“Hi.” Hale pulled away from the salesgirl’s hand as if he had felt a spark. Literally. “I was just . . .” he started.
Kat sighed. “Dad says you have thirty minutes to make it back on board or else we’re leaving for Majorca without you and telling your mother you fell overboard.” Kat turned to the salesgirl. “Of course, I voted for actually pushing him overboard.” She exhaled loudly. “I’m his sister.”
“Stepsister,” Hale added without missing a beat.
The young woman smiled with the knowledge that Kat wasn’t his girlfriend. Kat wasn’t competition. She was simply a petite girl who was too pale and too thin to have spent much time on the Italian coast.
“Are you almost finished?” Kat asked with some genuine annoyance.
“Yeah,” Hale said, sounding exactly like the bored billionaire he was. “They’ve got some cool stuff.”
Somehow Kat doubted that the geniuses behind the finest watercrafts in the world would like to hear their inventions demoted to “cool stuff,” but if the salesgirl shared this feeling, she didn’t show it.
“So are you going to buy one or aren’t you?” Kat asked.
“Uh . . . yeah,” Hale said, walking around the showroom. “I kinda like this one.”
If Kat hadn’t known better, she might have thought the vessel Hale had chosen was a model, a replica—something shrunk down to size in order to fit onto the showroom floor. But, of course, it wasn’t. And that, of course, was the point.
The Sirena Royal was the smallest non-military underwater vessel in the world. Not much larger than the mermaids for which it was named, it was six feet long and four feet tall, roughly the size of a go-cart—the very type of craft that could submerge in the small river that connected to the Taccone moat. The very type of craft that—at this moment—was their one and only lead.
“Yeah,” Hale said, standing back and admiring it. “I’ll take this one.”
“Eccellente, signor! ” the salesgirl exclaimed, but Hale just jerked his head in Kat’s direction.
“You’ve got the credit card, don’t you, sis?”
Kat was more than happy to follow the young woman to a tall counter, where she began pulling out forms and shuffling papers until Kat’s pale hand landed on top of her own, cutting her off in midmotion.
“If I may be honest, Lucia,” Kat said, reading the woman’s name tag, “my dear stepbrother is a bored little boy.” Kat looked at Hale from the corner of her eye. “He likes toys.”
Kat could never be sure if Hale had heard her or not, but nevertheless, he chose that moment to pick up a model of a world-class racing yacht and begin making bubble noises as it dove to the bottom of an imaginary lake.
“Three years ago he convinced his mother to buy a villa on Lake Como because he needed a place to play.” Kat paused for a moment, recalling that Hale’s family did have a home in Northern Italy. “The year after that he bought an eighty-foot yacht because he needed something to play on.”
Behind her, Hale was using his model to dive-bomb a cup full of pencils.
Kat leaned closer to the salesgirl and lowered her voice. “But boys don’t like sharing their toys, do they, Lucia?”
The salesgirl shook her head. “No.”
“And so when the Bernard brothers bought a ninety-foot yacht last summer, my dear stepbrother was not very happy. And”—she cut her eyes back to Hale and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper—“unfortunately, when he’s not happy, his mother isn’t happy, and when his mother isn’t happy . . .”
Lucia nodded. “I see. Yes.”
“I’m telling you this because he really needs to be the guy with the Sirena Royal—not one of the guys with the Sirena Royal.” Kat flashed her most sympathetic smile. “Trust me, if we get home and find out that there’s another one just across the—”
“Oh no, there isn’t!” Lucia exclaimed.
“Really?” Kat asked.
“Well, to be honest . . .” Lucia stole a glance around the room, as if what she was about to say might make three generations of Marianos roll over in their graves. “It’s really more for show, you know? We don’t sell that many.”
In the corner of the room, Hale had strapped himself inside the Sirena Royal and was doing his best imitation of a World War II fighter pilot, bombing unsuspecting foes.
“But they’re so cool,” Kat said. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Really,” Lucia soothed. “In the last year, we sell only two.”