Blurb
The first time Cassius Ulysses Costas met Alice Paradis, she was in a string bikini and filling up a long line of boats that were there just to see her. She was eighteen and every man’s wet dream.
Even his.
For the longest time, he went out of his way to stay as far away from her as he could get without actually taking his eyes off of her. For years, he was the better person. He played his hand close, and not a single person would know just how obsessed he was with her.
Then he goes to prison and comes out a man that couldn’t care less about anyone or anything, least of all what someone thought of him and his actions. But not one second while he was behind bars did he forget about Alice.
He tries to stay away. For a few long months, he fights his every instinct to make her his. But, as if the universe is conspiring against him, Alice is thrown into his path time after time, instance after instance.
And his resolve is waning. Fast.
In one last ditch effort to stay away, he walks away, hoping making her mad enough will force her to do the work for him.
However, when Alice is attacked, it isn’t Cassius’s harsh words she remembers, but the way he makes her feel safe.
Soon, the very last thing he’ll do is let her walk away. He did the right thing, and that didn’t work out. Now, it’s time for him to embrace the wrong.
PROLOGUE
The blinker isn’t there for decoration. It’s to communicate with other drivers because we can’t read your fucking mind.
-Cassius’s secret thoughts
CASSIUS
The first time I met her, she was all of eighteen, in a string bikini, and pumping gas into the boat I was about to pilot out of the channel.
She was leaning over the boat and was pouring gas stabilizer into the stream right along with the gas.
She had a fantastic ass and an even better set of tits.
The shortest pair of short shorts covered her bathing suit bottoms—barely—that I’d ever had the pleasure to see.
I, Cassius Ulysses Costas, a thirty-year-old man, was perving on an eighteen-year-old.
If she was even that.
Last week when I’d been here, she’d been celebrating a birthday. She’d had the cute little hat on top of her cute little head. She had streamers decorating her workspace. There were fuckin’ cupcakes, for Christ’s sake.
Damn good cupcakes.
From what I’d been told during my lurking, Alice had baked them herself.
Her family owned not only the small marina where we were at today but also the larger one where they fueled up the big ships—the ones I normally piloted.
However, if I was in need of a break, I’d take the smaller ships in and out instead of the bigger ones. Mostly because, if you were off your game, you sank ships—literally. So if I wasn’t where I needed to be to pilot multi-million-dollar vessels, then I took a break and did the fun ones.
Such as today.
I’d already taken out two yachts, worth half a million a piece, and I’d already brought in four fishing charters—and gotten two tunas to show for it.
“Hey, you okay?”
I hadn’t realized that my stillness had been noticed.
Luckily not by the object of my desire.
But, sadly, it was almost just as bad.
“Fine,” I said to Jaycee, Alice’s twin sister. “How about you?”
Jaycee was almost the exact opposite of Alice.
Where Alice was sweet, bubbly, and willing to do anything to please anyone, Jaycee wasn’t. Jaycee was rude, selfish, and had the voice of a high-pitched dog toy that you couldn’t help but hate listening to.
Like those toys that you got kids for Christmas and immediately took the batteries out of to save your sanity.
She was that kind of annoying.
“I see you’re doing the fun stuff today.” Jaycee continued to talk to me, unaware of how much her voice annoyed me.
“Yep,” I said as I took a pull on my water bottle. “You delivering pizza today?”
Not only did her family own a marina, but they also owned a successful chain of pizzerias. Silvain’s Pizza, a local hot spot, was the best of the best. The family all took turns delivering pizza if they were needed. Including Alice.
Though, I hadn’t seen Jaycee do it willingly in a long time. She was a vapid, selfish girl that only saw the dollar signs and not the hard work it took to get those dollar signs.
And her family mostly humored her. Giving her the money, without making her work, unless they were just so super busy that she was forced to.
But, with her working, came her messing up. And the family saw her getting a paycheck but not working as the better of two evils. At least, that’d been what I’d gathered from their family. Their brother was very vocal about how awful a worker Jaycee was, and how they’d love it if she just never came in and fucked up.
Truthfully, I wasn’t really sure why she was here today.
She’d been sitting at the dock bar area with a drink in her hand while Alice filled up every single customer that was in line. Had Jaycee gotten off her ass and helped, Oberon’s goddamn yacht would be filled up and we could get him the fuck out to sea and I could go back home.
He was my last of the day—even though it was only eleven in the morning.
I’d been going since late last night and could use a fuckin’ break.
Though, my mother had begged and pleaded with me to meet her boyfriend, Oberon, for ‘brunch’ at the North Shore Bay, where Silvain’s Pizzeria was located.
Oberon Kalb. My mother’s newest man.
My mom wasn’t a person that did well when she was left alone for long. She thrived with someone taking care of her, and the yacht captain, Oberon, was able to do that to her liking most of the time.
My mom wasn’t a bad person. Honestly, she was great. Though a little shallow at times, Crista Pritchard was sweet as honey and never missed laughing at a good joke. What she failed to do was take care of herself.
If she didn’t have a man, she was lost.
Hence the reason I was currently on the patio waiting for the douche’s yacht to get fueled up, eating pizza, when what I really wanted was to go to bed.
Getting Oberon’s yacht out of the inlet would be easy, though. It was so small it could barely be considered a yacht. Hell, Oberon couldn’t even afford his own captain. He had to do it himself. Yet, he felt all special that he could afford a yacht.
“No, I’m just sitting here, looking pretty.” She grinned, answering my previous question, as if that made her something special.
Newsflash. It didn’t.
It made her seem tasteless.
“You are indeed, sweetheart,” Oberon cooed to her. “How are you?”
My mother, who wasn’t paying attention to her sixty-five-year-old boyfriend flirting, looked over at me with a smile. “When are you going to settle down, honey?”
When was I?
Never.
At least, that was the plan.
I’d seen the kind of heartache that my mother had lived through.
The sheer hell that she’d gone through the day that my family perished in that accident.
That night, they’d been coming home from one of my college football games. My mom had stayed with me because I’d had a possible hairline fracture in my wrist.