Page 14 of Below Deck Billionaire
He grinned, his blue eyes flashing, and he looked just like the charming playboy from the wedding who’d had her under him within two hours of the I do’s.
‘Really.’
‘Is there a story behind calling her that?’
‘My grandfather – Yanni – used to tell me tales of the Nereids when I was a boy. They were stories hispappouhad told him when he was a boy. Every year my family would travel to the village where he grew up on the island of Kalymnos and in the evenings, he’d take me down to the crumbling stone walls of the harbour where the old men were mending their nets and we’d sit with them as they told stories of seeing sirens on the rocks.’
He laughed and shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe he’d been sucked in by their tall tales, but Tiffany could tell the memories were happy ones.
‘I’m sure they were embellishing just for me but I used to hang on every word. So’ – he looked around the boat – ‘when it came to naming her, it was a no-brainer for me.’ Glancing at her, he asked, ‘Why mermaids for you?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe because I grew up surrounded by land instead of water?’ Balmain Downs was an eight-hour drive to the ocean. ‘I remember, there was this old cowboy who worked for my dad for years. Bear, they called him, because he was built like a grizzly, or a brick shithouse as my brother Gordy would say.’
Theo laughed. ‘I like it. I think I’m going to adopt that expression.’
‘He had hands like meat cleavers and a big old raggedy beard. And he used to be in the merchant navy so he had this old faded tattoo of a mermaid on his arm he got at some port or other and sometimes, around the campfire at night, if he had just enough rum in him, he’d tell stories of hearing the siren songs when he was at sea.’
‘And you’d hang on his word?’
Tiffany smiled at the surprising similarities in their very disparate backgrounds. ‘Uh huh. And I’d go to sleep weaving tales about mermaids.’
‘So, you’ve always been a writer?’
‘Yeah… I guess? I think I’ve always had stories in my head. I was just too busy being my dad’s little buckaroo to think they were anything other than my active imagination.’
Back in the days when her father had been made of gold and his praise had meant the world – it had been a shock to discover under all that pretty shine he had feet of clay.
‘And then I stepped foot on my first cruise ship and looked out at all that water and it was like this portal opened in my brain and all these ideas came pouring out. Images that had been there from when I was a kid that had been kinda jumbled and indistinct were suddenly clear as a bell. I just knew it was a plot for a book.’
‘How did that feel?’
She looked beyond his shoulder, remembering the emotions of that moment which had been revelatory. Pragmatic, practical Tiffany didn’t indulge in something so amorphous – that was Mikey’s territory. ‘Scary,’ she admitted. ‘But also like I was… putting on an old pair of slippers.’
‘And so you started writing?’
Tiffany laughed. ‘God, no. Not really. I tinkered here and there. I kept notebooks. But… life was full and busy and there’s absolutely no privacy and not a lot of space on a cruise ship to think, and it seemed… silly and superfluous, and honestly?’ She brought her gaze back to him. ‘Doomed for failure. But… it never went away either and then?—’
She stopped abruptly, realising she’d been about to sayI met you.And then I met you. That’s when the restlessness had started, this need for more. But no freaking way was she saying that out loud. It was hard enough admitting it to herself.
Rolling onto her back, she shifted her eyes heavenwards once again. ‘It suddenly became this imperative. Like my brain was telling me to start now or it’d never happen. So I didn’t renew my contract with Oceanós but I still needed to be able to support myself while I gave this writing thing a red-hot try so?—’
‘You couldn’t go home?’ he interrupted.
Tiffany almost laughed out loud. She’d burnt that bridge at eighteen. ‘No.’ Nor did she want to. The ocean had replaced the red dust in her veins, and she was fine with that.
The sharp probe of his gaze heated her profile as she hurried on. ‘Then this job came up and it seemed a perfect balance between what I know how to do and more time and space to explore what I don’t know how to do. Yet.’
‘And still be surrounded by water.’
Tiffany nodded to the stars. ‘Exactly.’
Theo didn’t say anything, just rolled to his back as well, and they both stared at the constellations as Tiffany silently berated herself for talking too much. She’d said more words in the past ten minutes than she had in the entire night they’d spent together. So had he.
Not that it had been a night for talking. Their two hours of surface chit chat had always been a prelude to sex and they’d both known it.
‘Did you ever think,’ he asked, turning his head again to look in her direction, ‘maybe it’s more than coincidence you’re here? Maybe it’s fate?’
A shiver – the good kind – worked its way down Tiffany’s spine at the statement.
