Page 36 of Lawless
I rolled my eyes.
“Hey, guys,” came a voice from behind us.
I jolted, and so did Button John. I spun and planted my feet back on solid ground—Button John didn’t. I heard a yelp, then the scrape of fabric against stone, and then a splash.
“Oh, shit!” Dominic peered down into the water. “Are you okay, Button John?”
Button John, sitting on his arse in the water, shrugged. He stood up, water pouring from his shorts, and held a hand up to me. I hauled him back up the shallow harbour wall.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Button John waved Dominic’s concern off. “Happens all the time.”
Dominic looked at me.
“Yeah,” I said. “It really does.”
He smiled, and warmth spread through me. Didn’t matter if that smile was for me or because Button John had fallen in the harbour—I liked his smile, and I liked the way it made me feel.
“I’m gonna—” Button John gestured vaguely at the street, and then squelched away.
“I missed you last night,” Dominic said in a low voice.
I felt my face burn, even as my stomach swooped unpleasantly.
This was why Dominic was a bad idea, and why I shouldn’t have been leading him on. Because last night I’d been out breaking the law, and now the law was standing right in front of me, looking hotter than he had any right to in that uniform, and waiting for me to say something. I didn’t have anything to say and, if I had, those words would probably have been stuck in my throat anyway.
God. I’d been so stupid thinking this could go anywhere. He was a copper.
Dominic’s mouth quirked awkwardly, and he looked down at his boots for a moment before he met my gaze again. “I mean, yeah, there are some things I think we should talk about, right? I?—”
“I can’t talk to you about that,” I blurted. “I can’t talk to you at all.”
And then I bolted, like a coward, leaving Dominic standing by the harbour wall staring after me.
Chapter 11
DOMINIC
The first meeting of the Dauntless Island Amateur Historical Society was held at the police station because, Eddie said, my kitchen was newer than the one at the museum.
“I don’t know how Amy cooks in it,” he said as he shoved a homemade pizza onto the top shelf of my oven. “It has a wood stove, Dominic. A wood stove. You need to turn a knob to open the flue to get it to light. She laughed at me when I asked her to write out the instructions. I’m so glad I live at the lighthouse.”
“It’s weird that you do,” I said. “Like, it’s weird that she moved into your house and you moved into hers, and there’s not a mountain of paperwork to fill out or anything.”
“That’s just the way things work here,” he said, straightening up and shutting the oven door. “It’s this sort of practicality and sense of community that comes from everyone being related to each other, but also from their origins. After the wreck, in the early days of settlement, they had to pool all their resources just to survive. Also, there aren’t any new houses being built here. I think the last time anything new was built was by the Americans during the war. So people shift around as their circumstances change. Amy and Joe lived in the village when they were kids. Then when Joe got the lighthouse job, they moved up there and someone else took their house here.” He shrugged. “It makes sense, you know?”
“It makes sense from a practical standpoint, but I can’t imagine it working anywhere else.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Eddie said. “Just because it’s not how our society has developed doesn’t mean that other societies haven’t been doing it this whole time. It’s actually really fascinating, because Dauntless has managed to retain its own culture, and they’re very protective of it.”
“I saw that at the council meeting,” I said, grabbing a couple of light beers out of the fridge. “I think Mavis was about to threaten Red Joe with a bloody end if Amy gets her trucks.”
“That’s partly Dauntless, but mostly Mavis.” Eddie grinned and took his beer.
I snorted and twisted the top off my beer. “Yeah, but you’ve been telling me from the start that they hate me because I’m a copper, and you’re sure right about that.”
It was nothing new, but it hit differently since Natty had bolted from me yesterday. At first I’d thought he was jittery about the wanking stuff, and me saying we had to talk about it. But it hadn’t been that—or just that—it had been the way his eyes had widened as he’d taken in my uniform, like he was seeing it for the first time or something. I thought we’d finally been at the point where he didn’t notice it anymore—where he saw me first—but for some reason all that had flown out the window. We were right back where we started, except this time I knew Natty well enough to know what I was missing out on, and it hurt. I wanted Natty and, unless he was a fantastic actor, Natty wanted me too. But it looked like we were both going to lose out just because of this island and its weird fucking anti-government feeling.
