“I’m Emily.” She extended her arm and gave him the hint of a smile. The kind that said hello and I’m not interested at the same time. No wedding ring, though. He was a details guy, and he noticed things like that.
“Chloe, only take a couple of things,” her mother said. “We still have to pay for that, and I only have a few dollars in cash.”
Ryan pulled a twenty from his wallet and slapped it down on the folding table. “Nice to meet you, Emily. Chloe. Dinner is on me.” He smiled back, friendly and casual. She probably got hit on all the time, and even though he loved a challenge, he reminded himself, again, that this trip was strictly business.
“Thanks. I can pay you back once we get to the island, or if we find an ATM,” she said, pulling out a tiny bag of cheese crackers.
“No worries.”
They helped themselves to crackers, pretzels, Hershey bars, and gummy bears. Not the best dinner he’d ever had, but given the circumstances, he was pretty damn happy to have that. Emily found some Styrofoam cups in the little office and filled them with water from the bathroom sink.
“Thank you for the feast, such as it is,” she said, handing him one of the cups.
“You’re welcome. Such as it is.”
She took a drink, then pointed at his computer bag. “It’s not going to be much of a vacation if you bring all that work with you.”
He shook his head and pulled a mini-pretzel from a foil bag. “Not a vacation at all. I’m heading to the island to work with my dad.”
“And to rescue him from a bimbo?” Her gaze was innocent as she popped a cheese cracker into her mouth.
“How did you . . . ? Oh, I guess you heard me on the phone.” Awkward.
Her smile might have been patronizing were it not for the tilt of her head that went with it. “Sorry. Kind of hard not to.”
Ryan swallowed the excessively dry pretzel and washed it down with some water. “I get kind of loud on the phone. Bad habit. Anyway, yeah. My dad’s been on the island for about a month now, and according to my brother, he’s fallen under the spell of some gold-digging bimbo.” Ryan didn’t believe that, though. Bryce was full of shit most of the time, and even though their father had been a widower for the past eight months, it wasn’t as if he was suddenly single and ready to mingle. Just the thought of his conventional, buttoned-down father in the arms of some woman after forty years of marriage to Ryan’s mom made him shudder. “I’m sure it’s nothing, though. Bryce is easily excitable, and my dad is much too smart to fall for some femme fatale.”
“Siri, what’s a femme fatale?” Chloe asked her phone.
“It’s a dishonest woman who uses feminine wiles to manipulate men,” Emily responded just as the phone replied, “It’s a woman considered to be dangerously seductive.”
Emily offered her daughter a satisfied smile. “See. I know stuff.”
“Dangerously seductive? How is that different from all women?” Ryan’s joke fell flat on this audience, and his skin prickled with embarrassment. “Anyway, I’ll be there for the next several weeks, and I’m sure I’ll get it all figured out.”
“Several weeks? What kind of work do you do?” Emily had taken off her jacket, and the pale pink sleeveless shirt she wore was just sheer enough to give a hint of lacy stuff underneath. She had a whole naughty librarian thing going, and it was as sexy as it was innocent. He slid his hands into his pockets and paced a bit to remind his body where they were and what they were talking about. What were they talking about? Oh yeah. His dad getting distracted by a woman. How ironic.
“I’m a consultant.” Ryan knew that answer usually stopped the conversation cold. No one ever really wanted to know what a consultant did, and he wasn’t at liberty to explain it anyway since his father’s company, Taggert Property Management, usually worked confidentially behind the scenes with their investors and clients. Time for Ryan to change the subject. “Do you know much about the island?” he asked.
“You bet she does. She grew up there,” Chloe answered, standing up and walking into a beam of fading sunlight to take another picture of herself.
Ryan looked back at Emily, feeling the surprise that must have been registering on his face. “You grew up there?”
She nodded. “Born and raised.”
“Really? Wow. I assumed native islanders were like four-leaf clovers, you know? Everybody says they’ve seen one but no one really has.”
Emily chuckled. “Well, I’ve never seen a four-leaf clover either, but I do know lots of people who grew up on the island.”
“That’s very cool. What was it like?” Ryan grew up in Sacramento, with sunshine year-round and every convenience nearby. He could not imagine living someplace so remote.
“Probably a lot like growing up in any small town. Close neighbors, lots of gossip, lots of people to turn to when you need help. Lots of people telling you how to live your life. The usual stuff.”
He still couldn’t imagine it. “What about in the winter? Were you trapped? It’s got to be like The Shining with all the snow.”
This time Emily laughed right out loud, sincere and unguarded. And sexy. He started pacing again.
“We had pretty much everything we needed,” Emily said. “Plus we weren’t really trapped. Other than about a month right in the middle of winter where there’s too much ice for the ferries to run but the lake isn’t frozen enough to snowmobile over, we could almost always get to the mainland if we wanted to.”
He stopped pacing to stare at her. “Snowmobile? Over Lake Huron?”
“There’s an ice bridge,” Chloe said, stepping toward him. “My mom’s told me all about it.”
Ryan turned to the kid. She was cute, a younger version of her mother, and he was pretty sure she had a gummy bear in each cheek. “Oh yeah? What’s she told you?”
“She told me that her boyfriend could make it from the island all the way over to the McDonald’s in Manitou in six minutes flat. But one time when my grandpa was young, he tried to go over the ice when it wasn’t solid enough and his snowmobile went in the water and sank right to the bottom.”
Ryan turned back to Emily. “He did? Was that your dad?”
She nodded but seemed wholly unconcerned. “Yes, that was my dad, but he’s so cheap he went right back out onto the ice the next day with some ropes and some hooks and tried to pull the thing back up.”
Ryan chuckled, relieved that the story hadn’t turned tragic. “Did he manage?”