“It sounds like you had an adventure, then.”
“Yeah,” Shelby muttered into her cup.
“Shelby always came up with the craziest ideas,” Justin said.
“And the stupidest, most dangerous ones,” Eli added.
“But they were always fun,” Justin insisted. “Tell Declan about the time you got Charlotte to borrow her mom’s truck—”
“Let’s not,” Charlotte interrupted.
Shelby nodded. “Really, let’s not.” Although she said it lightly enough, she was staring intently at her drink, and he could see the tension settle in her jaw.
“But that was the time that she—”
“Justin,” Charlotte smoothly interrupted, “wasn’t that the same time that you got pulled in for exposing yourself in Wilson Park?”
While the others laughed, Declan noticed the relief that spread across Shelby’s face and the grateful look she sent Charlotte. “That’s one of the bad things about living in a small town,” she said quietly to Declan. “You never get to forget anything.”
“And I’m a new audience for the stories?”
“That probably has something to do with it.”
“I’m sure you have embarrassing stories you could tell about them.”
“Of course. I just don’t think it’s fair to drag all that out. And with you here, I’d just be begging for them to pull out the really embarrassing stuff to tell you just to make me squirm.”
“But Shelby’s the only person who’s ever been banned from church.” Declan didn’t know who’d said that, but he heard Shelby’s exasperated sigh before she responded.
“That’s how you make sure you get a front row seat in hell.” Dropping her voice while the others laughed, she turned to him. “Wanna go? It’s about a half-hour walk back to the marina from here, but it’s a nice night.”
He was fine either way, but Shelby had gotten visibly uncomfortable. “Sure.” He pushed to his feet and helped Shelby to hers. As she said her good-byes, he could see Eli giving them the hairy eyeball. Shelby noticed, too, and just smiled as she waved.
The evening had thrown some weird curves, and he felt like he was missing a pretty important piece of the puzzle. At the same time, Shelby wasn’t acting strangely—just her family and friends—so maybe it wasn’t actually that important. And he wasn’t sure if he should ask about it—or even how he would, since he didn’t know what it was he didn’t know.
And was it even his place to say anything?
Shelby seemed perfectly fine as the light of the bonfire and the noise of the gathering disappeared into the shadows behind them. She even reached out and took his hand, twining her chilly fingers between his.
“So was that the most redneck thing you’ve ever experienced?”
“It was different. I don’t know about redneck, necessarily. But it was fun.” He squeezed her hand. “Thanks for including me.”
“My pleasure.” She moved a little closer, tucking her other hand under his arm. “You can check that official small-town experience off your bucket list.”
“I didn’t even know it was on my bucket list.”
She grinned up at him. “Now you do. Anything else you want to experience while you’re here? Now that I’ve got you off that boat and out in public, there’s a whole wide world—or small town, actually,” she corrected with a giggle, “that I can show you.”
He stopped, right where they were on the side of the road, and pulled her close, taking the kiss he’d been waiting for all evening but hadn’t seemed appropriate in the middle of a crowd of people. She sighed into him and rose up on tiptoes, kissing him back with a passion that was dangerous when they were still a good twenty-minute walk from the marina. He broke it off with a groan and got a quick thrill when she echoed it. “I’m game for anything.”
“Anything?” she asked. When he nodded, her eyebrows went up. “Ooh, I like the sound of that.”
So did he.
* * *
Although Declan fell asleep Friday night with Shelby wrapped around him, she was gone Saturday morning when he woke up. Even though intellectually he knew the marina would be busier on weekends, he was a little disappointed to wake up alone, without even a note or a text from her. It also gave him no small helping of something akin to shame or guilt—he’d kept Shelby up late when she had to get up early and he could sleep in. And she was working while he had nothing better to do than laze around surfing the Internet. But what did one do in a small town on a Saturday afternoon?
Shelby’s idea to get him out and do things had been a decent plan, but it had both worked and backfired. He wanted to do something, but the one person he wanted to do something with was busy doing actual important stuff. He was no longer happy just doing nothing, but he didn’t have much to do, either. So he was still doing nothing, but now he felt bad about it.
Shelby just laughed when he told her that.
The sting was less than it might have been, simply because Shelby was laughing while draped across him like a naked nymph, and he wasn’t bored at all at the moment. “I can’t entertain you twenty-four hours a day, but there are chores for everyone. I’ve got tanks that need cleaning.”
He wasn’t sure he’d felt that much shame yet. “Pass.”
“Lazy bones.”
“I’ve got to keep my strength up,” he rebutted, pulling her up for another kiss, just as her phone went off again. “Do you want to get that?”
“Not really. That’s Jamie’s ringtone.”
There had been other calls, each with its own ringtone. He’d bet those were all Tanners. “They don’t like me at all, do they?”
Shelby snorted. “I hate to deflate your ego, but they honestly probably don’t care that much about you either way. In fact, it might not have anything at all to do with you. I do talk to my brother on a regular basis about all kinds of things.”
“Then why not answer it? It could be important.”
“If there was something major going on, my phone would be blowing up with texts and calls from ten different family members, and there’d probably be someone banging on the door downstairs, too.” Then she looked up at him and grinned. “But it is probably sort of about you, but not because they don’t like you. They all just like to annoy me, and you’re the weapon of the week.”
“Last night at the football game, though—”
“Yeah, Helena told me how they ganged up on you. I’m sorry they’re so obnoxious. I just try to remind myself that they love me and they mean well.”
“I’m not worried about me. I recognize it for what it is, and I can handle it. You’re a grown woman, though.”
“They’re overprotective.” She said it with such a sigh that no matter how she tried to convince him—or herself—otherwise, he could tell it frustrated her.
“Just because you’re a girl?” he teased.
“There’s some of that, sure.” She sounded uncomfortable. After the way both her family and her friends had acted last night, whatever the rest of it was would probably explain that strangeness.
“And?” he prompted when she didn’t say more.
“I’ve always been flighty, disorganized, impulsive, and easily distracted. I’ve made a ton of bad decisions. Jamie and the others have spent a good portion of my life pulling me out of messes of my own making. I tell myself they’re just trying to head trouble off at the pass to save themselves some work later on.”
The Shelby he’d seen was confident and capable and fully able to run her own life. “No wonder they infuriate you so much.”
“Yeah, but lifelong habits are hard to break.”
“Not that. The fact they think you’re flighty.”
“I was. Still am, sometimes.” She sounded disappointed in herself.
“No. I don’t believe that for a second.”
“I really was.”
“Maybe, but now? No way. You’re probably the most grounded and sensible person I’ve ever met.”
“Thank you.” She grinned at him and ran a hand teasingly down his chest. “Flattery will get you everywhere.”
“It’s not flattery.” Why he was so indignant on her behalf, he didn’t know, but it was rather surprising she wasn’t. If nothing else, being treated like that all the time, regardless of the reason or the fact they were family, had to be brutal on her ego. “I know what it’s like to have people treat you like something you’re not.”
“You?”
“I was a shy, bookish kid from the wrong side of town on a scholarship to a good school. People thought that because I was poor, I was stupid.”
“No one should be made to feel stupid when they’re not.” She said that very quietly yet very earnestly. “I’m so sorry.”
“But I left all that—and all those people—behind. It sounds like you’ve got people treating you like a child, all day, every day.”
“I’m used to it.”
“You shouldn’t be.”
“Like I said, old habits are hard to break. What am I going to do? Stand in the middle of Front Street and shout about it until people change their minds?”
He remembered the rather patronizing tone Officer Rusty had taken that day. “Wait, you’re telling me the whole town treats you like that?”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she sighed. “People don’t take me seriously.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I’m female in a primarily male occupation.”
“This town may look stuck in the sixties, but you can’t tell me the entire population is, too. Everyone knows you’re good at what you do.”
Shelby didn’t say anything, which piqued his curiosity. There was definitely something else in play. And it suddenly seemed very important for him to figure out what that was. This was the piece of the puzzle he’d been looking for, the piece that would make this all make sense. “What’s the deal? Tell me.”
There was a very long pause. “People think I’m slow. Cute and sweet, but not too bright, ya know?”
“Because you’re pretty, you can’t be smart? Or because you’re supposedly flighty and disorganized?”
“I am flighty and disorganized. That’s my ADHD, but I’m now on good meds, and those have helped a lot. But in high school, when we were still trying to get the dosages and everything right, well, that was just one long string of bad choices and disasters.”
His high school roommate had had ADHD, so he knew from experience what that was like for the bystanders. In that sense, he could relate to the Tanners’ hovering, trying to prevent the possible catastrophes and protect her from her own mistakes.
Shelby’s ADHD must be well controlled now, though, because he wouldn’t have guessed. She didn’t need hovering over, but the lifelong habit she had of letting them hover was probably equally hard to break, even if they annoyed her.
But there was something else. Something more to this story. He could feel the tension in her body, feel her jaw flex against his chest. Whatever it was she wasn’t telling him, it was bad, but he couldn’t for the life of him begin to guess what that might be. He could feel the change in her body when she decided to tell him, a subtle shifting of her muscles as she resigned herself to say it at the same time she was bracing for his reaction. He concentrated on keeping his muscles relaxed, his face neutral. He just hoped he could appropriately handle whatever it was she was about to say.
“I’m also pretty severely dyslexic. The ADHD kept me from getting diagnosed earlier than I did. I struggled all the way through school, and barely graduated. I’m not dumb, or anything, it’s just that I can’t really read. I mean, I can read, just not well, and it takes forever and makes my head hurt to do it . . .”
Her words were tumbling over themselves at such a speed it took him a moment to sort them out enough to realize that this was, indeed, the deep, dark secret and shame she felt she had to confess like a sinner in a confessional.
It wasn’t exactly a bombshell revelation—he’d been braced for something bad—but things snapped into focus for him nonetheless. The hovering of her family made even more sense now. The fact she tried so hard not to make him feel stupid when she taught him about boats—God, she’d probably dealt with that a lot, explaining her instant empathy for him being called stupid just because he was poor. Hell, even the fact that Shelby didn’t have a single book or magazine lying around in her apartment now made sense.
It had to be a bitch of a thing to deal with—he couldn’t even imagine—but she obviously had it figured out. She should be proud of all she’d overcome. But as she kept talking, he realized she was trying to convince him she wasn’t dumb. He waited for her to trail off and take a breath. “And?”
Her head snapped up so quickly, it bumped his chin and rattled his teeth. “What do you mean, ‘and’?”
“You’ve obviously figured out how to accommodate for it, so I’m not making the connection.”
The look on her face now questioned his intelligence. “People assume I’m completely illiterate. Even in Alabama, that’s a big deal. We do expect our kids to read and write. People may like me, but they still think I’m a little slow.”
He couldn’t believe how angry that made him. Both the attitude of the people who’d misjudged her intelligence, and Shelby’s seemingly calm acceptance of that like it wasn’t infuriatingly insane. “I find myself questioning the entire intelligence of this town because they’re questioning yours,” he said carefully.
That was obviously the right thing to say, because he felt her relax in his arms. Then she shrugged. “It’s a small town. Everyone knows there’s something going on in my head, but it’s not like I’m going to run informational meetings to educate them on the ins and outs of dyslexia.”
“Maybe you need to.”
“Nah. I just still need to prove myself to them, I guess.”
“If they haven’t figured that out yet . . .” His indignation on her behalf finally boiled over. “You know what? Move. Pick a town—any town—and go.”
That made Shelby laugh. “Nah. Believe it or not, I do like it here, even when I get frustrated with people. I grew up here, and I’ve got friends, family, a job I like, and hey, I already know what all the signs say.”
“That doesn’t mean you belong here. Or that you have to stay here.”
She balanced her chin on her fist and looked at him closely. “Is that why you left Chicago? You didn’t feel like you belonged there?”
The sudden one-eighty caught him off guard. He hadn’t thought about it quite like that. “I thought we were talking about you.”
“And now we’re talking about you. It only seems fair.”
“I left Chicago because I got offered a better job.”
“Just because a better job comes along in a different city, that doesn’t mean you belong in that city. Especially if you won’t be happy there.”
“I think I’ll be very happy in Miami. Who wouldn’t be?”
She snorted. “All the people who choose not to live in Miami.”
“You’ve got a comeback for everything, don’t you?”
She pushed up onto her elbow and gave him a pitying look. “Do you think you’re the first tourist boy who’s tried to convince me that Whatever Town is better than here for whatever reason? I’m not saying that Magnolia Beach is the bestest of all possible places on earth or that it’s the right place for everyone. I’m just saying it’s the right place for me, warts and all. You can live anywhere, but it seems hard for some people to find a place that’s home. We get plenty of drifters through here, you know, and it makes me wonder if that’s what they’re looking for. A place that feels like home.”
There was something very unnerving about the surety in Shelby’s voice—the utter con
fidence behind the words and the implication that his decision to move to Miami might not be as uncomplicated as it seemed. He’d had a beautiful girlfriend, friends, a good job, a great apartment in Chicago . . . All in all, he’d built a nice little life for himself, and he’d ditched it all with hardly a second thought. “Are you saying I’m some kind of drifter?”
Shelby looked up at him. “Maybe a bit of a wanderer.”
“‘Not all those who wander are lost.’”
“But they are looking for something.” She sat up and straddled him, rubbing her hands across his chest seductively. “What are you looking for, Mr. Hyde? Fame? Fortune? Adventure?”
His blood wasn’t exactly rushing in the direction of his head at the moment, making a thoughtful answer to that question impossible. He ran his hands from her knees to her hips and up to her waist. “Nubile Southern belles with honeyed drawls.”
Shelby batted her eyelashes at him. “Well, I do declare, sir,” she said in an accent so thick it added extra syllables to every word, “you might be hard-pressed to find many Southern belles willing to be nubile in the company of a Damn Yankee.”
“I’m not a Yankee,” he insisted.
“To me you are.” A tiny bit of pressure applied to her waist had her leaning down over him until the tips of her breasts tickled against his chest. She closed her eyes briefly, seeming to savor the sensation, then opened them to meet his evenly. “And I’m sorry to say I don’t know a parasol from a pinafore. How do you feel about rednecks?”
He gathered her hair into a loose ponytail and pretended to inspect the back of her neck. It was tanned the same color as her arms and legs—a few shades darker than the skin of her breasts and belly. “It doesn’t look very red to me.”
“Hm. I promise I really am Southern,” she murmured as he kissed the side of her neck and her collarbone. “Which is more than I can say for the ladies of Miami, by the way.”
He flipped her to her back and settled between her legs. “Florida’s a Southern state.”
She snorted. “On a map, maybe.”
He leaned down onto his elbows. “So I’m a Yankee even though I’m from the Midwest, but people in Miami aren’t Southern even though they live in the southernmost part of the southernmost state?”
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