Accidental Bodyguard Summer (Sunbreak Harbor Security Romance #10)

Chapter 1

Abby

“Okay, Carl, honest opinion. Does this footage make the reef look good?”

Carl the pelican, perched on the dock post he’s claimed as his office, tilts his head at my laptop screen and then goes back to preening his wing feathers like a colleague who’s already mentally checked out of the meeting.

“That’s fair. You’ve seen it live.”

I scroll through this morning’s dive footage anyway, because somebody on this dock has to have professional standards.

Forty-two minutes of the north reef site, and it’s gorgeous.

Staghorn coral that was rubble three years ago is throwing out new branches like it’s showing off.

A loggerhead cruised past my camera at minute nineteen and looked directly into the lens, which is basically a celebrity endorsement.

My grant committee is going to weep. I might frame a still for the cottage wall, right next to the whiteboard.

Sunbreak Harbor spreads out behind me in full June glory, all white boats and glittering water and the smell of diesel and salt and somebody grilling shrimp too early in the day.

Six weeks I’ve been here, and I’m already planning how to never leave.

I mean, I have to leave. The grant ends in August. But a girl can love a place irresponsibly for one summer.

“There you are.” Marnie leans out the takeout window of the Salty Bean, the coffee shop that shares the dock with the harbormaster’s office, and waves a cup at me. “Iced hibiscus, extra ice. And I need to tell you what Dennis did with the boat.”

Dennis is Marnie’s almost-ex-husband. The divorce has been “almost” for eleven months, which I know because Marnie updates me every morning like it’s the weather report.

“What did Dennis do with the boat,” I say, because I am invested now. That’s the thing nobody tells you about small towns. You show up for coffee, and within two weeks you’re emotionally shackled to a stranger’s marital dissolution and a boat named Second Wind.

“Renamed it.” Marnie’s face does something complicated. “Freedom.”

“He did not.”

“Stenciled and everything.”

“Marnie, that’s the most divorced thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Right?” She looks weirdly delighted. Eleven months of almost will do that to a person. “Anyway. Gus is looking for you. Something about Saturday.”

Gus, the harbormaster, is a barrel of a man in his seventies who runs this dock like a benevolent city-state, and he emerges from his office before I’ve even finished the tea.

“Marlowe. Saturday. You in or out?”

“Gus, I RSVP’d. I RSVP’d verbally, twice, and once by text with a turtle emoji, which is legally binding.”

“Checking. Kayla asked.” He tucks his thumbs in his belt, gruff as a piling, and absolutely delighted underneath it, because his granddaughter has adopted me and everyone knows adoption goes through Kayla. “She’s playing left defender now. Coach says she’s got instincts.”

“She took out two forwards last game like a tiny golden-retriever bouncer. She’s a wall, Gus. She’s the whole harbor seawall in shin guards.”

“That’s what I said.” He nods at my laptop. “Reef behaving?”

“Reef’s showing off. Come by the booth at the festival next month, I’ll have prints.”

“If there’s turtles in ’em, Doreen’d have bought three.” He stumps back toward his office, then pauses. “Orange slices.”

“Already on the list. I know my role in this ecosystem.”

So I confirm orange slices, and I trade Marnie a muffin from my bag for the iced tea, and I tell Carl to hold my calls, and honestly? This is the whole problem with Sunbreak Harbor. It makes you feel like the world is a friendly place.

Six weeks ago I didn’t know any of these people existed.

Now I know that Marnie’s mediator smells like cough drops, that Gus keeps a photo of his late wife Doreen’s prize snapper over the radio, that Kayla wants to be a marine biologist or a monster truck driver, whichever certifies first. My grad school advisor used to say I’d never survive fieldwork because I “collect people like barnacles.” Joke’s on him.

Barnacles are filter feeders, ecologically essential, and fully capable of finishing a dissertation.

Which is probably why it takes me until minute thirty-one of the footage to understand what I’m looking at.

I almost skip it. That’s the part that will keep me up later.

Minute thirty-one is the far edge of the study site, past the last of my marker stakes, where the reef shelf drops off toward the channel. The visibility gets milky out there and there’s nothing to count, so my thumb is already on the fast-forward when a shape resolves out of the blue.

A hull. Mid-size fishing boat, sitting where no fishing boat has business sitting, dead center over the protected zone.

And below it, sinking through the water column in a slow ugly cascade, is—stuff.

Crates. Drums. Something wrapped in what looks like tarp, strapped tight, dropping past my camera’s field of view toward the reef shelf.

“No,” I tell the laptop. “Absolutely not. Do you know how long that staghorn took to come back?”

The laptop does not answer. Carl makes a low grumbling noise, which I choose to interpret as solidarity.

I rewind. Watch it again. Watch it a third time with my face six inches from the screen like proximity will change the facts. Somebody is dumping over my reef. My reef, which is technically the State of Florida’s reef, but I have counted every colony on that shelf by hand and that makes it mine.

Deep breath, Abby. You are a scientist. You are a professional. You have a protocol for this.

The protocol is: I screenshot the hull, and the registration number that’s visible for exactly nine frames, and I write it all up in the calm, factual language of a person whose eye is not twitching.

One copy to the Coast Guard’s environmental crimes tip line.

One copy to the state environmental agency, attention of the very nice woman named Renata who processed my research permits and once mailed me a corrected form with a smiley face on it.

Then, because the public deserves transparency and also because I’m mad, I post a thirty-second clip to my research blog. Caption: This is what illegal dumping looks like over a recovering reef system. Three years of regrowth under that debris field. Do better, humans.

Send. Post. Done.

For context, my research blog has around nine hundred followers, and I’d estimate four hundred of them are my mother’s book club, two hundred are colleagues, and the rest are people who arrived for one viral video of a loggerhead sneezing and stayed out of politeness.

It is not a media empire. But the comments start within the hour—outrage, sad crab emojis, one guy from a dive forum offering to “handle it,” whom I gently talk down—and there’s something bracing about it, the whole little community leaning in the same direction at once.

I also leave Renata a voicemail, because Renata likes a heads-up before paperwork lands.

“Hi, it’s Abby Marlowe, permits 44-B and 44-C, you’ll see a report from me tonight and I want to say in advance: I’m calm, the documentation is thorough, and I’ve already drafted the incident narrative in your agency’s preferred format, because I love you and I know Tuesdays are hard. Okay. Bye.”

“And that,” I tell Carl, closing the laptop with the satisfying click of civic duty, “is how the system works. They’ll trace the registration, somebody gets a fine, maybe a very stern letter, and the reef gets cleaned up. Justice, Carl.”

Carl yawns. Pelicans can yawn. It’s horrifying and I respect it.

By Thursday I’ve mostly stopped thinking about the boat, because it’s peak nesting season and the loggerheads have no interest in my crusade against maritime crime.

Nest forty-one is my problem child. It sits high on the beach north of the pier, close enough to the dune line that I’ve been watching it like a nervous stage mom.

Tonight I’m on my knees in the cooling sand, checking the marker stakes and the screen mesh, narrating my findings to the clipboard because my field assistant is a clipboard.

“Marker’s solid. Mesh is intact. And nobody’s been partying on top of you,” I tell the nest. “You’re welcome. Sixty days, ladies. Give or take.”

Loggerhead eggs incubate for about sixty days, and warmer sand skews the hatchlings female, which means climate change is out here running a matriarchy program on Florida’s beaches, and I think about that constantly.

I once explained it to Marnie’s book club in such detail that they now call me Turtle Girl, which—fine.

There are worse brands. I have a t-shirt that says SHELL YEAH on it. I’m wearing it right now.

The sun is doing its nightly showoff routine, the water’s gone pink and gold, and a pelican that is statistically probably not Carl but that I greet as Carl anyway sails past the pier. This is the part of the job they can’t put in the grant reports. You can’t cite a sunset.

My phone buzzes. Renata, from the environmental agency, and I answer on the first ring because I’m hoping for news about my dumping report.

“Abby.” She sounds odd. Careful. “That footage you sent over. Did you post any of it publicly?”

“On my research blog, yeah. Just a clip. Why, do you need me to take it down for the case? I can take it down.”

There’s a pause with texture to it.

“It might be a good idea,” Renata says, “to take it down. And Abby—the registration on that hull came back interesting. I passed it up the chain. Someone may contact you.”

“Interesting like paperwork, or interesting like a bigger fine?”

“Interesting like I’m not supposed to say,” she says. “Take the clip down, okay? Tonight.”

She hangs up before I can ask a follow-up question, which has never happened in my relationship with Renata, a woman who once spent twenty minutes on the phone with me about margin formatting.

“Huh,” I tell the clipboard.

The clipboard, like everyone else in my professional life, offers no comment.