eleanor Our-Gracious-Hostess, or the occasional, painful Eleanor Benjamin’s-Sister-I’m-So-Sorry. Or the one that I dreaded the most: Eleanor Virgil’s-Wife-You-Know-Yeah-That-Virgil.
That all fell away as I sat there amongst the pastel-and-jewel-toned revelers. Suddenly I was just another of them, another person come to wish the couple good luck and congratulate them on taking the ultimate of terrifying, yet potentially exquisite, adventures of their lives together. That’s when I knew that I didn’t want it any other way. I didn’t want anyone there to know who I was. Not Auntie. Not wealthy. Not anything. Just Eleanor. For once, I was going to experience what it was like to not have expectations hanging over me, or to see that look in the eyes of a person who I was meeting. That look that said their perception of me changed completely the instant that they knew about my family’s money. There were a few different variations of that look. They could either look at me with the disgust that seemed inbred in people, making them automatically assume that I was arrogant, entitled, out of touch, or any other of an assortment of less than flattering adjectives that meant I was somehow less of a human being than they were because I was born into a wealthy family. Or they might get a little glint in their eye that told me that they were no longer seeing my face, but one of those giant money symbols that popped up in Scrooge McDuck’s eyes when he looked at his vault.
When I looked back on it, that was the look that I saw in Virgil’s eyes when we first met. In my youthful starry-eyed stupidity, I thought that I was seeing love at first sight. Instead, what I was really experiencing was greed at first what-did-you-say-your-name-was-again. Not that Virgil was completely destitute. If he was, we wouldn’t have met at the oppressively boring party held by a particularly vacuous daughter of one of my father’s clients. I later found out that he wasn’t there as an invited guest, but by that time, I was already in too deep.
