Forbidden Game: Seducing the Bride at the Altar novel · Chapter 23 of 32

Chapter 23: The Office Shower

The captain's radio crackled on his shoulder.

He turned it down and walked to the bow to answer it, so we'd have the deck.

Jasper didn't move his forehead from mine.

"Without a pearl," he said.

"I don't have one to give."

"You gave me something down there. I felt it go."

"It comes back," I said. "Slowly."

I didn't know if that was true.

I said it because his hands were shaking.

The big one dropped a blanket over both of us without a word.

Then he went and stood over the cut hose with a boat hook.

At ten to one, a Coast Guard boat came out of the dark with its blue light turning.

Four young men in orange vests swung the door off our deck with their own crane.

The captain went with it.

He stood on their stern with his camera against his chest and both arms around it.

"It goes in the evidence locker at the station tonight," he called across. "I sign it in myself."

"And the camera?" Jasper called.

"The camera goes home with me."

We motored back to Shem Creek with nobody talking.

The younger one steered.

Ida was on the end of her dock at two in the morning, in her robe, with Biscuit and a flashlight.

She counted us as we came up the ladder.

Four.

She shut her eyes for a second.

"Second Corinthians," she said. "I remember the rest now. Kitchen."

She fed us eggs and grits under the bare bulb.

The crew ate standing up and went home.

Jasper put his fist on the table and opened it.

The gold watch lay on the oilcloth between the salt and the hot sauce.

Ida picked it up by the band.

"That's his," she said. "He wore it to your mother's funeral."

The face was cracked across.

The hands had stopped at nine thirty-one.

Nobody said what that meant.

Ida set it down very gently.

"The office shower's got hot water," she said. "You're both salt to the eyebrows."

She went to the door with Biscuit.

"I'm going to bed at the house. I'm sixty-four, not born yesterday."

The door shut behind her.

Jasper looked at the table.

I looked at him.

"You go first," he said. "You're cold."

"Jasper."

He stopped halfway out of the chair.

"I'm done being angry," I said.

He sat back down slowly.

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