So that’s why when Wednesday night rolled around, I found myself at the Mermaid Café.
Not because of anything Jenna had said, of course. Only because I had nothing else to do at that particular moment, since she’d insisted—insisted—on teaching the Wednesday-night yoga class for me. For a month.
The fact that I’d flat-ironed my hair and paired a new sundress with my sexiest bra had nothing to do with anything she’d said, either.
Or so I told myself.
I heard not the faintest hint of ukulele music when I walked in . . . but I saw plenty of kids running around, giant grins on their faces, putting their sticky hands all over everything.
And I saw tons of the instruments lying around on the Mermaid’s many teal-colored Formica tables. A dockside diner (though by the plethora of mermaid Barbies hanging from the ceiling, many tourists mistook it for a dive bar and steered clear, which was fine by me), the Mermaid catered to a diverse clientele. I recognized most of the ones in attendance for ukulele night . . .
Including Ryan Martinez, who was looking sizzling hot in a white guayabera of paper-thin linen, through which I could see the faintest hint of crisply curling dark chest hair.
What was I doing here? I was dead meat.
I was listening to the warning bells going off in my head and turning on my heel to leave when I heard someone call out my name.
“Roberta!”
Crap. He’d spotted me.
I spun back around, trying to smile but feeling uncomfortable, not only because I’d spotted a number of my clients in the crowd, all of whom were watching my interaction with Ryan with intense interest, but also because I suspected his partner, Chrissie, might be there somewhere (he’d said they went almost everywhere together).
The problem was, I couldn’t figure out which one she could be. None of the women I saw appeared to be of the ubertall skinny blonde super cop variety. Most looked like ordinary moms, dressed for the hot weather in blousy tops and yoga pants, except for Bree, the pretty but sad-eyed little waitress who took my afternoon spin class every Tuesday and Thursday.
“Oh, hey,” I said, extending my right hand toward Ryan. “How’s it going? How funny to run into you like this—”
He looked down at my hand like it was something foreign. “What’s this?” he asked, and knocked my hand away with one of his big bear paws. “I thought we were friends. Friends don’t shake hands. Friends hug.”
And before I knew it, I was swept up into an embrace that was at once as careful not to crush me as it was emphatic that we were, indeed, friends. Friends? I had not come here to be friends. But that’s apparently what we were now.
When he thrust me away from him again, he said, with total sincerity, “You saved me.”
I blinked at him. “I what?”
“You saved me. You really did. Hey, guys.” He swung me around by my shoulders to face a group of young men, each as muscular as he was. “This is that trainer I was telling you about, Roberta.”
The guys all lowered their bottles of beer and looked at me with a degree of interest I decided to find flattering. My only other choice was to be completely freaked out by it, and I don’t freak out.
“Oh, cool,” one of them said. Another said, “Hi, Roberta.”
“Um,” I said. “Hi. But I really didn’t do anything—”
“Are you kidding?” Ryan was flabbergasted. And still holding my shoulders with one of those heart-meltingly masculine arms. “You have no idea how much better I’ve felt since your class. All the guys have seen a difference in me. Even Sheriff Hartwell noticed.”
“It’s true,” one of his friends said. “He hasn’t been nearly as much of an asshole.”
“He means Martinez, not Hartwell. Hartwell’s always an asshole,” another one of them joked.
“I really didn’t do anything,” I repeated, taken aback. “Ryan’s the one who did all the work.”
“Are you kidding?” Ryan said again, spinning me back toward him. “You taught me to breathe.”
I was about to repeat for a third time that this wasn’t true when I remembered that this was exactly what I’d assured him he’d learn in the class—how to lower his stress, and how to breathe. It was the unstated goal of bridal boot camp, though most people took it to lose weight.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s great. Maybe I’ll see you there next week.”
“Damned right you will,” Ryan said. “We’re all going to be there. If that hurricane doesn’t head in this direction.” There was a hurricane brewing in the Atlantic that forecasters were giving a strong chance of heading toward Florida. “Won’t we, guys?”
The five guys in front of me nodded in unison, grinning. I was sure they were kidding . . . until I looked into their faces, and then I was sure they were not. They seemed as sincere as Ryan.
“Long as I don’t have to wear a wedding veil,” the tallest one said. He appeared to be the jokester of the group.
“You don’t,” I assured him. “Although can I just say you’d all look really good in white?”
This brought a round of good-natured laughter from the deputies. I joined in . . . until I felt something cold and wet between my thighs. Then I jumped about a mile high, pushing the cold wet thing away and encountering fur and slobber with my fingers.
“Chrissie!” Ryan yelled. Looking down, I saw a beautiful, bright-eyed German shepherd panting up at me, her tongue lolling comically from one side of her mouth.
“Sorry,” Ryan said, tugging on his partner’s bright red leather collar. “That’s how Chrissie says hello.”
“It means she likes you,” his jokey fellow deputy added with a beer-goggled smirk.
I tried to laugh along with them, but mostly all I could do was try to wrap my mind around the fact that Chrissie, Ryan’s “partner,” was not an ubertall skinny blonde female super cop—or even a human being.
“Your partner is a dog?” I heard myself blurt.
“Yeah. I thought I told you. We’ve been together two years now. She’s a great dog. The best, really.”
“I can see that,” I said, numbly, as I looked down into Chrissie’s bright, laughing brown eyes.
“Can I get you something?” Ryan asked. “A beer?”
“Uh . . .” My mind was moving at a snail’s pace. Chrissie was a dog. A great big slobbery dog.
“Rob?” Bree, the sad-eyed waitress, was standing behind the bar, looking at me questioningly. “Ryan asked if he could get you a drink. You want your usual?”
I could only nod, still trying to recover from my shock. Thanks to my parents, I generally avoid alcohol, so my “usual” is iced tea.
“Wait,” I said to Ryan, as Bree slid a cool, tall glass into my hand. “Does this mean that you pulled your Taser on—?”
Jokester looked delighted. “He didn’t tell her the whole story.” He elbowed the guy next to him. “She hasn’t heard the whole story!”
“Frickin’ great,” said the guy next to him, grinning ear to ear. “We get to hear the story again!”
Ryan glared at them sourly, but good-naturedly. To me, he said, “See what I have to put up with? But, yeah, so I left Chrissie in the squad car for a minute while I ran inside the Circle K to grab a cup of coffee—”
“Circle K!” Jokester cried. “That’s where Rookie gets his coffee! Not even Island Coffee Queen!”
Ryan said, “Ignore these clowns. And I’m not a rookie. Well, I am, but only because I was the last guy hired, and that was three years ago, so to them that makes me a rookie. Anyway, I was on night shift, and Circle K was the only place open to get coffee. Obviously I left the windows in my ride up, but the engine was running with the air on so my girl would be comfortable. But the new cars we’ve been assigned by the county are all hybrids, so you can’t hear that the engine’s running. So some guy comes along who sees Chrissie inside and is concerned I’ve left my dog in a hot vehicle, and being an animal lover, he tries to open the doors to let her out—”
“And then Rookie here comes out and almost tases him!” Jokester cried, delighted with the story. “You shoulda seen Hartwell’s face when he saw the security footage! I thought he was gonna have a stroke.”
I glanced at Ryan, who didn’t look nearly as amused as his fellow coworkers. The memory of the incident was still too raw.
He’d dropped his arm from my shoulders, so I reached out to touch his fingers.
“You thought the guy was trying to break into your car to hurt Chrissie, didn’t you?” I asked, softly.
Ryan nodded. “It never—not even for a moment—occurred to me that he might be trying to help her.”
I squeezed his hand. “I bet you meet a lot of jerks in your line of work.”
“I do,” he said, squeezing back. “But thanks to your class, I’m starting to remember that I meet a lot more really great people who only want to help.”
His hazel-eyed gaze on mine was so intense that for a second or two, I forgot we were standing inside a dockside diner decorated with mermaid Barbie dolls, surrounded by other people. It felt as if it were just the two of us . . . and Chrissie, who’d thrust her cold wet nose between our hands, her hot tongue on our fingers, her tail thumping against one of my bare thighs.
But just as I was mustering up the courage to ask if he maybe wanted to skip the class for the night and go to my place, Bree came bounding up to the microphone on the café’s mini-stage.
“Okay, players, are we ready to get this show on the road?” she asked.
Ryan tore his gaze—and hand—from mine.
“Damn,” he said. “I’m up. Excuse me a minute, okay?”
Then he grabbed a ukulele and rushed onto the stage, taking the mic from Bree.
“Hey, kids,” he said, with a sweetly impish smile. “What’s it time for?”
The reply from the children in the audience was as shrill as it was enthusiastic: “It’s ukulele time!”
I felt an almost overwhelming urge to flee. I had, after all, fulfilled my part of the bargain I’d made with Jen. I’d showed up, hadn’t I? Surely I didn’t have to stay for the actual ukulele playing. I honestly had better things to do. My Netflix queue was full of rom-coms I’d been wanting to watch. There was a new recipe for cauliflower crust pizza Jenna had sent me that I’d been dying to try.
And if this hurricane Ryan had mentioned was actually heading in our direction, I needed to get some laundry done. A girl couldn’t evacuate without clean underwear.
But just as I was slinking for the exit, Ryan and the kids broke into the song he said they’d been practicing all month.
I froze.
The song was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
Really? It had to be that song. Of all songs.
Never mind that it’s way overplayed, and has basically been a cliché on the ukulele circuit ever since that Hawaiian guy sang it and everyone went wild for it, and then the Hawaiian guy died, and the song became even more popular.
Never mind that the lyrics are complete lies, and have led perfectly innocent people—such as myself, for instance, way back when I was an impressionable teenager—to believe that there’s a better world out there, only to have us poor saps find out—the hard way—that this information is incorrect: there is no place over the rainbow. Rainbows are actually optical illusions created by raindrops being hit by sunlight at just the right angle. You can’t travel to an optical illusion.
And even if you tried to find a place you felt might approximate one where happy little bluebirds might fly around all the time—like Little Bridge Island, for instance—and you saved all your money and moved there, you might be surprised to find out that it has its fair share of problems and heartache, too.
But that’s not even the worst part. No, the worst, most irritating thing of all, is that the song always reminds me of people like my grandmother, who, when I asked her where rainbows come from, informed me that each one is a promise from God that He’ll never again destroy the Earth by a devastating flood.
But even as a kid, I knew this was total bull, since floods regularly destroyed whole communities all over the world all the time. Even Little Bridge Island gets destroyed—well, not entirely, but sometimes devastatingly—by flooding almost every hurricane season.
But here were these sweet, childish voices—along with Ryan’s surprisingly in-tune mellow baritone—assuring me that somewhere, over the rainbow, I was going to find happiness—which I knew was a bold-faced lie.
Yet somehow their singing, along with the plinking notes of their really, really not very good ukulele playing, was making me feel—
Well, like I believed it. I did! For the first time since I was teenager, as I stood in that tacky dockside diner, watching that full-grown, handsome cop play that dumb, tiny instrument, surrounded by so many kids, with his beautiful dog sitting at his feet, gazing up at him worshipfully, I found myself not only actually liking “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” but actually believing that there might be something to those stupid, overhyped, clichéd words.
And getting choked up about it. As I looked around, I could see that no else in the café felt the same way. Everyone else was smiling and humming along—even Bree, whose eyes, for once, didn’t look sad at all.
So why was I the only one getting emotional (which I never do, except, as Jenna had mentioned, at weddings or the occasional really good made-for-TV romantic comedy)? My nose was suddenly stuffy, and my eyes were beginning to sting.
What was happening to me? Was I going to cry?
No. Oh, hell no. It wasn’t possible. Not here. Not now, in my sexiest bra, in front of Ryan.
I had to get out of there. I had to get out of there right now, before any of my clients—and especially Ryan—noticed.
So I threw a few bucks onto the counter for Bree, then hurtled my way out of the diner to safety.
Outside, dusk was falling, the sun sinking slowly into the Gulf, turning the puffy clouds that hung over the glassy sea pink and purple and smoky gray. As usual, there was a crowd gathered to appreciate the sunset, as there was every night, both on the dock and in boats gliding on the water’s surface before it.
I hurried as far as I could get from them—and the sound of that infernal song—until I found myself way out on the farthest point of the pier, beside a diesel gas pump where boats low on fuel came for refills. It wasn’t the most romantic place to be—the smell of diesel was almost as strong as the fragrance of the sea—but I was glad. I wasn’t there for romance. I was there to get my head together. I just needed to be alone for a few minutes to figure out what was wrong with me.
And I was alone, except for a few three-foot tarpons rolling around in the clear water beneath my feet, looking for their evening meal, their shiny silver gills flashing in the evening light.
What was wrong with me? I wondered as I sat down on the edge of the dock, the wood worn smooth from the sun and surf and seagull crap. How could a song—and a dumb dog—have turned me so inside out? How could a guy have done this, after all the careful armor I’d built around my heart?
Because a part of me, deep down inside, knew it hadn’t been “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” or Chrissie that had made me feel so emotional.
It had been Ryan Martinez.
Who knows how long I would have sat out there by myself if it hadn’t been for the fact that there was no cell phone service whatsoever, so I couldn’t even text Jenna to tell her what a weird night I was having, and how mad I was at her, and how I wanted my Wednesday yoga nights back.
I was getting up to go when I heard footsteps approaching. Looking up, I saw Ryan coming toward me, the wind catching at his unruly dark curls and the edges of his guayabera. Chrissie trotted obediently at his heels, her tail wagging.
Crap.
