Hero
After that, everything had to be sold off in a hurry. The creel boats went for far less than they were worth because every fisherman in Fife knew we were desperate to liquidate. The shop lease expired, and the landlord promptly leased the space out to a Costa Coffee instead. My mum, Moira MacLeod—who had delivered half the babies across Fife as an NHS community midwife, working exhausting twelve-hour shifts for thirty-seven thousand pounds a year and coming home with dried blood on her shoes—could not carry a two thousand two hundred pound monthly boat loan on her own. She tried to hide the mounting notices from me, but I saw the bold red letters stacked on the hallway table.
That was precisely why I was standing on a dock in Puerto Banús, scrubbing the hull of a Greek billionaire's yacht for nine euros an hour cash in hand. That was why I had an airline ticket booked for forty-eight hours from then, though it was not bound for Anstruther. I was not going home. I was heading somewhere cold, distant, and obscenely expensive where no one knew my name, funded by an international scholarship that had made my mum cry for an entirely different reason.
If I had told Marco I was leaving Spain to go study Business Management, he would have laughed directly in my face. If I had confessed that I wanted to learn how to structure a business properly so I could return and rebuild my father's shop from the ground up—so Alistair's name would not simply fade away from the harbour—he would have thought I was soft. He would have told the rest of the deckhands, and they would have spent the rest of my shift calling me uni boy. So I simply let them believe I was returning to Scotland. Going home. It was another convenient lie. Scotland was a simple story that made sense to people; the actual truth was much harder to explain.
Around me, the marina woke up in slow, deliberate steps. The massive superyachts registered out of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Greece began to hum as their heavy diesel generators and air conditioning systems kicked on—a steady, low vibration that sounded like pure money. Deckhands clad in matching navy polo shirts with yacht logos embroidered across the chest began hosing down high-end teak decks that were worth far more than my mum's annual salary. Young women in microscopic bikinis walked tiny dogs that cost more than my entire summer earnings, their eyes sliding right past someone like me. Puerto Banús in July was an elaborate theatre of wealth, and I was merely part of the background scenery. The boy who cleaned. The boy who remained invisible right up until something required a scrub brush.
I had moved to the stern of the Eleni and was working on the polished chrome nameplate with a soft microfibre cloth, precisely as Marco had instructed. He had warned me that Italian chrome was delicate and would scratch if a person so much as looked at it the wrong way. That was when I felt someone watching me.
It was that distinct, unmistakable sensation of an unseen gaze. The back of my neck grew hot—a sharp prickle of heat that had nothing to do with the midday Spanish sun. The fine hairs along my forearms stood on end, rising even through the layer of sweat slicking my skin.
I wiped my palm against my shorts and looked up.
A man was standing on the elevated VIP aft deck of the yacht, entirely barefoot.
He was tall. He towered over my own six-foot-three frame, possessing a lean build that made him appear even taller than he was. It was not the bulky, engineered lean of the personal trainers who paraded around the Banús promenade with their plastic protein shakers; rather, it was the raw, spare build that came from a restless constitution—from someone who rarely sat still, frequently forgot to eat, and carried a quiet, constant stress in his upper back. He possessed broad, squared-off shoulders that tapered into a narrow waist and long legs.
He was clad in loose beige linen trousers that were casually cuffed at the ankle, exposing tanned, bare skin, paired with a crisp white button-down shirt with the sleeves pushed up past his forearms. The shirt bore a small, subtle logo on the chest pocket—not a loud or garish design, but a crest stitched in matching white thread that practically screamed understated wealth. His forearms were deeply tanned, the veins beneath the skin sharply defined, and a heavy silver chronometer glinted on his left wrist.
He held a phone pressed tightly to his ear while a pair of black sunglasses rested pushed back into his hair.
His hair was dark—a deep, rich espresso brown—thick, wavy, and slightly unkempt, as though he had spent the entire morning running his fingers through it in frustration while locked in an argument. It was left longer on top and cropped close along the sides, with distinct streaks of silver emerging at the temples. It was not the faded grey of old age, but a sharp silver that caught the morning sunlight, giving him an air of seasoned maturity. Dark stubble peppered with silver covered his strong jawline—not a groomed beard, but three days of neglect from a man far too preoccupied to bother with a razor.
He was locked in an intense telephone argument. He spoke first in rapid, sharp Greek, his tone dripping with frustration, before shifting seamlessly into English. His voice was deep, low, and clipped—the voice of a man accustomed to immediate obedience, visibly irritated by the resistance on the other end of the line.
"No, I told Andreas I would not do that," he said, his posture taut. "Tell him I am not in Athens. I am not available to him. Yes, I know precisely what day it is."
Andreas. The name lingered in my mind because of the way he spat it out—like the word left an unpleasant, bitter taste in his mouth.