Page 80 of Falling Overboard

“What time is it?” I mumbled.

“Three in the morning,” she said. “Please hurry.”

She left, closing the door behind her. My first thought was that something had to be seriously wrong for Georgia to come in and wake me up in the middle of the night.

My second thought was that I had not actually been making out with Hunter. It had been a dream. A very vivid one that had felt way too real.

My third was that Hunter was still snoring away next to me, shirtless.

A fact my second stew couldn’t have failed to notice.

Letting out a soft groan, I tried to climb over him as carefully as I could, but some bodily contact was inevitable if I didn’t want to fallonto the floor. He made a sound and then rolled to his left, into the spot I’d just vacated.

Like he was searching for me.

Had I made any sounds in my sleep? If I had, my second stew was never going to let me hear the end of it.

I came out into the galley, bleary-eyed and not feeling at all prepared for whatever Georgia was about to do.

“What’s going on?” I asked, blinking against the bright lights of the galley.

“That was my question for you. What is going on? Why is Hunter half-naked and sleeping in your bunk? Are you two ...” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Becoming one?”

I was too tired to figure out what that meant. “What?”

She let out a sound of exasperation. “I was trying to say it in whatever flowery romance language you use. Are you having sex with the man?”

Other than in my dreams? “No!”

“Ugh. Such a waste.”

My hormones and overactive imagination agreed with her. “Nothing is going on. We do sometimes sleep together but in the most platonic sense of the word. Just sleeping. We don’t cuddle or anything. We haven’t even kissed.”

Other than that smooch I’d laid on him a few hours ago.

But I knew she wouldn’t count that.

Or maybe she would. And she might count my feverish dream. Which was reason enough not to tell her.

“That’s very disappointing,” she said.

“Why did you wake me up? It wasn’t to grill me about Hunter.” Even though that was something she would absolutely do.

“Rodney wants homemade chocolate chip cookies.”

I blinked several times, not sure I’d heard her correctly. “What?”

“He hasn’t gone to bed yet and he’s up in the main salon looking very sad. I asked him if there was anything I could bring him and he asked if someone could make him chocolate chip cookies.”

We’d certainly had weirder requests in the middle of the night, but until today Rodney hadn’t been that kind of guest.

“And I was afraid that if I tried to wake Andre up he would shank me and then Preacher would ring loudly enough to wake everybody up,” she added. She wasn’t wrong on either count. The captain had complained on more than one occasion about the parrot. I didn’t want him to have a reason to get rid of Preacher. Andre would leave and we needed him. Talented yacht chefs were hard to come by.

“Good call,” I said. “I’ll make them.”

“I figured.”

Pieter came into the galley and went over to Georgia, putting his arm around her waist and squeezing her once before he went over to grab a cup of coffee. He was whistling a merry tune as he filled his mug up and then left the galley.

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