“Seriously, Seb,” I said. “Where the hell are you taking me?”
“I barely know myself,” he said, taking a turn toward the harbor. And that’s when I saw a sign that identified our destination:charlestown marina.“When I tell you that I made a large deposit on something, sight unseen a month ago, I feel like you’re going to get mad and yell at me.”
Uh-oh. “Sight unseen... ?”
“But,” he argued, flicking a sheepish look in my direction. “I think it all turned out okay, so maybe you’ll fall in love with it like me and Punkin did.”
“You’re making me nervous.”
“I’m making myself nervous,” he muttered under his breath aswe drove through a small parking lot that bordered some of the slips in the marina. “Oh shit, this is us.” He whipped the Bronco into a parking space and shut off the engine. Punkin got excited.
“Seb... ?”
“Just come see it before you say no. Please?”
I had no idea what I saying yes or no to until I climbed out of the Bronco and watched Seb jog across a narrow strip of grass that separated the docks from the parking lot. He stepped onto the dock and stood in front of a white-and-brown trawler—one that was clearly being used as a houseboat.
I stopped in front of him, head cocked. “What am I looking at?”
“Madame, you are looking at a custom-built houseboat—a real, working boat, not just a floating barge. It’s seaworthy. Slow, but seaworthy.”
“Um... ? Huh?”
He stepped onto the boat’s main deck from where it was moored to the dock. “A lot of houseboats aren’t real, working boats. The guy who built it is totally legit. He spent like three hundred thousand renovating an old fishing trawler into this. Let me show you...”
Seb offered me his hand and tugged me onto the boat with him. Punkin jumped on as if she’d done it a thousand times. The trawler had some nice seating on the main deck, a windowed wheelhouse on a small level above, behind which was a second covered seating area under a canvas Bimini top.
“Look!” he said. “You get inside it proper through here,” he said, inviting me inside to a cozy cabin with seating, a TV, and a two-person dining table. “And through here, there’s a sweet galley. That means kitchen, Paige.”
I knew what a ship’s galley was, but he was so excited, I let itgo. This galley was super tiny and you had to step down to get to it. But I was surprised how nice it was. Nicer than the kitchen in the cottage.
We headed through it, into a narrow hallway with storage and a couple of doorways.
“Main bedroom is here,” he said, showing me. “Queen-sized bed, baby! Bigger than the cottage! Lots of little nooks for storage. And the bathroom isn’t ridiculously small—look. Fancy shower. Oh, and there’s a tiny room back here with two extra fold-down sleeping berths and a little desk. See... ?”
“Seb,” I said, trying to get a word in edgewise as he bounced around the boat. “What is all this?”
He stopped in the open doorway that separated the galley from a short flight of stairs leading to the main deck and spread his arms wide, waggling his blond eyebrows. “ThisisQueen Anne’s Revenge.”
I tilted my head. “Blackbeard’s ship?”
“Exactly!” he said, excited. “Technically, it’s justQueenAnn’sRevenge, without the ‘E,’ because the owner’s wife is named Ann. But come on! When I saw the name, I knew it was meant to be.”
I put a hand on my chest. “Seb. You just said this was a custom three-hundred-thousand-dollar boat. You don’t have that kind of money.”
“Nope. I rented it.”
“Oh.” Huh.
He was practically exhilarated. “The owner built it to cruise the Great Loop when it was just him and his wife—”
“I have no idea what that is.”
“Great Loop—you cruise through the Great Lakes, Mississippi, Gulf of Mexico, and up the East Coast into the New Yorkand Canadian canals. Takes six weeks if you’re speeding through it, but people sometimes take years to do it. Anyway, the guy who built this is a Looper—he’s done the Loop a couple times. But now he’s got kids and needs something bigger. So he’s renting this out while he builds a new one.”
“And you now have this one because... ?”
“I got it for us,” he explained. “You said to figure out a way for us to be together while you go to school.”
