Page 4 of Windlass (Seal Cove #3)

“‘I want you to draw me like one of your French girls.’” Stevie infused her voice with melodrama in an ode to Titanic .

Angie’s lips twitched in a second slight smile. “Only if you let me on the raft.”

“Uh, science says it would sink if I did. Sorry.”

“‘Fair.”

“I’ll cherish your memory.”

“No need—I’ll just haunt you, shivering, dripping icy ghost water all over your floor.”

Angie’s pen left off tapping her chin and she began to sketch, glancing up at Stevie with slightly narrowed eyes and a focus that did not see Stevie the person, but Stevie the form. Stevie struck a pose, careful not to disturb Marvin.

She needn’t have worried. Sensing the mood, he rolled onto his back so she could rub his belly, gravity pulling his lips down over his teeth in a ridiculous grin.

Stevie wanted to grin, too. The mood had lightened. Everything was going to be okay.

Angie’s pen moved swiftly over the page.

The scratch of the ballpoint on paper filled the silence, preventing the awkwardness from moving back in.

She had a habit of chewing her lip when she drew that didn’t help Stevie’s own Angie-specific oral fixation.

More than that, though, she liked the way Angie’s face changed.

In total concentration, the shadow that lay across her countenance lightened.

The shadow wasn’t noticeable the rest of the time; she only knew it was there because she’d seen Angie without it. Angie with a sketchbook was an Angie totally in the moment, and it was obvious, so excruciatingly obvious, that the moment was one of the few times she was at peace in her own head.

“Any luck finding a roofer?” Stevie asked. The house roof had an ominous dark patch that hadn’t yet turned into a leak, but threatened to with a few more storms.

“I haven’t had a chance to look.”

“The trials of land ownership.”

“You have no idea, peasant.” Angie paused, then with a nod of satisfaction held up the rough sketch.

Stevie laughed. Angie had placed the drawn Stevie on the couch with a ridiculous feather boa covering her faux nudity, and the rapturous, vacant expression that Stevie had been trying to project stared back at her, captured perfectly in a few strokes.

Angie’s style blended realism with the comic style favored by graphic novelists, all wrapped up with a hint of abstraction.

She had no idea how good she was. Stevie knew—and one day, if she had anything to say about it, so would the world.

Angie just needed to listen to her first.

“What did you do to my hair?” Stevie asked.

“I gave you a period updo. Like the ringlets?”

“ Love them,” she said sarcastically. “They match my bubbly personality.”

“You do bubble.” Angie turned the pad back around and examined her work. “Oops. Forgot your freckle.”

“Not the freckle . . .”

Angie’s phone buzzed. Angie glanced down at it, and her cheeks simultaneously flushed and paled, blotches of color disrupting her lightly tanned skin.

Dread seized Stevie’s intestines in a tight fist. The expression in those eyes—guilt, defiance, shame—told her exactly who had sent the text message.

“Um,” Angie began.

Stevie pulled Marvin’s lip back up and let it drop, watching the mottled pink inner skin surrender to gravity.

“I was gonna move my stuff into Morgan’s room tonight, anyway. That room has a better view. Dibs.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

They stared at each other. She thought Angie might be about to cry. Her eyes glistened, huge and luminous in her stricken face.

Which made no sense. Why was she upset when she’d been the one to say yes to Lana? Did she know how much it hurt Stevie? That was worse. Why had she gone ahead and done it anyway—to remind Stevie that Angie saw her only as a friend?

“It’s cool.” She shrugged. The motion was difficult with the weight of the lie tugging at her body as surely as gravity had tugged Marvin’s lips a moment before, but she wasn’t going to reveal her hurt. “You going to her place?”

Angie shook her head. “She’s . . . coming here.”

What did it feel like to get shot? Stevie’s hand rose unconsciously to her throat, shielding her chest too late.

Silently, she stood and left the room, heading upstairs before Angie could see her cry.

Angie had joked about haunting Stevie, but the expression on Stevie’s face would haunt Angie forever.

She gasped out the breathless sob she’d been holding in once the door to Stevie’s room shut upstairs.

She allowed herself one more searing breath, then shoved the emotion down.

This had been her decision. Her choice. She had known this would hurt Stevie, and she had done it anyway. She didn’t have the right to be upset.

Lana waited on the front step, looking impatient as ever.

Seeing her after spending time with Stevie always jarred Angie.

Lana was coldly beautiful, with gorgeous pin-straight dark hair—that stupid hat she always wore notwithstanding—and a litheness to her limbs promising the kind of violence that made Angie’s skin shiver in anticipation.

Stevie, meanwhile, was warm and golden, with eyes the cornflower blue of summer, and she made Angie shiver right down to her dark matter.

The comparison ended when Lana reached for her and kissed her hard, possessively, as if tasting something she was sure would always be hers. It left Angie breathless, but literally so, not metaphorically.

“Not on the lips,” she reminded Lana with an edge of irritation she didn’t bother concealing. Lana knew Angie drew the line at her lips.

“Forgot.” Probably a lie. Lana always “forgot” things like that when it was convenient. She’d never liked Angie’s no-kissing rule.

Lana laced their fingers together and led Angie back through her house, stopping at the liquor cupboard to grab a bottle of vodka (it was always vodka, which Angie hated) before leading them upstairs to Angie’s room.

Stevie’s door was shut, but so was Morgan’s, so Angie didn’t know which room she’d occupied.

Morgan’s, she prayed. It was farther away.

She should tell Lana to leave. There was still time. Stevie might forgive her.

Or maybe it was better this way. Kinder in its up-front cruelty. Stevie deserved better than anything Angie could give her, and Angie deserved someone like Lana, who could personify her self-loathing.

Lana shut the door to her room at least before shoving her against it.

The thud of her back against the wood was audible.

Lana pinned her hands to her sides and looked her over, blue eyes—so much colder than Stevie’s, an Antarctic chill ringing her dilated pupils—raking up her body.

Angie’s lips tasted like Lana’s Chapstick. She wished she could scrub them clean.

“Strip,” said Lana.

“I can’t.” She pulled at Lana’s grip, illustrating her point.

Lana released her, but before Angie could obey, her T-shirt was ripped over her head, catching the tip of her nose uncomfortably, and the ice in Lana’s eyes sharpened with lust. Angie knew what she must look like, pinned against the door, her breasts straining at her bra and her hair tousled.

She knew, too, what Lana wanted, and she looked up at her through her lashes and moved as if ducking away, the deer to her wolf.

Lana’s nails were on her instantly. She dragged them up Angie’s ribs, leaving red welts that would linger for several days, and shoved Angie’s legs apart with her thigh. The smell of her perfume was suffocating.

Still, Angie’s body responded, and as Lana’s nails claimed each rib, pain tinging the edges of arousal, she closed her eyes and let the dark, wet heat of oblivion wash over her.

She’d met Lana at a farmer’s market, of all places, innocuous and wholesome, and in sharp contrast to the way Lana had looked at her across the gap between vendors’ stalls.

Lana had been with another girl—she was always with another girl—but when Angie was walking back to her car, past the rusting park benches and the couples lounging with their dogs, a hand had touched her forearm.

When she’d spun around, Lana had been waiting, hands now shoved in her jean pockets, looking at her from beneath the brim of her snapback, a knowing smirk on her lips.

Angie, who always had a pen on her in case she saw something she wanted to sketch, stepped into Lana’s guard and wrote her number on the exposed skin of Lana’s wrist. They’d not spoken a single word to each other, but when her phone buzzed with an unknown number two days later, she’d known, just as she had at the market. Void called to void.

Now, Lana pinned Angie’s arm behind her back, pressing Angie’s face against the door as Lana bit the muscle where her neck met her shoulder. She stifled a sound. Stevie was somewhere on the other side of that door. Cruelty was one thing, salt in the wound another.

Lana bit harder. This time she gasped, Lana’s teeth not quite breaking skin, and she hated herself for her body’s immediate answer. Need rippled out from Lana’s bite. Need, and with it the permissions she did not grant herself lightly: to feel, to weep, to want .

She pictured Stevie standing on the other side of the door, listening with that same terrible expression—perhaps resting her forehead opposite Angie’s.

Lana’s teeth found her shoulder blade and scraped along it.

The moan that sensation ripped out of her throat would have carried easily through wood.

Stevie could have heard every breathy second of it.