Billionaire on Board (17 page)

The second course was served. Quails with truffles and mangold. 

"We have this amazing idea to fund hydraulic fracking. It's an absolute winner, no doubt about it. The shares coming out of this will be bang on for everybody who joins in and I'm talking up to fifteen percent. It's a whole new industry and people want it, you know, they're asking me about it, Mark, they say, where can we invest in fracking, risk-free, no worries? I'm telling them, I'm already pulling something up. Did you read the memo I sent you?"

"I did."

"So, are you in?"

"I would have to let my experts look in on it. Right now I'm on holiday, Mark. Would you like red wine with the quails? Dan, could you fetch the Floriano, please?"

"It's in your private vault, Sir."

"Ah yes. I'll go get it." He got up and strolled away.

"How beautiful this town is," Patricia observed.

"Charming," I said vaguely.

"I hear the beaches in the South are so great." 

"Is this your first time in Sardinia?" 

"Yes…" Patricia replied. She exchanged a tense glance with her husband.

He cleared his throat. "Yes, we think it's splendid, the sea is so blue, you think it's photoshopped." Suddenly he leaned over and whispered to me. "Listen, Jude… This fracking fund is very close to my heart. Do you think you could try to find out from where the wind blows with Ryan, maybe? You could drop me a hint some time soon, within the next few days, I'll leave you my card when we go, and don't you worry I'll make it worth your while. Say, twenty grand?"

I sat motionless.

"You don't have to say anything. Ah, here he comes! Now, let's taste this Floriano of yours!"

"My brother-in-law makes it, it's completely free from pesticides, you can drown yourself in it and feel born again the next day."

"Wow…"

"Fantastic! Just what we need!"

I could not believe what had just happened. Had this man really offered to pay me twenty-thousand dollars to tell him what Ryan thought about his fracking fund?

"Wine, Buttercup?"

"Hm?" I was still distracted.  

Ryan's eyebrows drew together. He sensed something was off. 

I looked up at him in a silent plead. 

"Buttercup," Patricia trilled. "That's so sweet, where does it come from?"

"It's from a song." 

"How romantic! How did you guys meet?"

"Jude went to school with my sister. We've known each other for over twelve years." 

Next to me, Mark choked on his quail. Patricia dropped her fork but instantly recovered. "Oh, how wonderful! Have you been together all this time? We never knew…"

"No, she would have been too young, but I still had a bad crush on her. She played the cello. I didn't stand a chance. I had always hoped I might see her again one day, so when I
did
run into her, I pounced on her like a tiger."

"How darling!" Patricia exclaimed. She was obviously trying to repair the damage her husband had done by mistaking me for a mayfly when in fact I was his quarry's dream girl. At least in tonight's fiction.

"Yes, it was rather miraculous."

I still felt a bit off and decided it would be better if I went to my cabin  to recover for a few minutes. I shoved my chair back.

"Will you excuse me for a moment, I'd like to powder my nose." 

Whenever I speak to Americans I use whatever euphemism comes to my mind when I actually want to say I am going to the toilet. It's a tour guide habit.

"Please! Feel free to use mine! It's great stuff." Patricia took a box from her purse and held it out to me.

"I'm sorry?"

"Didn't you say you'd—" 

"No…," I muttered. "I only need to pee."

I left the upper deck and descended the stairs to the cabin level. 

Ryan caught up with me when I had nearly reached my door.

"Wait. Jude, wait. What happened? Do you really need to pee or is something the matter?"

I gazed at him. Then I had to giggle. "No, I just wanted to catch my breath. He tried to bribe me… he offered me twenty-thousand dollars if I reported your opinion about his fund to him."

"Only twenty? You should have asked forty."

I shoved him gently. "Fuck off! Are they what you call friends? She's a jittery coke nose and he's a conniving asshole!"

"I play golf with him occasionally. I'm sorry, I should've warned you, he really is a wanker. I just didn't think he'd try anything right under my nose. Not with my girlfriend."

"Look what she wanted to put under
my
nose! Has he done it before?"

Do not worry, dear reader, I caught the 'girlfriend' all right.

"He does it all the time. Boodles everybody he can get a hold of. Caddies, gardeners, cleaning ladies…"

I grunted. "You said you wanted to go to the Med because you wanted to meet your friends. We haven't met a single friend of yours yet. Tell me Ryan, do you have any friends? For example, who's your best friend?"

"I have two best friends."

"Yes?"

"Great friends."

"Where are they?"

"Right here."

"They are?"

"Yes…" 

I felt his hands crawl under my dress. They went up and up until they covered my breasts.

"They've been looking at me all evening from across the table. They wanted me to know they needed to be squeezed and fondled and massaged… and nuzzled…"

"Did they?"

"Yes. They told me they needed it before dessert."

"I understand."

"They also promised their proprietress could do something about this." He pressed his hips against mine.

"Oh dear, it's an emergency! I believe we must act without hesitation!" 

"We must."

And we did.

Yes, we had a quickie in the corridor. So what? It was his boat!

Nine

"Ryan, darling." A sophisticated, flat chested, beautiful brunette came striding towards us and for a moment I considered to send her overboard with an improvised kung-fu kick. "Hello, you must be Jude. Amazing! You really are the cello girl, how lovely you're here. I was at St. Cecil's too!"

It was Ryan's sister, Camille, of course. Who else should it be, welcoming him as a guest on her own yacht? I needed to get my jealousy under control. 

I am jealous by nature. Not the kitchen-knife-murdering type of jealous, just the normal, planning-the-kitchen-knife-murder-and-then-not-doing-it type. 

"Thank you for the invitation, what a nice boat you have here."

"Are you taking the mickey? I've been shooting poisonous arrows over to the Myrtle since this morning. She makes us all grow pale with envy. You must think I'm living on a toilet."

It was good to be with people who spoke my own language. I had not completely recovered from Mark and Patricia yet. They had said their good-byes after hurriedly eating their dessert and picking up their children. Thank God.

"Thanks, Millie," Ryan embraced her. Her husband, Laurent, who was a Swiss banker - as in, he owned the bank - also welcomed us most warmly.

"
Bienvenue. Je suis enchanté.
"

"
Merci beaucoup.
" I said and complimented him on his wine. 

"Yes, I have a lovely little vineyard near Lake Geneva. You must come one day with Ryan."

One day… My future with Ryan was a very vague thing to me. I did not dare to think about it. So I said the one thing anybody would say in such a situation. "Oh, of course, with pleasure!"

"Ah, here comes Giordana," Camille called and waved at an old lady approaching the stern. When she stepped into the light I took hold of Ryan's arm, I was so startled. She was a tiny woman with thin wrinkled arms and an unsteady gait but her face belonged to a forty year old porn star with mumps.

"Giordana Vanderhart," Ryan breathed into my ear.  "Canadian. She was one of my granny's best friends, in the days of Jackie O., if you get my meaning."

"Wow, she must be nearly a hundred."

"Yes, she is, ninety-eight! She's married to a plastic surgeon twenty years her junior."

"Which makes him seventy-eight."

"You really are a wunderkind."

"Hush."

Giordana Vanderhart had finally reached us.

"Oh, Ryan!" she tittered. "Oh, you are so handsome! Are you his girlfriend? He looks so much like his grandfather. He played polo when I was young and it's so funny because my friend Beatrix Clearmont had a crush on him but he was not interested. He had a wife in Argentine already! Beatrix ended up being the Duchess of Heresford and thirty years later their children got married, isn't it a funny story?"

"Absolutely!"

"Yes, Giordana, how could we forget." Ryan kissed her puffed up cheek. "Is Robert not coming?"

"No, no, he's sleeping at this time of the night, he's really getting old. He's lost his eyesight by almost eighty percent, didn't you know?"

"No. I hadn't heard he had retired."

"No,no, he still operates."

"I see." Ryan's fingers dug into my arm. He was rightly afraid I was going to topple over in spasms of laughter. "Well, Giordy, I have to show Jude my old ship. We'll get together later, rightie?"

"Sure, sure."

He dragged me along and pulled me into a dark room where we both broke into tears of mirth and silently clung to one another.

"I can't go back out there," I sniffled after a while. "I must be totally smeared with mascara."

"You're not wearing any."

"Am I not?"

"No, why would you? You're gorgeous."

The butterflies, the butterflies, they were all over me.

"I usually do when I go to a party, why did I forget?"

"Because we shagged in the jacuzzi to celebrate Mark and Patricia's departure."

"Do we ever do anything else?"

"I hope not."

"Where are we anyway?"

"The gym."

"Is there a light?"

He switched it on. 

"Thank God, there's a mirror." I fished my mascara from my purse and also applied a pink lipgloss I had bought in Saint-Tropez. 

Whatever Ryan said, certain standards were to be upheld.

"Do you have to use the stuff? I find it hard to wash off my jock."

"I see you're having great expectations."

"If I were up to it, I'd do you twenty times a day, darling. You should've tried me at St. Cecil's twelve years ago instead of the French teacher, when I was still in my prime."

"I was fifteen when I first played in a Christmas concert. I had not even kissed Michel."

"You're telling me only a cello separated me from your virginal flesh? I could have been the one to invade your fortress?"

"You would have been arrested, you bloody lecher. But I liked the story you told the Karrenbergers, it gave their foul attempt and even fouler note."

"It was completely true."

"No, it was not, you had not hoped to see me again and you did not pounce on me like a tiger."

"Yes, I did."

"No, you did not, it took you about twenty-eight hours to pounce."

"I did not want to look like a total creep. But I had hoped to see you again."

"Please, Ryan," I said seriously. "Don't be absurd."

"I'm not." 

"Why don't we go up?"

He sighed. "Alright. Let's go up."

We had just rounded the corner to the party deck when another brunette pushed herself through the glitzy crowd to get to us. I recognised her. It was Laetitia.

"Jude! Hi! Somebody normal at last!"

Laetitia suffered from the same phenomenon I described earlier: She treated me as if we were the best of friends. (Please remember, she and I had never spoken a conscious word to one another in school, apart from, 'sorry', when passing in the door, or, and I could not even be sure about that, 'do you have a light?' behind the sports pavilion).

She hugged me.

"You haven't changed a bit!" she cried.

"Hi, Laetitia. How are you?"

"Great, great! But before you say anything else, I must, must, must ask you one thing. When I told Fiona and Tabitha you were coming here, they begged me to ask you right away. Do you remember them? Fiona Whitacker and Tabitha McNabb?"

"Sure, sure…" 

I did not remember them at all. I hardly remembered anybody from the lower years, only Laetitia, because she had been the one with the mega-hot brother in a Mercedes convertible. 

I remembered everything about the ones from the upper year, though. So, apparently, did Laetitia.

"This was the number one St. Cecil mystery. Did you have sex with Monsieur Lasalle in the purser's office?"

"Titia, honestly…," Ryan butted in. "You can't."

"Go away! Jude knows what I'm talking about! Shoot! Get your girlfriend a drink or something."

"No—"

"Yes," I said, "I'd fancy a glass of champagne."

He grudgingly started towards the bar.

"Tell me."

I raised an eyebrow. "Are you willing to pay for the information?"

"Sure. How much?"

"Two-hundred-million."

"Pounds?"

"Yen!"

"Really?"

 "Ha ha, no. We did
not
have sex in the purser's office."

"Oh noooo."

"We had sex in the headmistress's office."

"WHAT?"

"Yes. Michel had the keys because he was supposed to water the flowers when Mrs. Rodgers went to a convention in Plymouth."

"Oh my God, oh my God! I can't believe it! You know how we all hated you because you got him fired? He was so yummy! But we also wanted to be like you, you were so cool! I'll never forget, you once wore lipstick in chapel!"

"Did I?"

"Yes you did! We talked about it for a week. You and Sophie Milliner, you were like Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. You used to drink Vodka-O in the Red Lion."

"Right, that's true. We also played pool. Were you allowed to go to the Red Lion in the fifth?"

"No, only in lower sixth, when you were upper. Gosh, those were the days, right?"

"They were."

"Thank God you sucked at netball."

"I did, they don't play it in Germany."