Page 36 of Our Little Secret

Once more she mentally kicked herself for not vetting him before getting involved with him. She’d been such a moron!

She should have done a lot more research on him and wondered why she hadn’t. Probably because she didn’t really want to know.

After receiving the package with the bracelet and charm she’d done a little digging on the Internet, doing a perfunctory google search and scraping the surface of social media. Nothing there. Then she searched the registrations at local marinas for a boat named theMedusa.

As luck would have it, she discovered the location of the boat, the owner registered as Gideon Ross.

That matched.

So she checked it out by driving to the marina.

From the parking lot on that gray April day she caught sight of the craft, a gleaming white sailboat with the nameMedusascripted on the transom. She decided to get a closer look, to actually climb out of her Explorer and walk onto the dock so she could see the boat more closely. The artwork curving around the side of the sailboat was an artist’s rendering of Medusa’s serpent-infested head captured in the arms of a jellyfish. The snakes and tentacles were wound together, caught in what appeared to be a death struggle.

“Wow,” she’d said under her breath, studying the disturbing scenario. “Dark.”

This was his boat?

Sure enough. Because as she looked past the weird art to the deck above, she saw him stretching to clean the windows of the cabin, the hem of his sweatshirt rising over the waistband of faded, torn jeans.

She felt awkward being there but told herself she had a mission. So, with one eye on the threatening sky, she made her way along the dock to the boat.

“Hey!” she yelled, standing close to the sailboat as it undulated with the dark water of the sound. “Hey, Gideon!”

He kept washing the windows, seemingly unaware of her.

“Gideon!”

“He can’t hear you.”

She turned and spied an older guy on the deck of his own boat, a smaller vessel moored on the other side of the dock.

His bald pate was rimmed with red hair turning gray and he was hauling buckets of bait. He set down one bucket on the deck of his boat and pointed to one of his ears. “He’s got those ear thingies in. Always.”

“Earbuds.”

“Whatever they’re called.” He picked up his bucket again, and she caught sight of the shiny scales of some dead fish as water sloshed over the pail’s rim. “He can’t hear a goddamned thing.” He shook his head. “Washing windows on a day like today. Waste of goddamned time, if you ask me.”

She headed up the gangway and stepped onto the boat. Gideon’s face was etched in concentration, lips flat, eyes narrowed as he rubbed at a spot on the window with a towel. Then, as if he’d sensed her presence, he looked over his shoulder and noticed her, his hair catching in the salty breeze. Slowly, a smile crept across his jaw. “You found me.”

“Yeah.”

Straightening, he nodded. “I wondered.” He dropped the towel into a pail on the deck.

“What?”

The lift of one shoulder. “If you’d bother.”

“I had to.”

One eyebrow raised, encouraging her as the wind kicked up and her hair blew over her face.

“Because—because I wanted to return this.” She brushed her hair from her eyes, then dug into her purse, came up with the tiny package containing the bracelet. She handed it to him. “I can’t take it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s—it’s not appropriate.”

“If you say so.”

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