Chapter 1 #3
He reached over and tucked a curl behind my ear that had staged its final escape from the pins.
His fingers lingered against my temple, tracing down to my jaw, and the gentleness of it almost undid me more than a bolder touch would have.
I caught his hand and held it against my cheek, and for a moment neither of us moved.
Then he kissed me.
His mouth was warm, and the hand at the back of my neck slid into my hair and held.
I rose up onto my toes without meaning to.
He pulled me closer until there was nothing between us but the cotton of my dress and the slow steady beat of his heart against my own, and somewhere down the block a bottle rocket whistled.
His other hand found my waist. The fingers spread wide there, possessive, certain— the touch of a man who’d stopped pretending he didn’t want me.
I made a small sound I couldn’t take back.
He felt it—the surrender of it—and his mouth went rougher against mine, less careful, and a slow heat unwound itself low in my belly and rolled outward until my fingers were fisted in the front of his uniform shirt and my pulse was hammering in places I hadn’t felt a pulse in ten years.
Chowder began snorting at the door, wet and accusatory and impatient, his dinner delayed past all reason. Romance, evidently, had a deadline.
When we broke apart, both of us breathing harder than the July heat warranted, he pressed his forehead to mine, his hand warm at the back of my neck while my pulse hammered.
“Good night, Mrs. McCoy,” he said, and his voice had gone rough in a way that told me I wasn’t the only one feeling the pull.
“Good night, Sheriff.”
He grinned. He squeezed my hand once. Then he was walking back down Harbor Street toward the harbor, toward the flashing lights of the patrol cars and the remaining crowd and whatever a sheriff does at eleven o’clock on a holiday night, and I stood on the piazza watching him go until Chowder pawed at the front door and reminded me his dietary needs were a matter of some urgency.
I sang as I unlocked the door. “The very thought of you, and I forget to do…”
The melody followed me inside, where the grandfather clock ticked its steady rhythm and the house smelled like home, wood and lemon polish and the faintest trace of the lavender sachets I kept in every drawer.
I gave Chowder his dinner. I locked the doors. I went through the motions of closing down the house for the night, same as I had every night. I checked the windows. I turned off the porch light.
I paused in the kitchen doorway.
The drawer was right there, at the end of the island where the silver polish, takeout menus, and kitchen odds and ends collected.
The manila envelope Bea had pressed into my hands at the end of the Pickering case sat inside, thick and accusatory, like a letter you’ve been meaning to open but keep finding reasons not to.
He has secrets that would make your blood run cold.
I’d told myself I would hear the truth from Dash. Whatever Bea had dug up, I’d rather learn it from his mouth, in his voice, in his own time. That was the right thing. It was the patient thing, and it was what a woman who respected the man she was falling for would do.
But patience, I was discovering, had a shelf life. And mine was developing a hairline fracture that widened every time Dash told me a story with all the emotional furniture in place but no actual walls.
“Not tonight,” I said to the kitchen, to the drawer, to the ghost of every question I hadn’t asked.
Chowder had already gone upstairs. I could hear him getting comfortable in his spot on my bed, the familiar grunt-and-circle routine that preceded sleep. I followed him up, changed into my peach silk nightgown, brushed my teeth, and climbed under the covers.
The ceiling held no answers. It never did.
I closed my eyes and thought about fireworks and Dash’s hand against the small of my back and the drawer downstairs that held an envelope I still hadn’t opened.
I thought about how this island kept its secrets close and its smiles closer.
How the things that glittered brightest on Grimm Island usually had the most jagged edges.
And how every time I convinced myself that the worst was behind me, the island found a new way to prove me wrong.
Tomorrow there would be biscuits and coffee and Dash at my kitchen table, and I would be happy. I intended to be happy for as long as the universe allowed it, which, based on my recent track record, might not be long at all.
But that was tomorrow’s problem. Tonight was for fireworks and borrowed melodies and the stubborn, reckless hope that love might be worth the risk, even when you couldn’t see the bottom.
Chowder’s snore filled the dark room like a small, wet engine. I reached over and scratched behind his ear.
“Happy Fourth of July, buddy.”
He snorted. I took it as agreement.
Outside, the last of the fireworks faded from the sky, leaving nothing but smoke and stars and the long, humid silence of a Southern night that held its secrets like a fist.