by Holley Trent
She made a face when he pressed it over her hair.
“It’s clean, pretty girl.” He flopped onto the seat beside her and woke up his tablet screen. “I promise you, there’s no redneck sweat in that hat band. The only head that hat’s been on was on a Styrofoam display head, and maybe not even that. I’ve got a bunch of them on the boat. I use them for promotional giveaways when I meet folks with rented boats at ports.” And sometimes he gave them to random homeless people he encountered on the streets with a fifty-dollar bill discretely tucked inside. The U.S. dollar was accepted pretty much everywhere he haunted.
She smoothed her hands over the T-shirt and pouted at him.
“What?”
“Where’s the other shirt?”
“Laundry bin, I guess. Why, did you want it?”
“I’m not really a T-shirt collector, but…” She shrugged.
“I’ve got plenty of Dowd T-shirts. I’ll get you another one.”
“An old one like that one?”
“Nah, that’s the only one I have of those.”
“Your old logo was cooler than your new one. Sorry.”
He pressed a hand over his heart and cringed in mock dismay. “That hurts, Valerie. You should be kind to an old man.” He knew the new logo sucked from a stylistic standpoint, but according to his ad guy, it had all the right cues boat owners looked for and conveyed speed, quality, and durability—all within one elongated oval.
“The boat with the wave chasing it was more fun. It was a little campy, but it stood out to me. I was disappointed when you swapped out your branding.”
“You remember that happening?”
“Mm-hmm.” She took a big bite of her sandwich and chewed thoughtfully for a while. “I don’t follow much what happens in the boating world, but my grandmother used to take me and Leah to this festival on the Potomac every year, and your company started sponsoring it around the time I was in college. The posters had the advertisers listed in pretty much the exact same order every year, so it was easy to remember. The Dowd placement was at the top right corner of the group of logos. I had to do a double take. One of the reasons we kept going to the festival every year was because Dowd Wave Cruisers sponsored that big barbecue meal for the first hundred folks and Mama Kay always got us into the first twenty spots to be sure we got it.”
“When the logo changed, you thought for a moment that you’d wasted a trip.”
“Yep.”
“Did you get the barbecue?”
She laughed. “Yes. I don’t remember what it tasted like, though, because I was chewing so angrily and wondering what asshole went and took a perfectly good logo and turned it into…well…” She pointed to the embroidered image on her new hat. “That.”
“You wound me, Valerie.”
She shrugged and took another bite. “I was, like, twenty-one and thought I knew everything.”
Damn, it was that long ago?
Yep. That sounded about right. Ten years ago was when he’d forked over the cash he hadn’t really wanted to part with and updated all the branding. That had been the “spend money to make money” phase of the business, and every penny going out had hurt. He sponsored food at events like the one Valerie went to only because folks in his network organized them and told him it’d be a good way to get his name out. Cutting that check every year made both him and Heidi a little green around the gills, but he couldn’t say he regretted it. All those folks had been right about the name recognition.
He grinned behind the mouth of his water bottle, and some tiny anal-retentive thing inside him gave a sigh of relief at having that question answered. Valerie being, “like,” twenty-one ten years ago made her, like, thirty-one.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Nothin’.” He scrolled down the list of emails, cringing at the handful of “urgent” business items forwarded by Heidi, and found Clay’s message buried between some penis enlargement spam and an advertisement for a Sperry Topsider sale.
Clay wrote:
Okay, you know I can’t say shit. Being lowdown in such an epic capacity requires that everyone keep shit to themselves, especially me since I’m the King of the Filthy Freaks.
Clay actually had that title screen-printed on a T-shirt. Their mother had seen him in it once, and he’d made up a quick like that it was the name of a music group. Tim had had to jog away before he let the laugh out and blew Clay’s cover.
What I can say without breaking my own rules is that girl is fine. I mean FIIIIINE, and I don’t mean in the response to “How are you doing today, ma’am?” kind of way, either.
Tim rolled his eyes. He’d never been able to figure out Clay’s taste in women, so Tim couldn’t even begin to guess what the woman looked like.
She was only gonna be down for the night since Valerie wasn’t around. She drove Carine home and was going to head back up to Virginia from Elizabeth City.
“Your sister went home,” Tim said to Valerie.
“Oh?”
“Mm-hmm.” He kept reading.
She enjoyed herself. That’s all I can say. Oh. Maybe I wouldn’t be stepping out of bounds by saying she might come back in two weeks.
“Clay says she might go back in two weeks.”
Valerie groaned.
“Hey, maybe you could take another little trip with me.”
“No promises, Tim.”
“I’m not asking for one. I’m just extending the invitation. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go, whether it’s by boat, plane, or gas-guzzling pickup truck.”
She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and looked toward him, but not at him. She seemed to be thinking as she shifted the end of her sandwich from one hand to the other.
He looked down at his tablet again and was trying to find his place when she said, “Anywhere?”
“Yeah. Give me a few days’ notice, and I’ll make it happen.” He’d set fire to his schedule and pretend it was no concern to him if he had to.
Ask me for something, Valerie. Anything.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“I hope you’ll do more than that. I hope you’ll take me up on it. It’d make me happy.”
“Why?”
“I like spending time with you.”
He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it before for himself, but he’d somehow managed to make a thirty-one-year-old woman blush. He wanted to kiss the red right off her cheeks.
“I’m sure there are a lot of folks you could take on a trip and who’d be appreciative of it, Tim.”
“Sure.” He could take Kevin—hell, he’d tried to take Kevin out with him on numerous occasions. He’d even resorted to offering bribes to the kid and that hadn’t worked. Either Kevin just didn’t want to spend time with his dad or whatever bullshit trouble he got into at home was more important to him than seizing the opportunity to see the world…or at the very least a slice of America larger than eastern North Carolina.
“The fact of the matter is,” Tim said, “you get to know a lot about folks when you take them out of their element, and I’d like to see how you’d open up to me thousands of miles from home.”
“If there’s something specific you want to know, you could just ask.”
“I don’t know what I want to know. This isn’t a job interview. There’s no prescribed list of questions I feel like I should ask. And I don’t want to just hear you talk, but I want to see you respond. I want to see you act.”
“I don’t think I’m as interesting as you seem to believe.”
“I think you’re probably more interesting than you seem to believe, and I’ll prove it. Here’s a random question. Don’t think, just answer. “If you were abducted by aliens and were offered your choice of a superhero power in exchange for providing a bit of your DNA for them to study, what would you pick?”
“I—” She shook her head slightly and looked down at her sandwich.
“No thinking. Quick. Tell me.”
; She shook with obvious nervousness. Apparently, being taken off guard wasn’t one of her good things. “I’d…I’d want to be able to split myself when I need to be in more than one place at once.”
“Spreading yourself too thin?”
“No, I just don’t want to miss anything. I wish there was a way to have it all when you want it, and not a little bit up front and the rest years later.”
“Me, too.”
“It’s different with you though, isn’t it?”
“In what way?”
“I…” She let whatever she was going to say fall off, furrowed her brow, and then shook her head. “Nothing. It doesn’t even make sense to me, so I’m not going to try to put it into a logical string of words.” She opened her water bottle and brought it to her lips, staring curiously at him as she sipped.
He stared right back, trying to understand what she’d been getting at. As intuitive as he was, and for as much as he got into his submissives’ heads, sometimes, reading Valerie was like trying to parse words typed in black on a dark sheet of paper, and he couldn’t tell if that was intentional on her part or not.
Didn’t matter, either way. He’d figure her out.
“You are interesting, Valerie. And I’m committed to finding out just how much.”
“That’s the problem. You shouldn’t be committing to me at all.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Leaving Tim’s boat turned out to be difficult for Valerie. Convincing herself that there was no way she could see him in any capacity again was even harder. She’d resigned herself to drive that wedge between the two of them because if they kept on as they were, she was going to fall for him. He was getting under her skin and making her want to talk—to share. And she felt comfortable with telling him her secrets. It was a freeing feeling being able to get up some words when she needed so desperately to, and she’d liked it too much.
He was becoming an addiction, and addictions had tendencies to prevent people from achieving what they were capable of. She knew herself too well.
So, when she returned to Shora and realized she had his house plans in her SUV and that his spare house key had magically appeared on her key ring, she had the tiniest of fits.
She’d need to get his things back to him—she needed to control the return of them so he wouldn’t take her unawares by seeking her out to fetch it.
She decided to wait until she was certain he was at the boat factory and used her lunch break to drive over to his house.
A sigh of relief escaped her lips as she steered down the treacherous slope of his driveway and saw that his truck was gone.
She left the car running and jogged to the door with the poster tube, let herself in with the spare key, and carried both to his office. She left his things on the desk and turned only to receive the fright of her life.
Leaning into the doorway with his arms folded over his chest was a tall, lanky young man with dirty blond hair that hung into pale blue eyes. He wore an oversized polo shirt and jeans that sagged a bit lower than was strictly necessary.
He drew in a long inhalation and let it out through his mouth. “You’ve got a key. You must be one of Dad’s flavors.”
“Excuse me?” She didn’t give a damn who that guy was or why he was there, but she wasn’t going to let anyone disrespect her like that.
Dad, he’d said, though.
He’d said “Dad” and he was in Tim’s house.
That’s meant…
Oh shit.
She slapped a hand to her forehead. The young man—whom she now guessed was Tim’s son—shrugged and cleared his throat. “I wonder how many keys he had made,” he mused.
How many…
She narrowed her eyes at him and suppressed the niggling compulsion to growl at him. Something in her had snapped at those words “how many.”
“I’m certain it’s none of your business how many keys he’s had made,” she said with forced calmness, “because unlike you—apparently—he’s a grown man and can give keys to the home he owns to whomever he wants.”
Kevin flinched.
Good, you little brat.
It was easy to be indignant when she didn’t have to confront everything the young man had said or let it mean anything. She was good at being the scolding parent type. She’d cut her teeth with that on Leah, and she had qualms about sticking her nose out when she needed to. Obviously, he needed the treatment.
She tapped the poster tube on the desk. “Those belong to your father. I will let him know I dropped them off. They’re just architectural plans, but if you’re in a nosy kind of mood I can recommend a couple of websites for you to reference as you squint at them. That way, you know what you’re looking at.”
He rolled his eyes and scoffed. “What, the first architect didn’t figure out how to turn this dump into a perfect wonderland for Dad’s Family 2.0?”
This little snot…
Valerie gritted her teeth and tried to temper her tone before replying. “What’s wrong? Did he tell you that there wouldn’t be a room for you or are you always this accusatory for no good reason?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t care if there’s a room for me. I won’t be here.”
“Why are you here in this so-called dump, then?”
He drummed his fingertips along the sides of his arms and stared at her.
“Clamming up now, huh? At least be a little less predictable, Mr. Dowd. You’ve got the moody teenager thing down pat, and I’ve got to tell you, it doesn’t suit you.”
“You telling me to grow up? You don’t even know me.”
“You’re right. I don’t.” And she had no intention of doing so. “I don’t need to know you to see exactly what you are. You’re a bored, entitled brat who apparently has nothing better to do with his day than terrorize people who drop things off at your father’s house.” She snatched the key off the desktop and pocketed it. “And yes, I have a key because your father trusted me enough to have one. Do you?”
She was pretty sure he did, or he wouldn’t have been there, but given his lack of response, wondered if that were actually the case.
Huh.
She didn’t have time to psychoanalyze the kid. She needed to get back to Shora and meet up with her boss who’d sent her an email stating he’d be on site by three. Valerie needed to get back and put her game face on. She was hoping that today would be the day that he told her, “All right, we’re winding this phase down. Time to pack up for Miami.”
She nodded at Kevin and squeezed past him. “It’s been lovely meeting you.” If you make those plans disappear, I will drive back here to throttle you. She had put hours of work into the preliminary plans in that tube, and it was good work.
“Hey,” he called after her.
“Hay is for horses.” You little brat. She cleared the front door and cringed as she saw that damned incline she needed to back out of. If she’d been smarter, she would have backed into the yard upon arrival so she could see better how to get out.
“Okay, wait, lady.” Kevin jogged after her, holding his pants up at the waist. He hiked them high enough that she could see the plastic monitoring cuff around his sock-covered ankle.
Oh, hell.
She recognized those things all too well. Her ex-dom had worn one for several months thanks to a crime that, fortunately, had nothing to do with his acquaintance to Valerie. She’d severed ties with his erratic ass a couple of days after his sentencing. She’d had a reputation to maintain and couldn’t handle having a known screwball attached to her name.
She pulled her car door open and fell into the seat.
Kevin jogged over and leaned onto the top of the door. “Look, don’t tell my Dad you saw me. When you talk to him, if he asks, tell him I didn’t come out of my room.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I just don’t want to deal with the fuckin’ nagging. It’s too much.”
“Adults get nagged all the time by the people they work for, but less when
those people trust them. It’s refreshing, actually, how they get out of your hair to let you work in peace. So, what’s that tell you?”
“I know he doesn’t trust me. That’s fine. Feeling’s mutual.”
Oh, God.
She drew in a bolstering breath and wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel. None of my business. “What makes you think your father isn’t trustworthy?”
She’d had to ask, because of all the things she thought about Tim, him being untrustworthy had never been one of them. In fact, she’d wondered if she trusted him too much. His candor and honesty had made her too comfortable—reckless, even.
“Come on, what do you think his priorities are, huh? Making boats and making money. I don’t fit anywhere in that.”
“Would you prefer the alternative?”
“Huh?”
“Him not making money? Because I’ve got to tell you, being poor ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. I’m not ashamed to tell you that growing up, I didn’t have a dad. I have no idea where he is or if he’s even still alive. He didn’t send money and didn’t stick around for anything but to sign me and my sister’s birth certificates. And then my mother died. That left my sister and me in some pretty rough circumstances for a while. I assure you, we were far more worried about having food in our bellies than counting the number of hours our grandmother spent with us in her limited free time. That’s called prioritizing. Maybe you should try it. And get off my door, please. I have somewhere to be and I’m sure you’re eager to go back into your cave.”
Kevin took a couple of steps back from the door, jaw hanging open and eyes round with shock or horror or maybe he was just high, she didn’t care.
He was Tim’s problem.
Dodged a bullet there.
And that totally explained why the guy was single. She knew there had to be a reason.
She got her seatbelt on, closed the door, and said a little prayer as she put her foot on the accelerator and backed up the driveway.