Chapter 1

1

Blue.

Apparently, there was about fourteen quintillion—if that was even a number—gallons of water in all the oceans reflecting the blue light of the atmosphere. That was a lot of blue right there. That was the kind of blue you saw from space.

Now personally, after spending the last eleven years working on cruise ships or tending bars in the Caribbean islands, I’d seen enough blue, every shade, pigment, and hue of it, from cerulean to midnight, to last me a fucking lifetime.

Even as I laid there in bed, slowly waking up, I couldn’t escape the blue. Through the yellowed curtains barely breathing in the window, all I could see was an azure blue sky shining over a big blue sea.

Wait.

This wasn’t my hotel room. Those airline skirt uniforms hanging in the open closet? Nope. Definitely not mine. I’d gone home with a woman last night. I remembered now.

“Hey, you,” she said, kissing my bare shoulder. Speak of the devil. “You awake?”

Her name was Bonnie. Flight attendant. Curvy. Happy as a Saturday morning cartoon. Last night, she’d stuck around my bar, drinking zombie cocktails and making me laugh with her quirky ways and facial expressions. I wasn’t going to give in, but she’d finally won me over with her Roger Dangerfield impersonation.

And also, she was a red-head. For some reason, I had a thing for red-heads.

I recognized the layout of the room. I’d been here a few times before. The room was at the Coconut Inn, a half hour walk from my resort. Well, not myresort, but the ritzy hotel I worked for and temporarily lived in.

“Hi,” I said, flipping to my back and looking at her. Oh, wow, great face. Dazzling smile. Vibrant dark red hair. That color. It always caught my attention. I couldn’t help dropping my eyes to the curve of her breasts stretching the cheap linen sheet she’d wrapped around herself. “How’s it goin’?” I asked, my eyes meeting hers again.

“It’s hot as a fart in hell in here. I should have picked a better airline to work for, right?” Smiling, she held her head in her hand, staring at me with warm honey-brown eyes that soaked up the sunlight in the room. She touched the hair sticking to my forehead. “How do you stand the heat with that Norse blood of yours? Swedish or Finnish?” Her gaze was moving over my skin as though my chest was made of vanilla ice cream.

I needed to get out of here. Not here here, but off this island. It was October already. The season was finished. From now on, it wouldn’t be nothing but rain, old folks who drank one long island iced tea at three in the afternoon and went to bed at seven, and hurricane warnings.

“I’m Norwegian,” I corrected her, though it probably didn’t matter. I sat up and looked around for my jeans. “But I left Norway with my folks when I was about ten. Lived in Quebec most of my life.” Why was I mentioning my parents to her?

Maybe because I missed them more than I liked to admit to myself. Especially lately. Kept wondering what Johan and Helga Lund were up to in their little house in the suburbs of Montreal. And my brother Boone? Was he keeping safe out there on the beat? My brother, the boy I used to toss over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes, was a cop? My baby sister Lene was at university.

Man, I was getting old. Twenty-eight years on this blue planet. That was more than a quarter of a century. I felt much older than that, though. Maybe even a little used up.

I made a move to get out of bed.

“Hey…wait.” Bonnie—pretty sure her name was Bonnie—touched my bare shoulder. Then she tugged a strand of my long blond hair. I usually had it tied up, but the rubber band must have slipped off during the night. “Let me make us some coffee before you leave, okay?”

Surprised, I glanced back at her. So she didn’t expect me to stay? She was cooler than I’d thought. “I’ll pass on the coffee, thanks.” Ah, there were my jeans. I stood and quickly slipped them on over my undies. “I don’t wanna have any caffeine, ‘cause I have to sleep four or five hours before my next shift.” I threw my white shirt on, tucked my hair behind an ear and gave her a genuine smile. “That’s when the circus starts all over again.”

She sat up, holding the sheet close to her body, and eyed me. She was free of make-up, looking sweet and homely. “You know,” she said, “last night, I told myself that I wasn’t gonna take you back here, ‘cause, I mean—a bartender? A bartender in a resort?” She chuckled and shook her head, watching me. “But…you are something else. Look at you. You’re like a well groomed Viking. You know, your eyes are the same color as my dog’s eyes.”

I laughed, frowning at her. “Your dog, huh? That’s, uh, wow. Thanks for the compliment?”

She cracked up. “He’s a Siberian husky. You know, white-blue eyes? Are you a model or an actor on the side?”

“No, I’m just a barman.”

I’d dabbed in acting, mostly figuration, and had done some modelling for a few fame-starved photographers. I’d been in a vodka ad, which was basically me in my birthday suit sitting up in bed with a bottle of vodka between my thighs. But the annoying sound of a camera shutter clicking away in front of an eager face asking me to look both nonchalant and dying to fuck someone, had always made me laugh. Most photographers would lose their shit with me. I remembered this one time, the photographer was so frustrated, he actually broke into tears. He was a sweet guy, and I felt bad, so I ended kissing him.