No Judgments: A Novel (Little Bridge Island Book 1)
No Judgments: Chapter 7

Time: 8:10 P.M.

Temperature: 80ºF

Wind Speed: 9 MPH

Wind Gust: 20 MPH

Precipitation: 0.0 in.

He’d changed out of the beat-up T-shirt he’d been wearing earlier in the day into a soft blue chambray button-down and a pair of chinos so faded they looked almost white.

“What are you doing here?” Drew Hartwell demanded.

This didn’t seem like the most welcoming way to greet a guest, even one he hadn’t been expecting, so I didn’t think I could be blamed for bristling.

“Uh,” I said, hoisting up the bottle of champagne I’d brought along. “It’s a party? Your aunt invited me? I don’t know. Are Fresh Waters not welcome, or something? Should I leave?”

He blinked those impossibly blue eyes like someone who was just waking up from a particularly bad dream and shook his head.

“But,” he said. It was difficult to hear him due to all the laughter and conversation coming from the people in the yard, and the salsa music playing merrily from the outdoor speakers above us. “I thought you were evacuating.”

“No. I said I wasn’t evacuating. Remember, we had a whole conversation about the frustrations of family?”

He shook his head again. His pupils weren’t particularly dilated, so I didn’t think he was high on anything.

But his eyebrows were constricted, and he definitely wasn’t smiling. He seemed genuinely concerned.

“Have you even been listening to the weather reports?” he demanded. “Do you know how bad this storm is?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Do you?”

“I live here.”

“Well, so do I.”

“I’ve lived here my whole life. I know about hurricanes. And this isn’t one anyone should mess around with.”

“You mean like someone who lives on the beach?” I blinked up at him, feigning wide-eyed innocence. “The beach everyone is warning people to evacuate?”

It was at that exact moment that I was hit by a slim, sweet-smelling rocket that came racing toward me out of the darkness of the yard, wrapping a sweaty arm around my neck.

“You came!” Nevaeh planted a kiss on my cheek. “I knew it! I knew you’d come!”

“Oof,” I said, as she crashed into me. “Of course I came. What else was I going to do tonight? I’m surprised you’re here. Didn’t you have a hot date?”

Nevaeh’s lack of hot dates (her aunt said she was too young to date and forbade her seeing any of the many young men who constantly hung around the café, thirsting for her) was a steady source of humor between us.

“No,” Nevaeh said, pretending to pout. “But what about you?” She backed away, eyeing my dress. “You look so pretty! You could have had a date tonight if you wore this more often. Why haven’t I ever seen you in this before?”

“Well, I thought about wearing it to mop the floors at the café. But then I decided it wasn’t formal enough. Where can I put this?” I waved the bottle of champagne. Drew, I noticed, had drifted away, probably to whichever section of the party had been reserved for hot brooding bachelors who were building their own beach houses.

“I told you not to bring anything.” Mrs. Hartwell was standing right behind her niece, looking stern.

“I’m glad she didn’t listen to you!” Nevaeh eagerly snatched the bottle out of my hands.

“Not until you’re twenty-one, young lady.” Mrs. Hartwell took the bottle from her niece. “Very nice,” she said, glancing at me with raised eyebrows after scrutinizing the label. “Hardly worth wasting on this bunch. I might have to hide this for my own personal use.”

“Please do,” I said. “It’s for you.”

Mrs. Hartwell snorted, looking embarrassed, and called to her husband, who was in a sunken part of the yard by the grill—or I should say multiple grills, with multiple men, all of whom were busily barbecuing by the light of numerous tiki torches.

“Ed,” Mrs. Hartwell screeched. “Ed, Bree Beckham brought us some champagne!”

Unsurprisingly, since Ed Hartwell hardly ever spoke except to yell at someone, there was only a grunt in reply. It sounded approving, however.

“Well, let’s go get this on ice,” Mrs. Hartwell said, and began moving at the speed of light. “And get you a drink, too, of course.”

She headed down the steps, into one of the biggest backyards I’d ever seen on the island—which, being only two miles by four miles, was in a constant and desperate battle to preserve green space.

The Hartwells had done a good job of conserving it. The yard was lush with native growth, mostly different varieties of palms, some of which towered as high as twenty feet overhead, forming a cooling canopy against the moody night sky. The air was thick with the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine, ylang-ylang, and grilling meats and vegetables. Exotic orchids in multiple colors, white, purple, yellow, and orange, grew from the trunks of some of the palms, the flowers swaying softly in the warm evening breeze.

Mrs. Hartwell placed my bottle of champagne in a silver bucket that held ice and a number of other bottles of wine, most of them open, that sat on an ornately carved Moroccan bench by the pool. Kidney shaped, and lushly landscaped so that it looked almost like a naturally occurring pond (only turquoise colored), the pool glowed iridescently in the darkness of the yard, a shimmering sapphire amid the bright ruby and topaz tiki torches.

At Mrs. Hartwell’s urging, I helped myself to a plastic glass of white wine from one of the opened bottles while Nevaeh, who’d trailed behind us the entire time, stood beside me, chattering nonstop.

“And over here is where we’re keeping the rabbits,” she was saying, guiding me toward an area of the yard that was near what appeared to be one of the most picturesque potting sheds I’d ever seen, painted white with blue trim to match the house. “We volunteered to foster animals from the ASPCA during the storm. They always make sure to replace foster homes for every pet in the shelter during a hurricane. They gave us two rabbits. What do you think? Aren’t they just the cutest?”

After my vision had adjusted, I saw that the rabbits were comfortably snuggled into newly constructed wooden hutches, their pink and brown noses twitching away as they nibbled at a head of lettuce someone had dropped inside their pen. I agreed that they were, as Nevaeh had said, the cutest.

“We’ll bring them inside when it starts to rain,” Nevaeh prattled on. “I’ve made a pen in the laundry for them out of baby gates. I want to keep them forever—along with the parrot and the tortoise—but Uncle Ed says we have enough animals. I don’t know why, we only have a couple of stray cats that come around because I feed them. They actually live under the church down the street. I know I’ll change his mind. Oh my God, Katie!”

This was directed at a young girl who’d just arrived at the party, Nevaeh’s best friend, Katie, who like Nevaeh was dressed in a halter top, short shorts, and some sort of silky robe. Like Nevaeh, she’d also flat-ironed her hair to a sheen. Both let out a delighted scream at the sight of each other.

Since Mrs. Hartwell had long since been snatched up by another partygoer, I drifted away as Katie and Nevaeh shrieked over the coincidence of their wardrobe selections, having noticed that Angela was standing beside a nearby table laden with chips, dips, and other party favorites.

“Hey, girlfriend,” she said, when she saw me approaching, and gave me a welcoming hug. “Check out the spread.”

When I turned to look at the impressive array of food—much of what had been in Mrs. Hartwell’s shopping cart that afternoon, only now it was transformed into tantalizing trays of gooey nachos, simmering brisket, cool and spicy fish dip, truffle popcorn, strawberry trifle, and watermelon salad—Angela leaned over to whisper into my ear, “And check out what’s behind us.”

I turned to look. The Hartwells owned an outdoor pool table, around which seemed to have gathered most, if not all, of Little Bridge Island’s most eligible bachelors (and bachelorettes). It would have been hard not to notice that one of the former was Drew, since he was currently breaking. Under the misty yellow glow of the party globes that someone had strung above the pool table, I could see that he’d pushed the sleeves of his chambray shirt up to his elbows, revealing his darkly tanned forearms. These flexed tautly as he leaned across the green felt to take a shot, as did his left butt cheek, clearly outlined by the thin fabric of those super-faded chinos.

Well, a girl could look, couldn’t she? Even if she was most definitely not interested in buying, and was, in fact, off the market.

Except that Drew chose that exact moment to look up from beneath the chunk of dark hair that had fallen across his eyes, almost as if he’d felt the direction of my stare. That ice blue gaze met mine.

Crap.

I glanced quickly away, feeling myself blush.

“So how’s the food?” I turned to ask Angela, taking a quick sip of wine. I wished I’d thought to put ice in my plastic cup, to cool my suddenly burning cheeks . . . and other places that happened to feel hot.

“The food?” Angela hadn’t noticed the look Drew and I had exchanged, whatever it had been, thank God. “It’s great. You should try the spinach dip. Oh, and the brisket is good, too.”

“Great.” My blush was deepening. Damn it! One of these days I was going to track down my biological mother and ask her if blushing ran in the family. Neither my mom nor my dad had ever blushed in their lives and had always teased me (good-naturedly) for doing so. “Is he looking over here?”

Confused, Angela glanced in Drew Hartwell’s direction, from which I could hear nothing but the murmur of casual conversation and, for some reason, a whining dog.

“Is who looking over here? What are you—”

“Nothing. Good. Never mind.”

Angela started to laugh. “Oh my God. You have got to be kidding me. Drew Hartwell?”

“No. Absolutely not. He just caught me looking at him, and I don’t want him to think—”

“Oh, right. Because nothing could be further from the truth?”

“Exactly.”

“Then why are you so dressed up?”

I knew it had been a mistake to listen to Patrick.

“It’s just a dress,” I said. “It’s a party, so I wore a dress.”

“A hurricane party.” Angela shook her head in amusement. “No one dresses up for a hurricane party. Everyone’s all sweaty from boarding up all day, so they just throw on whatever so they can get their drink on. Man, I should have known this was going to happen when you were outside this morning, talking to him for so long.”

“I wasn’t talking to him. I was talking to other people,” I hastened to remind her. “On the phone. Nothing is going on between me and Drew Hartwell, I swear. You warned me to stay away from him, remember?”

“Yeah, like you’ve ever listened to me.” Angela had a paper plate in her hand and was filling it with truffle popcorn. “I told you not to eat the lobster roll at Duffy’s Clam Shack and you went straight out and tried it.”

“It was featured on the Food Network!”

“That doesn’t mean anything. You know, now that I’ve gotten to know you better, I’ve come to think that you and Hartwell might not be the worst thing that’s ever happened. You actually have a lot in common.”

“Oh, right.” I sampled the spinach dip. It was delicious, like everything Lucy and Ed Hartwell made. “Name one thing.”

“Well, you’re both white.”

I smirked. “Oh, well, everyone knows that guarantees happiness in a relationship.”

She laughed. “And you can both be pretty sarcastic when you want to.”

“That might be true, too, but again, not a guarantee of relationship success.”

She grew more serious. “You do both like animals. You have that crazy cat, and Drew’s got, what, like five dogs out there on the beach with him?”

“I heard it was only three.”

She grinned at me. “Wow, you really are into him. You’ve been checking into his private life?”

“His aunt mentioned the dogs, that’s all. And anyway, what about that truck of his? You’re the one who told me—”

“Oh, forget about that. That was years ago. Before he left for New York. His truck has pretty much been parked in the same place for ages now.”

“Which is?”

“His own driveway. And the Mermaid parking lot. And Home Depot, of course, where he buys all his—”

“Excuse me.” A man’s deep voice cut through our conversation. I turned to see Drew Hartwell standing beside me, holding a paper plate.

I felt my face heating up again, and it wasn’t because of the sultriness of the evening air.

“Yes?” I asked, with concentrated primness. “May I help you with something?”

“My aunt’s brisket.” He pointed at something behind me. “You’re blocking it.”

“Oh.” I hopped out of the way while Angela stifled a snort of laughter. “Sorry.”

How much had he overheard? Any of it? All of it? He didn’t appear at all discomfited, if that was the case. He was digging into his aunt’s brisket like a starving man, piling it onto one of the rolls that had been provided to make sandwiches of the meat.

I should have known to run to a different section of the party when I saw Angela smiling mischievously beside me. But of course I didn’t.

“So, Drew,” she said conversationally, her laughter barely contained. “Is it true what I hear, that you’re going to stay in your house on Sandy Point for the storm?”

“It’s true.” Drew was hesitating over the vast selection of homemade and commercial barbecue sauces for his brisket sandwich.

“That’s a really bold choice, Drew,” Angela said, still grinning. “They’re warning everyone with places on the shoreline to head inland.”

“I built my place to withstand two-hundred-and-fifty-mile-per-hour winds.” Having made his selection, Drew now squirted barbecue sauce all over his brisket. “It’s made of poured concrete and rebar, on forty-foot pilings to keep it above the storm surge. The place should be fine. And if not, it’ll be good for me to be there to make any necessary repairs on-site as breaks happen.”

I stared at him. “Are you insane? That’s exactly what they’re telling people not to do.”

He’d taken a large bite of his sandwich. “You do realize,” he said, as he chewed, “that there’s nowhere on this island you can go that isn’t coastal.”

“Yes,” I said. “But you can go inland. You don’t have to stay on the beach—”

“What do you care?” Those bright eyes glittered at me a little too intensely. “Why is what I do during the hurricane so important to you?”

I took a sip of my wine to escape his smirk. “It’s not. Trust me, whether you live or die makes no difference to me.”

Drew grinned. “Now you’re starting to sound more like a local, Fresh Water. So where are you hunkering down, if you’re so intent on staying?”

I’m sorry to say that I flipped my hair. What was wrong with me? I wasn’t even drunk, I’d only had one Jell-O shot and a few sips of wine. “Oh, I have a lot of options.”

“Really?” He was still grinning. “Like where?”

“I invited her to stay with me,” Angela said mildly, leaning over between us to scoop some spinach dip onto a corn chip. “But apparently, she got a better offer, since she said no.”

I almost choked on the sip of wine I’d taken. This statement was a complete falsehood, and Angela knew it. What she’d actually said earlier that day back at the café was that she’d be staying at her mother’s during the hurricane. Mrs. Fairweather’s home was a historic Spanish-style bungalow made of concrete and not situated in a flood zone, and so ideal for hunkering down during storms.

I was welcome to join them, Angela had said, but her brother’s rottweilers would be there as well, and might not be too thrilled to see Gary.

I had not taken her invitation seriously.

“Um,” I said. No way was I going to mention that Drew’s own aunt had invited me to stay with her. That seemed like it would be walking into whatever mischievous trap Angela was setting for me. “Yes, well, Lady Patricia invited me to stay with her in a fourth-floor suite at the Cascabel—”

His grin vanished. “The Cascabel? You’re not staying there, are you?”

“Well,” I said, noting that his objection appeared to be over the hotel, not whom I was staying with. Lady Patricia was the most well-liked drag queen in Little Bridge, and everyone bought fabrics for their curtains and outdoor furniture at Patrick’s fabric shop. “Well, yes, I thought I might. Pat says it’s rated Cat Five, too—”

“The building itself, sure. But the lobby and stairwells flood every time there’s even a minor rainstorm. Why doesn’t anyone ever remember that?”

“Remember what?” Ed Hartwell was approaching with a platter still sizzling from the grill. He appeared to have almost every variety of barbecue possible, from burger patties to hot dogs to kebabs to portobello mushrooms.

“The Cascabel,” Drew said. “What’s the point of being safe from wind damage on a high floor when you can’t exit in an emergency because there’s three to six feet of floodwater on the first?”

“They have a generator,” Angela pointed out.

“Sure, to power the rooms,” Drew said. “Not enough juice to handle the hallways or lobby. And I wouldn’t trust the electricals anyway under those conditions. Salt water will have flooded the elevator shafts, corroding the cables. So you’re still going to have to walk up and down a dank, dark, smelly stairway every time you need to go out for anything—”

Who knows how long I would have been forced to stand there politely listening to these locals argue the pros and cons of riding out a hurricane at the Cascabel Hotel if the dog that had been whining up until that point hadn’t suddenly let out a yelp of pain? All four of us swiveled our heads toward the sound.

“Oh, no,” Angela said.

That’s when I noticed for the first time that we had a hurricane-party crasher.