Behind them, footsteps pounded.
Rox wasn’t entirely sure that Pierre guy was on the up-and-up even if he was Max’s brother, and everything that had been said about Estebe Fournier made him seem like the type of mobster who would dump bodies into the sea.
And both of those jerks had thugs tailing them.
Damn it.
Roxanne turned on a burst of speed, her short legs pumping harder than when she was at the gym. She had a baby back in Amsterdam who needed her, and she wasn’t going to die in a stupid marina in Monaco just because Maxence didn’t have the sense that God gave a nit on a gnat’s ass.
The yacht began to pull away from the dock, frothing the seawater behind it.
When they neared the boat, Casimir yanked her hand, wheeling Roxanne around and pushing her ahead of himself.
She had just one step to plant her foot and leap, reaching to grab Arthur’s outstretched hand.
Arthur grabbed her fingers out of the air and spun Roxanne around, practically throwing her at Gen, who was just three steps inside the boat.
Roxanne flailed in the air, not wanting to tackle Gen and the unborn baby in her tummy. She piked to the side like she was diving into a lake back home.
Gen sidestepped Roxanne’s tumble and tried to catch her but missed.
Roxanne landed on her back, and she scrambled to her elbows to look back.“Caz!”
In the bright sunlight streaming in the square opening of the back of the boat, Casimir was leaping, his hand outstretched, and Arthur caught his hand just as Casimir began falling, not quite able to make it.
But Arthur yanked Caz’s arm and threw himself backward, hauling both of them into the ship. They landed in a tangle of long legs and broad shoulders and scuttled apart, looking around to see what they had to fight next.
Back on the dock, eight burly men gathered, cursing the boat that was too far away for them to board and then eyeballing each other.
Then, the shoving started.
Roxanne started laughing.
Casimir and Arthur looked behind them, and then they started laughing, too.
Even Gen was chuckling, then laughing, by the time an all-out fistfight erupted on the sidewalk.
The yacht accelerated hard, making all of them grab a handle or rope to keep from toppling out of the back of the ship.
And they were away.
Twenty minutes later, Roxanne was hanging onto the railing on the top of the boat, one of two parts of the yacht with a real deck where you could stand outside. There was also some deck space near the prow, the pointy end of the boat.
Flirting with Disasterhad cleared the edge of the marina and turned on the proverbial afterburners, increasing its speed up to more than seventy knots and barreling toward Genoa and, hopefully, Maxence.
Casimir stood behind her back, his arms holding onto the rail on both sides of her, making sure she didn’t fly off the top of the boat. “This isn’t safe,” he yelled into the wind.
“I don’t care!” Roxanne yelled back.
It felt exactly like riding in the bed of a pick-up truck at seventy miles an hour and standing to raise your arms above the cab and feel the wind.
The yacht was skimming over the rough winter chop of the Mediterranean Sea, so add in that the pick-up wasn’t driving down a flat highway but bouncing over moguls out in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe not smart, butexhilarating.
Chapter Sixteen
On the High Seas
