Waltzing on the Danube Read online

  The crew member nodded and consulted his clipboard, checking it against her crumpled documents. “Miss Brooks, yes. You’ll be on D deck, cabin twelve.”

  “Please, call me Jeanie.” Her broad grin sparkled. “D deck. So, is that a good deck to be on? I’ve never been on a ship like this before. Or any ship, for that matter!”

  The man smiled in return. “It’s water level. That’s the deck with all the single cabins.”

  “Well, that’s me! Single as can be. Though maybe not for long if I’m lucky, right?” She gave him a saucy wink. “Now, how do I find where I’m going?”

  “Take the lift down one level,” he responded with a nod in its general direction. “The cabin doors are numbered. You’ll find a sink in your room, and there are shared toilets and baths at each end of the hall.”

  “Thank you so much. You’ve been extremely helpful. What’s your name?”

  “It’s Rolfe, Miss Brooks.”

  “Now, Rolfe—just call me Jeanie, remember?” she teased. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you. I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

  His final best wishes for the cruise were barely audible over the din of her suitcase wheel, which had lost its fight to stay intact during the final sprint down the ramp. It jangled around at a precarious angle as she headed along the hall in search of the elevator—or ‘lift’ as it was apparently called in these parts. She squinted at a sign in the distance with a symbol that she was fairly certain marked her destination. She’d spent the entire flight from New York pouring over a European travel guide to prepare for her voyage, doing her best to memorize the meanings of enough signs and vocabulary to get her through her first trip abroad.

  Then she’d slid the book into the seat pocket in front of her before drifting off to sleep, and, much to her regret considering the thing had cost her fifty bucks, left it behind when she disembarked. Along with chronic lateness, absent mindedness was far from unusual behavior for her. She always had the best of intentions, if not the best follow through. But as the door in front of her slid open to reveal the hoped-for elevator, she was able to shrug off her earlier missteps. Luckily for her, things usually turned out for the best, despite her blunders.

  She stepped out of the lift and into a narrow, windowless hall, her rolling behemoth of a bag rubbing black marks along the stark-white walls, which were barely far enough apart to accommodate a human of average proportion. Packing light had not been an option. A two week trip to Europe on its own would have been cause for a sizable wardrobe, but combined with a ship full of eligible singles, Jeanie’s packing preparations had taken on the focused intensity of training for an Olympic sport. She was a queer woman who’d been born and raised in a hamlet in upstate New York so small that a trip to Poughkeepsie qualified as an adventure in the big city. She knew better than to squander a golden opportunity for finding love. She was on the hunt, and dressing to kill was her weapon of choice.

  Her bag clattered to a stop in front of a door marked with the number twelve. She took the key that Rolfe had handed her and twisted it in the lock. The door swung open to reveal a shadowy space lit by a sliver of a window high up on the opposite wall. She smacked her palm against the switch until an overhead fixture spluttered to life, bathing the room in flickering neon. She blinked as she took in the cabin, then blinked again. For the first time since embarking on this journey, her perpetual optimism flagged.

  To begin with, they’d assigned her a room with no bed. The tiny space in front of her was equipped with only a narrow bench. Stepping over the threshold and giving her bag a gentle tug, she discovered a potentially larger problem, which a forceful yank of her suitcase handle confirmed: the door was too tiny to allow her suitcase to pass. The sinking feeling inside her belly intensified. What was she supposed to do for two weeks in a room with no bed and all her earthly possessions stranded in the hall? She would have to complain to someone about this, and she dreaded the prospect. She lacked the forceful personality for confrontation, mostly relying on honey rather than vinegar to get her way.

  The staccato echo of approaching footsteps prompted Jeanie to look up, embers of hope flickering at the sight of an approaching crew member. He looked like a pleasant man, and if she was nice to him, perhaps he could fix her problem before she had to ruffle too many feathers.

  “Is everything alright, miss?” The man surveyed her and her bag quizzically.

  “I’m afraid it’s not,” she said, her engaging smile crooked with embarrassment. She gestured toward her luggage. “It won’t fit through the door. And that’s only half the problem. Somehow they’ve forgotten to give me a bed.”

  The crew member’s eyebrows shot up. “No bed? Let me take a look.” He peered over Jeanie’s shoulder and began to laugh. “Let me guess. You’re American?”

  “Yes, why?” Jeanie tilted her head, unable to figure out why that could possibly matter in her current crisis. What did her nationality have to do with having no place to sleep, no way to unpack, and exactly two minutes to make it up four floors to the observation deck to meet a few hundred potential loves of her life? She was beginning to suspect that he didn't take her seriously!

  “You Americans always react this way the first time you see a single bed.”

  Her eyebrows knitted together as she took a closer look into the room. “A single bed? Where?” She stared again until the crew member gestured in the direction of the narrow bench. Jeanie’s eyelids sprung open wide. Surely not. “You mean, I’m supposed to sleep on that?”

  The man nodded. “I assure you, the size is very common. And see the drawers built in underneath? That’s for storing your clothing.”

  Jeanie sighed. “I’m not sure how I’ll get them there. No way is this bag going to fit through the door.” She gave the crew member her most pitiful look, adding a dramatic tug on its handle for good measure.

  “That is a problem. Perhaps you could unpack it and I can store it someplace else for the duration of the trip? But you’ll need to do it right away, I’m afraid. Blocking the passageway is against regulations.”

  In a matter of seconds, Jeanie unzipped each compartment and tossed her belongings by the armload into her tiny cell. “There we go!” She surveyed the resulting heap with a sense of accomplishment. “Thank you so much…I’m sorry, what was your name?”

  “Thomas.”

  “Thank you, Thomas.” She pulled the door to the room shut with a reverberating click. “Now, which way to the observation deck?”

  Thomas stared uncomfortably at the obstacle blocking their path, pointing down the pathway on its opposite side. Without a second thought, Jeanie hiked up the hem of her skirt and stretched one long leg high up and over the offending bag, teetering momentarily at its top before dragging her other leg successfully over and onto the floor on the correct side. “You’re a determined woman!” He regarded her with a mixture of awe and surprise.

  “As my Nanna used to say, Thomas,” she called back gleefully as she scurried down the hall, “you ain’t seen the half of it!”

  Pinching pennies, supplementing her teaching income with after-school tutoring and summer jobs—now that was determination. And all for this. Not just the singles cruise, though that was a welcome perk. Jeanie’s hometown wasn’t quite so far removed from civilization that she didn’t know she could meet single women of like-minded inclinations closer to home. Finding someone special on this trip would be the icing on the cake, for sure, but that wasn’t why she’d traveled all this way. No, she'd come seeking redemption. Or at least to make herself feel better about the past she'd left behind.

  For as long as she could remember, she'd dreamed of becoming the curator of a museum. Instead of going to community college like most of her high school friends, she'd gotten into the art history program at Vassar, where she consistently placed at the top of her class. But she was a scholarship student and her family couldn't afford things like study abroad programs. Her parents owned a hardware store where they didn't exac
tly cultivate the social connections to get a prestigious internship. Most of those were unpaid, anyway, so even when she'd landed one she couldn't make ends meet. Even so, Jeanie had kept at it as long as she could, enrolling in a graduate program for museum studies at the City College of New York, even though her parents thought she should come home and teach.

  By the time end of the first year of graduate school, she still had never so much as stepped foot in Europe. That knowledge humiliated her, and she knew that her fellow students regarded her as a little country mouse in the big city. When the fellowship she'd been counting on to afford doing research abroad was awarded to some trust fund screw-up instead, her cheerful optimism was crushed under the weight of reality. She was trying to make it in a world where she would never belong. When the history teacher at her old high school retired, she'd ended up quitting her graduate program just a few credits short of completion to return home to take the job. That had been ten years ago. The least she could do was get a few stamps in her passport before the reunion rolled around.

  She gave the elevator button a sharp jab, annoyed at herself for dredging up old memories. She was on the trip of a lifetime, and about to meet scores of sexy single women. She had no reason to complain. The bell dinged and a woman in her eighties stepped out of the elevator and started down the hall. Jeanie stared after her in surprise. A singles cruise at her age? You go, Granny! Jeanie laughed. That little old lady had her beat in the determination department if she was still looking for love this far into her golden years.

  Jeanie lifted her head high as she strode toward the observation deck and gave the door a push. Her smile froze, however, as she stepped out onto the sun-drenched, and extremely empty, deck. Jeanie looked around and gulped, her pulse beating a chaotic rhythm in her ears. She had to be running much later than she’d thought, and had missed the meet and greet entirely. What other explanation could there be? There wasn’t another soul in sight.

  Correction: there was precisely one. Jeanie saw her on the second sweep, a solitary figure with a pair of sunglasses covering her eyes. She was partially hidden behind a life boat rig, slumped slightly in her chair in such a way that Jeanie wondered if she was asleep. Jeanie studied the woman closely. She had a slender, muscular build. The somewhat ghostly pallor of her skin suggested that the woman got her exercise at a gym and spent the rest of her time behind a desk.

  Jeanie recognized Eleanor’s ensemble of black palazzo pants and muted print tunic as belonging to an easy-care travel collection recently touted by several of her favorite celebrity lifestyle bloggers. She'd considered buying a few pieces herself, right up to the point where she glimpsed the price and realized she could buy a week’s worth of clothing for the cost of one no-iron skirt. Whatever this woman did for work, she was obviously very successful at it.

  Perhaps most important: this woman was definitely no more than a few years older than herself. Jeanie breathed a sigh of relief. After seeing the elderly woman in the elevator, she’d started to worry about exactly who the other women on this cruise would be. But the presence of such an attractive woman reassured her that she’d had no reason to be concerned.

  She cleared her throat loudly as she approached, and the woman stirred and stretched fitfully, then looked up with such a comical expression of surprise that Jeanie stifled a giggle with only marginal success. The woman’s expression shifted to a scowl at the sound, but in doing so it first passed through a state of such exquisiteness that Jeanie’s heart lurched into her throat. She tried to call out a greeting to the woman, but choked on the words in a fit of coughing instead.

  She finally managed to whisper a single word—“Mercy!”—and was glad the stranger was too far away to hear her. She couldn’t tear her eyes away, or even move a muscle as the lovely vision lifted her lithesome body from where it rested. The woman wound her way slowly through the sea of empty deck chairs that separated them. Jeanie’s heart ricocheted against her sternum and she prayed she wouldn’t pass out.

  Chapter 3

  Eleanor’s thoughts had been consumed with work as she’d settled into the deck chair to wait. She'd turned over a particularly enticing project to one of her colleagues just before the trip, and the details of it still filled her brain. But soon her mind had grown fuzzy and she’d drifted into a light sleep, falling victim to the combined effects of jet lag and the warm July sun.

  Suddenly she found herself running around the deck, clutching fistfuls of color-coded spreadsheets in her hands while being chased by hundreds of screaming women. Eleanor stretched her arms in front of her to fend them off, until she awoke in confusion, heart racing and lungs tightening, to find that she was alone. No, strike that. During the time she’d been asleep one other woman had joined her on the deck. From first glance, Eleanor’s already rapid pulse ticked into the red zone. Calm down! A pretty face is no reason for alarm. She struggled to control her ragged breaths. This was no place to start to panic.

  The stranger stood several feet away, her wavy blond tresses blowing in the breeze. She wore a white cotton skirt with colorful embroidery at the hem, and a matching blouse that exposed the tops of her sun-kissed shoulders. It was the type of vaguely tropical outfit that people felt compelled to buy when going on vacation. It was hardly special in itself, but the way the woman stood, back-lit by the sun’s rays, rendered the gauzy fabric nearly transparent. Eleanor’s eyes swept along miles of shapely leg and she wondered if this might not be the most fascinating bit of sightseeing she would partake in during her trip.

  She swallowed roughly as her body buzzed like someone had flipped the switch of an electromagnet in her nether-regions. Hadn’t she just been lamenting her lack of a sex life? Perhaps the answer to that problem was standing right in front of her. Perhaps you should stop being such an idiot, snapped the part of her brain that was not currently in thrall to the flood of hormones coursing through her veins. Still groggy and disoriented, she heard the stranger laugh and felt the muscles in her face contort in a fit of pique. If there was one thing Eleanor could not tolerate, it was being laughed at. Perhaps this woman was not as intriguing as she had first appeared.

  Eleanor rose and strode to the middle of the deck where the stranger stood. “Who are you?” Eleanor immediately regretted the unintended brusqueness of her tone as a cloud of uncertainty darkened the stranger’s face, and she began to sputter and cough. Being discovered mid-nap had provoked an anxious awareness in Eleanor of her own vulnerability, which triggered her body's overdeveloped sense of fight or flight. Her knee-jerk reaction in such cases was always to go on the offensive. It was a tactic that worked well enough for her in the office where she spent most of her time, but when it came to more delicate human interactions, she sometimes needed reminding that not every situation was a zero-sum competition, or a gladiator battle to the death. “I’m Eleanor,” she added more gently, taking a delayed stab at civility.

  “I’m…uh, Jeanie?” The woman managed to cough the words out, but without conviction.

  Eleanor stared, dumbfounded. Did she just say she’s a genie? Eleanor felt her insides heat up like a furnace as she took in the woman’s shapely body. Is she going to grant me a wish? Eleanor wondered what the policy was on inviting a genie back to your place to get better acquainted. Was that an acceptable wish?

  What the hell is wrong with me? Obviously, she couldn’t have said she was a genie. Eleanor wondered if she was still asleep, because this interaction was making about as much sense as the spreadsheet dream she’d just had. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” she managed to say, more than half convinced that she was going soft in the head.

  “Janine? Jeanie for short. Jeanie Louise Brooks.” The woman stuck out her hand in greeting.

  “Eleanor Fielding.” Eleanor grasped the outstretched hand, her senses returning to her at the familiar, businesslike gesture. The ritual calmed her enough that she might even be able to remember the stranger's name. “Did you say Louise Brooks?”

  “I k
now what you’re thinking. Haven’t I heard that name somewhere before?” The woman gave a self-deprecating shrug. “Mom’s a huge fan of silent films. With a last name like Brooks, she couldn’t resist.” Jeanie giggled nervously, tossing her head to one side so that her golden hair flew. “I didn’t like it when I was younger, but when I first came out to my mom, she said she could hardly hold it against me since she’d named me after the most notorious bisexual of the flapper era, so at least I got some practical benefit out of being saddled with the name.”

  “Oh?” Eleanor squinted in confusion, feeling hopelessly out of her element at the woman’s steady stream of chatter. She could barely keep up. “Are you bisexual?” Eleanor’s heart, which had only just managed to return to a normal speed and rhythm, lurched in embarrassment and sent a rush of blood to her cheeks. She’d realized the second after the words were out of her mouth just how inappropriate they were. It was simply the first thing that had popped into her head, and her brain was still muddled enough to have let it slip out. I'm such a disaster!

  “No, not me.” Jeanie took the question in stride, smiling as pleasantly as if Eleanor had asked the time of day. “Nothing against people who are, or anything. I just never saw the appeal. How about you?”

  “How about me?” Eleanor repeated dumbly. “Am I bisexual, you mean? No, not me, either. Like you said, I never saw the appeal.” This was possibly the most bizarre conversation with a stranger that she’d ever experienced in her life.

  Jeanie laughed. “I feel like we’ve made it through a lightning round of speed dating, don’t you?”

  “Well, Louise, tell me your stance on sex toys and it might qualify as a first date,” Eleanor quipped, proud of herself for her display of humor.

  “It's Jeanie, actually. And I have an entire bag of them back in my cabin.”

  Eleanor gaped.

  “Oh.” Jeanie bit her lower lip as her cheeks flushed scarlet. “That wasn’t a serious question, was it?”