Tattered Innocence (3 page)

She stared at him, not sure whether he
really wanted her to buy beef jerky or if he was calling himself a
jerk.

He pulled a debit card from his wallet, and
handed it to her. “Two, six, four, one.”

Jake stared at the pink flap on the envelope
Gabrielle had given him as the dregs of his hope died. If there was
one thing he’d learned about Gabs, she had a will stronger than
epoxy. She’d climbed into her Beemer and was probably halfway to
the Panhandle by now.

Part of him wanted to believe she broke up
because she thought she was too good for him, too rich—that he was
knocking his head against the six-foot thick Plexiglas wall between
blue collar and white he’d banged against his whole private school
career. But status and money meant nothing to her. She could live
on a teacher’s salary the rest of her life and be content.

She flat out didn’t love him. Pain had
encapsulated in him like he’d swallowed a plastic prize bubble from
the arcade. Today’s
closure
lanced open the bubble. Anger
oozed into his body, propelling him out of the dining nook and onto
his feet. He yanked the companionway steps up and wrenched the
engine room door open.

Was that Gabrielle’s scent? He inhaled
deeply and realized it was the candle in a glass jar she’d left
behind. He’d never burn it. Fire hazard.

He grabbed the candle from the catchall
nailed to the bulkhead, tossed it in one hand, and hurled it as
hard as he could through the engine room door. It skimmed the
engine and shattered against the planking over his workbench,
spraying glass in all directions.

He ducked through the doorway as the candle
galumphed to the edge of the bench and fell to the floor. He
slammed the wax glob against the bulkhead with his boot. The
cloying smell of flowers filled the cabin.

Rachel jostled the paper grocery bags on the
finger pier in front of
The Smyrna Queen
to get a better
grip.

Jake swabbed the teakwood deck, his chest
slicked with sweat. He glanced up and narrowed his eyes.

He was surly―and better looking than he had
a right to be. She tapped her foot on the finger pier, balancing
the two bulging grocery bags. “Didn’t your mama teach you
anything?”

“What?”

“Be a gentleman.”

Jake blew out his breath and dried his hands
with the T-shirt hanging from his waistband. He crossed the
gangplank and grabbed the bags out of her arms.

“The meat and fish are in these. They need
to go into the freezer.”

Silence.

“Jake,” she said to his back.

He stopped halfway across the cockpit, but
didn’t turn back.

“Because Gabrielle ditched you doesn’t mean
you’re a jerk.”

Jake glared across the
Queen
’s
deck at her. “You don’t know squat.”

She whipped the slim package of beef jerky
out of her back pocket and fired it at his head. “Be a jerk,
then.”

Jake’s eyes widened before the missile
beaned him on the head and ricocheted to the galley below. He
stared at her for a full second. A smile tugged at one corner of
his mouth, the first she’d seen since she met him.

She lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t mess with me.
I’ve got a brother just like you.”

She pivoted and walked up the finger pier,
thoughts of Hall stinging her as if she’d smacked into a jellyfish.
When had she last seen her brother? Even though he’d been a senior
at the high school, they hadn’t spoken in months. He barely
accepted her congratulations at graduation.

“My baby,” she’d called Hall as she clutched
him to her after Mama delivered him on the kitchen floor. With Mama
and Daddy at work all day and Granny too tired in her seventies to
chase a little boy, Rachel had relished mothering Hall. He’d never
balked at the mother-son quality of their relationship—until
Bret.

Jake swiped the mop across the
Queen’s
weathered teak deck, shaking his head at Rachel as
she disappeared into the conglomeration of sun-baked car hoods
along Riverside Drive. She’d actually distracted him from Gabs for
thirty seconds.

He glanced at Leaf under a makeshift awning
on the next boat and almost called him Gramps, like he had a
hundred times. But the only things Leaf had in common with Gramps
were his age and a penchant for saving electricity. He liked the
old guy, but not how he resurrected grief he didn’t want to
feel.

Leaf’s ponytailed head bobbed. “I like your
new girl.”

Jake smiled in spite of himself. “You
would.”

Leaf pulled an orange out of a dirty plastic
Winn Dixie bag and tossed it to Jake. “Found these today on my
rounds.” The guy cruised the neighborhoods on his rattletrap
Schwinn, looking for free food.

“Hang on.” Jake jogged down the companionway
and back up. “Catch.” He tossed the beef jerky into Leaf’s bony
hand. “Trade you.”

Leaf squinted at the ingredients. “Stuff’s
poison.”

“Stuff’s protein. Eat it.”

Rachel walked toward them, her arms loaded
with grocery bags. He should tell her about the cart at the end of
the dock she could use to carry supplies. Naw. More interesting to
see what she’d say when she found out. He grinned as he watched her
stride up the pier.

Details he hadn’t intentionally recorded
paraded through his mind as he sloshed the mop back into the
bucket. Rachel spoke an octave lower than Gabs. Sitting across from
her at the Dolphin View, he’d noticed her eyes, like her hair, were
brown, flecked with gold. She came across confident, but freckles
dusted the tops of her cheeks and nose with vulnerability.

She’d convinced him that she loved sailing.
But she wanted out of New Smyrna Beach, too. What was that about?
He glanced up at Rachel’s angular frame and riotous curls as she
pushed through the gate at the end of the pier. He shrugged. The
girl was Gabs’ polar opposite. Good.

Leaf motioned his head toward Rachel as she
headed up the dock with another load of groceries. “You should be
grateful to have her.”

“Yeah. But I’m not.”

Jake had barked orders for the three days
since Rachel started working for him. She should be ticked.
Instead, she wanted to thank him for chasing away a thousand
thoughts she didn’t want to think. Since sunup, they pinged around
the boat doing last minute chores. The menu had been posted, bunks
made, the electric and water lines disconnected.

Rachel stuffed the last sail cover into a
nylon bag and tossed it into the bin under the port cockpit bench,
her last task completed. She wiped sweat from her forehead with the
back of her arm. Sadness crawled back into her chest.

The old man on the sloop in the next slip
pared a mango with his pocket knife and flipped peels into the
water one at a time.

I don’t have to be happy about doing the
right thing. But at least I’m one step closer to the sister Hall
used to be proud of.
She blinked, and for a moment, she was
sprinting beside a kindergarten Hall, helping him balance on his
two-wheeler for his first solo after the training wheels came off.
Sprinting away from Bret was one last thing she could do to launch
Hall into life.

In the wait for their guests’ arrival, like
the pause between the pep band’s tuning and the first note of the
fight song, Rachel peered over her clipboard at Jake. He rubbed a
smudge off the ship’s stainless steel wheel with the hem of his
T-shirt, grief and determination welded on his face. For a moment,
hi
s pain dislodged hers.

A speeding Boston Whaler buzzed past their
stern, belching exhaust. Its wake jostled the
Queen
and
clanged rigging against her masts. Rachel glanced toward the pier.
A boy, maybe a second grader, climbed over a dock box, then
shimmied up a light pole. His tow-headed little sister plunked
somebody’s clam shell collection into the Intracoastal with her
toe. Her laugh rattled the longing for a child inside Rachel like a
noisy sheet of aluminum foil.

Rachel’s gaze followed the children on their
Family Circle
exploration of the pier. Behind them, a tall
man with a white buzz cut, who might have played college basketball
forty years ago,
s
trode up the dock with
an olive-skinned woman in a poodle skirt. She pushed up oversized,
red plastic glasses on her nose and squinted at the
Queen
’
s
name.

The man turned up the finger pier. “Whoa
kids. Hold up. This is where we get off.”

The woman followed him, keeping her gaze
laser-beamed on the kids.

The man stepped aboard, and Jake held out
his hand. “Welcome aboard the
Smyrna Queen
.”

“Lyle and Angela Rosebrock.” He shook Jake’s
hand and tossed a grin toward the children. “And miscellaneous
progeny.”

“Jake Murray.”

Rachel nudged an elbow into Jake’s ribs.

“And first mate, Rachel Martin.”

Rachel waved at the children who stood on
the finger pier. “You must be Katie and Cole.” She’d read the
twelve names on the passenger list so many times she had them
memorized.

Katie nodded shyly. “Mamaw, will you hold my
hand so I can get on the big boat?”

Her grandmother laughed. “After skating up
and down these docks like a hellion, now you’re scared?”

Cole lay on his stomach and hung his head
and ankles off either side of the finger pier as if he wanted to
examine the barnacles growing on the pilings under the dock.

Rachel held her hand toward the girl.

Katie bunny-hopped across the gangplank, all
fear gone.

Rachel didn’t want much, a couple of kids
like these. Or three or four. She swallowed hard. “Come on, Cole,
I’ll show you the engine.”

Cole’s legs stopped kicking up and down, but
his chin still hooked over the edge of the pier.

Rachel talked to the crown of his head.
“You’ll want to make sure the
Queen
is seaworthy for her
first cruise. We’ll have to flip the steps up to get to the engine
room. Not my favorite job.” When Cole peeked up, she shrugged. “You
can flip the steps if you want.”

Cole scooted his legs under him and popped
up in one motion.

Can I keep these two?
Rachel tamped
down the longing in her chest. At twenty-three, she had decades
left for having babies. Never mind the years she’d already waited
since tucking in Hall.

“What?”

Rachel’s head popped up at the unfamiliar
voice.

A brown ball of a man lumbered up the finger
pier. “I’m on the maiden voyage?” His mock horror dissolved into a
gale of laughter. He took the hand Jake offered. “George is the
name.”

“You don’t have to worry about the
Queen
’
s
seaworthiness. She used to run drugs. Bought
her at auction. She’s a tough old bird.”

George wiped sweat from his bald head and
face with a wilting handkerchief. “So, all I have to worry about is
the captain’s skill on his maiden voyage, eh?” He squinted at
Jake.

“That’s right—second mate.” Jake slapped
George on the back. “Always need somebody aboard who knows enough
to worry.”

George’s chuckle floated toward Rachel as
she took the children below. Okay, so Jake wasn’t always surly.

Jake’s voice filtered through the open
hatch. “Check out my certification tacked to the bulkhead. I had to
put in seven hundred and twenty sailing days and take seven exams
to get licensed by the Coast Guard.”

In the engine room, her gaze settled on
Jake’s desk. Rows of books anchored with elastic shock cords lined
the hull—how-to-sail, sailboat repair and maintenance, and
marketing textbooks. Her eyes caught on a dog-eared Bible. A
bizarre book for a guy who nearly axed her job for mentioning
church.

Katie’s arms circled her and squeezed. “I
like you.”

Rachel smashed the mommy-ache into a tiny
foil ball. Bret sure wasn’t going to daddy-up for the job.

An hour later, Rachel could almost feel Bret
ripping from her like a scab as the
Queen
sliced through the
ocean, the mouth of the Intracoastal shrinking behind them. She
clung to a forestay, the salty wind stinging her wound.

Jake came up behind her. “I need a crewman,
not a figurehead.”

She faced him. “Excuse me for taking a
two-minute break for the first time all day.”

“Take down the jib.”

“You’re not paying me enough to put up with
your lip.”

Jake’s eyes clamped on hers. “My lip?”

Breath moved in and out of her lungs too
quickly, making her lightheaded. She’d get herself fired before the
first cruise ended.

His jaw clenched. He turned and stalked back
to the helm.

She wasn’t angry with Jake, only provoked
enough to zing him. Sparring with Jake was her personal
World of
Warcraft—
good entertainment when she could get it. She loosed
the jib halyard and brought down the sail. Sailing and the kids had
already rubbed salve into her rending from Bret.

Two days later, Rachel sprawled on the deck,
playing “I Spy” with Katie, who was nearly swallowed up in an
orange lifejacket. Cole, his hair sticking out in tufts from under
his ball cap, kibitzed nearby.

“Rachel!” Jake shouted against the wind.

“What?” she yelled back.

“Check the depth. The pole is on the
starboard foredeck. We draw six feet, but I want eight to ten with
all this seaweed.”

Not taking time to pull a T-shirt over her
Speedo swimsuit, Rachel scrambled over the top of the cabin to
snatch the pole. She sounded for the bottom with quick jabs of
Jake’s world’s-longest-mop-handle.

They sailed at four knots, she calculated.
She called out the measurements notched into the wood, “Seven feet…
seven and a half… seven and a half―”