“Thank you for keeping me safe.”
“Thatis my pleasure. You’re a good person. You deserve it.” She lifts a large brown paper sack with her free hand and gives it to me. “Eat up. Especially the vegetables. Good food, good fuel. You’re gonna need it.”
Heat creeps over my face. “Were you listening in?”
“There are certain things I never want to hear, and I avoid them at all costs.”
I’m initially relieved enough that I almost miss her implication. “Oh.Oh. Oh no, we weren’t?—”
“Not my business.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“Hotel. Relief shift is on its way. I’ll be back in the morning.” She looks past me. “Nice haircut. Suits you. Don’t fuck with Chuck, or he’ll fuck you right back.”
“I can call in my own security team,” Davis mutters.
“But you don’t want to, or you would’ve done it by now.” Giselle hands me a card. “Call this number if you need me. Day or night. Vacation or not. I’m ordained to perform weddings too, and I’ve been known to lose the paperwork. If you need someone like that.”
“Can I hug you?”
“No. But I appreciate the sentiment.”
She salutes us with the chicken leg as headlights flash on the driveway.
Davis tugs my arm, pulling me back into the trailer.
And for one brief moment in time, my brain fills in an alternate reality where I trust men and this specific man with his terrible haircut courtesy of me and a few rabid raccoons, this man with the story of his life tattooed on his body who wants to do more than just pull me to safety out of a sense of obligation.
Where there aren’t pirates and treasures and ex-boyfriends hunting for things that could hurt my adopted hometown and my friends.
Davis shuts the door as Peggy leaps onto the kitchen counter and meows at me.
“Yes, sweet thing, you get chicken too.”
I don’t want to eat.
I want?—
Well.
Once again, it doesn’t matter what I want, does it?
Especially when I know I shouldn’t want it at all.
23
Davis
The first timeI saw Sloane in Shipwreck was the week that Ellie was here for a friend’s destination wedding the summer after her car accident. I’d been called up for a Frogger emergency—no, Beck doesn’t know anything ever happened to his Frogger arcade game, and he’s welcome—and I was headed down Blackbeard Avenue, going to join Wyatt and Ellie and tell them I’d fixed what they’d broken, when I felt someone looking at me.
Not unusual.
But what was unusual was that I noticed.
I watched out of the corner of my eye and behind my sunglasses while a redheaded bombshell gaped at me like she wasn’t quite sure what she was seeing.
And that’s exactly how she’s staring at the papers laid out in front of her now after analyzing them for the last several hours since we ate dinner, looking at the printed pages of Thorny Rock’s diary as if she believes in the treasure and also agrees that the diary has clues.
