More Than Anything Page 4

  “And all the books?” She looked pointedly at the piles.

  “I like to read.”

  “So if you’re not a writer, what do you do?”

  “I’m an architect.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Cool. I’ve never met one of those before. Have I seen any of your buildings on TV?”

  “Not yet.” But one day, maybe.

  She sighed dramatically. “You’re being very cagey, and I give up.” She leveled a look at him. “What are you doing here?”

  “I told you, I have no place I need to be until after the new year, so I’m just killing some time until my apartment opens up. I’m taking a long overdue and extended vacation.”

  “Well, that’s nice for you. I hope you enjoy your stay in Magnolia Beach. So,” she said briskly, rubbing her hands together, “shall we start with a recitation of the excellent safety features on board the Lady Jane?” She waved her arm around the cabin in an excellent imitation of a The Price Is Right girl. “That way, should you ever find yourself in a predicament like last night again, you’ll feel comfortable sitting tight and waiting until a reasonable hour before calling me.”

  “Touché.” And that reminded him . . . “Did you find out how I got loose in the first place?”

  “Drunk kids pulling a prank. I’ve already turned the video over to the local police. I’m sure they’ll be in touch.” She shrugged it off.

  He nearly choked on her nonchalance. “You suddenly have a broad definition of a prank—especially since you’ve done nothing but lecture me about the dangers.”

  “And I’m sure there will be hell to pay for Kirby and his crew. But it was just a prank, and had it happened to pretty much anyone else, it wouldn’t be much of a problem at all. You made the situation worse with your lack of basic knowledge.”

  She was just not going to let that go. “Maybe the marina should have better security,” he challenged, but it was weak and he knew it.

  The corner of her mouth twitched. “Well, I’m going to get Cupid’s hearing checked.”

  He’d met the dog when it came out to greet him in the parking lot a couple of times. Cupid was an older dog, going gray around the muzzle, willing to come to anyone who might pet her, and it seemed, slightly deaf. She was hardly a deterrent to crime of any sort. Gotta love small-town security measures. “What will happen to the kids involved?”

  Shelby shrugged again. “I’m hesitant to throw the book at them for simple teenage dumbassery—God knows I’ve done my fair share of stupid stuff—but that’s up to the authorities. I’m sure Rusty or someone will come talk to you and let you know what charges can be pressed if you choose to.”

  “But you won’t be pressing charges?”

  She shook her head. “About the only thing I can get them for is trespassing. I know these kids, though, and they’re not bad kids, just . . . bored, probably. And intrigued.”

  “Intrigued?”

  “A reclusive hermit living on a boat? Who never seems to go into town? No one knows anything about him. What could he possibly be doing on that boat?” She shrugged again as she dropped the overdramatic tone. “I’m actually a little surprised it took this long for a bunch of them to get curious enough to come see what was up with you.”

  Shelby’s questionable logic was giving him a headache. “So it’s just chalked up to curiosity and harmless mischief?”

  “Around here, kids have to make their own fun. That doesn’t always end well.”

  “You certainly weren’t quite so blasé about it last night.”

  “Last night, I had been woken out of a sound sleep and a very good dream in order to save your butt because of their stunt. I was grumpy and irritated at all y’all.”

  “Yet today we’re all forgiven?”

  “Rusty will make sure Kirby and his crew have a new religious awakening. You’ve already agreed to rectify your lack of knowledge. No one was seriously harmed, there’s no property damage, and we all learned a valuable lesson and are taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” she chirped, sounding much like the camp counselor she resembled.

  “We? And what did you learn?”

  She shot him a smug smile. “To make sure live-aboards know what the hell they’re doing before leasing the slip to them.” She brushed her hands against her shorts. “So Monday after lunch? Say two-ish? Boating 101?”

  He had to hand it to her. She had spunk. And he couldn’t even be irritated at her heavy-handedness with him because she was being both rather reasonable in her arguments and perky about it, too. Shelby was definitely a “people person,” able to get along and make friends with everyone—a valuable skill, he had to admit, and one he’d never quite been able to master.

  He’d heard the jokes about how Southern girls could tell you to go to hell in a way that would make you look forward to the trip. It seemed it might be true. Her accent bordered on hypnotic—not too syrupy, but with enough of a drawl to rope him in.

  “Two o’clock is fine.”

  Shelby flashed a brilliant smile at him. “Great. I’ll see you then.”

  There was something about that smile and the tone of her voice . . . Why did he get the uneasy suspicion he was going to regret this?

  Chapter 3

  “If anyone wanted to wipe out the Tanner family, they could pick any Sunday at two o’clock and easily erase the entire bloodline,” Eli grumbled as he unfolded chairs and set them around the table.

  “If they want the entire family,” Shelby corrected her cousin as she laid out silverware, “they’ll need to wait until one of the big holidays when everyone’s here. Hell, the whole immediate family isn’t even here today. That leaves more than enough of the family to start repopulating the world with Tanners.”

  “Don’t talk about repopulation too loud.” Eli looked over his shoulder toward the kitchen, where all the women—other than Shelby, of course—were gathered. “Gran’s on another ‘We need a grandbaby’ kick.”

  “Then tell Ryan to marry Helena and get on that.” She said it quietly so Ryan and Helena wouldn’t overhear. Their wedding date was a bit of a touchy subject. She wasn’t sure who the holdout was, but her money was on Helena. She had settled in, but she still seemed a bit gun shy. Not that Shelby blamed her—she still had hearts and minds to win and that was a slow process in a town that had only had a year to adjust to the idea of a new Helena.

  Plus, Ryan was so obviously insanely crazy about her, he couldn’t be the one with cold feet.

  Ryan and Helena certainly weren’t a couple Shelby would have ever envisioned, but then she didn’t know who could have. But Ryan seemed happy, so Shelby had come around. Whether Helena would continue to hold a grudge, well, that was hard to tell.

  Eli snorted. “I’m not that stupid, Shel.”

  “That’s debatable,” she mumbled, then dodged the elbow he threw.

  Most people would probably say there were enough Tanners in Magnolia Beach already—the younger generation didn’t really need to start reproducing or else they might take over entirely. But it was true that most, if not all, of them could be found at Gran’s on any given Sunday afternoon. Gran believed that the family Sunday lunch was the cornerstone of civilization, and it was nearly impossible—or at least very unwise—to argue with her about it.

  Which was why every Tanner without a good reason not to be was here. Honestly, Shelby didn’t mind all that much. The Tanner women—herself excluded—were known for their amazing cooking, and Shelby was not one to turn down a home-cooked meal. She even wore a dress every Sunday, much to the amusement of her brother and cousins, simply because Gran expected her to.

  Of course, the boys had to dress up, too, so it wasn’t like she was being singled out or anything.

  The table in the parlor wasn’t really big enough, but Shelby set it for six anyway. The true “adult” table was in the di
ning room, and with the four younger boys away at school, there was no reason to set up another table, so they’d just squeeze around this one. Sometimes when the extended family came, they’d have tables all over the place, but it was just the fifteen of them today.

  For her family, this was a downright intimate affair.

  Of course, with six around this small table—her brother, Jamie; cousins Ryan, Adam, and Eli; plus Helena and herself—this felt pretty intimate, too. And since things between Helena and Jamie—and Helena and Shelby, too—could still be a little awkward at times, the intimacy was a little uncomfortable.

  But a lot could be ignored—or at least tolerated—for her grandmother’s corn casserole and country ham.

  Adam paused in buttering his roll to look at her. “You said you wanted me to rewrite something for you?”

  She nodded and swallowed. “The slip rental agreement. I want it to have something that says we expect the renter to have a valid operator’s license. Or some kind of proof they have basic know-how.”

  Adam looked at her as if she’d lost her mind, but Jamie was quicker to ask, “Who would—”

  “Declan Hyde,” she answered. “The dude living at the marina right now.”

  Ryan laughed. “So that’s what Uncle Mike was talking about. Was there some kind of trouble Friday night?”

  “What?” Adam asked.

  Shelby sighed. “A bunch of drunk kids snuck into the marina Friday night and untied his boat. He was drifting out into the bay, and I had to go get him because he didn’t even know how to start the thing.”

  Jamie looked pointedly at Helena, who dropped her fork and held up her hands. “Hey, I had nothing to do with that. I have an alibi and everything.”

  Ryan chuckled. “Yeah, I’ll vouch for her whereabouts all night long.” Helena made a face and smacked him on the arm.

  “It was Kirby Peterson and his crew, actually,” Shelby said.

  Ryan frowned. He volunteered as an assistant coach for the football team and didn’t like hearing his players were causing trouble. “How do you know it was him? Do you have proof?”

  She nodded. “It’s all on video. And Kirby wore his practice jersey. That made it pretty easy to identify him.”

  Ryan’s frown deepened, and Helena made a sound suspiciously like a snort.

  “Sounds like Kirby might be picking up your torch, Hell-on-Wheels.” That was Eli’s comment, but Helena liked Eli, so she responded only with a small smile and a lift of her eyebrow.

  “He’s welcome to try.”

  “Bite your tongue,” Jamie said. “One Hell-on-Wheels is enough for any town.”

  Shelby turned back to Adam. “So I need you to add some fancy lawyer-speak to the rental paperwork—”

  He smirked. “To keep the dumbasses out of your marina?”

  “Something like that,” she muttered, only she didn’t really think of Declan as a dumbass. Sure, the situation was ridiculous, but he seemed—at least based on what little time she’d spent talking to him—to lack the true arrogance and stupidity needed to really claim the title. He was willing to admit the problem and take steps to correct it, so that had to mean something, right?

  “Wait,” Eli said in a tone that meant he’d just realized something. “You went out in the middle of the night to rescue some guy you don’t even know all by yourself?”

  All four of the boys were now staring at her in varying degrees of outrage and horror. She should have expected this.

  “Shelby—”

  “Are you insane?”

  “What if—”

  It comes from a place of love, she reminded herself, but it also came from the fact that none of them could get over stuff that happened over a decade ago, so she needed to shut it down fast. “And which one of you chuckleheads was I supposed to drag out of bed at three in the morning to do it instead?”

  “I’d rather be dragged out of bed than have you do something so stupid,” Jamie snapped back. “Did you even stop to think about what might have happened? Or did you just run off half-cocked as usual? I think we need to discuss who’s the real dumbass in this situation.”

  She couldn’t kill her brother in Gran’s parlor, but . . . “Careful, I have a key to your house and access to a boat,” she warned in a low voice. “They’d never find your body.”

  Helena was stabbing at green beans, a small smile on her face. Although she normally kept quiet in situations like this, choosing to stay out of family squabbling, she didn’t even look up as she said, “My money’s on Shelby, Jamie.”

  Jamie frowned in Helena’s direction, but he was still too chicken to take her on directly. He’d tried it once, back when he was sixteen or so, and he was still pouting over the smackdown Helena had delivered in return. Of course, Ryan would kill him if he tried to take her on now, so Jamie was stuck in forced silence and acceptance.

  Personally, she found that very amusing.

  Adam cleared his throat. “That addition won’t take but a minute or two. I’ll e-mail it to you tonight.”

  “Thank you. You know,” she said casually, playing with her green beans, “I was thinking we might want to consider allowing more live-aboards, particularly during the off-season.”

  “There’s not enough space,” Eli said immediately, like he knew anything.

  “There is,” she corrected. “We just would need to use our space more wisely.”

  “Dad doesn’t like a lot of live-aboards. It doesn’t always attract the most high-quality people. You don’t want that, do you?”

  His patronizing tone was enough to set her teeth on edge. The amazing thing was that Jamie was always the first to jump on anyone who dared treat her as though she was stupid, yet ironically, he was often the very first to treat her as if she were. It was infuriating. Not that Ryan, Eli, or Adam were much better. It was a miracle they let her run around without a leash, much less run the marina. She kept her tone neutral. “We’d just need to be very specific about the rules and careful who we lease to. Of course, we’d also want to consider sprucing things up, adding more amenities.”

  “The kind of people who use the marina don’t want amenities.”

  She kept the sigh behind her teeth and concentrated on keeping her tone very, very casual as she turned back to Ryan. “Attracting a more varied clientele is not a bad idea, you know. Some of the captains running boats out of Bay Breeze are getting close to retirement. We need to be looking ahead.”

  “As long as there are fish, there will be fishing boats. Don’t borrow trouble you don’t need, Shelby.”

  And Ryan considered himself a forward-thinking mayor. Small-scale fishing was in trouble and not nearly as profitable as it used to be. She wanted to reach across the table and smack him. She’d been hoping that the feedback from them might be a little more positive, giving her some backing if she brought it up to her father. “None of you know squat about the marina.”

  “We know you,” Jamie said. “You may have great ideas, but you don’t always think them through, and you rarely follow through. It wastes money and time and then we’ll end up with a mess when you decide it’s not worth fooling with anymore and jump to the next thing.”

  Okay, that was a low blow and completely untrue. Well, now at least. “Are you saying I don’t know what I’m doing? I’ve been running that place for years. No one knows it better than I do.”

  “No one is saying you don’t, Shel.” Eli was, as usual, trying to be the peacemaker, but his tone was more placating than earnest, and it made her want to throw something at him.

  “It sure sounds like Jamie is.”

  “Jamie is going to shut his mouth,” Eli insisted, and Jamie, who’d been about to argue something, actually did. “We’re just saying there’s no reason to mess with something that’s already working.”

  But I could make it work better. Sadly, thoug
h, that wasn’t an argument she was going to be able to make right now, not with all of them able to gang up on her and dismiss her. And since she couldn’t shout or knock heads together in the middle of a family Sunday lunch, it would only frustrate her to continue banging her head against that brick wall. “Fine.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence until Ryan cleared his throat. “So what are you going to do about your current live-aboard?” he asked.

  She’d lost her appetite, so she placed her fork on her plate and leaned back. “Teach him the basics, glue the Lady Jane to the dock, and pray he wasn’t lying when he told me he could swim. I mean, I can’t kick him out now.”

  “But why is he here?” Ryan asked. “I think it’s safe to assume he’s not here for the fishing.”

  “From what I understand, he’s out of work and had no place to live, so a friend offered him the boat.”

  “That’s a very nice friend,” Adam muttered. “And not at all sketchy. Are you sure he’s not cooking meth on board or anything?”

  “That’s a terrible thing to assume.” Granted, she’d had a similar thought, but it had been fleeting.

  “I was wondering the same thing,” Jamie added.

  “Well, y’all should be ashamed of yourselves. He’s an architect. He says he has a job starting in Miami after New Year’s, so I think he’s probably just in a bad spot at the moment. And anyway, I’ve been in the cabin—when I made the repair yesterday,” she clarified against the look on Jamie’s face, “and I saw no indication of anything other than some Netflix binge watching.”

  “Sounds heavenly, if you ask me,” Eli said with a sigh. “A long vacation of doing nothing followed by a nap and more nothing.”

  Jamie shook his head. “Real grown-ups don’t take four-month vacations. The dude definitely sounds sketchy. ‘Between jobs’ is just a fancy term for ‘unemployed.’ How’s he paying for that Netflix?”

  Jamie was a CPA, so everything always came down to money. “Maybe he’s independently wealthy,” Shelby offered in explanation. “One of those trust fund babies or something.”