“Save your perfect smile for the tourists.” Chrissy motioned with her chin toward two bikinied ladies near the end of the bar who were batting their eyes in Romeo’s direction. “It doesn’t work on me.”
“You sure about that?” Romeo ran a seductive finger down Chrissy’s bare bicep when she stopped next to him.
Chrissy rolled her eyes, but there was no heat in her voice when she grumbled, “You’ve got some balls on you.”
Everyone knew Romeo flirted with anything that walked and sported double-X chromosomes. But while other guys might come off as smarmy and gross, Romeo managed to remain charming.
Alex supposed it was because he genuinely enjoyed women. All shapes and colors and sizes. When it came to flirting and seduction, he believed in equal opportunities for everyone, and never told any lies to get a woman into bed. He was the epitome of sex positivity, and it attracted the ladies like an argument about the rate of economic growth during the Industrial Revolution would attract a gaggle of historians.
Plus, it helps that he looks like Mario Lopez and Jay Hernandez got together and made a baby.
“Just two balls at last count.” His teeth flashed white against his black goatee when he grinned at Chrissy. “But I’d be happy to get your second opinion.”
That got a laugh from Chrissy before she hopped onto the barstool beside him. “From what I’ve seen, you get more beaver than a mountain stream.” Unlike Alex, who tended to have a staccato-quick rhythm to her speech—due in no small part to her need to convey information as quickly as humanly possible—Chrissy talked like an islander. Slowly. Softly. Taking the Key West vibe, that whole We do less by Friday than most people do by 6:00 p.m. thing to heart. “Which means you don’t need to go hunting mine,” Chrissy finished.
Alex chuckled. She liked Christina Szareck. The woman was tough and tenacious, not to mention blond and long-legged enough to prove her Polish surname wasn’t for show.
And, yeah, okay. So maybe that makes me a little envious.
As a runt of a redhead, Alex had always dreamed of being tall and tanned. To have men turn and stare when she walked into a room. To go through life without being slathered in copious amounts of sunscreen and hair conditioner.
Of course, it helped the envy that Chrissy didn’t seem to know or care how pretty she was. Chrissy’s hair was always in a ponytail, and she seemed to sport a perpetual pair of flip-flops when she wasn’t wearing swim fins. In fact, the first time Alex could remember seeing Chrissy wear makeup was at last night’s reception.
Chrissy owned a dive shop on Key West and made her living taking tourists out to the reefs. Although recently she’d teamed up with Seaplane Charters and Deep Six Salvage to bring groups of day-trippers out to Wayfarer Island—the small speck of sand Alex and all the rest of the guys lived on, thanks to a land-lease deal one of LT’s ancestors had made with the U.S. government.
Chrissy got to charge more for the excursions because people could scuba dive on any reef anywhere. But treasure hunt for the world’s most famous ghost galleon? That was a unique experience. The guys who ran Seaplane Charters got some guaranteed butts in the seats for their flights. And Deep Six Salvage got a whole lot of free eyes looking for their prize.
It was a win-win-win for all those involved.
Unfortunately, except for a few trinkets and some old iron ship’s fastenings—none of which had been conclusively tied to the Santa Cristina—they’d yet to find the grand old ship. There was an expression treasure hunters liked to use. You miss by an inch, you miss by a mile. Meaning, it could be right under your nose, but if you don’t land on top of it, you might never find it.
Alex had been mulling over this depressing thought when she’d had her epiphany.
“Spit it out,” Wolf said now, eyeing her curiously.
“Hmm?” She blinked at him, bending to scratch behind Meat’s floppy ears when he woofed at her.
She liked to think the bulldog loved her because she was such a super-duper, top-notch human being. But she feared the truth of the matter was that she was usually eating something and she wasn’t averse to sharing. The way to Meat’s heart was definitely through his stomach.
“The thing spinnin’ around in that pretty head of yours.” Wolf tapped a finger against her temple.
It was hard not to preen under the compliment. Wolf was a gorgeous man, after all. But unlike Mason, his male appeal tended toward the beautiful. Like, if he ever decided treasure hunting wasn’t for him, he could easily land a job modeling expensive cologne—à la David Gandy.
It was also hard not to turn to Mason and stick out her tongue. Nanner, nanner! See? He thinks I’m pretty. Maybe I should have propositioned him!
Instead of doing either of those things, however, she told Wolf, “It’s spooky when you do that.”
“Do what?” He quirked a jet-black eyebrow.
“Read people’s minds.”
That elicited a snort and a head shake. “No mind reading needed. Your body language is screamin’.”
“Yeah,” Chrissy piped up. “I can vouch that Wolf has zero ability to read minds.”
Wolf glared at the blond bombshell. “Damn it, woman! How many times I got to apologize for that? It was an honest mistake.”
“Honest?” Chrissy’s voice lifted an octave. “You thinking dragging a woman into—”
“It was dark,” Wolf interrupted, a muscle going crazy on the side of his square jaw. “I couldn’t see. I was goin’ on feel. And besides, I didn’t hear you complainin’!”
“Ooh-ooh!” Chrissy sputtered. If the look on her face was anything to go by, she was two seconds away from tearing into the soft bits between Wolf’s legs.
“Children, children.” Romeo patted the air. “Either come clean with what happened, or let it go. Because I’m tired of trying to put the pieces together, eh? And if I wanted to break up fights between five-year-olds, I’d become a kindergarten teacher.” He glanced back and forth between them. “So which is it going to be?”
Alex leaned forward, hoping they would finally reveal what had happened to make them go from kind of, maybe, sort of flirting with each other a couple of months ago to taking every opportunity they could find to rip strips out of each other’s hides.
Unfortunately, if their thinned lips and locked jaws were anything to go by, neither of them was going to be confessing anytime soon.
With a dramatic sigh, she turned to Romeo. “Guess it’ll remain one of those impenetrable mysteries.”
Deep dimples appeared in Romeo’s cheeks. “In my experience, nothing is impenetrable.”