See You at Sunset

by V. K. Sykes

  “Lily Doyle Flynn, you know very well that age is relative,” her granny shot back. “Chester’s still got most of his marbles, but Amos Hogan can barely figure out where the town hall is, and Thor Sigurdsson isn’t much better. They can still catch lobsters like nobody’s business, but why in heaven they ever wanted to be selectmen is beyond me.” Miss Annie’s fluffy white perm practically quivered with frustration.

  Father Michael made a gentle scoffing noise. “Oh, climb down from your soapbox, Annie. Some of us had to practically get down on bended knee to beg Amos and Thor to run since nobody else wanted to, other than Chester.”

  “Oh, I know, but who ever thought that prehistoric trio would wind up having to decide the fate of poor Florence and Beatrice?” Miss Annie raised her gaze to ceiling. “May the good Lord above help us all.”

  Despite the importance of the subject at hand, Holly was having a hard time concentrating. She kept getting distracted by Micah’s back—or, to be more geographically precise, his very fine ass. How insane was that? Though she’d always looked at her friend with deep appreciation for his manly attributes, her reaction to him now felt quite different. She tried to tell herself that she was simply too tipsy to keep her guard up, and yet she knew that would be too easy an answer.

  Damn hormones.

  “Earth to Holly Tyler,” Miss Annie said, waving her bony right hand halfway across the table at Holly. “Are you with me, dear?”

  Feeling the heat of embarrassment rising up her neck, Holly managed a contrite nod. “I’m sorry, Miss Annie. I’m just a little tired and distracted.”

  “Well, no wonder. You must be worried sick about your aunts. I was saying that we need to start a petition drive to convince the selectmen to deny Night Owl their building permit. I’ll draw it up, and you can get everyone who comes into the store to sign. And Roy can take it around the island to those folks who don’t visit the store much.”

  “Hey, don’t I get a say in all this?” Roy protested, winking at Holly.

  “No, Ancient One, you don’t,” Miss Annie said firmly. She looked back at Holly and smiled. “Most folks will be glad to sign. Those three dinosaurs won’t be able to ignore the will of the people after that.”

  Holly perked up as everyone nodded in agreement. “That’s a great idea,” she said. “I know how much Florence and Beatrice appreciate all your help. And so do I.”

  Miss Annie smiled and uttered a soft psshh.

  Ryan stood up, pushing his chair back. “Okay, now that we’ve got our battle plan, let’s get back to some serious partying. Morgan and I want to lay down a challenge to any pair that has the mistaken impression that they might beat us at shuffleboard.”

  “That would be Lily and me,” Aiden said.

  Ryan shook his head. “Forget it, dude. No, I was figuring the deputy could take us on. Joined by our sweet pal Holly, who we’re so happy to have back on the island.”

  Holly saw Morgan turn in her seat and stare up at her fiancé, her icy blue eyes conveying what she thought of Ryan’s mischief making. Her friend knew Holly would be uncomfortable being put on the spot like that.

  Unlike darts, Holly enjoyed shuffleboard and was generally decent enough at it to hold her own, so that part didn’t bother her. But she could barely believe Ryan’s meddling. She opened her mouth to refuse but didn’t get the chance.

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Micah said. He gazed down at Holly, his dark eyes glittering with an unspoken challenge… and a whole lot of heat.

  Holly, you are in so much trouble.

  “We can’t duck a challenge, can we?” he added.

  When Morgan gave her an apologetic look, Holly waved a hand and got up from the table. She would not look like a wimp to her friends. Even more important, she would not disappoint and maybe even embarrass Micah by making some lame excuse for not playing. Not after everything he’d done for her. She simply had to keep her unruly hormones under control.

  Good luck with that.

  “Game on,” she said, pinning on a smile.

  Micah gave Holly lots of space as she made her way across the room to the shuffleboard table. It wasn’t like him to jump in like that, accepting Ryan’s challenge—not when it was clear that Holly was about to decline. But he just hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to get close to her. He never could when it came to Holly Tyler.

  Not that he wasn’t tempted to whack Ryan upside the head for being so obvious. His buddy knew exactly how conflicted he was about Holly, and yet he still hadn’t been able to resist playing matchmaker. Like plenty of islanders, Ryan wanted Micah and Holly to hook up. Not just for his sake but because it might pull her back to Seashell Bay.

  Too bad Holly wasn’t down with the program. Nor was she the type to want a casual summer fling. And when it came to Holly, neither was Micah. He wanted more than that, and was pretty well convinced he would never get it.

  And she has a boyfriend. Micah forced that unpleasant thought away.

  He kept his eyes pretty much glued to Holly’s perfect ass as she slipped through the crowded tables. Her short, red skirt was hot enough to peel the paint off the Pot’s walls. Her form-fitting white blouse showcased her trim waist and dynamite rack. Not for the first time, Micah couldn’t help thinking that, looking the way she did—not just tonight but all the time—Holly could have virtually any man in the world. Add in a sweet personality, and it’d been no surprise that she’d ended up with a dude like Drew Tyler, a guy about as handsome as they came, not to mention a brave airman and a hell of a nice guy.

  By the time he caught up with her, Holly was already lining up the shuffleboard pucks at one end of the fourteen-foot wooden table. “Ryan, since you issued the challenge,” she said with a sly smile, “I assume you have no problem with Micah and me having the hammer to begin?”

  Micah swallowed a grin. Players usually flipped a coin to see who would have the advantage of throwing the last puck—called the “hammer”—in the opening round. Holly had smoothly backed Ryan into a corner.

  “No problem,” Ryan said with a mock sneer. “You and my big doofus pal will need all the help you can get.”

  Morgan poked him in the side. “Play nice, you jerk.”

  “Babe, I love it when you talk dirty,” Ryan said, pulling her tight against his side.

  Holly laughed. “Hey, are we here to play shuffleboard or make out?”

  Making out sounded pretty great to Micah. He couldn’t help pointedly raising his eyebrows as he stared down at her. Holly’s eyes opened wide as she realized her mistake, then a sweet flush turned her cheeks rosy. He almost laughed when she scowled back at him.

  “Both sound good to me,” Ryan joked.

  Morgan rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Keep it up, buddy, and you’ll be sleeping on the sofa tonight.”

  This time Micah did laugh, easing the tension.

  Smiling, Holly shook her head at Morgan and Ryan’s banter and gave one of the pucks a little spin. Micah lined up close behind her, breathing in the sweet vanilla scent of her silky hair. He was close enough to hear her exhalations of breath and to practically feel the rise and fall of her chest. Surprisingly, she didn’t slide away from him, instead standing there with a hip cocked, spinning the disc slowly as she stared down at the table. Micah felt the blood in his head begin to flood down to territory below his belt.

  Not good.

  He forced himself to get a grip. “Holly, go ahead and throw whenever you’re ready,” he said, his throat a little tight. “We’re gonna murder these guys.”

  That overblown declaration seemed to defuse the rest of the tension in her sweet bod.

  “Murder?” she tossed out, only half turning around. “Goodness, that’s hardly an appropriate thing for an officer of the law to say, Deputy Lancaster.”

  Micah didn’t miss the slight catch in her voice, despite her flip words. Was he doing that to her? He sure as hell hoped so.

  Man, how he wanted this woman. He could tell himself a
million times over that it was batshit crazy, and even self-destructive, to think of Holly as more than a friend. He had told himself that, so many times that the words were carved into his gray matter. But his resolve always took a powder whenever he saw her. In fact, the more he vowed to put his feelings for her out of his mind, the stronger they seemed to get.

  Holly inhaled a deep breath, and with a gentle spinning motion, she slid the puck down the table. The beads of silicone that had been scattered over the polished wood surface gave the puck a smooth glide until it finally stopped in the three-point section at the opposite end. Holly clapped her hands in delight.

  “Great shot.” Micah patted the slender curve of her hip. “You’ve always had a real sweet touch, Holly.”

  So much for his resolve to play it cool.

  Holly swung around and eyed him cautiously. Micah gave her what he hoped was a totally innocent-looking smile, just a well done, teammate look. The slight narrowing of her eyes told him he’d probably failed.

  Morgan elbowed him. “Okay, it’s time for the pros to take over.”

  Micah inadvertently bumped into Holly as he took a step to the side. She’d been moving too, and their bodies collided, his arm sliding over her breasts. Soft and oh so sweet, they felt amazing, even though the touch was momentary.

  More blood drained straight south to his dick.

  Holly practically jumped back, keeping her gaze firmly on Morgan and not on him.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “No worries,” Holly replied. She refused to look at him, but he heard a slight catch in her throat.

  Morgan slid a blue puck in a straight line down the board and knocked Holly’s shot into the gutter. Micah made himself concentrate on the game instead of on his partner. He stepped up and wasted no time mirroring Morgan’s shot, knocking her puck off the table.

  They all played well through the rest of the first frame, falling into an easy rhythm. Even Holly seemed to forget her worries—and the sexual tension between them—long enough to get into the spirit of the competition, enthusiastically urging Micah on whenever it was his turn.

  The score was tied, and Holly held the hammer in her hand. She was facing a board with Ryan’s puck in scoring position and the next one belonging to her and Micah. If Holly could somehow manage to curl her last shot just enough to both knock Ryan’s out and stay on the board, she and Micah would win the frame.

  Micah didn’t offer any advice because he knew she had it under control. She’d shown a deft touch throughout the game. He put her chances of making this moderately difficult shot at something like 70 percent if her speed was perfect. If not, the odds went way down.

  Holly turned to him. “I could do this for sure if I wasn’t half-lit,” she said with a rueful laugh.

  Micah leaned in. “It’s good to be loose. You can’t make tough shots when you’re uptight.” He gave her shoulder a quick squeeze. “You can totally do this.”

  Holly gazed at him for a long moment. She seemed… he searched for the right word… almost grateful for his support. As if she wasn’t used to it.

  That couldn’t possibly be true. Everyone loved Holly, including, he had to assume, her boyfriend. If he didn’t, the guy was a total tool.

  Then she broke the moment by nodding and turned back to the board.

  She spun the puck once and then launched her shot. It slid down the table on a perfect trajectory, slipping past the guard and hitting two-thirds of Ryan’s puck, knocking it out. Holly’s spun to the right and came breathtakingly close to the gutter but didn’t fall off. That clutch shot gave her and Micah a total of five points, and they won the frame.

  “Yes!” Holly cried. She swung around, eyes lit with excitement as she pumped her fist. “I can’t believe—”

  Those were the only words she got out before Micah grabbed her and hoisted her into the air until her eyes were a few inches above his. Without conscious thought, he’d lifted her and now held her about a foot and a half off the floor. She was so light in his arms that it had taken no effort at all. It was purely an instinctive response to the moment and to her joy.

  Her eyes flew open wide as she sucked in a shocked breath, then she slapped her hands on his chest. She gazed down at him, her cheeks flushed and her silky hair falling forward to brush his cheeks. He felt a shudder race through her body as their gazes locked.

  Embarrassed, Micah set her down, mentally cursing himself for acting like… well, like she belonged to him. As if he had the right to touch her like that, especially in public.

  “I’m sorry, Holly,” he managed. “I don’t know what got into me.”

  Morgan’s expression was as gobsmacked as Holly’s, while Ryan just grinned and said, “Nice toss, man. Way to celebrate the win.”

  Holly tilted her head and studied Micah, looking puzzled rather than annoyed. To his amazement and relief, a small smile crept onto her flushed face.

  “I’m glad we won the frame,” she said, “though it makes me worry about what could happen if we end up winning the whole match. You might celebrate by bouncing me off the ceiling. You don’t know your own strength, buddy.”

  Her joke unwound some of his tension. Still, Micah couldn’t believe he’d made such an impulsive gesture. He was never impulsive. Unfortunately he’d drawn a hell of a lot of unwanted attention to the both of them now. Holly was a private person and hated that sort of thing.

  “I’ll behave myself,” he said. “At least I’ll try.”

  “Good, because I’d hate to have to handcuff the deputy sheriff in front of half the town,” Holly said with mock severity.

  When she turned away to speak to Ryan, Micah scanned the bar, expecting to be on the receiving end of weird looks and puzzled stares, especially since islanders thought of him as such a total straight arrow. Instead, he saw only smiles and even a few approving nods.

  It seemed that his fellow citizens had no problem at all with the fact that their deputy sheriff had just taken matters into his own hands.

  It gradually dawned on Holly that Boyd Spinney, Miss Annie’s old foe in the last town fight, was making a public display of himself again.

  She’d been so absorbed in the shuffleboard game—and in Micah, especially after he’d wrapped his big hands around her waist and lifted her straight up in the air—that she hadn’t been paying attention to what was obviously a raucous argument going on back at their table. Spinney and his pal Cooper Frenette were hammering away at Miss Annie and Morgan, and Miss Annie looked about ready to murder the two men.

  Micah took Holly’s hand and wrapped his fingers around it in a comforting grip as he led her back to her seat.

  “Dammit, Spinney’s three sheets to the wind,” he said, clearly annoyed.

  Holly didn’t know Spinney well, and she’d only met his fellow lobsterman Frenette a couple of times. But she did know that Spinney and Miss Annie had historically been like gasoline and open flame, and they were obviously taking turns yelling at each other. Spinney was in his midsixties and had a reputation for being even more opinionated and dogged in his views than Miss Annie, which was really saying something.

  As Holly and Micah approached, Spinney threw his arms up in the air in clear frustration. “Annie, you’ve got to stop being so pigheaded,” he thundered. “Night Owl could sue both the town and the selectmen if they try to deny that permit. They’ve got no damn grounds for saying no. You’re just causing trouble for nothing.”

  “What bull. Night Owl won’t sue,” Morgan said indignantly, putting her arm around Miss Annie’s narrow shoulders. “They don’t need Seashell Bay. Hell, I doubt they’d even want to come here if the majority of people were against it. So Miss Annie’s idea makes good sense to me. Let’s find out what people really think. Or are you guys scared to find out?”

  Spinney’s head jerked back. “Are you kidding? You people are crazy if you think there aren’t a lot of people on the island who feel the same way as Cooper and me. Your problem is that you can’t stand e
ven the idea of change. I keep telling you it’s like you’re stuck in time. Like you’re damn fossils.”

  “Stuck in time, my ass, Spinney,” Morgan said, her eyes blazing. Ryan slid into position behind his fiancé, looking like a big muscled wall of intimidation. Still, he remained silent, letting Morgan fight her own battle.

  Besides, it wasn’t as if Morgan and Spinney were actually going to start duking it out.

  “Anybody with half a brain wants to keep the good things we’ve always cherished,” Morgan retorted. “Things like the Jenkins General Store. There’s no reason why we need Night Owl. The stores we’ve got now can meet all our needs just fine.”

  Before Spinney could launch another rebuttal, Morgan cut him off. “And, hey, how about showing some loyalty, huh? Taking the side of a big corporation over Florence and Beatrice? You two should be ashamed of yourselves!”

  Miss Annie joined in, wagging her finger at her foe. “Boyd Spinney, you can call me all the names you want, but this old fossil will have no part of anything that hurts the Jenkins sisters. And like Morgan said, you shouldn’t either. Why should we line the pockets of some big mainland corporation that sticks stores every ten feet across the state of Maine? We’ve done just fine without places like that for a couple of hundred years, so we sure don’t need them now.”

  Blowing out a loud sigh, Father Michael finally rose from the table. “Now folks, I don’t think—”

  Frenette moved to hover over the much shorter priest, his black eyebrows furiously pulling into a unibrow. “You people are just full of hot air. Times change, and the general store ain’t up-to-date. Everybody knows that.” He swayed a bit, clearly drunk. “If we’re going to be honest here, the place is a stinkin’ dump.”

  The shock of those words hit Holly squarely in the chest.

  “Watch it, Frenette,” Micah said in a cold voice, giving her hand a squeeze that she suspected was a signal for her to stay out of it.

  But she couldn’t. For Frenette to launch such a vicious insult against the store was too much. She pulled her hand free, ignoring Micah’s growl.