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“But if you’d rather not, I really don’t have a problem waiting for the subway to open if you drop me there,” she added, giving them both a final get-out clause.
She’d certainly been in worse places than Sheepshead Bay at the crack of dawn.
“Forget that. Faith would murder me.” He climbed into the driver’s seat and waited for her to get in on the passenger side. A maneuver that was less easy than it looked given that Versace hadn’t factored SUV travel into the design of the gown.
Once she was finally settled, he turned on the ignition.
“But just so we’re clear,” he said. “You get the couch.”
“Not a problem,” she said graciously as he reversed out of the lot. “Take me to your house barge, Sir Galahad,” she added, unable to resist teasing him, when he glared back at her across the console.
“Why do I get the feeling I’m gonna live to regret this,” he grunted, before driving off into the night.
Chapter Three
‡
Ty jerked out of a groggy dream, to the piercing beep of his iPhone alarm ringing in his ear. Hauling himself up, he scrubbed exhausted hands down his face. Jay-sus wept, as his pop would have said, his body ached as if he’d been hit by a truck last night.
Sunlight streamed into the snug cabin past the crack in the shutters and gleamed off the flat-screen TV anchored to the wardrobe at the end of the bed. He needed caffeine, preferably tongue-scorchingly hot and lots of it. Whipping back the sheet, he stared at his shorts. Weird, why had he kept those on? When he always slept in the raw in the summertime. The pulsing in his groin wasn’t all that surprising though, given the freaky dream he’d been in the middle of involving Faith’s fancy friend, Zelda Madison, emerging from the water on Manhattan Beach, buck naked. Freaky, psychedelic, and kind of disturbing, because it had been so vivid it had given him an epic boner.
Throwing on a T-shirt, he waited for the thing to deflate, before he tugged back the screen door. He strode into the boat’s main living area, making a beeline for the coffeemaker, only to smack into an invisible wall when his gaze landed on the barge’s couch.
Lying face down under a haphazardly slung sheet—one slender arm and one long, toned leg thrown over the side of the bunk and the graceful line of her naked back visible right down to the slope of her ass—was the star of his psychedelic dream. Looking real solid for a figment of his imagination.
“What the hell?” He whispered through chapped lips. Blood rushed into his groin and his head at exact the same moment, making his body sway into the tidal swing of the boat.
The apparition stirred, one slim shoulder shifting but then snuggling back into the bunk. Thank the Lord, the last thing he needed now was for his surprise guest to flip over and give him a full-frontal shot of her naked rack.
The unedited version of last night’s trip to the Sixty-First precinct house flooded full-throttle into his foggy brain, clearing out the cobwebs faster than his mom on the warpath, back when he was a kid and watching a Yankees game with Pop and his brothers had left their living room looking like a bomb site.
While his temper spiked, the burning pulse in his crotch refused to die.
His dream was a reality and she looked dead to the world. Probably because, just as he’d figured, she’d been wasted last night.
Of course, she’d seemed sober, but then he guessed party girls learned early how to hold their liquor. She must have been on one hell of a bender to have ended up swimming on Manhattan Beach, not to mention agreeing to come back and sleep on a house barge.
How tall was she? Too tall for the dimensions of the bunk it seemed. Her neck cricked at a funny angle under the pile of sunshine hair that had made her a fortune. Her signature feature puffed over her face in a cloud of blond fuzz, the long tangled tresses trailing over her slender shoulder and spilling over the side of the bunk in a golden waterfall. Like some fairytale princess from a storybook. The one with the hair in a tower with the weird name. He titled his head to one side, noticing her tattoo. A ring of black thorns circled her bicep.
The fantasy became dark and edgy and discordant.
Not a lot of fairytale princesses got caught skinny dipping in Brooklyn Bay.
And her hair didn’t look anywhere near as well groomed as it did in the giant billboard ad that had looked down over Times Square last Christmas. But it did still look soft and tactile, reminding him of the summery scent that had invaded his SUV while they drove home together in the moonlight. That had to be some shampoo, able to keep her hair smelling that good even after getting dunked in the Bay and spending a night at the station house.
He shook the sentimental thought lose, while resolutely ignoring the dumb reaction in his crotch as he filled the kettle and headed for the shower cubicle in the barge’s compact bathroom.
Twenty minutes later he was dressed in a crisp shirt and tie, and a dark blue Calvin Klein suit. He slicked his damp hair back as he gulped down his first shot of caffeine for the day and concentrated on stopping his dick from getting delusional.
His houseguest was still comatose on the bunk, the pile of hair and the pearly soft skin lustrous in the morning light. She was going to have one hell of a sore head when she finally came to. Although he would have gotten some satisfaction out of telling her ‘I told you so’, he figured it was probably for the best he wouldn’t be here to see it. Quite apart from his dick’s dumb reaction, something about that radiant, ethereal beauty, which could stun a man into speechlessness even in the middle of the night in the Sixty-First Precinct House, when they were sporting a fairly bad case of ‘who the hell signed me up for this gig’, really unsettled him. He hated to be predictable, and he had always despised women as high maintenance and high class and generally useless as Zelda Madison. It was lowering to realize that despite his crusading belief in defending the civil rights of the poor and huddled masses, that he should be as susceptible as the next guy to the woman’s pampered, patrician beauty.
He jotted down a note and attached it to the table next to the couch, then dug through the week old pizza boxes and takeout cartons and the piles of court reports to find his case files
for today and stuff them in his briefcase. One of these days he needed to find time to shovel out this dump. His mom would have killed him if she could see it now. To Kathleen Sullivan, a speck of dust had been considered a mortal sin.
He quashed the prickle of guilt and grief that always accompanied thoughts of his mother. After all, it hadn’t been his idea to invite Zelda Madison, supermodel and high-society party animal, back for a visit.
He stole another glance at the woman in question before his breakfast Pop Tart popped out of the toaster. Grabbing the sweet treat to go along with his briefcase, he headed out the glass door onto the boat’s deck, ready for another day of fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. And forced himself not to look back.
