cash economy,” Liz said. “And he can take care of himself.” He moved to Jason’s spot opposite her and held up his empty beer bottle to summon the waiter. When he came over, Liz asked for the menu.
“Mahi-mahi come in today, chicken, ribs, lobster,” the waiter said, and looked at Els, who lifted her cup. He raised his eyebrows.
“The lobster here’s the best on the island,” Liz said.
“Go ahead, rub it in,” she said, and ordered chicken.
By the time their food arrived, Liz had explained how Iguana split her year between the Caribbean and the Mediterranean and Els had admitted that her work took her all over the world, but never to the Caribbean. She’d also downed her second Killer Bee, switched to beer, and was famished.
Liz dug into his grilled lobster tail, prying the meat out with his fingers, while Els struggled to separate her chicken leg and thigh with her plastic knife.
“Forget your fancy manners, Lady Eleanor,” Liz said. He tilted his head. “What kind of royalty are you, anyway?”
“Salustrio calls me Lady only to bait me,” she said. “My father’s a legitimate Sir. He was knighted for being a power in UK finance.” She picked up her chicken leg, and soon her hands were bronzed with barbecue sauce. “I’m just a lass from the Highlands—at least, I was until I was exiled to a nun’s school in Edinburgh.”
“They teach you to swear?”
She smiled. “Nah, that was the evil influence of schools in London and Cambridge—Massachusetts, that is—and investment banking, first in New York and now back in London.”
“You’ve lived around,” he said. “No wonder you don’t sound like our usual Brits.”
“I’m a Scot, not a Brit.”
“What’s the difference, once you peel away the skirts and bagpipes?”
“Centuries of history,” she said. “What stripe of Yank are you?”
“I come from Iguana.” He drained his beer. His rumpled shirt, a cornflower-blue linen, was missing its top button. When he leaned forward on his elbows, a blue bead on a leather thong dangled from the opening.
“Dropped on board by the stork?”
“Other boats before that,” he said. “Do you have family?”
“A father I adore.”
“That’s all?”
“I was raised by a nanny, a widow who moved in when I was two. She and Father have been shacked up for decades. She tried to mother me, but I wouldn’t let her. She has . . . had . . . a son of her own.”
“Your mom’s dead.”
“Might as well be.” She tidied the mound of rice and pigeon peas on her plate. “Let’s not get into that.”
He cocked that scarred eyebrow, took her beer, and drank from it. The gesture felt challenging, intimate, playful.
She reached for the bottle even though she didn’t want it back. “Get your own beer.”
“You’ve had enough.”
“Says who?”
When she pushed her unfinished dinner aside, a dog padded over, her tail waving figure eights, and Els cupped her chin. “Yir master wouldn’t approve of me feeding ye from the table.”
“She might starve without table scraps,” Liz said. He pulled Els’s remaining chicken off the bones and held a piece out to the dog, who took it delicately and slunk under a nearby table to eat it. “We’re overrun with feral dogs,” he said, “but Trixie’s smart enough to hang out here and hit up the softie tourists.”
“And the softie sailors,” she said. “You’re only encouraging bad behavior.”
“Begging’s a tough way to make a living,” he said. He piled the bones onto his lobster shell and set Els’s plate on the sand. Trixie finished the food and licked the paper plate until she had chased it out of the bar. Liz turned back to Els. “Do you like what you do?”
“Why do you care?”
His eyes darkened as they had on the yacht when she was snappish. She’d discovered his tell; she wondered what it signified. Hurt, reined-in anger? Maybe both.
“I only ask a question if I want to know the answer,” he said.
The tables were emptying. A couple walked tipsily into the darkness, their arms draped around each other’s waists, their hips bumping.
“I’m a scrapper,” she said. “M&A is one scrap after another. Competition on the outside, colleagues itching to savage you on the inside. Addictive, in its own weird way.” She ran her plastic knife blade in and out between the tines of her fork. “I crave some of what it gets me.”
“The money,” he said.
She shook her head. Work had become a place to hide, a reason to drag herself out of bed in the morning, a way to fill the