Was the ship vibrating?
She quickly checked her phone and turned ice cold.
Hours had passed. She had been asleep for close to three hours already. Her friends had been frantically messaging her and calling her, and she had slept through it all.
She whisked through their messages, frowning deeply.
Their cruise tickets were canceled by the cruise line for no other reason than something had come up, and they were immediately refunded with a generous gratuity added for their inconvenience. They also had a choice to embark on a different cruise line if they wished, and it would be complimentary from The Black Opal—in other words, absolutely free.
Heaving heavily as she tried to make sense of it, she told herself to calm down and understand the facts, but the thing that bothered her the most was that her friends were asking her where she was when everyone who was meant to board The Black Opal had been refunded.
And worse, she was now certain the ship was moving. With her in it.
Panic soared, and for a moment her mind blanked completely.
She charged toward the glass door that led out onto a balcony to see exactly where she was. Her heart pounded loudly in her ears as her brain asked a much scarier question. What if she had been locked in?
But before she made it to the glass doors, something changed in the atmosphere around her. Not daring to breathe, she slowly turned around.
A man dressed in a suit, with dark almost black hair, looking utterly and disturbingly magnificent, stood with his hands in his trouser pockets as two unbelievably green eyes looked back at her.
Parker Knight.
She stopped dead in her tracks, retreating a few steps away from him as she took in the sight of him.
His presence forced her to admit the truth.
Had it been any other man her father had crossed, which resulted in her having to marry him, she would have stayed and owned up to her new set of circumstances. She wasn’t a coward.
Any man except him.
She'd had a rather intimate kind of encounter with him once before, three years ago, which explained why she chose to run away and board the cruise instead of facing him again. An encounter that he didn’t even know he had involved in.
She had a strong urge to do the same thing she had done the instant her dad had dropped the name of the man who had the power to destroy them.
She had collapsed onto a sofa then in her family house, her knees too weak to carry her, and if it weren’t for the piece of furniture behind her, she would have sunk to the floor instead. The same urge to give in and curl into herself on the floor of the ship struck her now again. Tenfold.
She knew him, but he hadn’t known she existed that night.
Chapter Two
Everleigh may have been momentarily knocked off her axis, but her senses eventually returned, and lucky for her, her voice came back as well, ending her muted shock.
“No,” she said with absolute determination. “You’re not here,” she added as if her words had the power of magic, and he would disappear just because she had said so.
“No. No. No.”
Her whole plan in life was never to set eyes on him in person. Ever. She didn’t care that they were married. And if it meant she had to go on a lifelong cruise to escape him, that’s what she would do.
Unfortunately, her treacherous body had other ideas and heated up at the sight of him. Flashes of him that one night blitzed through her mind and warmed every part of her.
Nope.
But her gaze kept reverting to him, and she wanted to dig her eyes out because seeing him in person again after three years, taking up every bit of real estate in her head, had tossed her out to sea with no lifeline. Pun bloody-well intended.
No, wait, her brain told her silently. She was being drastic. There had to be a valid explanation for what was happening. But with every effort she made to stay logical, what her friends had told her about the whole cruise being canceled and everyone refunded, huge alarm bells set off in her head.
Somehow the notion that they had forgotten her on the ship started to make less sense now that Parker Knight stood in front of her.