Ashley is deeply asleep in a heartbeat.
What I should do is get up from this chair right now. I should go up on deck, get status reports from everyone, and review any communications that have come in. There will be offers and negotiations and bribes. My brothers think I spend all my time sinking ships and throwing bodies overboard. They’re only half right. Sinking ships all on its own doesn’t make a business.
So there is the shipping, and the dealmaking, and the occasional mercenary mission. There is the search that underpins everything else in my life. All of these things take up my time and attention. They deserve my attention over some lost, sleeping woman. I should tend to those things before I spend another second tending to her.
Instead I pull my godforsaken cell phone out of my pocket so I can text Nicholas.
Ashley Donnelly
He sends me back a tiny picture of a thumbs-up, and though I dearly want to harass him for sending tiny fucking pictures to me, I do not. Within twenty minutes he’ll send me a dossier filled with all the information I could ever want about Ashley Donnelly. Her parking tickets. Her boyfriends. The name of her favorite childhood dog. The name of her least favorite childhood dog.
Impatience runs up from my toes and into my shins and over my knees. I don’t tap my feet, don’t do anything to let it show. There’s no one here but a sleeping woman, and I don’t let it show. Pacing the deck would be an outlet. But I can’t bring myself to leave her side.
It’s a cousin to the feeling I have about the sea. I find it unsettling to be on land for a long period of time and avoid it whenever possible. Avoiding my own business isn’t possible. I don’t want to avoid it, but I don’t want to stop watching her. I don’t want to stop listening to her breathe.
Ashley’s fallen asleep with her hands fisted in the blankets, pinning them to her chest. As if she’s worried someone might pull them down. As if that worry follows her into her dreams.
She’s right to be worried.
There’s nothing I want more than to pull that sheet down to expose her skin, except for the things I’d do after. Perhaps a life on the sea made me into the kind of man who would relish her wide-eyed shock and the pink flush as she scrambled to try to pull the blanket back up.
A joke, a joke. It was my life on land that made me this way. Ashley Donnelly will never know about that life. Telling her about it seems as impossible and reckless as getting up from this chair and leaving her here alone.
Reckless? Please. My life is half reckless and half a show to give legitimacy to that recklessness. I laugh at my own bullshit. Ashley stirs, pulling the blanket up another inch, and I let my mind wander beneath it. She knows I took her clothes off. What she doesn’t know is how the image of her body in that bathtub is burned into my memory. She has pink, perfect nipples that beg to be pinched.
Patience can sometimes be a virtue. And she does need her rest. I settle for watching her chest rise and fall beneath the blanket until my phone vibrates an alert. A message from Nicholas—an attachment, no words. I don’t like this kind of direct contact, but it’s obnoxiously convenient.
I watch a few more of her breaths.
Then I open the attachment and scroll.
Ashley Donnelly is the daughter of Joseph Donnelly. The man founded Donnelly Tech. He made his fortune on some innovation in silicon, and venture capitalists did what they always do—poured money into him until he was big enough to start eating other companies alive. After that, he went on to plunder Silicon Valley.
Not old money, then. I don’t doubt that most of his connections now are below board. Between the two of them, my brothers have made fortunes with an incestuous financial relationship that won’t be fully documented in any official record books. I know the bare details of my sister’s involvement, which has been limited lately on account of her house arrest.
Anyway, I don’t give a fuck about what my brothers are doing on land at this moment or about Silicon Valley. The reason tech companies matter to me is that their products often fill the hold of my ship. Donnelly Tech doesn’t make phones. They make parts, so if they’re customers of mine, they’re indirect ones.
They’re also the next level up. They buy companies that make phones and tablets and the apps to go with them. They buy data security companies and social media startups and streaming platforms.
And they buy it for a song.
Pirates on land. These assholes come in with lawyers instead of brute force. With hostile buyouts instead of ships.
Brute force is a specialty of mine. In some circumstances, not all of them. That’s not the case for Donnelly Tech. They use it at every opportunity. There are several behind-the-scenes emails included in the dossier. There’s very little they won’t do to force a sale. The approach seems imbalanced.
Then again, I’m not on a campaign to own all of Silicon Valley and the tech giants, so what do I know?
The pages on Ashley’s father and his company end in a brief profile of his wife. A kidnapping, followed by a murder. Dark. The man never remarried. They’ve included a photo. She looked like Ashley. Something thin and serrated slices into my chest. I ignore it and keep scrolling.
Because then there’s Ashley herself.
Her profile is the bulk of the dossier, twice as long as the section about her father.
Because she is a minor celebrity.
I don’t make a habit of patrolling gossip blogs. Or any blogs. I have a phone because my brother Zeus insisted after our last meeting. I guess if I had been looking on those websites, I’d have seen what’s in this dossier: Ashley Donnelly splashed all over them. There are pages and pages of paparazzi photos with people like Paris Hilton. In another one, there’s an enormous arrow pointing to someone called a Jonas brother.
She has never had a parking ticket.
She has had her own apartment—one of her father’s properties. It features in a news article about how he bought the building out so his daughter could have a secure living area while she attended the nearby university. The dorms weren’t good enough for her. It’s matter-of-fact reporting and wraps up with a quote from her daddy’s PR firm.
Joseph Donnelly isn’t in the habit of letting things slip, beyond his public business deals. It’s much easier to collect information on his daughter. She gives it away herself. There are pages and pages on her social media profiles. A hundred well-lit shots of her in this bikini or that sundress against backdrops of private islands and, yes, pocket yachts.
The last photo she posted was on the deck of one of those yachts.
She’s centered in the frame, leaning back on one hand with her knees bent to show off slim thighs and delicate ankles. It’s another bikini shot. The bathing suit is a deep purple, almost black, and she has her other hand up, holding a hat to her head. Dark curls spill over her shoulders, sunlight caught in all the curves and dips of her. Ashley’s chin is tipped up, her neck arched, throat exposed. It’s meant to look like she was alone. Absorbed in her pretty vacation. But there was someone else behind the camera, wasn’t there? The now-dead boyfriend. The one who got in over his head and couldn’t get out.
I look from the glossy, sequined version of her on the screen to the one currently in my bed.
Her formerly shining hair is a tangled mess. She’s bedraggled, sunburned, half-starved. But before this, before she washed into my sights, she shone like one of Hades’ diamonds.