John wasn’t sure what the proper etiquette was anymore when it came to approaching attractive single women in whom he had a romantic interest, particularly at charity fundraisers. They had not covered this topic at the four-hour sexual harassment–awareness training program.
And the Red Cross Ball was still technically a work function, since he had not paid for his ticket himself—it had been comped, as his tickets were to most such functions.
So after his failed attempt at offering her a drink, he’d stayed assiduously away from the librarian, even though he’d been highly aware of her presence, especially during the cornhole tournament, where she’d made a very pretty—and enthusiastic—spectator.
It was gratifying to have anyone appreciate what a challenging and ultimately tricky game cornhole could be. Most people considered it a children’s game, or something to be played only at birthday parties or outside of bars. In Little Bridge, it was generally considered that the more intoxicated the participants, the better.
But if anyone really gave it a moment’s thought, the way Molly Montgomery obviously had, they could see how difficult a sport it was, and how much hand-eye coordination it required. John liked that Molly respected that, and also how closely she’d observed his technique.
But even that didn’t seem like enough of a reason to approach her at what was, technically, a work event . . . until she tripped in the sand in front of him and fell over. As a first responder, it was his responsibility—his duty, really—to go over to her, and make sure she wasn’t in need of first aid.
“Are you all right?” John asked, reaching down with a supportive hand.
“I’m fine.” Her small hand felt warm in his, vibrant and alive as a little yellow finch Katie had once found in the backyard, stunned from a tropical-storm-force wind.
It was only when Molly lifted her head and saw who it was who’d offered her help that her large, dark eyes flared even wider than usual, and she quickly slipped her hand from his, almost as startled as the finch had been.
“Oh,” she cried. “You!”
“Yes,” he said, still concerned. “It’s me. John. Are you hurt?”
“No.” Quickly brushing sand from her knees and strands of her fine dark hair from her damp cheeks, she said, in a shaky voice, “I just feel stupid.”
“You shouldn’t,” he said. “Everyone trips sometimes.”
“Oh, yes. I tripped,” she said. “That’s exactly what happened. So. Baby Aphrodite. That was so nice of you!”
“Well.” Obviously he hadn’t chosen to donate the money to Baby Aphrodite to be nice. He’d done it to get Molly to like him. He didn’t actually believe the kid was going to need the money. The grandparents would call him soon for the good news—it was a bit odd they hadn’t called already, but he’d never been to Alaska, who knew what their cell service was like—and reconcile with their daughter, and in no time, mother and daughter would be back in the Brightons’ mansion in New Canaan, Connecticut (he’d looked up the Brightons’ address on Google Earth—they had a four-car garage), enrolled in some fancy Mommy and Me class that cost more than his monthly mortgage payment, and living happily ever after.
And, of course, if Beckwith really was the father, John would get him—or his family—to pay up as well.
But he couldn’t let Molly Montgomery know that this was something he thought. He had a pretty strong feeling that somehow she wouldn’t approve of his having interfered in the girl’s affairs in this way.
“It seemed like the right thing to do,” he said, instead.
He hadn’t been the only one to hurry over to help the librarian. Patrick O’Brian, owner of Little Bridge’s Seam and Fabric Shoppe and the island’s most popular drag queen (who, John had to admit, was pretty damned entertaining), had also rushed over to make sure she was all right.
Upon seeing John already at her side, Patrick took a quick step back and said, “Miss Molly, I told you, you need to hydrate. In this heat, you have to drink one glass of water for every glass of alcohol.” He looked at the sheriff and rolled his eyes. “Mainlanders. Am I right? Maybe you should take her inside, Sheriff, and get her some water.”
John could not have agreed more. He slipped his fingers around one of Molly’s bare arms (how could her skin be so satiny?) and said, “Yes, that’s probably a good idea.”
“Oh,” Molly murmured weakly. “No, it’s fine. I’m all right—”
“You’re not all right, honey.” Meschelle Davies, whose articles in The Gazette rarely treated law enforcement fairly, gave the librarian a little push. “You go on with the sheriff. You look a little flushed.”
“Oh, well,” Molly said. “Okay, then, I guess.”
John swore he would never grouse about his treatment in one of Ms. Davies’s articles again.
The librarian allowed him to lead her along the beach path back to the hotel’s open-air dining room, with its tropical plantation décor and large, gently swinging ceiling fans. She held her high-heeled shoes and sparkling evening bag in her hands, and seemed much less chatty than at any other time he’d ever encountered her. She must, he told himself, truly be dehydrated. This happened often to those who were new to the Florida Keys. A combination of the heat and humidity, coupled with alcohol consumption, occasionally caused them to become ill. It was a very good thing he’d come along and rescued her.
Her silence, however, lasted only until they reached a booth inside the hotel restaurant and he guided her onto its soft black leather, then slid in beside her and ordered two large ice waters from a conscientious server. That’s when she lifted her face and asked, her dark eyes seemingly even larger than ever in the mysterious flame of the hurricane lamp on their tabletop, “Did you really mean what you said out there? You’re going to donate all that money you won to the baby?”
“Well, of course,” he said, surprised that she’d doubt him. “And to her mother, as well. I’d make a pretty sorry public officer if I said it in front of all those people and didn’t mean it.”
“It’s just . . .” She drew a circle in the condensation on the side of the water glass that had been placed in front of her. “I thought you were going to arrest her. The baby’s mother, I mean. You said the other day—”
John stirred uncomfortably in his seat, remembering their initial meeting, when he’d sat in that tiny chair beside her desk. “I know. And it’s still a criminal offense to abandon a newborn, unless it’s in a state-appointed safe haven. But my investigation so far has given me reason to believe that the mother of Baby Aphrodite was probably not the person who did the actual abandoning—”
“I knew it!” Molly leaned forward to wrap her ruby red lips around the paper straw inside her water glass. Damned if he couldn’t stop thinking about other things he’d like to see those red lips wrapped around. What was wrong with him? He was an elected official and here he was, with a member of the public—a librarian, no less!—and all he could think about was sex. “The leader of the Sunshine Kids, right? Dylan Dakota? Fingerprint analysis proved it?”
All thoughts of those red lips around any body part of his evaporated. John felt a not-unfamiliar spurt of irritation. Dylan Dakota? How on earth did she know about him? What was it with this woman? Librarian or not, had she been faking dehydration the entire time?
Because suddenly she looked not only perfectly alert, even cool, in what should have been a very romantic setting, but extremely curious, even feline. Dylan Dakota? How was he ever going to make love to this woman if all she ever wanted to talk about was his mortal enemy?
Not that he wanted to make love to her! Not at all. Because he was a professional and so was she and they were at a professional function and he was in uniform and he’d just rescued her (maybe) and he’d given up on romantic relationships because they never worked out.
Or had he?
But damn! Suddenly she did not seem at all flustered or faint. She seemed to be in perfect possession of her faculties.
“I mean, this Dylan Dakota person sounds like a very bad guy,” she said, in a deceptively innocent tone, after swallowing some more water.
Deceptively innocent to some people. But not to Sheriff John Hartwell.
“Are you even dehydrated?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” Molly said. “Why? Do I not seem dehydrated to you?”
“No.”
She shrugged, her smooth bare shoulders luminous in the candlelight. “I don’t think I am, either. But you know what I do think?”
This, he said to himself, is a very dangerous conversation. “What?”
“I think you’re an excellent cornhole player.”
John frowned. “Now you’re only sucking up to me, probably because you want to hear more inside information about the case, which I can assure you I am not going to give you.” She removed her lips from the straw to make a soft noise of indignant protest, which a part of him found incredibly sexy, but another part of him worried was only an act to gain more information. “Where did you even hear that stuff about Dylan Dakota? Wait, let me guess. Meschelle Davies.”
She had the grace to look affronted. “I’m sorry, but did you miss the fact that I am a librarian? I have access to a vast network of resources. Vast. But I feel that as the person who found Baby Aphrodite and saved her life, I have the right to know everything involving her case.”
“You do not,” he said irritably, aware that he felt irritable only because she looked extremely attractive in the candlelight, and was also morally, although not legally, correct, “You do not.”
“I do. How are your dance lessons going?”
“What?”
“Dance lessons. With Katie, your daughter?”
Belatedly, he remembered another demoralizing moment in their relationship, which so far seemed to consist of almost nothing but demoralizing moments.
“Not so great,” he said. “It turns out I only need to know a very specific dance for the performance. A very specific dance that goes to a very specific song by a very specific performer you might have heard of—Beyoncé?”
Molly’s red lips pressed inward, as if she was trying to keep herself from smiling. “I’ve heard of her. What very specific song of hers are you dancing to?”
“‘Single Ladies.’” He tried not to show how uncomfortable the dance made him, although he enjoyed the song. “I’d never heard of it.”
Molly’s lips curled into a smile. “You’re not exactly the target demographic. Do you want me to help you learn it?”
He was surprised. “You know the dance to ‘Single Ladies’?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t believe the things I’ve had people ask me to teach them in my capacity as a librarian. The ‘Single Ladies’ dance is the least of it. Come here.”
The next thing he knew, she’d slid from the booth and taken hold of both his hands. Then she was gently pulling him from his own seat and toward the center of the room. He let her, because the feel of her skin on his was so magical, and also because there was no one else in the room except a few servers, and they were paying no attention to the librarian teaching the bumble-footed sheriff to dance. They were bustling around, putting glassware away. All of the party guests were outside on the now night-darkened beach, drinking and laughing in the red-orange glow of the tiki torches.
“Stand up tall like this,” Molly commanded, and put her hands on his shoulders to straighten them. When she stood close to him, he could smell the fresh flowery shampoo she used on her shiny dark hair, and something else—something fruity. It took him a minute to recognize it. It was the key lime–coconut signature scent the Lazy Parrot inn housekeepers sprayed everywhere. It must have sunk deep into all of Molly Montgomery’s belongings by now.
He’d never smelled anything as intoxicating.
“Now put your feet about shoulders’ width apart,” she said, inserting her foot, still bare, between his feet and giving them both a dainty little kick until he widened his stance. “That’s it. Now put this hand on your hip—no, this hand—”
He did as she asked, looking down at her bent head, her narrow brows furrowed with concentration, and wondered how they ever could have argued when she was so adorable.
“Perfect. Now put your other hand in the air, like this—” She manipulated his left arm so it bent at the elbow. “Remember when you sang ‘I’m a Little Teapot’ with Katie? You two sang that together, right?”
“I did.” He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“Well, your arm should look a little like that.”
She stepped back to observe her handiwork, and John didn’t even care how ridiculous he might appear to whoever might happen to come strolling in from the beach. Randy Jamison or even Pete could walk by and laugh all they wanted. John had Molly Montgomery all to himself, and right now, he couldn’t think of anything he wanted more.
“Good,” she said, after giving him a critical once over. “That looks good. Though it might help if you could maybe . . . loosen up a little.”
“Loosen up?” He glanced down at himself. He felt plenty loose. “How do you mean?”
“Well, you just look kind of . . . tight. The whole point of this dance is to have fun, and you look like you’re on the way to the guillotine.”
He gave her a sarcastic look. “That’s just my face. I’m a cop. I have to be ever vigilant for would-be miscreants.”
“No.” She shook her head, still studying him critically. “It’s not your face. It’s your body language. You need to loosen up in here.” She stepped forward, her gaze on his face, but her hands in the air. “May I?”
“Um . . . sure.” What was she going to do with her hands?
He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised when she placed them on his hips. This was a dance lesson, after all.
“You need to loosen up here,” she said, pressing firmly on his hips, and then swaying her own in front of him to illustrate what she meant—while not releasing her hold. “Do you see what I mean? You’ve got to feel the music. If they were playing Beyoncé, I mean, and not this—”
What they were actually playing was jazz. Coltrane, to be exact. John liked Coltrane and listened to him quite a lot in his car on the streaming channel that Katie had set up for him. The combination of the Coltrane and Molly Montgomery’s hands on his hips, plus her own hips swaying so suggestively in such close proximity to his own, plus the sweet scent of her hair and coconutty smell of her clothes in this darkened room, with the ocean breeze blowing in from the beach, was doing something to him. Something he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Something he liked a lot.
Still, he wasn’t sure what he should do about it. He hadn’t dated in so long. And this was the librarian. Up until this very moment, he’d been fairly sure she hated him.
But would a woman who hated a man be holding him by the hips and encouraging him to loosen up while also smiling up at him with such enticingly red lips?
He didn’t think so.
Still, his heart pounding as nervously as it had the time he’d asked his first-ever girlfriend—Lori MacNamara, seventh grade—to couples skate at the long-since-demolished Little Bridge Skateland, he lowered both hands to her hips.
“Molly,” he said, in a voice that had gone suddenly hoarse.
Her body instantly stilled, and she brought her questioning gaze up to his. Those red lips were still smiling, invitingly to his mind. “Yes?”
Should he ask first or just kiss her? What did people do these days? He knew what they’d said in the sexual harassment seminar, but that had been about work, and this wasn’t work . . . or was it? Why did everything have to be so confusing? Why couldn’t—
To his utter shock, Molly pulled him toward her, raising up on tiptoe in her bare feet to bring her mouth toward his. He wasn’t even aware of what was going on at first, it all happened so fast. One minute they weren’t kissing, and the next, they were, her arms slipping around his neck so that her soft, round breasts pressed up against his chest, her scent enveloping him in a heady cloud.
He might have considered himself the luckiest man alive if his cell phone hadn’t chosen that moment to let out a shrill blare from the pocket of his dress uniform.
She pulled away immediately, startled. For him, the sudden break in contact was as if he were an astronaut traversing a bleak and airless planet and she was his only connection to home and oxygen.
“Goddammit,” he swore, and clawed at his uniform trousers in an attempt to find the phone, which was continuing to ring loudly.
Fortunately Molly seemed to find the situation funny. She stood a few feet away, her arms folded across her chest, laughing at him. “Does this happen to you often?” she asked.
“Too damn much.” He managed to extract the phone and glared down at the screen. For a second or two he’d been worried it was Tabitha’s parents—he’d left them his personal number. How was he going to explain to the librarian that he’d violated what he’d expected were the personal wishes of Baby Aphrodite’s mother by contacting the family from whom she’d run away?
But it was only Marguerite, who’d volunteered to skip the party and work late, since so many of his deputies were still out looking for Beckwith and John had wanted someone competent at the office (and Marguerite professed to hate parties, anyway).
“What is it?” he barked into the phone. He couldn’t help it. He’d been kissing Molly Montgomery. What were the chances of that ever happening again?
“Well, and good evening to you, too, Chief,” Marguerite said with cheerful sarcasm. “Sorry to bother you, but I just thought you might want to know that while you and everyone else was over there on Jasmine Key, partying it up, the High School Thief has been busy.”
John threw a glance at Molly. She’d turned away from him because Mrs. Tifton and a number of her friends had come into the bar, all chattering at once. Mrs. Tifton was waving her cell phone and looking alarmed.
“Oh, yeah? Busy doing what?” But John was pretty sure he already knew the answer.
“Robbing Dorothy Tifton’s house,” Marguerite said, confirming his suspicion, “while she was there with you.”
