Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,3
festival days holed up in his cottage in Paradise Cove.
“I was helping the new doctor get set up for her vaccine campaign, and I stupidly left my truck on the other side of Main, so I’m stuck until after the parade.” He pulled out a stool.
“Well, help yourself to whatever you want, but do me a favor and watch the place for a few minutes, will you?” Law came out from behind the bar. With anyone else, he would have expected an interrogation about his sudden need to bail on his place of business, but he was counting on—and got—merely a grunt of assent from Jake. That was the nice thing about Jake. He wasn’t always jumping to conclusions where there were none to be made.
He’d made it almost all the way to the door when Jake’s voice caught up with him. “You’d better hurry or you’re going to miss her.”
“What’s with the Spice Girls thing?” Sawyer asked a few minutes later as he came to stand next to Law on the curb near the end of the parade route. Sawyer had finished his role in it, parked his cruiser, and shown up to watch the end.
The Gorgons were approaching, performing an enthusiastic version of that “If you wanna be my lover” song. Several of them sported headpieces that made it look like they had snakes for hair.
“Why is it always the Spice Girls?” Sawyer went on. “I mean, songs from The Little Mermaid I get. But the Spice Girls?”
“Maya got her undies in a bunch years ago because I didn’t have any Spice Girls on the jukebox at the bar. So I think she gets them to sing it to stick it to me. Also, you may remember that the Gorgons never marched in front of the royalty float back in the day. They were further up in the parade, and…”
He trailed off, registering Sawyer’s puzzled look. Yeah, Sawyer didn’t remember that. It was a weirdly specific detail that only someone obsessed with the parade would recall.
“So what you’re saying,” Sawyer said, “is that you get Maya elected mermaid queen every year, and she responds by surrounding herself with a choir named after figures from Greek mythology whose whole schtick was to turn men to stone and she has them sing the Spice Girls purely to irritate you.”
Ah, yes. That was what Law was saying. But he did realize how ridiculous it sounded when put like that. Annoying Maya was his main hobby, which maybe didn’t reflect well on him, but he didn’t care. Given that he was cursed by being wildly attracted to a woman who hated him, and given that the feeling was mostly mutual—though he couldn’t honestly say he hated her as much as he was endlessly annoyed by her—the Mermaid Parade was pretty much the highlight of his year. He got to see Maya in all her glory, and he got to bug the shit out of her. Win-win. But he didn’t know how to answer Sawyer’s question. Law had learned to live with the contradictions inherent in his relationship with Maya, but his friends did not need to know about them. They wouldn’t understand.
Sawyer shrugged, returned his attention to the float, and said, “That sounds about right, actually.”
The Gorgons wrapped up the song, and the band began playing a royal flourish, heavy on the horns.
Maya was wearing her signature Converse high-tops—a sky-blue pair. After the first year of her reign, she’d cut a hole in the bottom of the tail so her feet could peek through, saying she “refused to be jailed,” which was a very Maya-esque turn of phrase. The green and blue sequins on the tail made it sparkle in the sun. She wore a hot-pink tube top and had painted her lips a matching color. Her long, so-brown-it-was-almost-black hair hung loose down her back, which was a rare occurrence, and it was windy enough that she kept having to push it out of her face.
As the float came to a halt, she made one last rotation perched on her throne, waving first to the people on the other side of the street. It wasn’t a fakey beauty-queen wave, but it also wasn’t the kind of wave she’d do in her real life. That kind would be fast and enthusiastic—Law aside, she was always happy to see people. No, it was merely a slow, unremarkable, almost disinterested wave. And as she turned to face forward, he could see that it matched her