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“Yes. It’s ingenious.”
“Well, I don’t know aboutingenious, but you sort of develop a knack for accommodations when you spend a lot of time on boats.”
“And I imagine you did before you started building them.”
“Not as much as you’d think.” He left the rolled plans on the table and searched the cabinets for some heavy mugs to hold down the corners. “I went to work right out of high school. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to the school I actually wanted to go to, so I guess I was playing the part of the martyr by not picking a cheaper second-choice.”
“Sounds like a typical eighteen-year-old.”
Tim was glad he had his back turned so she couldn’t see him cringe. The way he was twenty-five years ago wasexactlythe way his son was now. Actually, Kevin might have actually been better at being eighteen than even Tim had been. Having all that money probably didn’t help.
Heidi hadn’t liked the idea of making Kevin wait until twenty-five to access his trust fund, and now they both wished Tim had been a little more aggressive at making it happen. They never knew where or when Kevin would pop up. Tim had to take his house keys away the last time he’d come home. Kevin had walked in to find a lady in a ball gag handcuffed to the kitchen table, thanks to Clay. It’d beenheridea, Clay had just made the “gift” possible.
Tim had to do a lot of lying about why the lady was there, and he wasn’t sure how much of it Kevin bought.
Tim cleared his throat and carried the cups to the table. He put one on each corner of the plans. “Anyway, I went to work for a local boat builder after high school. He manufactured motorboats and the occasional sailboat. No-frills kind of stuff. It was either I work there or get my ass on a tractor.”
“Your parents were farmers?”
“Yep.”
“My grandmother’s family did some farming as well. They all moved up north during the Great Migration, though.”
“Where from?”
“Actually, not too far from Shora, if my geography memory serves me well. My grandmother hasn’t yet had a chance to point the exact area out to me. I don’t even know if she’d remember it. She moved when she was so young and hasn’t had a reason to come back except for family reunions. She tends to skip them. She’s a cranky old broad.” Valerie’s smile was soft. She obviously had warm feelings for the woman.
“Well, we have something in common, then. We’re both descended from salt of the earth-type folks.”
“Well, at least on one side of my family.” She shrugged. “I can’t say much about the other.
He opened his mouth to follow up on that statement, but before he could get out the words, she asked, “So, what did your folks grow? I think my grandmother said her family grew peanuts.”
“Ah, my family never got into peanuts. Cotton, corn, and sorghum, up until about ten years ago. Hard to turn a profit anymore, and Dad was getting too far up there in age to think about switching to some other crops. Plus, the house was in shambles and he and Mom just didn’t want to live in it anymore. It was too much work for them.”
“You mean, Clay’s house?”
Tim grunted and pulled the chain on the lighting fixture over the table. “Old-assed thing. Our family had been on that property since around seventeen-eighty. If Clay hadn’t taken it on, they probably would have had to sell it. He couldn’t really afford the upkeep, either, and at the time, neither could I. My business didn’t really take off until a couple of years later, and Clay was only here about two months out of the year. I don’t even want to think about what kind of hustling he did to get the money together to pay the taxes. Nothing is beneath him.”
She pressed a hand over her heart and grinned at him.
So pretty.
“Is that a bit of reverence I detect in your tone, Mr. Dowd?”
“Hell, no. I may be a degenerate, but my brother is a ruthless deviant. When folks start talking about him, I cut them off at the pass.”
“How did two respectable farmers end up with sons like you and Clay?”
Tim leaned his palms onto the table and watched again as she pursed her lips and drew some of that luscious liquid between them.
If she liked red wines, he’d have her sample everything he had in that drawer. He’d supervise every sip and hold the cup up to her lips. He’d make her keep her hands primly on her lap, and if she spilled a single drop, he’d give her something else to drink—something she’d have to work her jaws hard to get out.
Clean it up, Dowd.
He groaned and closed his eyes against the sight of her beckoning mouth.
“I think they tried hard to make us respectable,” he said, “and it backfired on them. But as far as they know, though, we’re perfectly upright citizens. Not too much word of the trouble we get into makes it down to them. They retired to Florida after Clay took the farm off their hands.”
