Marooned with the Rock Star (A Crazily Sensual Rock Star Romance, with Humor) (6 page)

The maître‘d comes forward.

“And do you have a reservation, Miss?”

“I do. For two. Under Ms. Hall.”

He thumbs his reservation book. “Ah yes,
table for two. Step this way, please, Ms. Hall.”

“Is my dining companion here yet?”

“I’m afraid not, Ms. Hall.”

Figures. He really might stand me up.

I lift my chin and follow the maître‘d to the
table he had reserved for us. It’s situated in a quiet little
corner, away from the main thoroughfare. The table is lit with a
single candle and decked with a vase of fresh flowers. Gleaming
silver cutlery is laid on neatly folded white napkins.

The maître‘d draws my chair and fusses over
me as I sit down.

“Would you care for some drinks while
waiting for your companion, Ms. Hall?”

Why not? It might be a long wait. I’ll give
Kurt Taylor thirty minutes. If he doesn’t show up, I’m out of
here.

“Yes. Can I see the menu, please?”

“Certainly.”

The maître‘d goes off. A waiter arrives with
the drinks menu and I take my time perusing it. Now, what shall I
drink to drown my sorrows?

“Are you ready to order, Ms.?” the waiter
says.

“Yes. Give me a margarita, please.”

“Very well.” He walks off, and the entire
restaurant quivers again, causing my empty wine glass to slide an
inch to the right. No wonder not many people are dining tonight.
Many of them are bound to be throwing up in their cabin
toilets.

I lean back. I consider letting my hair down
and relaxing. I take out my cellphone to note if I have any missed
calls. Naturally, I don’t encourage anyone to call me when I’m out
here at sea, seeing as the costs would be astronomical. I consider
starting a round of ‘Plants vs Zombies’, when a presence at my
table registers itself.

“I’m here. Bet you thought I wouldn’t show
up, right?”

Kurt Taylor seats himself without being
invited. My jaw drops, and I quickly shut it again. He is
resplendent in a white dinner jacket and a black bow tie. His pants
are black. I never knew he would look so good. Wait. I remember him
at our prom. He looked good enough to eat too, especially when he
was crowned prom king.

His auburn hair is neatly combed but left to
trail in a tousled mane all across his broad shoulders. It is
certainly a lot longer than I remembered it. I seem to be
remembering a lot of how it used to be between the three of us –
Kurt, Adeline and myself.

The rage bubbles within me again and my
fingers curl around the stem of my wine glass. A few diners from
the other tables around us turn to glance at Kurt Taylor in
admiring recognition. He soaks all this in.

The waiter comes to our table again,
smiling.

“Would you like to have the menu now?” he
says.

“Yes, please,” Kurt replies. “And bring me
your wine menu as well. What’s the most expensive wine you have on
the house?”

Uh oh. I can sense where this is going.

“That would be the Chateau Haut Brion
Pessac-Lognan, sir. From Bordeaux, sir.”

“What year is it?”

“1982,” the waiter replies without missing a
beat.

I’ll bet he thinks Kurt Taylor is going to
pay for it and that this is a normal date.

Argggh!!

“Bring a bottle of it,” Kurt says with a
wave.

Yeah, I’ll bet he’s used to doing this a lot
too. Money would be nothing to him now, and I’m still scrounging
along in my beat-up Ford and my shared apartment. I glance at my
menu. The particular red he named is $600 a bottle!

As the waiter leaves, Kurt slyly glances at
me.

“You’re buying, aren’t you?” he says. “That
was the deal.”

I grit my teeth. “Yes,” I hiss.

“Good.” His fingers dance over the menu.
When the waiter returns, he says, “I’ve made up my mind what I want
for dinner tonight.”

I cringe. How much of my monthly paycheck is
this going to cost me? This is the Captain’s fault. He doesn’t know
Kurt Taylor the way I do. Kurt Taylor is selfish, self-absorbed and
vainglorious. He thinks the world revolves around him.

Kurt announces, “For starters, I would like
the lobster bisque with foie gras on the side.”

Figures. He orders two starters – both the
most expensive on the menu.

“For the entrée, give me the Wagyu
tenderloin, medium rare, with potatoes gratin and creamed spinach
on the side.”

I glance at the price and my heart sinks. I
don’t even know where Wagyu beef is from, but it sounds
expensive.

“And throw in a tub of your Beluga caviar,”
Kurt adds. He looks at my drained face and says, grinning, “I’m
hungry tonight.”

OK, I think I’ve just lost my appetite for
the next three days.

The waiter turns to me. “And what would you
be having, Miss?”

“Uh, just a salad would do.”

“On a diet, Miss?” The waiter’s eyebrows
move mischievously.

“Yes.”

Kurt remarks, “You were always a little on
the large side, Rebecca. Good to know you’re making an effort to
thin down.”

I glare at him. My fists bunch under the
table.

“What sort of salad would you like, Miss? We
have a classic Caesar’s, with or without a choice of chicken, and
an Asian salad with oranges and Thai sauce.”

“Asian, please.”

“Very good, Miss.”

The waiter knowingly retreats.

I am left alone with Kurt Taylor, who leans
back in his chair and grins wolfishly at me.

“So, Rebecca. What brings you this side of
the world?”

KURT

To be honest, I’m really not that hungry.
I’m a little queasy from the gently rocking motion of the ship.
It’s a big ship, and so the waves must have been huge to rock us
like that.

But it’s so delicious to see Rebecca Hall
being taken down a peg or two. She was getting too full of herself,
telling me off like that. And she looks gorgeous tonight. She has
always been on the heavier side in high school, as I used to remind
her. But she was always pleasing to look at.

Scratch that. She’s more than pleasing right
now.

In fact, she’s downright hot.

My groin stirs uncomfortably underneath my
dinner jacket. The jacket is not even mine. I didn’t bring anything
nice to dine in during my incarceration here. I honestly didn’t
think I would be invited to any tables, and I was hoping to keep
the terms of my sentence as quiet as possible.

So I borrowed the jacket, shirt and bowtie
from Manny across my cabin. We are pretty much the same size. Manny
works in engineering. He’s only too happy to lend me his stuff
(“from my prom, just in case I get invited to chow with the
Captain,” he tells me) for a signed autograph and a photo for his
girlfriend.

I have to loosen my bowtie a little as I am
getting a little hot under the collar. Rebecca still is on the
plump side, but her curves are very apparent. I’ve always liked
women a little bigger anyway. There’s more to grab and grope. Could
never go for the stick thin Kate Moss types who always look as if
they are going to slip through the grating on the drains and fall
into some subterranean sewerage tunnel.

But why am I finding Rebecca Hall so damned
attractive tonight?

Am I delusional? Do I want to have a death
wish? I think I would be safer in a pit of female praying
mantises.

I’m not even sure I know how to make small
talk with her. How do you do anything ‘small’ where Rebecca is
concerned?

(OK, bad joke.)

Because my balls are twitching uncomfortably
within my pants, I have to be extra ruthless. When in the full
flush of libido, go for the offensive.

The waiter comes back with the Chateau Haut.
Frankly, I haven’t the faintest clue about wines. I just selected
the most expensive one on the menu. He offers me the cork.

“What am I supposed to do about this?” I
demand.

Rebecca’s mouth curls into a slight
smile.

“Would you like a whiff of it, sir?”

“A whiff?”

“You’re supposed to sniff at it,” Rebecca
says acidly.

Oh, right. Forgive me if I haven’t been
trained in the fine dining arts. I have been too busy making and
raking in the moolah, and before this, I have been a small town
hick.

I wave my hand, feeling my cheeks heat
up.

“No need. I trust your taste, man,” I say to
the waiter.

“Very good, sir.”

He pours a little wine into my glass for me
to sip. At least I know how to do this, but Rebecca is watching me
carefully, like a shark in the water, waiting for me to trip up and
embarrass myself further. So I opt for an even further
offensive.

I hold up my wine glass, salute Rebecca, and
down the fruity red liquid in one gulp.

“To apologies,” I say, wiping my mouth with
the back of my hand.

She doesn’t say anything as the waiter pours
her a full glass of wine.

When the waiter has left, she says, “I
suppose you’re enjoying yourself.”

“A paid dinner with an old nemesis? What
could be better?”

She glares at me. “I’m not the villain here.
It’s you.”

“Oh, so we’re talking heroes and villains
now? How superhero-ish.”

“You know what you did.”

“Why don’t you tell me what I did, because I
don’t think I did anything wrong.”

I fold my arms across my chest and sit
back.

Yes, this is the matter between us. The
elephant in the room. It sits there on the table like an
omnipresent weight. The air between us is choked with tension.

Rebecca is the first to speak. She raises
her vivid green eyes to mine.

“You left her,” she says flatly.

REBECCA

“I didn’t leave her,” he says hotly. “We
agreed to part amicably. It wasn’t any of your business.”

Yes.

Adeline.

The three of us. Best friends forever, or so
we swore all those years ago.

“It was my business, thank you very much,” I
insist. “She was my best friend.”

“Look, Rebecca, I know she was your best
friend. But people change. People want different things.”

I shake my head. “It wasn’t just the fact
that you left her. It was
why
you left her.”

His complexion mottles. He looks as guilty
as hell.

I press my advantage. “Oh yeah, Kurt. You
know exactly why you left her. Everything changed, didn’t it?
That
night?”

His face blanches.

Oh yeah. We both know what happened that
night all right.

*

We were the Three Musketeers, only two of us
were female and one of us was fucking the other. Kurt Taylor and
Adeline Frost were the golden couple. They were both beautiful,
popular and destined for greater things.

Or so we thought.

Kurt and Adeline hooked up when they were
both sophomores. Kurt was a natural athlete, the kind who was good
at whatever sports he tried his hand in – which was basketball in
his case. He was tall for his age and as nimble as someone much
smaller. Adeline wasn’t a cheerleader but a basketball star
herself. She was in the girls’ team. They were both good enough to
have won basketball scholarships if they wanted to go to
college.

I was the token class geek. Well, I didn’t
wear glasses or braces or anything, but I was on the large side and
I mugged like crazy for my exams because I knew I wasn’t going to
get anywhere on a sports scholarship. The only hope I had was an
academic one. Neither of my divorced parents had enough money to
send me anywhere but a community college.

But I wanted a lot more than community
college. I wanted to do psychology, and that necessitated a move
out of our little town.

I knew our friendship wasn’t going to be as
close-knit as it was forever. Each of us was going to move away to
different colleges, different lives. Sometimes I envied Kurt and
Adeline. They had each other, and I was kind of the odd one out.
The lamp post. Adeline never made me feel that way when the three
of us were together, but I got the feeling that sometimes Kurt
wished he could have more time alone with Addy.

But it wasn’t to be. Addy treasured our
friendship above everything else, and she tried to get me involved
in everything. It was as though we were a threesome, only we
technically weren’t.

Anyhow, it was the night of our final SATs.
It was time to celebrate. Kurt’s grades were always mediocre, and
so he wasn’t expecting too much. But Adeline thought she did very
well for a change. Of course, she had me as a study partner.

Adeline was driving the car. She was the
only one of us with a halfway decent car. I didn’t have the money
to get one, and Kurt had a banged-up number that probably wasn’t
worth as much as its weekly gas consumption.

We were delirious with joy. With the SATs
finally over, a burden was lifted off our shoulders. Our fates were
in the wind.

“The night is ours!” Adeline whooped. “Where
do we want to go?”

“I heard the Lasseters are having a party,”
Kurt remarked.

He was in the front passenger seat and he
had his arm around Adeline’s headrest, as always. His incredibly
long arms made for easy grabbing.

I sat at the back, of course, watching their
two heads turn to each other’s to gab. Adeline’s hair was a sleek,
shiny silhouette while Kurt’s was a wavy shimmer. They were both so
compatible it was stunning to watch, except that I always nursed
this little kernel of jealousy in me.

I never told anyone about it, of course.

I wasn’t sure if I was jealous of Kurt being
with Adeline, or Adeline being with Kurt. Kurt being with her took
her time away from me. Time we used to spend doing stuff together –
just the two of us. And the fact that she got a boyfriend before I
did rankled deeply in me, although I never told her.

Of course she would get a boyfriend before I
did. She was prettier, slimmer, better than me at everything except
schoolwork. But I was hoping against hope that she wouldn’t get a
boyfriend until she went off to college.