shot me an amused glance. I smiled back, but it was hollow. Luca’s eyes were on the boat. He was looking past Maddy to the day ahead, and all she saw was him.
Roux sauntered toward us in his wake, and the very sight of her jacked my heart rate, made me work to keep my smile in place. Not that anyone was looking at me. Both brothers, the married one and the spare, paused to watch Roux. Her pale pink bikini and her skin shone the same through a gauzy white cover-up, the colors and the sheerness conspiring to make her look more naked than naked. Even Captain Jay, who was pushing seventy, stopped to look.
Leslie Babbage smacked her husband’s shoulder, and that broke his hypnosis. He laughed and threw an easy arm around her, turning away with her to stow their gear.
The single brother, Mark, kept right on looking.
Roux was aware of his gaze. I could see it in the extra swing she added to her hips, the sly glance she sent me as I walked out to meet her with the liability paperwork.
“Men are too easy. All I have to do is show up and have tits,” she said, skipping the greeting to go straight to gross generalizations.
“How clever of you to have tits, then,” I said, deadpan.
That made her chuckle, but I could feel the prickle of something electric in the air between us. She was no more at ease than I was, and I was glad of it. If she was on edge, then there must still be a way for me to win her game. God, how I wanted to win.
There was an old picnic table on the walkway just before the dock, and she sat down to fill out the forms with made-up information. It rendered them useless, but there was nothing I could do about that. It was an added pressure pulsing at the base of my neck. The whole day felt like disaster coming, though it was warm and breezy-beautiful, a summer throwback with a high of eighty-seven. In Florida this passed for fall.
My feelings of dread, I knew, had little to do with today’s dive, and yet they colored everything. The weekend was being eaten up with boat trips and Roux and family obligations. I had almost no room to maneuver, and my time was running out.
Roux was flipping through the pages to find the signature lines. She paused to look up at me. “Take good care of my boy today.”
“Of course,” I said.
If she’d been any other mother, I would have asked her to do the same for Maddy. I’d tell her what I’d seen down in my basement. But this woman weaponized sex, and she was proud of it. She might be concerned, but she also might laugh and give Luca a gold-star sticker. I didn’t know if she was protecting the sweet kid that Luca seemed to be or actively raising a predator to follow in her footsteps.
Now she was filling out his forms, putting in his fake name. He was complicit in this much at least. He answered to “Luca” like a pro. But if he was trying to keep his mother out of jail, I couldn’t blame him. Most kids would do the same. That went double if the two of them were on the run from the man who had pounded her pretty face and her whole body black and purple, until it was as ugly as raw meat.
Every instinct, every minute I had spent with him, said Luca was troubled but not rotten. He was also likely new to this. After all, Roux had three full sets of fake ID. He had only one, and the “Luca” passport had been shiny-new and free of stamps. I believed he’d been protected, kept separate from her career until now. Then something—an arrest warrant, an attack, or a marriage gone so sour that it turned deadly—put them on the road with whatever possessions they could pack up in a hurry.
And Roux loved him. That was obvious. Maybe she wanted better for him than for herself. Most mothers did. As she finished the forms and rose, I decided I had to say something.
“Can I talk to you, mom to mom? About Luca?” All movement in her body stopped, as if I’d hit a button. I had her complete attention. Roux’s stillness, the preplanned absence of any tells, was her tell in and of itself.
“Okay,” she said. Light, but