by Jill Shalvis
Both the two-legged and the four-legged variety.
“Well,” she said, “thanks again for checking in on me. Good-bye.” She moved to go inside, but Cole just stood there, studying her like she was fascinating. “You’re supposed to be polite and say good-bye,” she said.
“Good-bye,” he said.
His smile was nothing but pure, unadulterated trouble, and at the sight of it, the devil on her left shoulder woke up and jumped up and down. Oh please, can we have him, just once?
But Olivia no longer gave in to frivolousness. Life wasn’t about that. Life was a series of hard knocks that you had to be strong enough to survive.
She was still working on that.
Falling for a guy like sexy charter captain Cole Donovan was not only frivolous, it would be distracting in the extreme.
The falling for someone and having them walk—that she couldn’t handle. Cole, with his tight-knit friends and family and perfect small-town life, was so far out of her league she couldn’t even see the league.
With nothing else to say, Olivia stepped inside and, unable to break eye contact, stared at him as she reached out and gave the door a nudge.
Just before it shut, Cole flashed her a grin that said game on, a grin that she felt all the way to her toes and back. For a long moment she stared at the door, wondering if he was still standing there, wondering how to tell him that there was no way in hell she was going to play.
Chapter 7
Cole was lying in his hammock, his good arm up behind his head, a beer in his other hand as he idly swung in the afternoon breeze.
For the third day in a row.
He’d gone to the doctor in the hopes of getting him to say Cole was fine and that Sam and Tanner were being overly cautious not letting him work.
Dr. Josh Scott, an old friend, had agreed with the majority. No work for at least a week.
Cole was still pissed about it.
He had a radio on the grass beneath him so he could hear Tanner and Sam if either needed him. It absolutely wasn’t because he was bored out of his mind.
The radio crackled to life. “Got some chop,” Tanner said. “Move clients from swimming platform to belowdecks. Over.”
“No can do,” came Sam’s reply. “Head honcho says rough seas don’t bother him. Over.”
“Repeat: ten foot swells ahead,” Tanner said. “Move him the hell off the swimming platform if you have to drag his ass with your own two hands. Over.”
“Negative,” Sam said. “He’s trying to get a tan to impress the ladies and is wearing a Speedo and nothing else. You want him moved, you move him yourself. Over.”
Okay, maybe he wasn’t so sorry not to be there. Still, it was hard to be idle, and he hadn’t had so many days off in a long time. None during his five years on the rigs. Not many more than that since starting up Lucky Harbor Charters. He’d spent all his time behind the controls of the boat, with Tanner at his back prepping whatever equipment they needed and Sam either helping or in their warehouse hand-building one of his many custom boats.
But now they were working without him. They’d be fine, he knew this. But he wasn’t feeling fine. He was feeling left out. The three of them had been a team so long they operated by instinct, and their bond was strong.
And now they were operating without him.
It felt wrong. He’d always been the nucleus of the group, the one who kept them all together, and it hadn’t been easy. The day after high school graduation, Tanner had gone off to the navy, and he’d eventually become a SEAL. Sam hadn’t had money for college, so he’d gone straight to the gulf, to the rigs.
Cole had spent two years playing college baseball, a little bored, a lot unmotivated, snoozing his way through life. He’d watched two of his sisters get married and create their own families, until the holidays had become these huge, noisy, overwhelming affairs where no less than thirty people would bug him about his future.
He hadn’t known then what his future would hold. What he had known was that, while he loved his growing family and the insanity that came with it, he hadn’t wanted that for himself. So when Sam had called him to the rigs, he’d gone without looking back. They’d met Gil there, and he’d fallen into the group like he’d been born to it.
And then Tanner had caught up with them after his navy stint and stayed. It’d worked. Everything had worked.
Until Gil had died—in Cole’s arms, as a matter of fact.
His phone was vibrating like it was having a seizure, but as it was ten feet away in the wild grass where he’d chucked it an hour ago, he didn’t give a shit. He sipped the beer and continued to swing idly, taking in the seagulls squawking, the waves hitting the rocky beach far below the bluffs where he lay, the sound of the wind whistling past him.
Inhale.
Exhale.
That’s what he concentrated on.
“Hey,” the nagging voice of his childhood said sometime later. “So you live.”
His oldest sister, Clare.
“You know I’m okay,” he said without opening his eyes. “You made me add you on that Find Your Friends app so you can stalk my dot.”
“Yeah, well, your dot wasn’t moving,” she said. “I was voted to come check and make sure you were still breathing.”
“Now you’ve seen firsthand that I am,” he said. “Feel free to go back and report to the coven that I’m fine.”
She made a sound that was half laugh, half pure annoyance at the old nickname he’d assigned to his sisters from the day they’d begun interfering in his life.
Which had been his birth.
Clare, Cindy, and Cara had been possessive of him from that day forward. His mom was the same. For most of Cole’s life he and his dad had banded together to ward off the estrogen. Cole hoped the guy was sitting on a cloud in heaven eating a pizza as a big fuck-you to his cholesterol problem, amused at Cole’s inability to fend off his sisters’ nosiness on his own. “And just out of curiosity, why wouldn’t I still be breathing?” Cole asked.
“Because you fell into the water two days ago, and apparently had to be rescued by some chick. I can’t believe you about drowned and I had to hear about it on the street.”
“What the hell?” Cole sat up, nearly upending himself off the hammock as he stared at Clare. “How did you hear that?”
“It’s Lucky Harbor,” she said in simple acceptance of the fact that while you could keep your car unlocked in the small coastal town and not worry about theft, you couldn’t keep a damn secret to save your own life.
“That’s not what happened,” he said, pointing his beer at her.
Clare set the large brown bag she was carrying onto Cole’s picnic table, her gaze going to his sling and then to the healing cut on his temple. “Then how did you get hurt?”
Well, shit. “Okay, I did fall into the water. But I did not need rescuing.”
Clare absorbed this and sat at the table. This was a problem because now he was stuck with her. “I’m fine,” he said. “And it was days ago.”
“Were you alone?”
“No.”
Her eyes sharpened. “Is this where the chick comes in?”
“Her name is Olivia, and she doesn’t come into anything.”
Those sharp eyes studied him. “Olivia who?”
“Not telling,” he said, well versed in this little game. “You’ll have me married by next weekend.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll just sic Cindy and Cara on you.”
Her co–coven members, aka his other sisters—and they were all equally crazy. Well, actually, maybe Cara was the most crazy of them all, which was really saying something. “Don’t even think about it,” he said. “Cindy’s busy with the baby, don’t stress her out. And Cara doesn’t need to bother herself.”
Clare looked at him for a long beat. Probably using her powers to read his mind. “You ever going to tell me what she did to piss you off?” she eventually asked.
Yep, reading his mind.
“I’m not pissed,” he said. “Do I look pissed?”
Clare snorted. “No, but then again, you never do. You put on this air that you let everything bead off your back. Nothing gets to you, isn’t that your deal? You could be ready to jump off a cliff and no one would ever know it. You’re just like Dad that way.”
“And the problem?”
She met his gaze. Matching stubborn blue. “He dropped dead of a heart attack at fifty-five,” she reminded him quietly.
Oh, yeah. That.
“Tell me about the Cara thing,” she said. “Maybe I can help.”
When their dad had died, Cara had pulled away from the family to grieve in her own way. Only Cole knew which way that was, and it was a huge bone of contention between the two of them. And it was literally just between them, as she’d sworn Cole to secrecy. “It’s nothing,” he told Clare.
“You’re so full of shit your eyes just turned brown.”
“You kiss Mitch with that mouth?” he asked.
Clare took a long breath. “Fine. Be stubborn. Change the subject. Works for me. I want to talk to you about something else anyway.”
“I’m talked out.”
Unconcerned, she rose, snatched the beer right out of his hands, and took a long pull from it as she looked around his yard.
He knew what she saw. A beach shack on the bluffs that had been built a hundred years ago and was in desperate need of renovation. He’d been working on the place slowly from the inside out, so most of his work didn’t yet show.
He wasn’t in a hurry. The most important thing was the mind-soothing view of his favorite place on earth.
The ocean.
“Do you want the truth?” Clare asked quietly.
“If I say no, will you go away?”
“Cole.”
Of course she wasn’t going to go away. She never did what he wanted.
“I’m worried about you,” she said.
Ah, Christ. “Don’t be.”
“You’ve been in Lucky Harbor for two years, and near as I can tell, you haven’t dated. You haven’t dated at all since Susan—”
Shit. Cole snagged his beer back and finished it off, trying to remember whether he had more in his fridge. Doubtful, as he hadn’t been to the store in recent memory. Rising, he peeked into the bag she’d brought. Homemade chili and cornbread. Nice. But beer would have been nicer. He reached in to pinch off a piece of the cornbread and Clare smacked his hand like he was her five-year-old son, Jonathan. “Save it for dinner,” she said. “Now back to Susan—”
“Gee, this has been fun,” he said. “But I have to go watch paint dry now.”
“She dumped you two years ago—”
“Not going there, C,” he said.
“Two. Years,” she repeated.
Like he didn’t know. It’d been Gil’s funeral, a couple weeks short of two years ago now, and he remembered exactly.
Just as clearly as he remembered why. “Don’t you have to get to work?” he asked. “Or, I don’t know, stir your cauldron?”
She narrowed her eyes at him.
He stared back, holding the silence. It was his only weapon against her. Clare couldn’t handle a silence. Not one of the coven could. Though in the old days, she’d used other techniques. Sitting on him had usually worked. Or ratting him out. His dad had never failed to fall for one flash of her baby blues, for any of his daughters’ baby blues. He’d had a real soft spot for the girls. For Cole, too, if he was being fair. He had no doubt of that, but he’d been taught that a female was to be loved, cherished, and pampered, and above all else, she was to get her way.
And he respected that. But he had different boundaries now, and he held his tongue.
“Fine,” she finally said. “Subject closed. For now.” Moving in, she hugged him hard, brushing a kiss to his jaw. “Love you, you big, stubborn ass.” She pointed to the bag. “Heat the chili on the stovetop for dinner tonight. Save the bread to eat with it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And Cole?” She flashed him a smile as she pulled her keys from her pocket. “Maybe you could ask this Olivia out sometime.”
“For all you know, she’s married with kids,” he said. “Maybe she’s a senior citizen and doesn’t even have all of her own teeth. Maybe—”
“Maybe she’s perfect for you, you ever think of that?” She smiled at his expression and wisely stepped back out of range. “Why don’t you just try dropping some of those unrealistic expectations, baby brother, okay? Not every woman is going to be a hormonal wreck like your sisters or dump you like your ex.”
That was the second time in three days he’d been told about his unrealistic expectations, and he rolled his eyes. His expectations, realistic or not, were just fine, thank you very much.
Clare shook her head at his lack of a response, blew him a kiss, and vanished.
Cole started to shove his hands into his pockets, but the left one couldn’t bend that way thanks to the sling—and the bolt of pain. So only his right hand entered his pocket, and encountered soft silk.
Olivia’s panties.
He’d forgotten they were there, and they must have gotten washed with his pants. Like a shockwave, arousal punched through his system, and he let himself get lost in that for a moment.
Olivia wasn’t a mom—at least he didn’t think so. She sure as hell wasn’t a senior citizen. But beyond that, he didn’t have a clue.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true, either, was it. He knew she had amazing eyes, dark and full of secrets. He knew she could make him laugh. He knew she would literally risk her own life for a stranger’s.
He’d told himself it didn’t matter if he never talked to her again. He’d even bought it, at least in his waking moments. But in his sleeping moments he’d been dreaming about her. Fantasizing, really; hot, dark, erotic fantasies where they’d been back on the boat with none of the danger and all of the nakedness…
Okay, so yeah, seeing her again was a really bad idea. Clearly he was all sorts of fucked up.
And then there was Olivia. She was guarded, and not exactly eager. Cole fingered her panties again and let out a long exhale.
But she had attempted to save his life. That was a big deal. It’d be rude not to at least give her back her undies.
Chapter 8
Three days after taking that unintentional swim, Olivia moved through her shop, reshelving and restocking, one ear cocked toward her tablet. She had it propped up on her desk, tuned to an American Pickers episode on Netflix.
Lord, she loved that guilty pleasure show. She loved all of them, Pawn Stars, Storage Wars, anything and everything about old stuff. It didn’t take a shrink to tell her why, either. The art of digging through the neglected and discarded, giving those things a new lease, was a thinly veiled metaphor for her own life.
She’d been neglected and discarded.
She was working on that. She looked around. Unique Boutique was three rooms, two for her customers to wander through and one that was both a storeroom and an office. She’d done her best to re-create the same sense of warmth and mystic adventure that Mrs. Henderson had instilled within her all those years ago.
The location was great, near the end of Commercial Row downtown, in the bottom floor of a “quaint” old Victorian that her landlord claimed had been renovated before the turn of the century.
It was probably true. Olivia just wasn’t sure which century.
The three rooms were tiny, but she’d made the most of them. They had the timeless look she’d always wanted, an old-fashioned