Page 8 of Undercover Billionaire

No. Hecouldn’tbelieve she’d steal, that she was some kind of player. Ari was usually a very good judge of character and Kelsey had struck him as genuine right from the get-go. He couldn’t believe it was her.

Which left a different scenario. A light-fingered passenger? The guy who’d been working the bar with her? Or another explanation? Ari made a note to check the CCTV footage at the end of the cruise. He’d left the wallet in plain sight so it should be easy to see who picked it up.

He just prayed like hell it wasn’t Kelsey.

He’d looked up her staff record when he’d returned to the cabin. She was an excellent employee, with a clean record and a rapid career trajectory. The kind of staff they’d had difficulty retaining on this ship. They needed more Kelseys.

* * *

It was just after eleven when Kelsey made it back to the staff cabins. She’d worked the dining room from six until nine and the Aphrodite Lounge on deck fourteen for the last two hours. All she wanted was a shower and to hit the sack until she had to be up at five thirty for the 6a.m. breakfast shift.

And a little alone time to think about her earlier transgression. With apassenger! God… whathadshe been thinking? Going into his cabin. Sitting on his bed.

Letting him kiss her.

But there was, as usual, a ‘shoving off’ party going on in the mess – a tradition for the first night of a cruise. Not that any of this lot needed an excuse to party. Put a thousand-plus mostly twenty-somethings in a room with cheap booze and it wasalwaysfive o’clock.

‘Kels!’

Tiffany, her best friend, waved at her from across the room. Also from Australia, they’d both been recruited to the Oceanós family in the same intake and had largely worked the same Mediterranean cruises. But where Kelsey had grown up in a city, loved the beach and saw her job as a means to an end, Tiffany had grown up on a cattle property in the middle of nowhere and saw cruising as a grand adventure far, far away from the heat, dust and flies.

Tiffany was dark haired and curvy – big boned, as she like to call herself – and worked in the casino. At the blackjack table she was quiet and dignified, her hair pulled back into a sleek bun, her uniform fitting her like a glove. She was the wholeCasino-Royale-elegant-sophisticated-croupier wet dream.

But out of her uniform and away from the tables, she held no airs and graces. She was just a sheila from the cattle station who could muster cows, fix a fence, string a bunch of swear words together that would make a cowboy blush and drink an SAS officer under the table. She also, genuinely, didn’t give one fuck what people thought about her.

Kelsey loved her.Everybodyloved her.

‘Grab a beer,’ Tiffany said, the quiet demure voice she used at the tables nowhere in sight. ‘Join us.’

Kelsey nodded, resigning herself to one beer, and headed towards the bar. ‘Hey, Sivat.’ She greeted the Malaysian bartender warmly. He’d manned the staff bar on every one of her cruises. ‘A beer please.’

‘You look tired,’ he said as he poured her drink. ‘I thought you were quitting this crazy lifestyle?’

Kelsey laughed. ‘One more year, Sivat, and I’m outta here.’

She’d have recouped enough of the money her ratfink ex had stolen – aninheritancefrom her grandmother – by then. Enough to put a deposit on the Pelican Cove beach cottage she and her mother had been coveting for what felt like a million years.

As Sivat handed the drink over, Andy sidled up and greeted her with a flirty smile.

‘Hey,’ Kelsey said.

‘Returned the wallet, Ms Goody Goody?’ he teased as he motioned to Sivat for a beer.

She rolled her eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘And was he grateful?’

Kelsey’s mind strayed to the kiss even though she knew it hadn’t been about the wallet. ‘Yes. He was.’

‘See.’ Andy reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty-euro note. ‘I told you he wouldn’t miss it.’

Kelsey stared at the note, dumbfounded for a moment, a hot cloud ofwhat-the-fuckmushrooming in her chest. Her face flushed as her blood pressure rose. ‘You’re fucking kidding me.’ She snatched the money out of his hand.

‘Hey,’ Andy protested.

‘Are you out of your mind? I took his wallet to him personally,’ she hissed. ‘He’s going to think I stole it.’

‘All right, all right, don’t get your panties in a tangle.’

---