Cottage at the Beach (The Off Season)

by Lee Tobin McClain

  “Here you go,” Trey said, handing it to the mother. “Cute baby.”

  “Thanks. He’s already a handful.” But there was pride in the mother’s voice.

  Trey bent lower to be on a level with the little girls. “I bet you were handfuls, too, when you were babies.” He glanced up at the parents. “I had foster brothers who were twins. It’s not easy.”

  “You haven’t lived until you’ve parented two colicky babies at once,” the mom said.

  “Ouch. Only one of my brothers had colic, but I remember the crying like it was yesterday.”

  Erica realized she didn’t know anything about Trey’s family of origin. Hadn’t known he was in foster care. Moreover, she hadn’t realized before that he was comfortable with little kids. A lot of men weren’t.

  As the family packed up and left, Erica watched them, until she felt Trey’s hand on her arm. “You’d better start licking. You have a drip.”

  Sure enough, a trickle of ice cream overflowed onto her hand and she hurriedly tried to catch up with the melting cone.

  When she looked up, Trey was watching her. Their gazes tangled, held.

  Heat climbed her cheeks. “You’d better look to your own cone,” she said just as his began to drip onto the table.

  As she finished her ice cream, she tried to calm down with some deep breathing, but a feeling of attraction to Trey kept making her heart beat faster.

  She should deny it, get rid of it, leave. But it was so sweet and pleasurable, something she hadn’t felt in ages.

  Why couldn’t she allow herself a secret crush on Trey?

  Because he likes kids and he’s only here for a little while anyway.

  But since he was only here for a little while, would it be so awful to enjoy his presence?

  “How’s your sister’s health?” he asked, jolting her out of her confusion.

  She looked at him and met eyes dark with compassion. “Not so good. We go scan by scan.”

  He nodded. “I figured it was cancer. Must be tough on all of you.”

  “It is.” She looked over to where Amber and Hannah were smiling and laughing with Pete and his dad. “She has an amazing spirit, though. And when you’re a mom, you have no choice but to fight it as hard as you can.”

  He shook his head. “Life sucks sometimes.”

  So he liked kids and he was sympathetic toward a family suffering through illness, rather than blurting out platitudes about how everything would be fine or God was in control.

  She hoped God was in control, but nothing felt certain these days. That made it hard to listen to people who seemed to know it all. But Trey wasn’t like that.

  “Do you want to go for a walk after this?” he asked abruptly.

  “What?”

  “A walk on the beach, or through town,” he said. “We could take Ziggy and work on some heeling.”

  “Oh, so...a training walk? At night?”

  “It’s not a bad idea for a reactive dog. Fewer distractions.”

  “Ziggy’s not reactive. He’s a puppy!”

  “Right, well...” He tilted his head. “Your call. I just thought I’d offer.”

  Amber and Hannah came back then, and they all finished their ice cream and strolled back to the car.

  Your call.

  It was her call whether she wanted to go for an evening walk with a guy who, she’d just discovered, was a great family man in addition to being incredibly good-looking.

  Her head gave a clear message: no. No, don’t get more involved. No, you’ve already spent way too much time with him. No, you’re feeling vulnerable.

  Her heart gave a different message: Why not? Just because your family has health problems, just because you can’t have kids, does that mean you can never, ever have fun with a nice-looking guy?

  Who’s willing to train your goofy dog?

  As they reached the house, Erica’s tension rose. She had to decide between her head and her heart.

  Amber and Hannah went on inside and, feeling cowardly, Erica started to follow them.

  Trey cleared his throat. “So...you coming?”

  She looked over her shoulder and caught a trace of insecurity on his face. Her heart melted, just a little. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll come.”

  * * *

  TREY HELD THE door of Erica’s place, waiting for her to get Ziggy calm enough to put his harness on him.

  She was coming. His idiotic impulse hadn’t alienated her, although her glances at him were plenty wary.

  “Ziggy! Be still!” Her exasperated commands only made the big white dog jump higher.

  He’d been right to ask her, because the dog needed training big-time.

  Although he couldn’t pretend that was the real reason; in fact, he’d only thought of it as additional motivation after she’d looked like she was going to turn him down.

  Finally, she got the harness on the dog and they headed out the door, Ziggy pulling hard on the leash. As she passed, Trey caught a whiff of perfume and his entire body leaped to attention.

  Had she been wearing that all evening, or had she put it on for him?

  “Want me to take him for a few?” he asked, glad for the distraction.

  “Um, sure. He’ll settle down in a little bit.”

  “He should be calm from the get-go. You can’t have him dragging you around.” He took the leash from her hand, ignoring the hot spot where their fingers touched. He tightened the leash and pulled back.

  Ziggy glanced back over his shoulder, his eyes confused.

  For a moment, Trey was flooded with thoughts of King, those alert brown eyes of his signaling his bond to Trey and his readiness to work.

  He’d punched King’s new handler’s phone number into his cell at least ten times, but he’d forced himself to turn the phone off before he hit the “call” button.

  And he needed to stop thinking about King and focus on this silly, untrained creature in front of him. “Sit,” he said a little more sharply than he’d intended.

  Ziggy sat, then started to get up again.

  Trey gave the leash a quick, sharp tug.

  “Hey! You’re hurting him!”

  “I’m showing him what to do.” When Ziggy sat again, Trey handed him a bit of dog biscuit.

  Ziggy smiled up at him, tongue out, panting, and once again, Trey felt a sharp pang of missing King.

  “Let’s walk,” he said, holding a treat directly in front of Ziggy’s nose. “Heel, Ziggy,” he said.

  The dog trotted along beside him, nosing at the treat.

  “I can’t believe he’s being so much better for you than for me!”

  Trey shrugged. “He loves you the best, but dogs respond quicker to a deep voice. The women in K-9 training always complained about it.”

  “Makes sense, I guess. Glad it’s not just me.”

  They walked slowly through Pleasant Shores’ downtown, talking a little about dog training. Erica questioned some of what he was doing, but she did pay attention, leaning forward to watch how he was holding the treat and the leash, listening to his words.

  And he was doing a good job of keeping this walk non-date-like; in fact, he could tell he was sort of annoying her because he was, in a way, criticizing the dog she considered as her baby.

  And while he didn’t approve of owners infantilizing their dogs, Erica was so cute about it that he didn’t mind.

  He needed to stop thinking about how appealing she was. “What brought you to Pleasant Shores?” he asked. “Did you have a background here?”

  “Yeah.” She looked around, smiling a little. Crickets chirped, and a light wind rustled through new leaves. “My aunt actually lived one street over, in a little place just like that.” She indicated a modest cottage surrounded by flowers and trees. “We came here every summer and it was the high
light of our year.”

  That brought up something he’d wondered about. “How come Pleasant Shores has all these little places—older places on this side of the peninsula—and then the mansions on the other side? I’d think the smaller homeowners would have been bought out.” It had happened all up and down the coast, he knew.

  “Have you noticed that the beach on the little-house side isn’t nearly as wide as the other, and that it’s rocky? That’s why. The big homeowners have the beach tended to every year. They ship sand in and have it groomed, but the way the tides run, that won’t work on the other side.”

  “Haves and have-nots?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but when we were growing up, everybody here was a have-not. Pleasant Shores used to be where the poorer folks lived when they worked at one of the tourist towns up the shore.”

  He looked around at the quaint streets and little yards, the neat picket fences, the colorful little cottages. “Why wasn’t this a tourist area? People love visiting this kind of place.”

  “Harder to get to. The neck of the peninsula used to flood every tide, so you could only go over to the mainland at certain times. Tourists find that inconvenient.”

  “But now...”

  “But now the road’s a lot better. They’ve built up the land to keep it from flooding, so the tourists have started moving in. Plus, now that the shore is so busy, places like this are more popular. It’s considered unspoiled.” Her nose wrinkled.

  “But it’s more spoiled since the tourists came.”

  “Yeah, the locals think so. My aunt was a local, so I identify with them more. Hoping to become one, actually.”

  That was interesting. He’d guessed that she and her sister and niece were here more temporarily, but she made it sound like they’d like to make it permanent.

  He got the briefest flash of what it would be like to live in a place like this, to raise a family here, in one of these little homes.

  It was him being ridiculous. Just like he’d been with his wife. His sentimental dreams were never going to come true.

  Erica was still talking about the town. “Plenty of people are glad that they can finally earn a living right here in Pleasant Shores, rather than driving up the coast. I mean, there’s always been the fishing industry, but now there’s a lot of work involving tourists, at least during the season.”

  “And I bet houses have increased in value,” Trey said.

  “They have. People could make a lot of money if they sold their houses, in many cases, but most Pleasant Shores families wouldn’t dream of selling. They’d rather keep their little homes and make a life here.”

  “So it’s now a mix of tourist and local. Nice.” He frowned. “I assume that’s why the school is here?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It used to be the public school for all grades. But bigger, more modern schools were built up the peninsula, and all the kids started getting bused there. So the old public school building became a private school.”

  They both paused while Ziggy lifted his leg by a fire hydrant.

  “That makes sense, but what about the academy program? That doesn’t seem to fit.”

  “It doesn’t fit that well, not anymore.” She sighed. “The program is a vestige of the old Pleasant Shores public school. Because it was the poor community, I guess, they got the honor of hosting the kids with behavioral problems. Plus, the idea was that Pleasant Shores was remote enough that at-risk teens couldn’t find any trouble to get into.”

  He nodded, watching the moonlight play on her face, getting a little lost in how pretty she was.

  And he didn’t need to be staring at her. Where had the conversation been going? “So things have changed with the school?”

  She nodded. “With all the new people, the rich people, there’s a group that doesn’t want to have behavior-support-type kids around their kids. And Principal O’Neil, well, he was hired specifically to increase enrollment. They need more paying students since there are a lot of scholarship students, kids of local crabbers or women in need. Even Hannah, she gets to go free because I teach there. So they need to balance that out by bringing in more tuition. That’s why he wants to get rid of the program. He hopes that’ll make the place more appealing to the high-income families.”

  “And you want to save it.”

  She nodded. And didn’t say why, and he wondered at her intensity around the school and the kids.

  Apparently, though, she wanted to change the subject, because she nodded down at Ziggy, now trotting along at their sides again. “He’s doing pretty well,” she said. “Of course, there are no other dogs around, and not very many squirrels and such. That helps.” She looked at him and sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if he’ll ever calm down and get trained.”

  “He will.” He touched her arm, and then quickly pulled his hand back. It’s not a date, it’s not a date. “Listen, don’t feel like Ziggy is a bad dog. I’m more used to dogs that have been raised by a certified puppy raiser and have had a lot of training all their lives. We get the canines when they’re at least a year old, sometimes two years old. They’re through their puppy craziness. Ziggy isn’t.”

  “Thanks.” She smiled up at him, and he was a little bit blown away. She had that chestnut hair, untamed and shaggy, and enormous eyes. She tended toward plain, practical clothes. She wasn’t his type, or his old type, but he couldn’t deny her appeal.

  He kept getting more and more fascinated by her, the more time they spent together. She was a woman with a lot of layers.

  The last thing he needed was to fall for a woman like Erica. She wasn’t the type for a quick fling, and that was the most he could offer. He needed to keep this professional and make his plans to move on as soon as he’d finished his time here.

  She went on talking about Ziggy. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t realize what a handful he was going to be. The dog I had before was completely different, an older rescue. He got me through a lot of stuff. I was heartbroken when he died.” Her eyes actually filled with tears.

  He put an arm around her shoulders and gave them a quick squeeze. She was so, so thin. She felt a little fragile, and not just physically.

  It was hard to remember that, because normally what she displayed was her strength, that spine of steel.

  “Believe me,” he said, “I understand how intense it can feel to lose a dog.” The image of King, the feel of his working leash in Trey’s hand, all of it washed over him, and his throat tightened.

  They turned onto the street that ran beside the bay. Piers jutted out into the water at regular intervals, some with boats, some stacked with crab traps. The water lapped against the pilings, a soothing sound.

  “So how are you dealing with losing King?” she asked, her voice hesitant, as if she knew it was a sore subject. “Have you heard anything about how he’s doing?”

  He shook his head, looking out over the water, cut with a silvery, moonlit path. “When you make a transfer of a dog, it needs to be complete. You can’t go and visit or anything, because that would confuse the dog.”

  “Maybe, but it seems kind of harsh. I would think that being able to visit him would help both you and King.”

  He shrugged. “Department rules.”

  She reached out, put a hand through his arm and squeezed, laying her head down on his bicep for a fraction of a second. It was an innocent gesture, a shared sympathy, but her touch electrified him in all kinds of noninnocent ways.

  Maybe she sensed something, because she let go quickly and took a half step away, creating a little distance between them. “Do you think you’ll continue being a K-9 officer?” Her voice sounded tight, tense, and it seemed like she was trying to get the conversation onto neutral ground, to avoid the attraction that sparked between them.

  “I’d like to.” He reached back reflexively and rubbed his spine. It was definitely starting to
hurt from walking. “It’s a competitive process to become a K-9 officer, so it seems like a waste to let it go. But if my back doesn’t get better, then I can’t do it anymore. Can’t do active police work anymore.”

  “What went wrong?” The question was soft, hesitant. “I mean, if you don’t mind talking about it. I know it’s none of my business.”

  Should he tell her? She seemed really sympathetic, not judgmental, but he hated looking like a fool in front of her.

  It was better she knew, though. He’d let his wife glorify him in the early days and it had backfired. “A routine door-to-door turned up a meth lab,” he said. “I should have stepped away and called for backup, but I...didn’t. I went in.”

  “Why?” She glanced over at him but kept walking, which made it easier to talk.

  “Heard a baby crying and I lost my head and went in alone. There were three guys inside, couple of teenagers and an older dude, all big and all high. They jumped me.”

  “What happened to the baby?” she asked softly.

  “We saved the baby, but the perps got away. I put my fellow officers at risk coming in to pull me and the baby out, because the place was ready to blow.” As he spoke, he remembered the pain from when two of the meth-crazed perps had thrown him down the stairs into the basement. More than that, though, he remembered his terror for the baby’s safety that had made him crawl his way up the stairs even after he’d called for backup. He’d done even more harm to his spine that way, and had reached the wailing infant at the same time the other officers did.

  “Sounds like you did the best you could,” she said.

  “Not good enough.” That was why he couldn’t trust himself or his impulses anymore.

  She didn’t press, didn’t argue with him. Just gave his arm a quick squeeze and then tilted her head back a little and sniffed appreciatively. He did, too, then, and inhaled the sweet fragrance of some night-blooming flower.

  By the time they reached the park, he couldn’t hide the fact that he was limping, and she suggested they stop and sit down on a bench. He was grateful for that, and so, apparently, was Ziggy, because he flopped down on the grass in front of them and started chewing on a stick.