Chapter Fifty-Three
FIFTY-THREE
The lunch rush was rapidly dissolving as cruise-ship customers made their way to their afternoon excursions and locals got back to work.
The air still carried the rich smell of tomatoes and garlic, but it probably always would, no matter how many customers came and went.
The walls were practically painted in it.
Shepherd stretched out his shoulders and looked at the life he’d built, not with careful planning, but by grabbing on to chaos with both hands.
Literally. Ginny and Lex were sitting together at the counter, whispering and sharing one of Noah’s new salads.
Ginny was wearing a Shepherd’s Pies shirt that molded to her chest in a way that Shepherd tried not to stare at when customers were present.
Shepherd snuck the peperoncino before Lex could stab it with her fork. “Hey!”
“You snooze, you lose.” Shepherd planted a kiss on his daughter’s forehead, and she leveled him with a glare that would’ve made Elwin Kent weep.
He bit into the salty treat with a grin. “You two are working hard, I see.”
“We are playing hard.” Ginny smiled wide, spreading her arms like she was going to hug the bar itself. “I just heard from Vincent. Who just heard from the chief of police. The bikers won’t be bothering us for a long time. Thank God for good old-fashioned South Florida police corruption.”
“I don’t know if I want to thank God for that,” Shepherd said. “Maybe I’d thank the amount of bomb-making materials I was able to plant in their clubhouse before the police arrived.”
Ginny waved a hand. “Pish. Without my family’s connections, they would’ve been out on bond in a few months, even with all the bomb stuff and weapons and meth. That’s the thing about police corruption, babe. Goes both ways.”
Shepherd sighed.
“So,” Lex shouted, “take us to the beach, Dad! Pronto! ASAP! Right this very now.”
“Oh, no,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” Ginny replied. “It’s kinda slow. Let’s close early and celebrate!”
“Yeah, Dad! Live your life for once!”
He shook his head, but he was still grinning. “I don’t close early for the beach, girls. Somebody’s gotta pay the bills.”
Ginny walked her fingers along the counter and up Shepherd’s arm. “We should take a vote.”
“Uh,” he said.
“Yes!” Lex used her hands like a bullhorn around her mouth. “Noah! Chris! Max!”
“Uh,” Shepherd said again.
Chris and Max wandered out from the kitchen, covered in streaks of what Shepherd hoped was sauce.
Noah walked over holding a full bus tub. “Yeah?” he asked, apparently appointing himself their leader.
“We’re taking a vote,” Lex announced. “To either close early and go to the beach or stay working like lifeless capitalist drones.”
“Alexis,” Shepherd warned, but Ginny laughed, and he knew he had already lost.
“All in favor of closing early,” Lex said, raising a hand. Ginny raised hers. Noah and Chris raised theirs.
Shepherd shook his head. “The disrespect I get in my own business, I swear.”
“All opposed?” Ginny asked. Shepherd and Max raised their hands, as did the three regulars still working on their beers.
“Looks like a tie,” Shepherd said.
Lex threw up a second hand. “Double beach,” she said. “And also, since I’m nine, I get veto rights.”
“That isn’t how voting works, Lex,” Shepherd said.
“It’s how it works in Florida,” Lex replied.
Ginny leaned across the counter and kissed his cheek. “Don’t freak out,” she whispered near his ear, “but I just bought a new bikini.”
Shepherd immediately raised his other hand and said, probably too loudly, “Beach!”
Lex clapped her hands. “Motion carried! Boys, pack a cooler! We’re going to the beach!”
The room erupted into cheers and groans, and Shepherd looked around at all of it—his employees laughing, the regulars arguing over a hockey preseason game, his daughter’s face shining with joy, Ginny’s hair falling loose from her ponytail—and thought, this was it. The best plan he’d never made.