Kallie walked hand in hand with Ash into a restaurant tucked down an alleyway. There was live music and smoke fluttering around in the air, and Kallie had no idea what she’d gotten herself into. Ash led her to a table next to the band that was playing, and a waitress approached them, taking their drink orders before Ash ordered for her.
“The two of us are going to split your family fettuccine seafood pasta dish,” he said.
“Want any cheesy garlic bread with that?” the waitress asked.
“Oh yes, please,” Kallie said.
“That’s a lot of food. You sure you can handle all of it?”
Kallie grinned as she leaned back in her seat.
“Bring it,” she said.
The pasta dish was massive. Easily three pounds of it. The decadent butter and cheese sauce coated the noodles and it was piled high with all kinds of seafood. Shrimp and clams. Oysters and scallops. There were chunks of lobster and a few crab claws they could dig into. And the cheesy garlic bread?
It was an entire half loaf of thickly sliced bread.
“Oh my gosh, this is incredible,” Kallie said.
“You know what makes it so good?”
“What?” she asked.
“They make the noodles in the back.”
“No they don’t.”
“They do. Scout’s honor.”
“Were you a Scout?” she asked.
“Not even close. But I’m dead serious. They make most of what they serve in-house. And the seafood? Caught from their personal dock out back. They have their own fisherman and everything.”
“Oh yeah. None of this is making it back to the villa,” she said.
The sound of Ash’s laughter made her heart flutter in her chest.
“So, I have a question.”
“The fact that your preempting it isn’t good in my world,” Kallie said.
“Okay. Then I’ll simply ask. Do you want to spend the weekend with me on a boat?”
Kallie looked up from her plate as a noodle hung from her lips.
“You, uh ... you got something there,” Ash said.
She slurped the noodle into her mouth and swallowed it all whole.
“A boat?” she asked.
“Yes. You know, one of those things that floats on the water?”
“You’re a sarcastic little shit, you know that?” she asked with a grin.
“My momma told me I could be anything I wanted to be,” he said with a smile.
“And whose boat would we be cruising on for the weekend?”