“I would hope not,” I said, taking his arm. “People are coming. The three of you can go into the house. We’ll hold the line here.”
Grimaldi, Dix, and David escaped, and I turned to greet the first of the well-wishers.
Chapter Two
It took an eternity—or felt like one—but three hours later, the wedding reception was winding down. I was counting the minutes until I could get out of my dress—and more importantly, get Rafe out of his tuxedo—when my sister Catherine pulled me aside into the kitchen.
“We booked you into a bed and breakfast for three nights,” she told me, handing me an envelope. “On the Gulf Coast.”
I took it, but said, “You shouldn’t have.”
“It seemed the least we could do,” Catherine told me. “Mother took care of everything else.”
And very ably, too. I shook my head. “No, I mean it. You shouldn’t have.”
“It’s a nice place,” Catherine said, sounding offended. “Jonathan and I took the kids there last year.”
“I’m sure it is. But this is our honeymoon. What made you think we’d want to spend it in a house full of other people?”
She looked down at my stomach, round under the chiffon dress Mother had picked out. “It isn’t like you didn’t already indulge.”
Well, no. But— “It’s my wedding night! Surely you’re not suggesting that I not have sex on my wedding night?” Rafe and I had spent last night apart, since Mother had insisted that the groom couldn’t see the bride before the wedding. So I’d slept in my old room in the mansion, and Rafe had spent the night drinking beer with Dix on the other side of town. I’d been looking forward to the moment when I could get him naked and horizontal. Although I hadn’t expected I’d have to drive to Florida before I could do it.
“If you start driving now,” Catherine told me, “you can be there by ten.”
The way Rafe drove, probably eight-thirty. Nine at the latest.
I sighed. “Fine. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. If we get kicked out for making too much noise, it’ll be your fault.”
“And my money down the drain,” Catherine agreed, and handed me an overnight bag. “Have a good time.”
“Where did you get this?” It was mine. The bag, I mean. Chances were the contents were mine, too.
“Your friend Tamara went to your house and packed for you,” Catherine said.
Tamara Grimaldi had gifted Rafe and me fuzzy handcuffs and sexy underwear for Christmas. That knowledge made me wonder what she might have added to the bag, that she thought we could use for our honeymoon.
“That was thoughtful.” Even if I would have preferred just to take my new husband home to Nashville and jump him in the privacy of our own bedroom.
“Have a good time,” Catherine told me. She leaned in and kissed my cheek. “I’m so happy for you, Savannah. I’m glad you got to marry Rafe.”
There was no ‘got to’ about it. Once I’d made up my mind that I was going to marry him, there wasn’t anything anyone could do or say about it. But I’m sure she meant it sincerely. Unlike Mother, who had taken some time to warm up to Rafe—and who was only lukewarm now—Catherine had never seemed to have a problem with our relationship.
“I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.”
So was I. At least once we got back from the honeymoon and had some privacy again.
I glanced at the envelope in my hand. “It’s a long drive to Florida. We should probably get started.”
Catherine nodded. “Rafe’s already in the car.”
Of course he was. I’m sure he was more eager than I was to get out of there. Sweetwater isn’t his favorite place in the world, and being in Sweetwater, in my mother’s house, in a tuxedo, probably added insult to injury.
“Does he have a bag, too?”
Catherine nodded. “Your friend Tamara packed for him, as well.”
The results of that should be interesting. Although I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about the mental image of the detective digging through my boyfriend’s—husband’s—underwear. Bad enough that she’d been digging through mine.
If wasn’t as if the detective hadn’t had her hands in worse places, of course. But still.
Although maybe she hadn’t. Touched Rafe’s underwear, I mean. Maybe he’d have to go commando for the next three days, and didn’t realize it yet.
I grinned. “This should be interesting.”
“Then go,” my sister told me. “Don’t leave him waiting.”
No. The sooner I got him to Florida and into the B and B, the sooner I could investigate the contents of the bags Grimaldi had packed.
I skipped out the door, still in my wedding dress, bag in hand.
Rafe was indeed waiting at the foot of the stairs, leaning against the car, and he was still wearing his tuxedo. Or at least wearing the necessary parts of it. He’d taken off the jacket and the bowtie, and had unbuttoned a couple of buttons and rolled up the sleeves of the shirt halfway to the elbow.
When I opened the front doors and ran down the stairs, he grinned. “Ready to blow this joint?”
“More than ready.” I handed him my bag, and he tossed it in the trunk next to his own before slamming the lid.
“Then let’s go. It’s a long drive.”
Someone must have told him the good news, then. Probably Dix and Grimaldi.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It wasn’t my idea.”
He glanced at me, in the process of sliding behind the wheel of the Volvo. “What wasn’t?”
“The bed and breakfast.” I pulled the seatbelt across my chest and fastened it, as Rafe turned the key in the ignition. “I think it was probably Catherine’s idea. She and Jonathan have three kids. They’re used to having sex in a house full of people.”
Rafe nodded and shifted the gears. We rolled off down the driveway. As we picked up speed, an awful banging and clanging came from behind us.
I glanced over my shoulder. “What’s that awful racket?”
“Cans,” Rafe said. “Your brother told me his kids and your sister’s kids have been collecting soda cans for the past week. They’re all tied to the back of your car.”
“You’re kidding.” I glanced out the back window again, where a small cloud of dust floated. Occasionally, I got a flash or red from a Coke can or a flash of green from something that was either Seven-Up or Mountain Dew.
I turned back to Rafe. “What about the smears on the window?”
“Those ain’t smears,” Rafe said. “The kids wrote Just Married on the back window with white shoe polish.”
I blinked at him, dismayed. “It’ll come off, right?”
I couldn’t drive around Nashville with Just Married scrawled across my car.
He shrugged. “I hope. I ain’t been married before, so this is all new to me. Did it come offa yours and Bradley’s window?”
“Bradley rented a convertible,” I said. “No windows.”
Rafe nodded. “As soon as we get outta sight, I’m gonna pull over and take the cans off. I ain’t driving to Florida dragging a hundred soda cans behind me.”
No, I wasn’t either. However— “I’m afraid we’ll have to wait a bit longer than just until we’re out of sight of the mansion. I’m sure everyone in Sweetwater knows we were getting married today. I asked Aunt Regina, and she said she’d put it in the paper. If we stop and take the cans off while we’re still within the town limits, somebody’s sure to tell my mother.”
Rafe sighed, but didn’t argue.
“Luckily it’s a small town,” I said brightly.
“Not small enough,” Rafe muttered. But he waited until we were out of town and ready to turn onto the interstate before he pulled off into a gas station and stopped the car. “Might as well fill up the tank. We got a ways to go.”
I nodded. “I’ll untie the cans.”
Rafe went to deal with the gas while I walked around to the back of the car and squatted, careful not to trail the bottom of my o
ff-white chiffon skirt in the dirt.
There were a lot of cans. Maybe not the hundred Rafe had guessed—the kids likely hadn’t had time to gather that many in the past week—but plenty. Coke and Seven Up, Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew. A few Michelob and Miller Lites I figured must have come from Rafe’s and Dix’s bachelor party last night. Or maybe Catherine and Jonathan sat around at night after the kids were in bed, drinking beer.
Each and every can was tied to the back of the Volvo with an off-white satin ribbon looped through the tab on top of the can and tied in a bow. It took forever to untie them all, but I felt too guilty about the children’s efforts in collecting and tying to cut all the ribbons and toss the cans in the nearest trash can. Instead, I untied them all and told Rafe, “Pop the trunk.”
He did, and I tossed them in there, where the ribbons draped over our two overnight bags and the spare tire. “There.” I slammed the trunk lid down again and leaned in to pick at the white letters scrawled across the back window. I’d hoped the white substance would just flake off, like chalk, but no such luck: instead, it stuck to the underside of my fingernail like glue. I left it alone and got back into the car picking at my French manicure. Rafe followed a minute later, and then we were off, headed south on Interstate 65 bound for the Gulf of Mexico, thankfully without the racket of bouncing tin cans as accompaniment.
We stopped once for a quick dinner—somewhere just south of Montgomery, Alabama—and got a round of applause when we walked into the restaurant. I guess Rafe’s pared-down tux and my wedding dress were a dead giveaway what we’d been doing today. Or maybe it was the shoe polish on the car.
Then we got back into the Volvo and kept driving. I turned out to be right. It was well past eight-thirty but not quite nine o’clock when we pulled into the parking lot beside the Davenport Inn B and B in Davenport, Florida.
Or rather, it was not quite nine o’clock in Sweetwater, Tennessee. What my sister had neglected to mention, was that Davenport was on Eastern time, not Central, so we’d not only had to drive for seven hours to get there, we’d lost an hour along the way, too, when we crossed the time line.
So really, Catherine was right. It was almost ten.
“But we’re here now,” Rafe said, opening his car door and swinging his legs out. I followed suit, and watched as he lifted his arms above his head to stretch out the kinks from the last half a day. The bottom of the tuxedo shirt escaped from the waistband of the black pants and rode up to expose a strip of taut, dusky skin.
I swallowed, and tried to hide it by clearing my throat. “I can hear the ocean. But I can’t see it.”
Rafe lowered his arms and shook his head. “You wanna go see if we can find it?”
Given how big it is—even if we were only talking about the Gulf of Mexico and not the entire Atlantic—I didn’t think we’d have any problems. However— “We won’t be able to see much. It’s dark. And late. We should probably make sure we can get in.”
Rafe nodded and turned toward the house, but I thought he looked disappointed.
“Although I guess ten minutes one way or the other won’t make much difference. Sure. Let’s go see.”
He smiled, which made tramping around an unfamiliar town in the dark looking for the beach in my wedding dress and high heeled sandals totally worth it. When he reached for my hand, I put it in his and fell in beside him as he headed in the direction of the waves.
“I guess you must really like the ocean?”
He glanced down at me. “I never spent much time on the beach. We never went on vacation or nothing, growing up.”
I nodded. Rafe’s mother LaDonna had been all of fifteen when he was born. A single mother, still living with her own mother and father. Wanda died within a few years, and after that, it was Rafe, LaDonna, and Old Jim, who had nothing but contempt for his only daughter, and less than that for the kid she’d spawned.
No, it hadn’t been an idyllic childhood. I wasn’t surprised that beach vacations hadn’t featured large.
“We went a couple of times,” I told him. “Usually to Orange Beach, in Alabama.”
He nodded, and I added, “You have seen the ocean, haven’t you?” This wouldn’t be his first time, would it? Because if so, the experience would be so much better in daylight, when he could actually see the sea.
He smiled, his hand warm around mine. “Yeah. The summer after I graduated from high school, and before I got myself thrown in prison, I got a job in Birmingham.”
“Working on cars.”
He nodded. “A couple of the guys drove down to the Gulf one weekend, just to see what it was all about. Had some shrimp, drank some beer, picked up some girls.”
“I didn’t need to know that last part,” I told him.
He shrugged, unrepentantly. “I never pretended I was a monk, darlin’.”
No, he hadn’t. “So what did you think?”
“About the water? Pretty color. Big.”
I tilted my head to look at him. It was hard, in the dark out here. It was cloudy, and Davenport didn’t seem to believe in street lights. Rafe’s expression was hard to make out. “You know how to swim, right?”
He chuckled. “Sure. I grew up next to the river.”
So he had. The same tributary of the Duck River where Old Jim had drowned the year Rafe was twelve.
“Good,” I said. “That way I won’t worry about you drowning.”
“You wouldn’t have to worry about that anyway, darlin’. I like looking at it, but I don’t like going in too deep. You never know when a shark might could come along and decide to take a bite.”
A weakness. And here I hadn’t realized he had any.
“Are you afraid of sharks?”
“Isn’t everybody?” Rafe asked. He stopped. “There it is.”
There it was. Big and black and noisy, with white-capped waves.
We stood in silence for a moment, listening to the water crash against the shore.
“OK,” Rafe said. “You were right.”
I glanced at him and he added, “It’s late and dark. We can look at it tomorrow. When there’s something to see.”
I didn’t tell him I’d told him so. Just turned around and trudged back toward the B and B on my strappy sandals, holding the bottom of my wedding dress up off the ground.
Two minutes later, we were back in the parking lot behind the B and B, dragging our overnight bags out from under the satin ribbons and cans, and making our careful way across the gravel—or maybe it was crushed shells—toward the back door. It was dark out here. You’d have thought the owner of a B and B would make sure the parking lot had decent lighting, but no. Everything was pitch black. The light above the back door wasn’t even lit. I could hear the rolling of the waves in the distance, and closer at hand, the buzzing of insects. Maybe that was why the lights were off. If the lights were on, the insects would probably be dive-bombing the bulb. And Florida insects are large. It would be like being hit in the head with a wedding bouquet.
We hadn’t had a bouquet toss back at the mansion. Nor the traditional garter ceremony, in which Rafe was required to pull the garter off my leg with his teeth. My mother is much too refined to allow that kind of ribaldry in her home. She had planned a tasteful wedding ceremony, and a tasteful—and tasty—reception afterwards, and Rafe and I had been given the heave-ho before things had wound down all the way. So the wedding bouquet was somewhere in the mansion. Hopefully someone had picked it up and would do something with it. I’m not sure gardenias dry well, but it was worth a try. Maybe I’d call Mother and ask her to hang it upside-down from a rafter in the old slave cabin, to see what would happen to it.
But I digress. We made our way to the back door, where Rafe nodded to the door. “My hands are full. Try the knob.”
I tried the knob. It wouldn’t turn. “Uh-oh.” I glanced at him. The idea of spending our wedding night on the beach didn’t appeal at all. It might sound romantic, but I was willing to bet it would just be uncomfortable.
“Knock,” Rafe said. “It’s only ten. Not like they’ll be asleep.”
Hopefully not. “There’s a bell.” I used it, and heard the sound reverberate through the house.
We waited.
Nothing happened.
I rang again.
We waited some more.
“Shit,” Rafe said.
I reached up to my fancy coiffure and pulled out a hair pin. “Why don’t you just unlock it?”
He gave me a look.
“You’ve done it before,” I said.
“On storage units and empty houses,” Rafe answered. “Not somewhere where somebody lives. This’d be criminal trespass.”
“Surely not. We have a reservation.” I wiggled the envelope Catherine had given me.
“I don’t care,” Rafe said. “I ain’t spending my wedding night in jail. Ring the bell again.”
I pouted, but rang the bell again. And leaned on it, for good measure. The shrill tone echoed through the house, shaking the windows and rattling my teeth.
Two minutes later, a dark figure came stomping through the house, headed for the back door. I could see the smoke coming out of its ears even before I could determine whether it was male or female.
It yanked open the back door, and we found ourselves face to face with a woman around thirty, with lots of fluffy, platinum blond hair, a heavy tan, and an attitude. “What the hell’s the matter with you? There are people in here trying to sleep, you know!”
She looked from me, directly in front of the door, to Rafe, behind me, and her expression changed. “Oh. Hello!”
They always do. Expressions, I mean. Women get a good look at my boyfriend—my husband—and they start acting like teenagers.
I smiled. With lots of teeth. “Hello. My husband and I have a reservation for tonight.” I made sure to put heavy emphasis on the word ‘husband.’ “Are you—” I consulted the information Catherine had given me, “Frenetta Wallin?”
She tossed hair the consistency of cotton candy over her shoulder. “Do I look like my name would be Frenetta Wallin?”
Busman's Honeymoon (Savannah Martin Mystery #10.5) Page 2
