“A… criminal one? Are we on the run?”
He dropped his hands, glanced around before releasing the foot brake, and then made a U-turn. “Socially criminal. I’m not sure about legally.”
“Hmm. Tell me more. I can usually spot the line between illegal and frowned upon.”
“And then what?”
“Flirt with disrespecting it.”
He lifted a cheeky eyebrow at me in question.
I straightened in my seat. “I have a record, Dezi.”
He glanced at me as we breezed back into town. “Ah yes, your ban from the docks. I’ve been told there was a bad boy in you. One that matched the outside.”
My heart skipped, and then it skipped again as I grabbed the handle beside the seat when he made a sharp turn into the tiny alley that ran behind Bay Hall. We cruised by the shops andbusinesses for a half-mile stretch in silence, which was good, since I’d found myself at a loss.
A social situation I didn’t normally tango with.
Cody suddenly pressed the pedal all the way down, and the golf cart picked up speed. “Illegal or frowned upon?”
I reached out to assess how much clearance we had between us and the brick columns covered in honeysuckle vines that ran beside us, but before I could get too far, I was yanked back into the cart. Cody’s hand remained on my bicep as he scowled at me.
“Hands and feet inside the cart at all times,Ti Bet.”
His grip was tight, and the warmth of it caressed my bare skin. Then, with a quick squeeze, he released me and took the next turn to the main street.
I hadn’t a clue what “Ti Bet” meant, but the way he’d said it and that Cajun accent thickened, like it did when he called Bree “Cher,” made it almost sound like an endearment.
I studied the tattooed fingers of my right hand and stretched my fingers into scale patterns—something I’d observed Vinh doing so many times that I adopted it into my own habit. As had Bree.
Cohabitation had led to a lot meshing and mingling of habits.
My mentor at the tattoo shop in Eufaula thought I was crazy to not only do my first real tattoo on myself, but also on my fingers, which was a notoriously painful spot. But they were all the simplest of line work, and the pain had been the perfect outlet for my feelings at the time, all those years ago.
Vinh had just announced that he’d bought a condo in Gulf Shores and was moving there to work. Four-and-a-half hours away from our home in Eufaula, without traffic.
Warmth engulfed my hand as I tucked my thumb under my middle finger for the imagined “G” in a D Major scale, and my itching thoughts paused.
It was distracting enough that I remembered the air around me and breathed it in until my heart rate slowed. I took in more and more until clarity reigned.
Cody glanced between the road ahead and his hand on mine several times before sighing as he said, “I’m terrible at recognizing plants or remembering their names.” He ran his thumb lightly over the flowers on my fingers. “It never ceases to horrify Jeanne. You’ve met Jeanne, right?”
“I have.” Jeanne rivaled my own mother in fierceness and worked as the head gardener at Fortuna, though she was still on maternity leave right now. I quite liked her the few times our paths crossed.
“Ahh. So this will make sense to you, then. I went to see her and her new baby a couple of days ago, and I speculated out loud that her fiddly snake looked thirsty and needed more water.”
I gasped. “And you lived to tell the tale?”
He smiled at me wryly and returned his errant, beautiful hand to the wheel. “She was probably too tired to muster up her usual wrath, but she did let me hold little Maggie.”
“Hmm. Maggie is a cute name.” I made a mental note to drop her some biscuits from Ari’s tomorrow as I clasped my hands together. “Do you like kids?”
His nose scrunched. “I liked her. She held onto my finger so tight and made these adorable little sounds.”
I needed to ask Bree if she’d gotten a picture.
Cody chuckled as we rounded the swampy-looking pond. “I wonder how old she’ll be when she finds out she was named after a tree.”
