My Dad's Best Friend Said No Daddy Jokes, So I Made Him Say Yes novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Cold Room

Lucius's POV

Tuesday night I went into the cold room to count blocks, because it was the only place on the dock where I could think.

It's a walk-in at twenty-eight degrees, with the compressors thumping behind the wall and four hundred pounds of crushed ice banked against the back.

I had counted the blocks twice.

I had not stopped hearing her say my name on the net table since Sunday.

I had thought about the tackle box on the Odette D., the one with the taped lid that I had not opened in eleven years.

I had thought about her mouth.

Neither thought did me any good.

The door opened behind me.

I knew without turning that it was her, because Odette locks that door at six and keeps one spare key on a nail in the office.

Nobody else on this island would have taken it down.

"I thought you'd be in here," Monalisa said.

I turned around.

She stood in the doorway in a green work dress and a cardigan, with her curls pinned up for court and a key in her fist.

She had come straight from the courthouse.

Her breath smoked in the cold.

"The dock's closed," I said.

"I'm not the dock."

She shut the door behind her and slid the bolt, and the sound carried through the cold room.

"Monalisa, no."

"You said once."

I took a breath that burned.

"I did."

"You had me on a table and you wouldn't let me touch you. That's not once. I've had Sunday on my mind since Sunday, and so have you, don't tell me you haven't."

I did not tell her.

She came down the narrow aisle between the ice, in her heels, and stopped a foot away.

"You said once, Captain," she said, softly, and set the key on a block of ice. "So say it again."

"I said once. I said a lot of things."

"You did."

She smiled.

I saw the gap in her front teeth, the same gap her father had, the same one that used to flash at me across a deck at four in the morning.

That was the thing I could never get past.

It was Rémy's smile on a grown woman's face, and I had wanted it for two years and told myself otherwise.

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