Bliss by Shay Mitchell Read Free Book Online Page B

covered head to toe. The kids, including the girls, wore Western clothes. They ran around the women standing in a tight circle. One man with a white headpiece, like a sheet, on his head seemed to be in charge. He spoke in Arabic to two other men in black suits and earpieces (bodyguards?). She took them for a sheik and his multiple wives, and their many offspring. It was so foreign, so exotic; she gawked. Couldn’t help it. When the bodyguards noticed her and glared suspiciously, she scurried off to find her connecting flight to Thailand.
    The family must have been in first class. She would have noticed them in coach. Leandra did the math. The Middle Eastern man told her that first-class suites—with full-size beds, hot showers, unlimited delicacies—from New York to Dubai cost $20,000 each. For a family of ten, one flight would run $200,000. Why didn’t the sheik just buy his own plane? Maybe his was broken? No matter. Dude was insanely wealthy. It was hard not to be awed by that. Vast riches and mysterious men were what she’d come for. One day in the not too distant future, she would find herself in an Emirates first-class cabin, and take a hot shower at 30,000 feet. That fantasy kept her smiling for the last leg of her twenty-four-hour journey to Phuket, including a sickening forty-five-minute taxi ride from the airport along the construction-clogged one-lane “highway” to her hotel on Karon Beach.
    â€œThis can’t be it,” she said when she arrived at the street-side entrance to Sawasdee House. The website photos sparkled like a jewel, but in reality, the hotel resembled a crumbling Holiday Inn tightly sandwiched between a yoga studio and a pharmacy. Leandra paid the driver in baht the exact amount on the meter. She’d read that Thai people didn’t believe in tipping.
    Leandra lugged her own bags into the small lobby, and had to wait a few minutes before a woman came to the desk to check her in. The whole process—filling out forms, giving her credit card—was a letdown. Where was the champagne cocktail, Thai mini-massage, the bowing-and-scraping she expected? Her room, on the first floor facing the street, was a disappointment, too, but she wasn’t in Fuck It to sit in a moldy room. Leandra put on her skimpiest bikini, walked through the lobby and a shabby dining room, and out the hotel’s back glass doors to the beach.
    Karon Beach was glorious. Pink sand, teal blue water, sexy Asian surfers riding waves at the crest of the horseshoe shoreline. Sawasdee House might have a trashy façade, but it was right on the beach. She stationed herself on a lounge, ordered a Singha from a passing waiter, and let the Thai sunshine soak into her skin. It was divine. Heaven. Rapture.
    Except.
    It was kind of boring just lying there, waiting for her fabulous life to begin. She looked up and down the horizon, and caught the eye of a woman trolling the beach selling sarongs out of a plastic bag. “No!” she had to repeat five times before the woman stopped pestering her.
    â€œThey’re rather persistent, aren’t they?” asked a stranger on a nearby lounge in a posh English accent.
    Leandra smiled at her. It was hard to guess her age with her hat and sunglasses. Asian women looked like they were twenty-five until age seventy-five, and then they looked one thousand. She was exceptional with a kitten-shaped face, a preciously pointy chin, impossibly thin with golden skin and red lips. A Chanel tote bag (that probably cost $5,000) was on the sand at her feet.
    â€œDo I look like I want to buy a crappy sarong?” Leandra asked. The woman laughed and smiled.
    â€œI’m Sari,” she said. “Just get here?”
    â€œLeandra. Yeah, I got in an hour ago. Isn’t it obvious? I’m so pale!” But she wasn’t. She’d prepped for the trip with a brown-sugar body scrub and spray tan.
    â€œAmerican?” asked Sari.
    Why did