And Smitty and Annabelle were laughing.
He looked back at them. Smitty stood in the shallow water, Annabelle propped on her hip while the tide lapped at her calves and sprayed water up her thin, ragged skirt. He could see through it.
“Hank! Hank!” Theodore ran up the beach. He skidded to a stop in front of him. “Look!”
Hank looked in the kid’s outstretched hands. Bits of blue, green, and amber glass polished smooth and round by the force of the sea were stuck to his small palms with globs of wet sticky sand.
“You know what these are?”
“Pieces of colored glass.”
“Uh-huh. Miss Smith said that if you melt the sand on this beach and then let it cool, you know what you’d have?”
“What?”
“You would have glass.”
Hank watched Smitty laughing at Annabelle. “She said that, did she?”
“Uh-huh.”
A wave splashed on her, and she raised the squealing little girl high in the air. From this distance Hank could see those incredible legs of Smitty’s limned by sunlight through the wet, flimsy cotton of her dress. With her arms raised, her whole figure from her breasts down stood in silhouette.
He forgot to breathe. Hell, he couldn’t breathe.
Spilling down her back was a thick wad of tangled blond hair, damp and curling and so damn female that even for a wagon load of gold he wouldn’t have pulled his gaze away.
“And look at this.”
“Yeah, kid.” Hank watched her. If he moved just a little closer and to the left, he could get a better view.
Theodore tugged on the tail of his shirt. “You’re not paying attention.”
Hank grunted, his gaze stuck on Smitty.
The kid tugged again. “Hank?”
Nothing.
“Hank.” Theodore’s voice had grown smaller. And in that sound Hank heard something he hadn’t thought about in too many years to count. The pain of being ignored. He knew what it was like to be treated as if he didn’t exist.
He glanced down. Theodore looked back at him with such awe and expectancy that Hank felt a small twinge of that guilt he had told himself he never experienced.
Theodore quickly dumped the bits of glass in his pants’ pocket and pulled out something else. He raised his sandy hands higher. “See?”
He looked at the kid’s hands. Cupped inside them was a small but perfect sand dollar.
Hank stared at it and laughed to himself. It hadn’t taken a wagon load of gold to rip his gaze away from the most incredibly carnal sight he’d seen in years.
It had taken one small white sand dollar.
Only a sucker could be had that cheap.
He shook his head. His life story.
* * *
The salvaged trunksturned out to be more than a godsend. To Margaret, they were as welcome as buried treasure. And something that was just as handy was Hank’s skill at picking locks, although she didn’t tell him so. She was busy going through one of the two trunks he’d unlocked.
