Busted (Promise Harbor Wedding) - By Sydney Somers Page 0,52
and Hayley probably knew that better than anyone. “I can’t imagine she’d be easy to impress.”
She shrugged. “I gave up on that when I was a teenager, but at least we can talk now without arguing.”
Remembering the tension between the women at Barney’s, he could only imagine how intense it had been when Hayley was at her troublemaking peak. “She must have been relieved when you became a cop.”
“As opposed to a criminal, probably.” She set her beer aside and flattened her hands on the boards. “I certainly never imagined I’d end up carrying a badge.”
“It suits you.”
She glanced at him, brow raised.
“Well, I would need to see you and the badge and nothing else to be absolutely sure.”
Hayley punched him in the arm.
“Seriously though,” he prompted, genuinely curious as to how that came about.
“When they found my dad’s body, no one would tell me anything. I was the first to find out that his car had been pulled out of the harbor, but they thought my mom should be the one to tell me his body had been inside, I guess. So I sat in the station and waited and waited for them to track my mother down. Waited for almost two hours.”
Her knuckles whitened around the bottle she reached for.
“Maybe they were respecting my mother, or maybe they were worried what the resident troublemaker would do when she heard that her father hadn’t actually left his family without a word, but had been sitting at the bottom of the harbor for two weeks.”
The sip Hayley took barely wet her lips. Jackson closed his hand over hers, and she stared at their interlaced fingers for a long moment before gently squeezing.
“So I promised myself,” she continued. “That I wouldn’t give anyone a reason to think I couldn’t be trusted after that. Roughly, anyway. It may have taken me a while to fully straighten myself out.” She slid him a sidelong look. “More of an answer than you were looking for, huh?”
It was his turn to take a drink. “Well, I had been hoping it might have involved a lot of soul-searching and a naked slumber party.”
Her shoulders shook with laughter, and he leaned in to her, relieved he’d chased away the pain in her voice for a while.
She exhaled slowly. “We’re a pretty pathetic pair, aren’t we?”
He shook his head. “What’s pathetic is how long it’s taking you to finish your beer. You’re a disgrace to the Stone name.”
“Oh, that’s harsh. Not everyone aspires to the heights of power-puking like you.”
Knowing she was talking about the borrowed truck incident, he shrugged in his defense. “I was a kid.”
“But grown-up enough to cop a feel.”
Jackson paused, searching her eyes. He grinned. “You weren’t mad because you got blamed for taking the truck. You were mad that I was at Sunset Bluff with someone else.”
She took his bottle and sniffed the contents. “Are you taking drugs?”
Snatching back his beer, he tipped the bottle at her. “Admit it. You were into me in high school.”
“Please.” Hayley blew out a dismissive breath, not quite meeting his eyes.
Wait. Was he actually on to something here? The goal had been to tease her, make her forget all the other stuff she had to deal with, but maybe he wasn’t so far off the mark.
“You were.”
“I was not.”
Nothing on her face betrayed otherwise, but somehow he knew she was lying. Or was he just too fixated on the way she’d kissed him in the janitor’s closet that night years ago?
When he continued to stare at her, thinking about the best way to get her to admit that she must have thought about him once or twice after that kiss in high school, she surprised him by caving. “I may have thought you were a little cute.”
“A little cute,” he mused aloud. He set his beer aside and stood.
She tipped her head back to watch him, but wasn’t fast enough to scramble out of reach when he swooped down and picked her up. Her beer slipped from her fingers, clunking on the old wooden dock and spilling the amber liquid through the cracks in the boards.
He held her over the water, his bad knee protesting the balancing stance required to keep himself firmly on the dock, but it was a good kind of pain.
“Just a little cute?”
Hayley squirmed in his arms, and he loosened his hold as if to drop her in the lake. She squealed, an awfully girly sound for a woman who’d fired fifty thousand