Sunset Siesta Fishing Charters.
“Fishing charters?” I breathed, pressing my nose closer to the grimy windowpane.
So that’s what he did. If he was driving a work truck, he was likely the captain. It explained the aura of reserved competence, the way he seemed so at home in the elements. It also made my idiotic blunder with the sprinkler even more pathetically amateurish. He probably spent his days wrangling actual sea monsters and recalcitrant, nauseated tourists, dealing with all sorts of unpredictable, dangerous situations. And on his day off, he discovered me attempting to drown his meticulously tended garden with the finesse of a bewildered, landlocked walrus.
But also… a captain.
There was something undeniably romantic about that, wasn’t there? The man of the sea, at the lonely helm of his ship, wrestling with the elements, bringing home the bounty of the deep…
Focus, Iris!I admonished myself sternly.Apology! Not composing seafaring fantasies about your aggravated neighbor.
A fresh wave of determination, admittedly shaky around the edges, surged through me. Austin was a fishing captain. He dealt with unpredictable things all the time. Surely, he could handle one profoundly apologetic neighbor armed with a peace offering of homemade chocolate chip cookies.
I grabbed the cookie basket from the counter, its ribbon still jauntily tied, and gave myself a stern nod in the dusty hall mirror. My hair was still a bit wild, but my eyes held anew, steely resolve—or possibly just terror masquerading as resolve.
“Okay, Captain Coleridge,” I said to my reflection, squaring my shoulders. “Prepare to be apologized to. Vigorously.”
My stomach did a nervous flip-flop, but I ignored it. I marched out the back door of Heron House. This was not the time to wrestle with the possessed front door. The basket was clutched in my hand like a shield or, perhaps, a fragile, crumbly olive branch. I set off purposefully, my sensible canvas sneakers making determined crunching sounds on the shell path, heading directly toward Austin Coleridge’s front door for the second, and hopefully final, time today.
Chapter Five
AUSTIN
I stowedmy gear near the cleaning station I’d built in the kitchen. My rods leaned in the corner, the black snapper still encased in ice inside the cooler. It could wait. After a long day, I was ready for a cold beer.
Then a sharp, determined knock echoed from the front door, and my head snapped up. Who the hell was that? My siblings usually texted or, in Braden’s case, just materialized on the porch with a couple of beers.
“Shit.” If it was some door-to-door salesman trying to peddle solar panels or salvation, they were about to have a very short conversation.
I strode to the door, my expression anything but welcoming, and pulled it open. And stared.
Holloway.
Son of a bitch. She stood on my porch, clutching a wicker basket covered with a brightly colored cloth napkin. Her blonde hair, the shade of sun-bleached driftwood, was pulled back in a loose, messy ponytail, but rebelliousstrands had escaped to frame a face scrubbed clean of makeup. It made her look younger, softer. And her wide blue eyes, the color of a clear summer sky over the flats, were fixed on me with an expression of acute, almost painful, nervousness. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other like a sandpiper testing the tide.
I braced myself. What now? A petition to have my hibiscus formally declared a public nuisance? Then I registered the anxiety radiating off her. The way her knuckles were white where she gripped the basket handle, the slight tremor in her hands. It was a marked contrast to the determined, if spectacularly disastrous, amateur plumber I’d encountered yesterday. This version looked vulnerable.
And it threw me completely off balance.
An uncomfortable feeling squirmed in my gut. Not guilt. Definitely not guilt. More like acute social discomfort.
“Holloway,” I muttered, the single word sounding more like a reluctant acknowledgment of an unavoidable natural phenomenon than a greeting.
Her eyes widened further, if that was possible. “Mr. Coleridge. Austin.” Her voice was a little shaky, a little breathless. “Um. Hi. Can I… I mean, I wanted to…”
She gestured awkwardly with the basket, as if it held the secrets of the universe. The faint, sweet, unmistakable scent of baked goods wafted from beneath the napkin. Chocolate chip, if I wasn’t mistaken.
Cookies? She baked cookies? After yesterday? I’d expected a complaint, an argument, maybe even a demand for me to fix the damn sprinkler she broke. This was disarming. And, as much as I didn’t want to admit it, thoughtful. She’d likely spent hours on this, psyching herself up for another encounter with the neighborhood monster.
Me.
“I am so, so incredibly sorry about yesterday,” she rushed out, the words tumbling over each other. “About your hibiscus. And your day off. It was completely my fault. I was an absolute idiot with the sprinkler, and I just wanted to… well, I baked these.” She thrust the basket forward, a hopeful, desperate offering. “As an apology.”
I stared at the basket, then at her earnest, anxious face. My mind, usually so quick to retreat into grumpy solitude, seemed to have short-circuited.
“Right. Cookies.” The words sounded flat, even to my ears. I cleared my throat. “Well, thank you. Uh, come in.”
The invitation was out before I could stop it.
