Page 44 of Brewbies
“You supervising?” Ethan’s truculent question was just the bucket of ice water her libido needed.
Darby blushed and cleared her throat, quickly averting her gaze. “Do you know how much longer it’s going to be?” she asked, coating her words with all the impatience she could muster.
“Hot date?” Ethan drawled.
With your mother,Darby thought but didn’t say. “That’s none of your business, sheriff.”
The knuckles wrapped around her shoe began to whiten. “Might go faster if you weren’t hovering.”
“Am I disrupting your concentration?” she asked, folding her arms beneath her breasts.
Ethan’s Adam’s apple bobbed above his starched collar. “No, ma’am. I just work faster when I’m not talking.”
Liar.
“Excuse me all to Poughkeepsie for being sociable,” Darby said, sauntering toward a wooden porch swing next to his work area. “Can I sit in this?”
“Kind of the point, isn’t it?” Ethan muttered without turning to her.
She decided to let that one slide. Between Roy’s whisky and the adrenaline rush of nearly eating a piece of Townsend Harbor’s historic sidewalk when her heel had broken, a sudden drowsiness had stolen over her.
Darby boosted herself up to the platform and settled into the swing, lifting one leg onto the bench to stretch it out long and using the other to give herself a push. The well-oiled chains barely squeaked as the bench glided back and forth. Darby rested both feet on the arm closest to Ethan.
She allowed her fingers to play over the silky wood, running them along the raised bumps and gnarls in the grain.
The sense of strangeness she’d felt looking at his pieces earlier came crashing back to her with a sudden realization.
Every single item she’d looked at until this one had been completely free of organic knots, scars, or other imperfections. Each and every one of them painfully, obsessively, free of flaws.
Talk about a metaphor.
“This is a beautiful swing,” Darby said, gazing up to admire the thick crossbeam that had to be an entire tree trunk.
“Didn’t make it.” Ethan set aside some kind of resin and reached for his hammer.
“You just babysitting it so it doesn’t get lonely?”
“It was my grandfather’s.”
“Would that be Ethan Townsend the second? Or is this on your mother’s side?”
His back stiffened beneath the crisp fabric of his dress shirt. Touchy subject, apparently.
“My father’s father.”
“He’s the one who taught you how to work with wood?”
“Yep.”
“That must have been nice,” she said, still determined to draw him into conversation. It was almost a game now. “Both sets of my grandparents passed before I finished elementary school.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be,” Darby said. “I’m not.”
“Weren’t close, I take it?”
She shrugged, returning her foot to the ground to give herself another push. “My dad’s mom was already dead when I was born. And his father I barely remember. We only saw him on Easter and Christmas for mass. My mom’s mom was also dead before I was walking, and her father was an asshole. So no big loss there.”
