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 J
aycee 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.
We’d already been there when my family had been brought into the hospital. All but one of them DOA—dead on arrival.
My little sister was the only one that had been brought back to life. But she’d succumbed to her injuries eight days later in the ICU.
The crash was known as one of the deadliest crashes on any Florida stretch of highway. Because, not only had my family died, but nineteen others had died in a deadly eighteen-car pileup.
We were still getting a stipend from the state due to their negligence.
Apparently, a state vehicle had pulled out in front of an eighteen-wheeler. That eighteen-wheeler had then swerved to avoid the vehicle and plowed into a guardrail. The guardrail had given—when it wasn’t supposed to do—and had taken out all of the cars before hitting the trees.
Technically, my mom was rich.
Richer than Oberon.
Not that Oberon knew that.
But it was fun to see him flaunt his money to my mother when my mother could easily do the same right back.
Turns out, I didn’t have a hairline fracture in my wrist. The fracture happened later, in my heart.
But it also helped me learn a few things.
One, you couldn’t be hurt if you didn’t give your heart out to someone to take care of.
Two, if I stayed away from entanglements, they stayed away from me.
That’s why I’d never pursue anything that even remotely looked like I could catch feelings for.
It bothered my mother.
She wanted grandbabies to love. She wanted a daughter-in-law to shower affection upon.
She wanted it all, all over again.
Meanwhile, I wanted to make sure that love never got anywhere near me.
“Oh, I volunteer!” Jaycee cried in response to my mother’s question to me.
Her loud, exuberant exclamation causing Alice, who was now on boat two since I’d arrived there and started watching her, to look over.
Our eyes caught, and it took everything I had to drop my gaze.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Mom,” I said. “But I’m not settling down for a while.”
“You just love your job too much. One day, you’ll find someone better than your job.” Mom waved away my words.
She was wrong.
The excitement of my job didn’t overpower the need to stay away from anything that might one day hurt me.
I did love my job, though. And didn’t see a point in not showing it.
Our small inlet was one of the worst inlets in the world. Mostly because of the topographical terrain, the width of the inlet, and the choppiness of the water where the gulf met the ocean, caused the waters to be turbulent at times.
I’d traveled all over Florida doing what I love best, but my favorite place was my hometown of Blue Ridge, Florida.
My mom was born here. My dad was born here. My sisters and brothers were born here, just like me. It was in my blood.
So there was no wonder that I’d want to work here. To make a home here.
Though my dad and all of my siblings were gone now, I still loved everything about this place.
And the view wasn’t half bad, either.
“Do you want a top off?” I heard the sweet, husky voice of the girl that’d held all my attention every time I came to this damn station say.
“I do,” Oberon tutted.
He wasn’t talking about his vessel, though. He was talking about the beer he was about to consume.
I took a bite of my pizza and ignored Oberon.
I also ignored my mother who continued to talk about me one day finding love.
My gaze, however, continued to stray to the girl working her ass off in the hot Florida sun.
If I could have anyone… it would be her.
• • •
“Hello?” I answered the phone before I’d even realized that it was in my hand.
“Cassius,” my friend with the Coast Guard, Tim, said. “Something’s happened.”
I was instantly awake.
“What?” I asked.
“Your mother,” he said. “She was apparently lost at sea.”
I felt my stomach clench. “What?”
Had I heard him correctly?
“She was on the boat with Oberon, and when he returned to dock, she was gone,” he repeated. “We’re looking for her now, but it’s not looking good. Oberon was too hammered to even notice when she went missing. He’s still hammered. We’re looking, but we’re searching a much wider area than we should be because Oberon can’t pinpoint where she went overboard.”
The words hit me like a hammer.
My mom, the last remaining person in this world related to me, was missing. At sea.
That was one of the worst things that could ever happen to her, truthfully.
The sea was the one place that I loved. The sea was the one place that my mom hated.
Why?
Because she was terrified of it. She couldn’t swim well, ...
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