Dash loaded everything into the SUV and then we were off to the marina.
I actually hadn’t realized he kept a boat docked, but I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me.I still knew frustratingly little about Dash on a personal front.I’d never been to his house or seen it, though he had invited me once.I’d chickened out because gossip travels faster than oxygen on Grimm Island, and I knew I’d be labeled as a fallen woman before I pulled into his driveway.But I’d not received any other invitations, and I hadn’t even heard rumors about where his house was.It was another one of those “best-kept secrets” Dash liked to keep close to the vest.
He parked the Tahoe in the gravel lot, that plain unmarked workhorse that smelled like coffee and the inside of a man’s whole ordinary life, and led me down the long dock with Chowder at our feet.He used his key card like all the owners had to get down to the docks.This surprised me.I knew renting space here wasn’t cheap.
I knew the name on the transom before I let myself know it.Hinckley.
Patrick’s people had said that word the way other people said Cartier, with a little hush of longing tucked into it, the way you talk about a thing you’ve decided to want for the rest of your life and never quite reach.I’d filed things away about the wealthy long before I’d married Patrick and become one of them.And here was a perfect example, painted in gold leaf across the stern of a sailboat that Dash Beckett was untying like he owned it.Which, apparently, he did.
I don’t know the first thing about sailing.But I know what loved things look like, because I keep a house full of them.The teak had been varnished to a shine.The brightwork was bronze gone soft and golden, polished by hand and recently.There wasn’t a speck of salt haze anywhere she’d show it.Somebody had spent time and money on this boat, and the two things together made something prick in the back of my mind that I chose not to pay attention to.
It was not the boat I’d have pictured for a man who carried a badge and drank gas-station coffee on purpose.
“You’re staring,” Dash said, not looking up from the line in his hands.
Because a thousand things were rolling through my mind, the least of all being that I really didn’t know the first thing about him.It was a disheartening realization for a woman whose bodily responses were moving much faster than her brain.
“I’m admiring.”I stepped down where he pointed and the boat took my weight and barely moved.“There’s a difference.”
He cast us off and took us out, and somewhere past the harbor mouth he put up the sails, and he did all of it without seeming to think about a single part of it.
His hands moved on the lines while Chowder and I got settled.He read the wind off the water with a glance, and he leaned us over into it until the rail kissed the green and Chowder slid six undignified inches across the cockpit.Dash steadied us with one bare forearm and never broke off what he was saying.
A man does not learn to handle a boat like that on a sheriff’s salary.He does not learn it in a season, either.That kind of ease comes from someone who’d been sailing for years, and for half a second the floor of my whole pleasant afternoon tilted the way the deck just had.
There was a knot in my stomach, and I wanted to ask him questions, but at that moment he laughed at Chowder, looking ridiculous in his life vest and sun hat.It was a laugh filled with freedom and ease, and I realized his persona as sheriff didn’t give him the opportunity to do that often.He always had to be on.
I stifled my questions.And then I forgot to think altogether when he unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, so his muscled torso was exposed to the sun.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?”he asked.
“Uh-huh,” I said, trying not to stare.“Real good.”
“You need sunscreen?”he asked.
“No, I’m good.I don’t burn.”
I took my shoes and shorts off, and made myself comfortable on the cushioned lounger on the aft deck, and Chowder found his spot under the shady awning.
We ran out into the wide green water where the marsh opened up on both sides and the heat finally let go of its grip.
He took us toward Charleston harbor and the downtown skyline, and then when we looped back we headed toward Mount Pleasant and anchored in an area where we could see the dolphins playing and diving around the boat.
“Are you thinking of Henry Wainwright?”he asked once he’d taken the lounger next to mine.
In reality, I was thinking about him.About the secrets he was keeping.And why he ever bothered to wear a shirt at all.I was a conflicted mess.
“Yes,” I said, because the lie was easier.
He let me have it.He didn’t push, and after a while the dolphins drifted off to wherever dolphins go, and the sun started its long slide toward the marsh grass, and Dash hauled the anchor and took us in toward Shem Creek.
There was a place there built right out over the water on weathered pilings, low and unfussy, that people came in from all over to eat at because the food was so good.He nosed the Hinckley up to the restaurant dock easy as parking a grocery cart, looped a line, and held out his hand.
“They’ll feed Chowder too,” he said, reading my face before I’d opened my mouth.“Half the tables out back have a water bowl under them.”
I unhooked Chowder’s life vest and removed his sun hat, and I put him on the leash, much to his consternation.And then Dash picked him up as we hauled ourselves up to the dock.We walked up a deck strung with bare bulbs that lit the way to the restaurant, and they sat us at a table on the rail with the creek sliding by underneath.
A waitress with a great tan and a sun visor brought Chowder a bowl of water without being asked and called him handsome, which perked him up considerably.He drank, turned circles until he found the right spot, and collapsed at my feet.
