“You let him walk all over you,” Lucian muttered. “You have done since uni. And Tickle? You could easily have done it all without him.”
“I really couldn’t have,” I argued. Atlas and I had met during an Introduction to Programming lecture. The subject was basic—I breezed through the course material, while Atlas struggled.
So, I helped him, and we’d become friendly. In the end, he had been the only friend I’d made at university. And we’d stayed friends, even after he’d transferred out of Computer Science into a marketingdegree, which was much better suited to his personality and capabilities.
Stoned and inspired one night, I started waxing lyrical about this weird idea for an adult content social media app. People would subscribe to the app, not the creators, and the creators were rewarded based on views and followers. Atlas had jumped on it.
“If you can pull off the code for this, I can absolutely market the shit out of it!”he’d cackled.“This is gonna make us fucking billionaires, Chewy!”
He hadn’t been wrong.
“If it wasn’t for Atlas’s trust fund, Tickle would still be an itch in my brain,” I reminded Lucian. “And that yacht we’re about to move into wouldn’t exist without Atlas having the people skills to get an investor on board.”
My cousin grunted. He thought I was an idiot. Thankfully the lift doors opened at the ground floor, and we could move again, so silence felt less like a void I needed to fill.
I swapped my glasses for sunglasses as we stepped into the thick February humidity. My shirt clung to my skin within seconds. The air was still and sticky, made worse by the crowd surging from Barangaroo to Darling Harbour. Normally I’d be on edge from the heat and damp fabric, but my excitement was growing with every step towards her, and that dulled the discomfort.
Whenshecame into view, I stopped breathing for a moment. “She’s beautiful,” I murmured to Lucian, stopping among the tourists to admire what I’d just dropped a stupid amount of money on. The February sun glinted off her silver hull and gleaming windows. I adjusted my sunglasses, squinting in the glare.
“You know, you could have gotten the same sensation from a waterbed,” Lucian remarked dryly.
“This way, I avoid the back problems … and gain the added bonus of being able to take my home with me if I need to move.”
“Bit of a change from what you’re used to, eh, Bax?” Lucian nudged me.
“Yeah. This one’s all ours.” I let out a sigh of satisfaction. Finally, after years of doing the rental shuffle with my father, I had somewhere that satisfied my intense need for stability.
“How do you think the cats are going to cope with sea life?” Lucianasked as we approached the gangplank and greeted the crew I’d hired to man my new home. Captain Gillies smiled, extending her hand for me to shake as I walked the plank and stepped onto the deck for the first time as the owner.
“They’ll love it.” I was reassuring myself as much as I was Lucian. “We’ll make sure they feel at home.”
“Welcome aboard theGirl on Fire, Mr Baxter,” Captain Gillies said, following me as I wandered over the expansive deck, the pristine lounging area and the hidden swim spa, currently covered with a sleek white shell. The gentle rocking motion of the deck was already soothing.
“You didn’tactuallycall it that,” Lucian derided, but when I turned, he was grinning at me.
“I gavehera very fitting name, thank you.”
Lucian rolled his eyes. “You are such a nerd, Bax.”
I gave a shrug. “I am who I am, and it’s not like this is a shock to you—you’ve known this about me since we were kids.”
“Weird name aside … this is the coolest place I’ve ever been able to call home.” Lucian turned in a circle, arms outstretched. “This is all yours now, Bax. Can you believe it?”
I followed his gaze, taking it all in. The luxury appointments … the freedom of the ocean, and an experienced crew on board who could take me away whenever I asked. This was about as far from how Lucian and I grew up as we could get.
“It’s still sinking in.”
I headed for the stairs that would take us down to the owner’s suite. “Let’s have a quick explore before we go get all our stuff and make the move official.”
… the little Princess woke up to find her life turned upside down. Her father, the king, had died suddenly. No one would tell her how it had happened. Her mother wouldn’t leave her room, and the servants milled around, pale and grim.
“Who is going to be king now?” she wondered, too little to understand yet that the father who had doted on her was really, truly gone.
But the servants would do nothing but wring their hands and shake their heads and tell her to go play with her dolls.
And then her uncle arrived …
Her uncle … the new king.
