“I’ll tell you what’s funny,” I said. Unlike Bernadette, I wasn’t laughing. I wasn’t smiling, not even a little bit. “Last night you were insisting that the reason I’d been given such a big stipend was to lure me here because Will is in love with me. Now you’re saying the only reason Will’s hanging around with any of us is because he wants our help to break into children’s lit—as if he’d need any help with that. Will could write the alphabet on a piece of paper and someone would publish it. Get your story straight, Garrett. If this is an example of how you plot your books, I don’t understand why anyone reads them at all.”
“Wha—?” Garrett looked even more hurt. “Jo. Where’s all this animosity coming from? Are your feelings hurt or something, because Will might not actually be that into you after all? I’m only trying to warn you girls that the guy is up to no good, and you—”
“Oh, God, Garrett. Shut up already.”
I must have spoken a little too loudly, since Chloe leaned her head around the back of her sun lounger and asked, “Hey ya. Is everything all right back there?”
“Oh, yes,” I called to her. “Sorry. Everything’s fine. Just talking about books.”
Garrett was glaring at me. I had clearly lost a friend—if he and I had ever been friends. But I felt like that ship had sailed—to coin a phrase—yesterday morning on the author bus when he’d so aggressively sang at me with his ukulele.
“Oh, books!” Chloe sounded excited. “My favorite subject! Are you sure you have everything you need? Can I get anyone more fruit kebabs?”
“No, we’re all good, sunshine.” Garrett tipped his hard seltzer toward Chloe in a toast. “You and your brother are the perfect hosts.”
“Oh, thanks for that,” Chloe said with a wide grin. “Cheers.”
Then her head disappeared back behind the lounger.
“Well, since you two seem to object so much to my company, I guess I’ll go spend time with people who actually appreciate it,” Garrett huffed at us. Then he began stalking over to the women on the sun loungers.
“Garrett,” Bernadette called after him. “Garrett, no, wait—”
But it was too late. Garrett sat down, set his drink in a cup holder, and began strumming his ukulele.
“Hey, ladies,” he said to Kellyjean, Sharmaine, and Chloe. “You know what you remind me of, lying there, looking so pretty in the sun? A little sea shanty I happen to know. ‘Farewell and adieu unto you Spanish ladies. Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain—’”
“Oh, God.” Bernadette looked at me, all signs of humor gone. “Now look what you’ve done.”
“Me? You’re the one who laughed in his face.”
“I know.” Bernadette seemed regretful. “I think I’ve had too much rosé.”
“Well, I’m starting to think Garrett might be one of those.”
“One of what?”
“You know, one of those guys who insists every other guy in the room is no good, so he can make himself look great in comparison.”
Bernadette gazed at Garrett thoughtfully. “If that’s his goal, it’s definitely not working.”
“Why don’t you keep an eye on him, while I go warn our host?”
“Wait.” She caught my hand as I started for the bridge. “What are you going to do?”
“Warn Will that he needs to look out for Garrett.” At Bernadette’s bug-eyed expression, I elaborated. “Don’t you think at least one member of the festival board should know the truth about him?”
“The truth about what?”
“What you heard about him at Novel Con. The guy’s sitting there serenading Will’s sister—his teenaged sister.”
“He’s playing the ukulele, Jo. You yourself said that a guy playing the ukulele wouldn’t have impressed you when you were their age.”
“Yeah, if he’d been an ordinary guy. But Garrett’s a bestselling author. That definitely would have impressed me enough that I’d have overlooked the ukulele thing. Did you or did you not tell me that there were rumors flying around about a bestselling author hitting on all the girls at last year’s Novel Con?”
“I did. But I also said I didn’t have any proof of who it was.”
I nodded at Garrett, who’d finished up his song about Spanish ladies and launched into something even worse, a ukulele version of a reggae tune. “I think it’s pretty obvious who it was. And if Chloe were my little sister, I’d want to know.”
“Oh, God.” Bernadette rolled her eyes. “Fine, okay, go. But don’t blame me if your plan backfires.”
“Backfires how? What do you think Will might do? Throw Garrett overboard?” This would actually make the cutest illustration for a Kitty Katz book ever. I could just see Raul Wolf tossing Rex Canine over the railing of the town ferry, into the Bay of Dogsville.
“Oh my God.” Bernadette’s voice, sounding incredulous, broke into my fantasy. “I know what you’re doing. You’re going to put all of this into a book, aren’t you?”
“What?” I looked away in case she somehow glimpsed the truth through the mirrored lenses of my sunglasses. “No! Of course not.”
“Yes, you are.” Bernadette shook her head in disbelief. “I know you. This is all going into Kitty Katz number twenty-seven.”
“Oh, please!” Too late. She’d seen right through me. “You really have had too much rosé.”
“If you break up Kitty and Rex,” Bernadette called after me, “your fans will hate you. You’re going to be the scourge of Goodreads!”
Worth it, I thought, but didn’t say out loud.
The Moment by Will Price
She was half asleep. I kissed both of her eyelids. “I have to tell you something.”
The eyelids rose. She smiled. “Tell me what?”
I leaned up on one elbow and swept some of her hair from her face. “The truth. I have to tell you the truth”
Melanie sat up. Her hair fell forward, over her full, round breasts. Her eyes were like twin blue ponds, fathoms deep. “There’s nothing you can say to me, Johnny, that will change the way I feel about you.”
What could I do after that but make love to her all over again?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The wind began to die a little as I wound my way up the steps to the bridge. It was too bad Frannie feared the ocean so much that she had forced Saul to go to the conch chowder lunch instead of joining us on The Moment. She was really missing out on a delightful day on the water. And also on what was about to happen.
“So when you see a pair of channel markers,” Will was saying to Jerome as I joined them in the cockpit, “you steer the boat between them. Except when you’re returning to dock, then you steer the boat right of the red ones—red, right, return.”
Jerome gazed in the direction Will was pointing, looking more relaxed than I’d seen him in ages. Possibly this was because he was on a luxury yacht with a beer in his hand, but you never knew. “Sure, sure. I will definitely need this information at a future point in my life.”