Sofia looked up at him, eyebrow raised. ‘So you’ve been doing your homework huh?’
He blushed, caught out. ‘I may have read your CV, and done some light internet stalking before you started. I wanted to know who this “magnificently overqualified” chef that Mary kept going on about was.’
Sofia looked bashful. ‘She really said that?’
‘That was the least complimentary thing she said, but I don’t want to go inflating your ego too much.’ When she grinned at him, his heart soared, and he let himself enjoy it, rather than chastising himself as he had been doing.
Chapter Thirty-One
Jack
He thought back to that first day, when he had seen her walk into the mess. The girl from the bar, the one he had thought about all evening, even as he laughed and joked with his friends from back home. They had teased him as he returned to the table with an Aperol-tinted stain down his shirt, but he couldn’t stop berating himself for not having asked her name. When she had walked out of the bar, amber-tinted curls flying in the wind, he had resisted the urge to run after her.
He couldn’t remember now if he had just wanted to sleep with her, this lovely woman with long, smooth brown limbs, but she had certainly played on his mind. Then there she was, introducing herself politely in front of the rest of the crew, avoiding his gaze as he watched her, running through the funniest lines he could pull out to defuse the tension between them and maybe even get her to smile. He had failed miserably, of course, when she had finally looked at him with that expression of derision and he had made his weak joke about the spilled water, and she had been deeply unimpressed.
With Captain Mary watching on he’d had to remind himself what he was here for – his on-land antics would have to be put to one side. She had finally entrusted him with a first officer role and he wasn’t about to mess that up for some pretty girl with hazel eyes.
She had introduced herself as ‘Chef Harlow’. It seemed clear to him that she had no interest in his banter. She was there for the same reason as him: to work. He had resolved that he would try and suppress this little infatuation. He barely knew the woman anyway, and there were plenty of other pretty girls out there.
‘I thought you hated me.’ Sofia’s voice broke through, suddenly clearing away the fog of his reminiscing. He looked down to marvel at her face, and brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes.
‘Well, that was only because you hated me. You literally threw a drink over me the first time we met.’
Sofia slapped at his bare chest playfully. ‘You look quite charming in orange I think, and anyway, that was only because you were very rude.’
‘I thought that Brits loved a bit of banter.’ He was aiming for cockney, but it came out sounding more Australian.
‘Not with strange Americans I’ve only just met who push in at the bar.’ Sofia giggled.
Jack feigned a shocked expression, covering his mouth with his hand.
‘No you’re right, it was all very improper.’ His British accent was terrible, and he always enjoyed how much it seemed to rile her. This time she did not take the bait.
‘No but for real, you always seemed to want to get away from me, when you weren’t raiding my fridge.’
He smirked at that, thinking of how he had planned to apologise for his weirdly macho behaviour earlier that day, when he had told her she wouldn’t be able to help load the boat up, even though he had, of course, been right. He had been nosing around, trying to piece together clues about this strange, mesmerising woman. The shelves in the fridge had been beautifully, if a little neurotically, organised. Fruits and vegetables piled high, and making up every colour of the rainbow.
The punnet of strawberries made him think of early summer in his grandmother’s house. He and his mum would go out into the garden, when he was only as tall as her knee, and spy the bursts of scarlet among the bright green leaves. Each time he found one, he would hand it over, stretching all the way up to reach the box in her hands. It wasn’t until the punnet was full that they would sit in the grass and gorge on the sweet fruit.
The taste of them brought him so clearly back to that moment, that he hadn’t noticed Sofia come in until it was too late. Behind the fridge door her eyes were full of rage. The plump red berry in his hand might as well have been a grenade. The ensuing explosion was almost as destructive.
‘I think you might have overreacted with the strawberries.’ He was amused to see a flash of anger pass across her face. ‘You’re still angry about that now?’
Sofia seemed embarrassed for a moment, and then defiant. ‘I am actually – it was my first day and I wanted everything to be perfect, how would you feel if you found me messing with some of your—’ she reached for the right word ‘—ropes?’
‘I would not mind you messing with my ropes one bit.’ It was a lame joke really but it made her giggle. He was struck by how joyous it made him, to see her laugh. ‘And to clarify, I never hated you, Sofia. I just always got the impression that I made you... I don’t know, uncomfortable in some way. I could never quite say the right thing.’
It was the truth, but not the whole truth. He didn’t want to admit that he was the one who often felt uncomfortable in her presence, that he could never quite understand the tension that festered between them. What’s more he suspected that he hadn’t wanted to understand it, better for them to clash occasionally and then avoid each other, than to give that ‘tension’ its proper name. The pact to stick to their half of the boat had given him some welcome respite, to actually concentrate on his job.
The morning on the deck, when he had seen a figure standing in the fog, his brain delirious from sleep, had convinced him it was his mother. The dark curls fluttering in the wind drew him closer. For a moment, after Sofia had turned round, he was frozen with shock. It was the stuff of dreams, and he wasn’t entirely sure he was awake.
It was his domain – dawn on the deck – and there she was, radiant but also, as usual, very unhappy to see him. When she had taken a jab at him, he heard himself sounding like a petulant child, reminding her that this washispart of the boat, and for the rest of the day he felt embarrassed about it. He never lost his cool like that. He was exactly the privileged sulky man-child that she had accused him of being.
Petra had come to him in a state of despair. ‘One stewardess down, a green deckhand and now our chef is having a panic attack about the menu,’ she gushed breathlessly. He had thought she was exaggerating. Petra shook her head. ‘No really, she’s having a lie-down. I thought she was going to faint or something. That poor girl’s perfectionism will be the death of her, I swear.’
He had stepped in, cooked up his ‘signature’ beef burgers, the only thing that his mother had ever taught him to cook, and incidentally, the only thing she actually could cook. He told himself he was doing it for Captain Mary, that he didn’t want her to bear the brunt of the guests’ displeasure, but if he was being totally honest with himself, he really didn’t like the idea of Sofia getting in trouble either. Maybe this good deed would atone for his spiteful words that morning.
‘I only just clocked the other day, after talking to Patricio, that that citrus grove you took us to, it’s basically yours right?’ Sofia had been trailing her fingers over his arms and chest, eyes closed, when the question rose from their contemplative silence.
