“Dane! Hey, we’re over here.”
“Hey, Cindy.”
He walked across the tiled concrete front porch and greeted Cindy with a quick peck on the cheek. She never changed. Sweet and smart, Cindy always expected the best from everyone. But then, she’d never met with much personal adversity. Both her folks were still living just down the highway. She had two younger sisters and a ten-year-old brother. Her father, a transplanted Yankee, owned one of the largest charter fishing boat companies in the area.
Cindy had called to tell him that Kelsey was on her way out to talk to Andy Latham. Dane hadn’t at all liked the idea of her being out there alone. Of course, he’d known that Kelsey wouldn’t be particularly glad to see him out there—she would hardly think of him as a knight in shining armor—but he’d made tracks to get out there as soon as possible anyway.
“Come on in,” Cindy said. “We were about to have quiche and beer.” She wrinkled her nose. “Reheated quiche and beer. But it’s still good. I can cook. Well, kind of, anyway.”
“Sounds great, Cindy, but I already ate.”
“Come in for a beer, at least. I mean, you’re here, aren’t you?” she demanded, blue eyes wide.
“Sure.” He needed to talk to Kelsey, and it was damn certain she was never going to invite him in.
He followed Cindy into Sheila’s side of the duplex. Kelsey was seated on a bar stool, a plate and a beer in front of her. Her shoes were off, one ankle curled around a leg of the stool. The sunglasses were gone, and he could see her eyes. Blue-green. Like a color that had been plucked right out of a shallow sea on a sunlit day.
He could see that she was surprised and definitely not pleased that Cindy had invited him in.
“Look who’s here,” Cindy said pleasantly.
“Surprise, surprise,” Kelsey murmured.
“You’re sure you don’t want some quiche, Dane?” Cindy asked.
“No, thanks.”
Cindy reached into the fridge and produced a bottle of beer. “But you’ll have a beer with us, right?”
“Sure.”
“Right. He hasn’t had enough to drink today,” Kelsey said.
For a moment Cindy looked as if she was going to try to ignore the obvious hostility between them, then she sighed, putting her hands on her hips. “Hey, kids, we’re all grown-ups here.”
“All right,” Kelsey said. “Hi, Dane. Have a beer. You are all grown up. If you want to spend your life drinking the days away, I guess that’s all right.”
He stared at her and took a long swig from the bottle, ready to tell her that she hadn’t seen him in years, she had no idea of what he did with his days, and she sure as hell had no right to judge him.
“That’s right, Kelsey. If I want to be a drunk, it’s my prerogative.”
“Dane isn’t a drunk, Kelsey,” Cindy said.
“Sorry, then,” Kelsey said. She made a point of yawning. “You know what, guys? I haven’t had much sleep since I got back. Maybe you want to move your little party over to Cindy’s half of the place.”
“Maybe, but not yet,” Dane said. He walked to the counter where she was sitting and set his beer bottle down. She tensed, and for a moment he thought she was going to jump up and try to escape.
But that would mean having to touch him because the way he was standing, at her side, hands on the counter, she would have to push past him to get by.
“So now you want to talk,” she said.
“I’d have been happy to talk earlier—if you hadn’t come on as such a bitch,” he said.
She blinked, and he could hear her teeth clench. “You were drunk, and I was worried. And Nate had just told me that you and Sheila were…that you and Sheila had a big argument the last time he’d seen her, and that she’d told him afterward she was going out to your place. He said you weren’t very nice to her.”
She wasn’t apologizing. She was still accusing him. And she sure as hell wasn’t about to thank him for coming around when she might have been in trouble at Latham’s. Of course, as far as any of them had ever known, Latham was just like a cockroach. Nasty as all hell, and germ-carrying, certainly, but not physically dangerous.
He inhaled a long breath before replying to Kelsey.
“Kelsey, I’m glad that your life is going so great that you feel you can judge everyone else. Although I’m curious as to how you got to be such a good judge of a man’s level of alcohol consumption.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I know you’ve been lying as low as pond scum, Dane, because Sheila told me.”
“She did, did she? Kelsey, you need to listen to me. You haven’t been around, and you don’t know anything about anyone here anymore. What you’ve got is a bunch of hearsay and assumptions. Maybe you don’t like what you think I’ve become, and maybe there’s even some truth to it. But what you’re doing here is dangerous. What do you think you are suddenly? Some kind of a crusader? Leave it alone. Quit running around accusing everyone of doing something to Sheila. You’re going to get yourself into trouble.”
Kelsey stared at him, eyes cool and hostile. “Dane, you didn’t want to talk to me this afternoon, and now you’re suddenly here telling me to keep my nose out of things. This is ridiculous. Apparently I’m the only one who’s really concerned about Sheila. And since I am concerned, my nose is going to be everywhere until I know where she is. And I know you were seeing her.”
“You’re not listening to me. You’re going off half-cocked and making a lot of assumptions. You know I was seeing Sheila because Nate told you so. Sheila hung around the Sea Shanty. So do I. So do Nate and Cindy—Cindy because she keeps up with old friends, Nate because he owns the place. And guess what? Lots of other people around here go there on a regular basis. It’s the in place for the natives. Sheila saw dozens of people at the Sea Shanty. Big deal. But Andy Latham doesn’t go there anymore, because Nate barred him. He got to be a little too obnoxious with some of the women customers. That’s why Cindy called me when she knew you were going to go over and start throwing accusations at Latham.”
Kelsey’s eyes instantly shot toward Cindy with recrimination. Cindy flushed but shrugged, still feeling she had done the right thing.
Kelsey took a sip of her beer. “Latham is a horrible man. We all know it. He’s a filthy, mean bastard—but that’s all. He’s scuzzy, not dangerous.”
“How the hell do you know he isn’t dangerous?” Dane demanded, wishing he weren’t feeling his own temper soar. Kelsey knew he was right; she just wasn’t about to admit it.
“He’s been around for years,” she said, waving a hand as if dismissing his words. “I used to go to that house when I was a kid. So did you, so did Cindy. He yelled, he was rude, and he created an environment no kid should have grown up in, but he never hurt anyone.”
“Really? And here I thought you were Sheila’s great friend. He sure as hell hurt her.”
He had her on that one, and she had the grace to flush. “When he was angry, he beat her a few times with a belt. He’d be arrested for child abuse now, but back then…parents used to spank their children.”
“Strange. Mine never beat me with a belt. And neither did yours. Or Cindy’s.”
“Okay, he’s a horrible man!”
“Listen to what you’re saying. He beat her with a belt.”
“When our