Page 89 of Brewbies
“Close enough.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Where?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does when you’re being weird.”
Puffing his cheeks out, he mumbled. “Stanford.”
“What the shit? You have a master’s degree from Stanford?” she shrilled, causing several scarf-buying customers to glance in their direction.
“I mean, it was kind of a legacy situation.” As in, all the Ethan Townsends received matching MBAs. “Got a partial sports scholarship, and the rest was tuition. A lot of tuition.”
One pink penciled eyebrow lifted. “Poly-sci major?”
“How’d you know?”
“Smell it all over you, Sheriff Townsend.”
“You can call me Ethan,” he grumbled again. “I’m off duty.”
“Okay, off-duty Sheriff Townsend. You puddle-jumped to California. That’s as far as you ventured from home? Two states?”
He took a blood-red dress that she held up in front of a mirror and replaced it with a teal/silver number that made her hair look like frosting against an ocean. A fashion suggestion of which she approved. “Worked a few college summers in Alaska on fishing/crab boats. My grandpa thought it would help to build character.”
“Helped build these, I bet.” Reaching out, she squeezed his biceps, eliciting another blush.
“I like to be busy.” Jesus, he was spending more time looking at his own shoes than the face she’d painted so prettily just for him.
But damned if he didn’t feel like the class nerd taking out the beauty queen in all those terrible eighties movies.
What was he supposed to do with his hands? All he wanted was to put them on her in all the ways. But once that started…where would he stop?
“So, you’ve ventured up and down the West Coast…” she finished, waving to some friends who laughed and made obscene gestures at the two of them.
Fucking springs on the fucking Airstream.
“I’ve seen more than you would think and have visited every continent that doesn’t host a pole. We used to vacation all the time when Dad was alive,” he remembered out loud. “Iceland, the Maldives, Himalayas, Bali, etc. If my parents had one thing in common, it was their mutual hatred of big cities, so we always went somewhere out of the way. I did love the glass igloos in Norway. The Northern Lights are ridiculous—Darby?”
It took him several more steps down the aisle of diminishing crowds to realize she was no longer following him. He turned to find her frozen to the grass beneath her feet, eyes wide as she stared up at him. “You never sawanyplace inallthat time that called to you to come back? I mean, you’re telling me you’ve been all over most of the world and ended up a sheriff in the bumfuck town you were born in?”
He looked toward the tree tunnel, wishing her question didn’t scratch at something tender inside of him. A defensiveness that reared its head in her presence every damn time. “I’ve been awestruck in Dubai. I’ve fallen in love for one night in Paris. I…experimented…in the red-light district of Amsterdam.”
She looked around as if to see who else might have captured that bit of pure bullshit. “You? Amsterdam?”
Ethan grunted. “Okay, I was the designated driver…which is weird on a bicycle, so I spent most of my night playing sherpa to my drunk/high buddies and making sure they made it back to the hotel alive.”
She broke into a warm laugh halfway through his explanation. “There’s the Ethan I know. You didn’t even get to be with one hooker?”
“Excuse me, I think they’re called sex workers,” he corrected her in a nasally voice.
She smirked at him. “Touché. So…was it family that called you back here to stay?”
Ethan looked around at the grass trampled by people. At the lights and energy and gleaming faces. People eating, playing, spectating, clapping.
This was right. It was good. It didn’t disrespect his grandfather’s land or memory. It brought Raven Creek to life.
“There isn’t a place in the world like Townsend Harbor,” he murmured.
