His grin widened, and he buzzed me through.
I parked the Aston Martin next to Dax’s BMW that matched the yacht. It was sleek, black and gray with hints of red. The yacht and the car were made as a pair, but Dax never drove the car. It was a collector item, a deal we’d brokered with BMW to match our yachts with their vehicles in an attempt to entice the billionaires in the world to buy both. For now, the car was just a shiny toy that went with the shiny one on the water.
While the car did nothing for me, the yacht made my heart pound with joy. For a brief moment, I let the stress of my undercover life leave me, and I reveled in the thing I loved most. The water. Being in a boat on the water. Even with all the other things tangled up with the race, the idea of skyrocketing across the Atlantic in it to beat the world record made my fingers tingle with adrenaline. As I walked down the pier, it felt like the yacht called to me almost as much as a purple-eyed genius.
We’d designed theAda Maeto the exact specifications we needed to win this race. The yacht was a never-seen combination of a power, cigarette, and jet boat. Dax and I had worked from start to finish on it with the shipyard. If we were a success, everybody and their uncle was going to want one. The trademark we had on it would be worth millions. If Truck thought the purses I’d won were a big deal, this would blow his mind.
The fact that we had three finished and ten more in various stages of production was sort of mind-boggling. It was a piece of my life I sometimes forgot while juggling my work with Malone.
When I reached the boat, I ran a hand along the outside of her. TheAda Mae. I smiled. If I couldn’t run my hands along Violet’s skin, this was a good consolation prize. It was named after two of Violet’s beloved female scientists: Ada Lovelace and Mae Jemison. I wondered if she would even realize the reason for the boat’s name.
The yacht’s smooth outer layer was a unique composite of Kevlar and a special blended graphene and plastic. It was light and shiny and was probably the most gorgeous boat I’d ever seen. Ever.
A cough across the pier pulled my eyes to another ship parked there. Cruz Malone stood on the deck of the yacht in the slip across from me, drinking coffee. He looked nothing like the Malone I knew. He’d thrown off his suit for an outfit that mimicked mine: board shorts, boat shoes, and T-shirt. I’d forgotten to give him the memo that I wasn’t the model for the rich and famous yachting world’s fashion. I held back my laugh as I ignored him and boarded theAda Mae.
The deck and interior were minimalistic to keep the weight down. Designing a boat to win this race was all about fuel consumption, balancing speed with the requirement to not refuel. That meant carefully considering everything that came on board. But, true to Dax form, that minimalism hadn’t come at the cost of luxury. Instead, some of the most expensive materials known to man were used on the exterior and the interior of the vessel.
Soft leather. Shiny metals.
Excessive but beautiful.
My phone buzzed.
DAX: Breakfast?
ME: Nah, I’m going to take the Ada Mae out for a warm-up.
DAX: We’re going to be on her for fifty-eight hours straight starting tomorrow. You’d think that would be enough.
Dax and I had never gotten around to taking theAda Maeout the day before, and the longing to be on the water had only grown.
ME: Less than fifty-eight. And how long have you known me?
DAX: You’re right. Let me know when you get back.
ME: Will do.
I ran through the checklist, threw off the ropes, and pulled away from the pier while Malone watched from his seat on the vessel opposite me. I gave him a salute, and even though I wasn’t close enough to see it, I was pretty sure he frowned.
Once I hit open water, I dropped the throttle and let her soar. Titanium and fiberglass shielded me at the helm from the wind, and I missed the feel of it on my face. But the blur of the sky and the ocean still settled my veins in a way I’d never found anywhere else. Soothing. An inner peace filling me.
By the time I returned an hour later, I was calmer. I’d let the last couple of days’ worth of failures slide away and refocused on the plans before me.
When I tied the yacht back up to the pier, I sent a text to our team to make sure they refueled before we took off. Then, I opened up the other messages that had tumbled in while I’d been out of reach. There was one from Dax and one from Jada, but before I could really take them in, my phone rang with a call from the front gate.
“Mr. Langley, there’s a van here from Mike’s Market. They say they have supplies for you?”
“Sure, let them in,” I said.
I turned back to Malone, appearing to sleep on the deck of the other yacht, and debated texting him before opting to just leave well enough alone. He already knew the details of the delivery.
After a few minutes, a couple of guys appeared, pushing a handcart with two wooden crates on it down the dock. They both had jeans and Mike’s Market T-shirts. Normal looking dudes. Nothing that would stand out.
They handed me an invoice, and I signed my name before helping them unload the crates. We hauled them down the steps into the cabin.
The cabin’s interior was as bare-bones as the exterior: two long bench seats, a small bed in the bow, a refrigerator, and a tiny latrine. It wasn’t built to spend months on. It was built as a day cruiser or, as in the case of the race, a two-day cruiser. But the elegance twined into the simplicity was as apparent here as it had been up top. The actual production line models would have a few extras, like a summer kitchen built on the deck, that our stripped-down version didn’t have.
The first crate we opened had the groceries Dax and I needed for our trip. Nothing extravagant, because every ounce of weight mattered, and I’d already had to fudge the numbers to Dax in order to hide the contents of the second container. We’d intended to put that crate inside the secret compartment as is, but after I’d pressed a series of concealed buttons and exposed the narrow compartment under one of the bench seats, I realized there was no way it would fit.
