“You?” she teased, grinning. “I was going to follow Lem.”
Elias’s smile faded and he looked around the crowd, squinting. “Lem shouldn’t be allowed to participate,” he announced. “For the sake of fairness.”
It turned out that he needn’t have worried, anyhow, for by the time they reached the rope that had been tabbed and measured for the pulling contest in a sandpit that had been built into the cradle of an old frigate sail, which was to be their arena, Lem was nowhere to be found.
“He’s painting faces,” Libba said with a shrug. “I told him not to work today, but he never listens.”
“Face paint, you say?” Rhys exclaimed. “Where?”
“After,” Errol told him. “Are we all together, or split?”
“Split!” Monica and Ruby both agreed.
Miss Boswell agreed to shepherd the pig during the proceedings.
“Typical,” Rhys griped at her.
“A good illusionist values her hands,” she replied sweetly. “I don’t expect you to know much about that.”
“All right, I don’t want Rhys on my team anymore,” Malcolm said with a sigh as he watched the other man turn various shades of puce as he failed to pluck a good retort from the sea air.
“Too late, Lennox,” Elias gloated. “Take up your rope.”
Hattie stood behind her husband, both because she knew she was mostly here for the spectacle of it and because this was the better vantage to observe his efforts. They had Monica, Mr. Harcourt, and Errol, while the other side had Libba, Malcolm, Rhys, Ruby, and the town vicar, who had wandered past while deliberations had been made and had volunteered to even their numbers.
The whistle blew and the pulling began in earnest.
Hattie dug her heels into the sand, her shoulders locking and arms aching. She cried out in effort, her feet pawing into the ground as she pulled and pulled and pulled.
The problem, of course, was that the others were doing the same thing.
“Heave!” Elias shouted.
But it was no use.
Perhaps it was because the vicar had God on his side, but it was only a moment later that they all went flying forward, directly into the sand, opposite a cheer of victory from the others.
At least, Hattie thought as she blinked away the daze of defeat,I landed on Elias.
That was a nice consolation, even if he was vexed by the matter.
“We’ll win a game eventually,” he assured her.
“We already have,” she told him, using the opportunity to stroke her hands along his chest before he tutted at her and pulled her to her feet.
She shook out her skirt, giggling at all the golden grit that fell out of it in the process and allowing Elias to paw at her front to get the clumps of it away, so long as she was allowed to return the favor.
She sighed and stretched her aching arms over her head, bending one leg back and then the other.
“Shall we walk?” she asked. “Before you demand a rematch?”
“Fine,” he grumbled, offering her his arm even so.
This time, she took him to a booth that she knew she could win. The riddles master had changed since her youth, and so she had not yet been banned from his stall. She would be, of course. It was only a matter of time. But until then, she could enjoy a feeling of victory this summer.
“If you feed me, I grow,” the man said with a wiggle of his white brows. “If you quench me, I die.”
“Fire,” she said.
