Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
I closed the shop at two on the dot, and Dash was leaning against his SUV in the parking lot when I came out the back.
He was clearly out of work mode. He wore a pair of shorts like so many on the island wore that could be worn on a golf course or in a swimming pool.
His white linen shirtsleeves were rolled up, his aviators on, and he looked like a man who had intentions.
I didn’t know what those intentions were, but I was willing to bet they were dangerous.
He smiled and my knees turned to jelly. “Good grief,” I said under my breath.
“Get in,” he said. Then he looked at Chowder. “You too.”
“What’s going on?” I said, resisting the urge to run into his arms. That was something desperate women did, and I wasn’t desperate.
“A little afternoon surprise.”
I wondered if I was reading too much into the way he’d said it. My face must have shown exactly what I’d been thinking when he said afternoon surprise because one brow went up and a corner of his mouth followed it.
“Unless that surprise includes a foot and back massage I don’t think I’ve got the energy for much else.”
I mentally smacked myself in the forehead. What are you playing at, Mabel? You are no match for the likes of a man like Dashiel Beckett.
His smile grew wider. “That can be arranged.”
“Dumb, dumb, dumb,” I muttered.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
Chowder looked up at me and then trotted off toward Dash and hopped into his car.
“You can put your feet up in the boat,” he said. “You need some vitamin D and drinks and a meal you don’t have to prepare for yourself.”
“I’m not dressed for a boat ride.”
“Then we’ll swing by your house on the way.”
I should have argued, but a day out on the water did sound nice, and the weather was perfect.
“Fine,” I said. “The traitor can ride with you.”
I followed him home and then changed into a strapless one-piece bathing suit in red-checked gingham and a pair of wide-legged shorts in solid red. It was decent enough to wear out to dinner. Fifties styles were always practical. I slipped on my red wedges and pushed my sunglasses up into my hair.
I put towels in a tote, along with a thermos of iced tea and a few tea cookies. And then I dug out Chowder’s life vest and sun hat.
Dash loaded everything into the SUV and then we were off to the marina.
I actually hadn’t realized he kept a boat docked, but I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me.
I still knew frustratingly little about Dash on a personal front.
I’d never been to his house or seen it, though he had invited me once.
I’d chickened out because gossip travels faster than oxygen on Grimm Island, and I knew I’d be labeled as a fallen woman before I pulled into his driveway.
But I’d not received any other invitations, and I hadn’t even heard rumors about where his house was.
It was another one of those “best-kept secrets” Dash liked to keep close to the vest.
He parked the Tahoe in the gravel lot, that plain unmarked workhorse that smelled like coffee and the inside of a man’s whole ordinary life, and led me down the long dock with Chowder at our feet.
He used his key card like all the owners had to get down to the docks.
This surprised me. I knew renting space here wasn’t cheap.
I knew the name on the transom before I let myself know it. Hinckley.
Patrick’s people had said that word the way other people said Cartier, with a little hush of longing tucked into it, the way you talk about a thing you’ve decided to want for the rest of your life and never quite reach.
I’d filed things away about the wealthy long before I’d married Patrick and become one of them.
And here was a perfect example, painted in gold leaf across the stern of a sailboat that Dash Beckett was untying like he owned it. Which, apparently, he did.
I don’t know the first thing about sailing.
But I know what loved things look like, because I keep a house full of them.
The teak had been varnished to a shine. The brightwork was bronze gone soft and golden, polished by hand and recently.
There wasn’t a speck of salt haze anywhere she’d show it.
Somebody had spent time and money on this boat, and the two things together made something prick in the back of my mind that I chose not to pay attention to.
It was not the boat I’d have pictured for a man who carried a badge and drank gas-station coffee on purpose.
“You’re staring,” Dash said, not looking up from the line in his hands.
Because a thousand things were rolling through my mind, the least of all being that I really didn’t know the first thing about him. It was a disheartening realization for a woman whose bodily responses were moving much faster than her brain.
“I’m admiring.” I stepped down where he pointed and the boat took my weight and barely moved. “There’s a difference.”
He cast us off and took us out, and somewhere past the harbor mouth he put up the sails, and he did all of it without seeming to think about a single part of it.
His hands moved on the lines while Chowder and I got settled.
He read the wind off the water with a glance, and he leaned us over into it until the rail kissed the green and Chowder slid six undignified inches across the cockpit.
Dash steadied us with one bare forearm and never broke off what he was saying.
A man does not learn to handle a boat like that on a sheriff’s salary. He does not learn it in a season, either. That kind of ease comes from someone who’d been sailing for years, and for half a second the floor of my whole pleasant afternoon tilted the way the deck just had.
There was a knot in my stomach, and I wanted to ask him questions, but at that moment he laughed at Chowder, looking ridiculous in his life vest and sun hat.
It was a laugh filled with freedom and ease, and I realized his persona as sheriff didn’t give him the opportunity to do that often. He always had to be on.
I stifled my questions. And then I forgot to think altogether when he unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, so his muscled torso was exposed to the sun.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” he asked.
“Uh-huh,” I said, trying not to stare. “Real good.”
“You need sunscreen?” he asked.
“No, I’m good. I don’t burn.”
I took my shoes and shorts off, and made myself comfortable on the cushioned lounger on the aft deck, and Chowder found his spot under the shady awning.
We ran out into the wide green water where the marsh opened up on both sides and the heat finally let go of its grip.
He took us toward Charleston harbor and the downtown skyline, and then when we looped back we headed toward Mount Pleasant and anchored in an area where we could see the dolphins playing and diving around the boat.
“Are you thinking of Henry Wainwright?” he asked once he’d taken the lounger next to mine.
In reality, I was thinking about him. About the secrets he was keeping. And why he ever bothered to wear a shirt at all. I was a conflicted mess.
“Yes,” I said, because the lie was easier.
He let me have it. He didn’t push, and after a while the dolphins drifted off to wherever dolphins go, and the sun started its long slide toward the marsh grass, and Dash hauled the anchor and took us in toward Shem Creek.
There was a place there built right out over the water on weathered pilings, low and unfussy, that people came in from all over to eat at because the food was so good. He nosed the Hinckley up to the restaurant dock easy as parking a grocery cart, looped a line, and held out his hand.
“They’ll feed Chowder too,” he said, reading my face before I’d opened my mouth. “Half the tables out back have a water bowl under them.”
I unhooked Chowder’s life vest and removed his sun hat, and I put him on the leash, much to his consternation.
And then Dash picked him up as we hauled ourselves up to the dock.
We walked up a deck strung with bare bulbs that lit the way to the restaurant, and they sat us at a table on the rail with the creek sliding by underneath.
A waitress with a great tan and a sun visor brought Chowder a bowl of water without being asked and called him handsome, which perked him up considerably. He drank, turned circles until he found the right spot, and collapsed at my feet.
Dash ordered a bottle of something cold and white, and the waitress poured two glasses and left the bottle sweating in a bucket of ice. The first sip tasted like green apples, and it loosened a knot in my shoulders I hadn’t known was there.
We ate the way you eat when nobody’s watching. A bucket of steamed shrimp we peeled with our fingers, hush puppies still too hot to hold, slaw out of a paper-lined basket.
“So good,” I said, licking my fingers. “I’m surprised you have the day off. You’ve been working a lot lately.”
“Ahh, along with summer comes stupidity,” he said. “It’s every man on deck until some of these tourists go home and leave us in peace.”
It was nice to hear him say “us” as if he considered himself a Grimm Islander.
“There was the man from Ohio who got drunk and passed out on the beach. Ended up with third-degree burns and a citation for sneaking alcohol into a restricted area. Then there was the couple from Arizona who reported a body floating in the river behind their Airbnb, but it turned out to be one of those anatomically correct blow-up dolls from a bachelor party that had floated down the river.”
“Yikes,” I said. “Bet that was a shock.”
“For Harris too,” Dash said. “He had to fish her out. I’m not sure he’s ever seen a naked woman before.”
I laughed and fed Chowder a hush puppy.