was helping her with the seatbelts.
“You gotta clicky click that one, Miss Lacey Larsen,” Naomi said. “Here! Clicky click!”
“Oh,” Lacey said, finding the chest strap, “got it.” She clicked it together.
Lacey sat next to Naomi in the back row of seats, which were facing forward.
I sat down on the longer row of side-facing seats. I was a few feet away from Lacey now, but I was close enough to smell her. I pulled out the files that I’d haphazardly put back together after knocking Silas onto my desk, and forced myself to read through them. Anything to keep my mind off Lacey.
“So this is a business cruise?” Lacey asked.
I nodded. “Red Sun is trying to poach our best authors away. They were about to get them alone for a week on a ship. My partner managed to get us on the ship at the last minute. Red Sun is going to be P.O.ed when they see us there.”
“What’s P.O.?” Naomi asked.
“Very angry,” I said.
“Is the ‘P’ like pee-pee?”
“Yep,” I said. “Exactly. Peed off. P.O.”
“You remember the confidentiality part of your contract?” I asked Lacey without looking up at her.
“I think so?”
“I don’t want to have to watch what I say around you. If you hear me talking about contract details, book release dates, stuff like that, you cannot let that leak. You keep it to yourself. Got it?”
She nodded.
I smiled. “With that said, let me vent a little bit here. You know Chance Charter?”
“Yeah. The Magi of Mars? I read them. We kind of have to read the big sellers to work in the library.”
“Magi of Mars,” I said, scoffing. “It’s just Harry Potter in space. That’s it. There’s even a sorting hat. You remember that? But of course he doesn’t call it that. He calls it a ‘categorizing cap,’ and it uses deep brain scans to figure out which house—sorry, not house—which “ship” you belong to.”
“Yes. It was very creative.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, well, ‘Harry Potter in space’ may not be creative, but it was still a multi-million dollar idea, and Chance Charter makes us boatloads of money. He’s a greedy little ba—” I looked over at Naomi. “A greedy little Gobblegurt. And he keeps fighting tooth and nail for these one-book contracts with us. We have to renegotiate with him every single book, and we haven’t even finalized negotiations with him for his next book in the series. And now he’s on this cruise. Red Sun is going to try to steal him away from us.”
“I guess you’ll have to offer him a better deal then?” Lacey asked.
“Yeah. Chance is going to love this.”
7
Lacey
The moment we reached the ship, a team of porters arrived to take all of our stuff. They whisked our things away, leaving us empty-handed as we walked up the red-carpeted ramp to the ship.
It was huge. I’d never been on even a small cruise before, but I’m pretty sure this was at least twice the size of a “cheap” cruise that the unwashed masses went on.
The ship itself looked sleek and elegant. It had a lot of aerodynamic lines and shapes, and it gave the impression of refined taste rather than garish opulence.
Then we got inside, and suddenly it was like I’d entered another world.
It wasn’t a total shock. I’d acclimated myself gradually to excessive wealth. I’d started the day on Staten Island, in my tiny little two-bedroom apartment I shared with Natalie. Then I’d split an Uber with Natalie to Flushing. Then I’d been in a limo, which was my first taste of upgraded taste. From the limo I entered Noah’s massive place in Central Park South. His “apartment” took up the top six floors of one of the most expensive high rises in the city. Every single floor had multiple rooms with full views of Central Park. He had a full staff of people keeping the place spotless, and everything about it was simply breathtaking—and intimidating. No wonder he could afford to casually drop a million bucks to make his daughter happy.
So now we were entering this cruise ship, and had I gone straight from Staten Island to this castle on the sea, I might have fainted. Coming from Noah’s apartment though, I had built up some tolerance for egregious displays of wealth. The lobby was all white marble. Marble floors, marble columns, marble fountains. Where it wasn’t marble—like the hand rails on the stairways, or the bookcases along the walls—it was a dark and polished wood.
Everyone around us was dressed