Especially since the new people moving to town are mostly young married couples looking for a quiet but not boring spot to raise their kids, which is where Shipwreck totally delivers.
I know the right guy will appear when I’m ready for him—the universe works in mysterious ways like that—but some days I wish it would hurry up.
“You didn’t hear?” Sloane’s dropping her voice while still cackling. “You know how Robinson Simmons is renting that room over their garage? He heard noises in the house this morning and—”
“And we don’t need to hear the rest of this story,” I interrupt as I bend over and straighten the bottle of wine, making sure I don’t need to run back to the storeroom and get more before lunch.
Probably not.
There aren’t a lot of people who order wine with lunch here.
“Again?” Georgia asks. “That poor boy. You’d think he’d learn.”
“Grady and Cooper are having a talk with both him and Trevor Stafford later today to offer tips on the best earplugs to use and which noises don’t require the senior citizens to be checked on.” Annika’s eyes are extra twinkly today. They’ve been twinkly since she told Grady they were expecting a baby right before their wedding a few weeks ago, but this is next-level twinkle. They clearly had a good honeymoon.
“Again?” Georgia repeats.
“They think it might sink in this time. Is it wrong to hope it doesn’t?”
I glare at my sister-in-law. She might think it’s hilarious that my parents get frisky still, but I don’t want to hear about it. “Yes.”
“What about you, TJ?” Sloane asks. “Any more excitement with your temporary neighbor?”
“Mr. Growly Bear with a stick up his ass? He’s ignoring me when he’s not growling at me.” And trying to catch me while I fall off my roof.
Holy muscles, Blackbeard. There’s knowing a man is large, and there’s feeling how large a man is for yourself, again, and dammit.
There goes another hot flash, along with another memory of him kissing me outside The Grog a couple weeks ago. I gulp my coffee to scald my tongue and distract myself.
“You still flirting with him?”
I grin even though I want to fan myself, and also want to kick myself for needing to fan myself. “Incessantly,” I lie, since I’ve hardly seen him. Pretty sure he’s avoiding me. “It’s the trick in my back pocket that sets Cooper off every time.”
Annika slides her glass across the bar to me. “I am so glad I don’t have brothers.”
“You practically grew up with Cooper as your brother, and you have Bailey. She’s as much of a handful as they were at her age.”
“Or more,” Georgia mutters.
We all laugh, but Annika’s wincing at the mention of her teenage sister as I refill her water.
There’s so much truth to Georgia’s statement.
“Has Max retaliated for the glitter bombing?” Sloane asks.
I shake my head. “I don’t think he’s the prankster type.”
“Are you kidding?” Georgia asks. “He was at Crow’s Nest yesterday telling Grady about hiding stuffed turtles in Trevor’s locker and laughing about that Fiery thong Mackenzie made Brooks wear last season.”
“So he’s not the prankster type with me. He’s not the acknowledge Tillie Jean is anything other than a pest type with me either. It’s like he’s never gotten over—”
I cut myself off.
And my friends lean in.
“Gotten over what?” Annika asks.
“I smell a story,” Sloane adds.
Georgia cackles. “Gotten over how they met.” She’s a Shipwreck native, and so naturally, she heard as much of the story as Cooper knows.
Also, I don’t care how muscly Max is, he is dead if he ever breathes a word to anyone about the other half of what happened.
And I don’t mean like the heart attack I was planning to give Grady this morning with delivery boxes of broken plates in retribution for the fake puke he planted in the Crusty Nut fridge last week, which doesn’t sound like a bad prank until you find out Grady’s been dreaming of replacing all of the plain Crow’s Nest plates with custom pottery for over a year, and it’s due to arrive any day now.
Definitely not kill Max like that.
I mean tortured for hours and then killed dead dead.
“Oooh, did you have a one-night stand?” Sloane asks.
Annika’s brown eyes light up even more when she smiles. “Or were you hiding in the locker room waiting to prank Cooper and fell out of the air duct when you saw Max n-a-k-e-d?”
I grab a stack of napkins and start rolling silverware. “One, I’m pretty sure Max is n-a-k-e-d practically all the time, so no. And two, he found out I was dating Chance Schwartz and told Cooper.”
“Oh my god, you dated Chance Schwartz? The catcher?” Sloane leans in. “Details. Details.”
“I hooked up with him for like two nights while Ben and I were in one of our off-again phases, Max found out, told Cooper, Cooper hit the roof, Chance got traded, and now it’s common knowledge among the team that I’m off-limits.”
“Oh, come on. Hello, double standard. Like Cooper isn’t just as much of a horn dog as the rest of them.” Sloane shoots a look at the kitchen door and drops her voice. “Your dad does know Cooper’s a horn dog, right?”
“We all pretend none of the rest of us have sex lives and we all get along better that way.” I gesture to Annika. “Artificial insemination and they had to knock Grady out cold to collect his swimmers. That’s what I tell myself.”
She snorts her water out of her nose.
But Sloane’s rolling her eyes. “Cooper should still stay out of your private life. What’s the big deal if you hook up with one of his teammates?”
“I could date one of Cooper’s friends. Grady’s too. They wouldn’t be friends with assholes. But a teammate? They’re stuck together. Might not pick each other if they weren’t. Seriously, how many guys on the team would want Cooper dating their sisters? So it’s not like I don’t get where he was coming from. I just think it’s dumb and it makes his teammates either go out of their way to make sure I know they’re only being nice because I’m Cooper’s sister, or it makes them act like I have cooties.”
The doorbells jingle, and the damn parrot flies into my restaurant a moment before my grandfather strolls in the door.
He’s in full pirate regalia today—Pop, I mean, not the parrot, though that’s not unheard of either—right down to the eye patch, and the sight both makes me smile and also wish my ancestors could’ve maybe been medieval knights instead of pirates.
I love my family, but knights wouldn’t have parrots for pets. They’d have horses.
The stray goats in town aren’t quite the same, though I’ll take them, considering they don’t curse out passing tourists.
“Ahoy, me lassies.” Pop flashes us a wolfish smile and lifts my car keys. “I be finding pirate treasure this morning, and I be in a mood to share. Arr!”
“Your parrot is a nuisance, Pop.” I try very hard to not limp as I walk out from behind the bar, retrieve my keys, and press a kiss to his weathered cheek. He knew they were mine because you don’t live in Shipwreck, with the damn bird around, without learning very quickly to attach a keychain with your name onto your keys. “Look at this place. Practically empty. He scared all the tourists away.”