“Yes. Oh my gosh, yes.” She let him help her up. “You should get back. And Hannah will be wondering where I am.”
“Why didn’t she come tonight?”
“My sister is not a party person. All those genes landed on me. Plus, she’s still a little scarred from her winery hangover.”
“Ah.”
Side by side, they started back, taking a different side street to avoid Blow the Man Down. When she rubbed her arms, he cursed the fact that he didn’t take the time to grab his jacket when coming after her, because he would have given anything to wrap her in it at that very moment. Collect it tomorrow with her scent on the collar.
“You did it,” she murmured, after they’d been walking for two blocks. “I’m still embarrassed about crashing the party. But I feel . . . better.” She squinted an eye up at him. “Brendan, I think this means we’re friends.”
They arrived at her door and he waited for her to unlock it. “Piper, I don’t just go putting my arms around girls.”
She paused in the doorway. Looked back. “What does that mean?”
He gave in to just a touch of temptation, tucking a wind-tangled strand of hair behind her ear. Soft. “It means I’ll be around.”
Knowing if he stood there a second longer, he’d try to taste her mouth, Brendan backed away a couple of steps, then turned, the image of her stunned—and definitely wary—expression burned into his mind the whole way back to Blow the Man Down.
* * *
Later that night, Brendan stood in front of his dresser, twisting the gold band around his finger. Wearing it had always felt right and good. Honorable. Once something was a part of him, once he made promises, they stuck. He stuck. A fisherman’s life was rooted in tradition and he’d always taken comfort in that. Protocols might change, but the rhythm of the ocean didn’t. The songs remained the same, sunsets were reliable and eternal, the tides would always shift and pull.
He’d given no thought to where his life would go next. Or if it could go in a different direction. There was only routine, maintaining an even keel, working, moving, keeping the customs he’d been taught alive. Ironically, it had been those same qualities that made him a distracted husband. An absent one. He’d never learned to shift. To allow for new things. New possibilities.
Now, though. For the first time since he could remember, Brendan felt a pull to deviate from his habits. He’d sat on the harbor tonight with his arm around Piper, and it wasn’t where he was supposed to be.
But he hadn’t wanted to be anywhere else. Not serving penance for being a shit husband. Not paying respect to his in-laws, who still lived as if their daughter had died yesterday. Not even plotting courses or hauling pots onto his boat.
No, he’d wanted to be sitting there with the girl from Los Angeles.
With that truth admitted to himself, wearing the ring was no longer right.
It made him fraudulent, and he couldn’t allow that. Not for another day.
The tide had changed, and he wouldn’t make the same mistakes twice. He wouldn’t stay so firmly rooted in his practices and routines that a good thing would come along and slip away.
As he slid off the gold band and tucked it into a safe place in his sock drawer, he said good-bye and apologized a final time. Then he turned off the light.
Chapter Fourteen
Deciding to make over the bar and actually doing it were two very different things.
The sisters quickly decided there was no way to salvage the floor in the bar. But thanks to an abundance of foot-sized holes in the hardwood, they could see the concrete beneath, and thus, their industrial-meets-nautical-chic vision was born.
Ripping up floorboards was easier said than done. It was filthy, sweaty, nasty work, especially because neither one of them could manage to pry open the windows, adding stagnant air into the mix. They were making progress, though, and by noon on Saturday, they’d managed to fill an entire industrial-sized garbage bag with No Name’s former flooring.
Piper tied up the end of the bag with a flourish, trying desperately not to shed tears over the abysmal state of her manicure, and dragged it toward the curb. Or she tried to drag it, anyway. The damn thing wouldn’t budge. “Hey, Hanns, help me get this thing outside.”
Her sister dropped the crowbar she’d bought that morning at the hardware store, shouldered up beside Piper, and took hold. “One, two, three.”
Nothing.
Piper stepped back, swiping her wrist across her forehead with a grimace. “I didn’t stop to think about the part where we actually had to move it.”
“Me either, but whatever. We can just disperse it among a few bags that won’t be so hard to carry.”
A whimper bubbled out of Piper’s lips. “How did this happen? How am I spending my Saturday dividing up garbage?”