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“Two what?”
“Doctorate-level degrees.”
“From where?”
“Cambridge and Princeton. Oh, and I got a masters in European history from Oxford. Just for fun.”
Brenna burst out laughing. She giggled until tears leaked from her eyes. “Of course. Just for fun,” she managed to say when she calmed enough to talk. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For killing any attraction I might have been delusional enough to feel for you.”
With that, she climbed the stairs and strolled down the wooden slats toward the parking lot.
He’d figured she wouldn’t take either his real credentials or his fake tasteless proposition seriously, but he hadn’t expected to be so disappointed in her reaction.
And the Yeats came back to him.
Here we will moor our lonely ship
And wander ever with woven hands,
Murmuring softly lip to lip,
Along the grass, along the sands,
Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands.
IN THE LIBRARY TWO DAYS later, Brenna leaned against the front counter, no doubt distracting Sloan from her work. But everybody was working. Maybe she should get a summer job.
Of course, she was supposed to be focusing on The Carolina project for the historical society. And that thought led her right back to the place she’d sworn to quit going. “He’s an insufferable egomaniac and an amoral, grave-robbing opportunist.”
“You forgot gorgeous,” Sloan said, never pausing as she tapped her fingertips on the computer keyboard.
“Looks don’t figure into this.”
“Sure they do. Helen said he’s hotter than the Fourth of July sun.”
Helen was another society member, who was also a business partner of Brenna’s father. The two of them were the best real estate agents on the island.
Generally, Helen was a fine judge of man candy, and technically, she wasn’t wrong in this case, though Brenna was loath to admit it.
She’d seethed for two days over her encounter with Dr. Gavin Fortune, whose mystery had only deepened. It took some digging, but with the help of the society’s resident computer expert—a teenager named Penelope Waters—she hadn’t found proof of advanced degrees, but a buried secret.
Fortune hadn’t always been his name. He’d had it changed several years back. When Brenna had asked what his name had been before, she’d gotten a strange answer from Penelope.
“Nobody knows,” she’d said. “The records were sealed by a federal court judge.”
Beautiful, mysterious and possibly brilliant. What were the odds?
Too bad he was a complete ass.
“Helen also says he has a thing for you,” Sloan continued.
“Well, he can keep his thing to himself.”
“He seemed pretty disappointed to find Helen as the new historical society representative for his recovery project.”
“I’m sure he was. He wouldn’t dare pull the kind of crap on Helen he tried on me.”
Sloan finally looked away from her computer screen. “What kind of crap … exactly?”
“He made fun of my cat, my temperament and my outspokenness. He derided a Brontë—he didn’t mention which one—and Jane Austen, then made a clumsy pass. That’s it.”
“So you already told me. I still contend something else must have happened for him to run you off like that.”
Brenna scowled. “He didn’t run me off.”
“Then why did you send Helen to deal with him?”
“Because I can’t stand him.”
Sloan’s gaze probed hers. “You sure it’s not because you like him too much? ”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Madame President, he’s destroying the history of our island.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Mrs. Kendrick.” A dark-haired girl of about ten walked up to the counter. “I’m supposed to find some books for my little brother. Can you help me?”
“Sure thing, sweetie,” Sloan said, rounding the counter. “How old is he?”
“Four.” The girl pursed her lips. “He can’t really read yet, but he likes to pretend.”
“I’m sure we can find something to help him on his way.”
Brenna propped her chin on her fist as they walked away. Sloan was defending Fortune? What was that about?
Maybe Brenna was more sensitive than any of them about this particular project, but the rest of the society had to agree that Fortune and his crew weren’t good for Palmer’s Island. Even her father, who generally lived in the here and now unless a good spot of history helped him sell a property, was concerned about the fate of The Carolina. Before her parents had left on their month-long cruise, they’d encouraged Brenna to keep a close eye on the ship’s recovery efforts.
She wondered what Grandmother would have thought about all of this.
Brenna had been raised on stories of Lucy McGary, her great-grandmother, who’d been a museum curator in Washington, D.C. In 1942, she’d been selected by the museum to transport several canvases of a well-known artist to London.
Unfortunately, the Germans had bombed their ship, convinced the vessel was transporting ammunition to the Allies. Her grandmother, along with fifty others, had been killed. The watertight safe of canvases had also met a watery grave.
Until 1992.
That year, the descendants of the artist convinced the ship’s former owners to explore the wreck site and try to locate the lost paintings, which were now worth millions.
The excavation team, led by Dr. Dan Loff—who would later be famous for serving as mentor to Gavin Fortune—scavenged the sunken ship for treasure. When Brenna’s family learned their relative’s large, jeweled broach had been recovered, they flew to New York with pictures and proof of ownership, hoping to reclaim it.
Loff had already broken the setting apart and sold off the pearls and emeralds, one by one.
So if she was a little bitter toward vultures like Loff and Fortune, Brenna figured she had a right.
As Sloan returned to the desk, though, Brenna tried to set aside her personal prejudice and think logically. She wouldn’t give a student a hard time just because his parents were rude. Maybe she’d wrongly stereotyped Fortune. She wasn’t delusional enough to think good looks equated stupidity. Sloan didn’t look like anybody’s vision of a librarian, but she was brilliant at her job.
Though Fortune was still an ass.
There had been a fleeting moment when she’d thought she’d been wrong about him. When he talked about Captain Cullen, she’d sensed something in his tone. Excitement, maybe?
Then he’d admitted he’d simply read about it on the flight from Miami. He probably had a team of research assistants who culled together the facts he’d need to get through a press conference.
So what about the name change? Who had he been before? Why was it so important to protect that background? And why had he lied about his degrees? If he even had any?
No doubt being a brainiac didn’t fit with his barefoot-with-a-ponytail, beer-drinking, hard-loving image.
“Did I mention I’m throwing a party tomorrow night at my house?” Sloan asked as she took her spot behind the counter.
Brenna struggled to drag her focus away from Gavin Fortune. “Party?”
“Yeah. Just the society, some of the supporters and the mayor. It’ll be a social strategy meeting kind of thing.”
“Sounds fun.” And on a Friday night. See, Dr. Fortune, I have plenty of fun. She’d bet anchovy pizza wasn’t on the menu, either. How had he known about that, anyway? “Can I do anything to help?”
“Yep.” Sloan grinned, and for some reason Brenna didn’t like that smile one little bit. “Don’t go crazy on Gavin Fortune and his team. They’re the guests of honor.”
“You’VE NEVER HEARD the expression about catching more flies with honey? ”
Despite the fact that Sloan was digging her fingers into her arm, Brenna still wasn’t leaving the kitchen. There was no way she was facing that man.
Guest of honor indeed.
“‘The only way to have a friend is to be one,’” Brenna said in panic.
Sloan stopped trying to drag her to the doorway long enough to ask, “Yeats?”
“Emerson. I’m also rather fond of ‘Thou shalt not betray your friends for the sake of hot maritime archeologists.’”
“Is that in Deuteronomy or Numbers?” Sloan asked sarcastically.
“The Gospel according to Brenna.”
“I thought you said he wasn’t hot.”
Andrea Landry, another friend and Palmer’s Island High alum, pushed open the door. “No luck?” she asked, her gaze skipping over Brenna and going to Sloan.
“She’s stronger than she looks.”
“Should I get the sheriff?” Andrea asked.
“Is that really necessary?”
Both women ignored her, but Brenna was encouraged by realizing the sheriff probably had better sense than to get in the middle of a chick fight—even if he was married to one of the participants.
True enough, the next person through the door was Sheriff Tyler Landry, who took one look at the fierce expressions on Brenna, Sloan and Andrea’s faces and headed right back out again.
And he used to be a marine.
Not deterred in the least, her friends simply picked Brenna up and carried her through the doorway and down the hall.
Sometimes it really sucked being small.
After setting her down in the foyer, they nevertheless kept a tight hold on her arms as they inched into the front parlor. “Now remember,” Sloan said, waving at the mayor as he walked by them with a loaded plate of food. “We’re the bees, you’re the honey and he’s the fly we want to catch.”
Brenna shifted her stare from one friend to the other. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Not at all,” Andrea said calmly.
Sloan nodded sagely. “Without the metaphors, he’s a hot guy who likes hot girls.”
“And you’re a hot girl,” Andrea added, in case Brenna didn’t get the reference.
Brenna got it all right. But she didn’t want to. She didn’t like Gavin Fortune and didn’t want to be anywhere near him.
A picture of his damp, shirtless body flashed before her eyes, and her stomach clenched. She couldn’t be attracted to him.
It wasn’t fair that the only man who’d gotten her motor running in the last two years had the morals and character of a starving hyena.
“Sloan has bigger boobs,” Brenna returned, her heart racing with panic.
“The only hot, single girl,” Andrea reminded her.
“I don’t think he has too many standards in that area.”
“But Aidan and Tyler do,” Sloan said.
“Friends should come before husbands,” Brenna said, as her gaze flitted around the room in search of Gavin Fortune. She finally spotted him in the corner of the parlor, surrounded by—who else—a group of smiling women. And one of them happened to be Penelope Waters.
They couldn’t let him get his hands on an innocent like Penelope.
But why did she have to be the one to sail to the rescue? “Helen and Courtney are single.”
“But he’s interested in you,” Sloan said.
Brenna’s eyes widened. “So you want me to seduce him into meeting our demands?”
