“Ooooohh-weeee,” Sunny sings, providing a grim reminder that she’s still here. She raises her arms over her head and snaps a rhythm with her fingers that makes her hips move. “Cappy, baby.” She bumps a hip into Cap, who—dances?What the hell does the muggy air in this place do to people? “We got our work cut out for us with this honey child, don’t we?”
Cap uses his cane to steady himself while he moves to the Sunny-induced beat. “Don’t I know it.”
“I’m forty-two,” I tell her, pulling my shoulders back. “I amnotahoney child.”
She stops dancing and purses her lips. I do not step away. On the contrary, rage from lack of money and these idiots playing with my emotions wills me to jut my chin out and take a step forward. Whatever this woman is trying to do—absolutely not. Not today. Not anymore.
She laughs—loud—and claps her hands together—louder.
“She does have some spunk in her after all, huh, Cappy?”
Cappychuckles. “That’s my girl.”
Nash shakes his head with a slight laugh and drops into the passenger seat of the car.
I hate every single one of them.
At Nash’s house, Sunny offers to drive Cap back to the marina.
“See you soon, bossman,” she says to Nash. “Be warned, it’s going to be a wild night.”
Wild night?
“Looking forward to it,” he says.
What?
Sunny flashes a challenging smile my way, then drives away.
“I have to run out for a bit,” Nash says to me. “You sure I can’t convince you to stay?”
“Run out?” I don’t like how possessive I sound.
“Run out,” he repeats with raised brows. “I do that sometimes.” In my silence: “You want to know where I’m going?”
Yes.
“I couldn’t care less where you spend your time. Or nights.”
“Kinda sounds like you do.” He twirls his keys around his middle finger, eyes not leaving mine. “Just like it kinda sounded earlier that you like that ring stuck to your finger.”
The way this man can make my moods and feelings flip like a switch could sell tickets at a circus sideshow. “I’ll get it off.”
He hums, glancing up and down the street before settling his gaze back on me. In the streetlight, in the silence, he looks so damn good.
Good enough I don’t want him to go do whatever he’s about to go do with a woman I wish didn’t exist.
Good enough it makes me homesick for a life I only ever had a taste of.
Those thoughts alone are enough to let me know I need to get out of here and dump a bucket of ice on my head.
“Night, Nash.”
He wordlessly watches me fumble to get my key in the ignition, not budging from his position on the street as he shrinks in my rearview mirror.
I circle his neighborhood for fifteen minutes just to be sure he’s gone, then park at the same vacant lot as last night and wheel my suitcase the two blocks back to his house. I barely glance at the empty driveway.
Jonathan hasn’t called—he has his kids tonight—but even if he had, I don’t want to talk to him. I’m frustrated.
