four-car garage), enrolled in some fancy Mommy and Me class that cost more than his monthly mortgage payment, and living happily ever after.
And, of course, if Beckwith really was the father, John would get him—or his family—to pay up as well.
But he couldn’t let Molly Montgomery know that this was something he thought. He had a pretty strong feeling that somehow she wouldn’t approve of his having interfered in the girl’s affairs in this way.
“It seemed like the right thing to do,” he said, instead.
He hadn’t been the only one to hurry over to help the librarian. Patrick O’Brian, owner of Little Bridge’s Seam and Fabric Shoppe and the island’s most popular drag queen (who, John had to admit, was pretty damned entertaining), had also rushed over to make sure she was all right.
Upon seeing John already at her side, Patrick took a quick step back and said, “Miss Molly, I told you, you need to hydrate. In this heat, you have to drink one glass of water for every glass of alcohol.” He looked at the sheriff and rolled his eyes. “Mainlanders. Am I right? Maybe you should take her inside, Sheriff, and get her some water.”
John could not have agreed more. He slipped his fingers around one of Molly’s bare arms (how could her skin be so satiny?) and said, “Yes, that’s probably a good idea.”
“Oh,” Molly murmured weakly. “No, it’s fine. I’m all right—”
“You’re not all right, honey.” Meschelle Davies, whose articles in The Gazette rarely treated law enforcement fairly, gave the librarian a little push. “You go on with the sheriff. You look a little flushed.”
“Oh, well,” Molly said. “Okay, then, I guess.”
John swore he would never grouse about his treatment in one of Ms. Davies’s articles again.
The librarian allowed him to lead her along the beach path back to the hotel’s open-air dining room, with its tropical plantation décor and large, gently swinging ceiling fans. She held her high-heeled shoes and sparkling evening bag in her hands, and seemed much less chatty than at any other time he’d ever encountered her. She must, he told himself, truly be dehydrated. This happened often to those who were new to the Florida Keys. A combination of the heat and humidity, coupled with alcohol consumption, occasionally caused them to become ill. It was a very good thing he’d come along and rescued her.
Her silence, however, lasted only until they reached a booth inside the hotel restaurant and he guided her onto its soft black leather, then slid in beside her and ordered two large ice waters from a conscientious server. That’s when she lifted her face and asked, her dark eyes seemingly even larger than ever in the mysterious flame of the hurricane lamp on their tabletop, “Did you really mean what you said out there? You’re going to donate all that money you won to the baby?”
“Well, of course,” he said, surprised that she’d doubt him. “And to her mother, as well. I’d make a pretty sorry public officer if I said it in front of all those people and didn’t mean it.”
“It’s just . . .” She drew a circle in the condensation on the side of the water glass that had been placed in front of her. “I thought you were going to arrest her. The baby’s mother, I mean. You said the other day—”
John stirred uncomfortably in his seat, remembering their initial meeting, when he’d sat in that tiny chair beside her desk. “I know. And it’s still a criminal offense to abandon a newborn, unless it’s in a state-appointed safe haven. But my investigation so far has given me reason to believe that the mother of Baby Aphrodite was probably not the person who did the actual abandoning—”
“I knew it!” Molly leaned forward to wrap her ruby red lips around the paper straw inside her water glass. Damned if he couldn’t stop thinking about other things he’d like to see those red lips wrapped around. What was wrong with him? He was an elected official and here he was, with a member of the public—a librarian, no less!—and all he could think about was sex. “The leader of the Sunshine Kids, right? Dylan Dakota? Fingerprint analysis proved it?”
All thoughts of those red lips around any body part of his evaporated. John felt a not-unfamiliar spurt of irritation. Dylan Dakota? How on earth did she know about him? What was it with this woman? Librarian or not, had she been faking dehydration the entire