Page 83 of Changing Tides

“Mmm, that’s a hella good pie,” I say.

His eyes crinkle as he watches me chew and swallow the cheesy goodness.

“New York ruined you,” he declares.

“Excuse me?” I say around my second mouthful.

“You sound like a Yankee now,” he teases.

“I do not. You take that back!” I shout.

No self-respecting Georgia girl would stand for being called the dirty Y-word.

“Call them like I see them, Doc,” he says with a smirk.

Leia picks at her dinner, but she’s all about the cotton candy and kettle corn. Usually, I’d deny her sweets if she didn’t eat her meal, but this is her date night, so I let it pass.

“Are you ready to win?” Sebastian asks her.

“Yes! I wanna goldfish!” Leia shouts as she skips toward the game that has small glass globes, containing tiny orange fish, lined against the wall.

He glances at me, and I shake my head and give him pleading eyes.

“You don’t like goldfish?” he asks under his breath.

“No.”

“You’re the worst marine biologist ever,” he teases.

I punch him in the side.

“Those things die so easily, and then I’ll either have a heartbroken child or I’ll have to keep hoping I find it floating before she does so I can replace it,” I whisper.

“Hmm, you’re right. Traumatizing for all involved. I’ll see what I can do,” he says.

Leia peeks over the counter to the longneck bottles. “You have to throw a ring onto one of them. It’s really hard,” she says.

Sebastian bends down to her level.

“It is, and I’m not good at that at all. But you know what I am good at?” he asks.

“What?”

He turns and points to the basketball game behind us.

“And look at the prizes,” he says.

She looks over her shoulder and follows his finger from the game to the large four-foot-tall stuffed mermaids hanging from the tented roof of the game.

Her eyes go wide.

“What do you say we try to win one of those instead?” he asks.

She nods enthusiastically.

It only takes him seven tries and seventy bucks’ worth of tickets to win the twenty-dollar doll, but he says it was all worth it when he hears the squeal of delight Leia makes as the fella hands it to her.

She insists on carrying the mermaid herself.

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