Page 32 of Revenge Honeymoon

Sylvia inspected her glitter nail polish and then looked up at him from beneath her possibly fake eyelashes. “Whatever you think I’d like.”

Ugh. Gross.

Max wouldn’t go for a woman like that. Would he?

He rubbed his jaw. “Um, okay.”

After the handsomest man in the room left, Sylvia asked her, “Where’s your ‘wife’?”

“Asleep. Why?” Emily picked at her lukewarm hash browns.

“Just wondering.”

A server appeared with a pitcher of ice water and a pitcher of orange juice. “What would you like?”

Sylvia flipped over one of the glasses on the table. “Water, please.”

“No, thank you.” Emily drank her coffee with cream and sugar.

The minute the server moved on to other guests, Sylvia leaned across the table and hissed, “Max will never go for a girl like you, you know.”

Emily’s fork, loaded with scrambled eggs, stopped halfway to her mouth. “Excuse me?”

“Just look at you.” Sylvia’s gaze roved over the basic shorts and T-shirt Emily wore. “Plain Jane.”

The words cut through her and bad memories from middle school when her best friend had enrolled in the Catholic school and left her alone with the public school wolves replayed in her head.

Laardvark.

Carbzilla.

Chunkster.

When she looked back at photos of herself, she hadn’t looked much larger than anyone else. Really, it had been her attempt to hide her oversized chest that made her appear larger than she was—loose sweaters, oversized T-shirts, anything to mask the fact she was a thirteen-year-old girl with the rack of a suburban mom in her thirties.

Nevertheless, Sylvia’s snark burned.

“I’m here on a cruise with my best friend.” Emily used all her willpower to keep her voice from trembling. “And you work for the cruise line. Do you think it’s appropriate to interact with a customer like this?”

Emily’s appetite fled. She set down her fork.

Sylvia gave a cruel smile that twisted her orange lipsticked mouth. “Right, I wouldn’t want to be ‘inappropriate’ with a paying customer.” She sipped her water and stared at Emily over the edge of the glass. “Maybe you’d like me to make some recommendations about how to make the most of your cruise? I know your friend generously let you accompany her after getting dumped by her fiancé. So really, isn’tshethe paying customer?”

Emily looked away. Her cheeks burned. This woman knew everything about Ruby’s pain. What was she supposed to do?

Before she could think how to respond, Max reappeared with a tray laden with breakfast foods. “To be safe, I got a little bit of everything: pancakes, muffins, sausage, eggs, danishes, fruit, bacon. The works.”

He set a plate in front of Sylvia and smiled.

The cruise director clapped her hands together. “Oh, fabulous. You are really too kind, Max. Too kind. I love it all.”

When Max was distracted by his own plate of breakfast goodies, Sylvia glanced across the table at Emily, shrugged her shoulders, and smirked.

* * *

Thirty uncomfortable minutes later, the table of three wrapped up their breakfast.

“Thank you so much for letting me join you,” Sylvia said with the fakest smile on her face.

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