Two Captains, One Chair: An Alaskan Romantic Comedy (33 page)

To the boys’ credit, they took their beating with aplomb.  Cheer, even.  They’d been Ed and his fight club’s biggest fans ever since.

I climbed into Ed’s lap.  His arm went around me, and he kissed my ear.  I snuggled closer and laid my head on his shoulder.  Conversations swirled around us, and I tuned in to a couple juicy ones as I was lulled by his steady breathing.

Ed was amazing.  Gentle, kind, quietly charming, and yet he had a darker side.  I honestly wasn’t sure which side of him I loved more, but I did know one thing:  I didn’t have to choose.  As he’d said, they were both in there.

He was simply handy to have around, in any situation. 
Particularly on sleepless nights
, I thought with a private grin.

Ed had fixed my roof.  I’d helped between barge runs, but it seemed like every time I did, we got distracted.  We got distracted on my bed, on my dresser.  In my closet.

He’d also built me a spiral staircase.  It was an interesting combination of black pipe and half-cut logs, with a beautiful, swirling railing.  He was still working on the bannisters, adding bits of colored glass that sparkled in the sun.

We’d been going back and forth, staying at each other’s cabin.  He felt like home, wherever he was.  I woke up tangled with him, and sometimes we made love.  We made breakfast, ate breakfast, and sometimes we made love.  We went out to visit and fix things and claim peoples’ old metal scraps, and… You get the idea.

It turns out, men really
do
fantasize about lifting little women into some fun and funky sexual positions.  Also, the quiet ones truly
are
nasty in bed.  Ed was more than happy to rip me out of my clothes, and then support my weight completely as he whispered the dirtiest, vilest, most deliciously sexy things into my ear.

My face ached from smiling.  For the past couple weeks, that’s all I seemed capable of doing—besides Ed.  He made me happy.  I truly believed, despite not noticing him for years, and despite the fact that he occasionally made people bleed, that we were meant for each other.

I was so comfortable with him, in fact, that two days ago, I’d brought my goat over to his place.  The goofy darling had spent a whole afternoon with the moose sculptures, cavorting around, trying to get the calves to play with her.

And Georgette?  Sitting pretty in Ed’s safe, snuggled amongst her smaller brothers and sisters, secured with a ten-digit pin and bolted into a structural steel beam.  In other words, if I found my gold nugget missing again, it wouldn’t be while I was hunting for earrings.  And if it was gone, then, well… we’d have bigger problems.

Other things going right for me at the moment included the Swede.  Things were working out beautifully between us.  I do the driving, and the money-handling, and the thinking… and the Swede does just about everything else. 

Though, about once a week, Ed pushes him aside to go barging with me.  And usually, when he does that, my deliveries are late.  (Despite Ed’s high-handedness, the Swede has absolutely no shortage of work.  Ed also has him helping out at the bar—and hell, on hot days, Dotty pays him to come over and ride her new mower.  Shirtless, of course.)

So anyway, at this moment in time, surrounded by friends and neighbors, sitting on my new favorite chair—that is, the man I love—my tummy full of good food, I could say that my life is just about perfect.

“Aaaahhh-hahaha!”  The loud, feminine squeal of laughter had everyone at the party swinging around.

In time to witness Helly streak out Gary’s front door.

Wearing nothing but paint.

“Come back here, wench!” he called, emerging after her.  He, at least, was wearing shorts.

It was paintball paint, I realized, but it looked to have been finger-painted on.  Two very clear handprints, one pink and one blue, decorated my best friend’s nether cheeks.

Helly headed toward the lake.  Gary chased after her.

“Gar!” called Rory.

“Yeah?” Gary tossed over his shoulder.

“It’s a few past midnight.  Can we set off the fireworks?”

“Go for it,” he said.  “Gotcha!”  Gary caught a laughing Helly at the edge of the lake and swung her up in his arms.

Rory cackled as he and Zack crowded around the firing module.  “I wanna,” Zack said, trying to shove his brother aside.

“Dude, I called it.  I asked!” Rory said, pushing him back.

“I’m oldest.”

“I’m the expert!”

Zack growled, yanked Rory’s hand away from the controls, and tackled him.  They went down amongst flying fists, and started rolling down the lawn.

While they were distracted, J.D., whistling, his hands tucked in his pockets, wandered up to the detonator.

A lot of things happened at once:

I realized the brothers were rolling toward the upright tubes of the fireworks display.

J.D., with a grin, reached for the device.

I reached out, getting ready to yell something like ‘Stop!’ or ‘Wait!’  But I didn’t get the chance.

J.D. hit the button.  The first firework whined as it shot from its tube.  Then the next, and the next.

The brothers rolled into one of the bigger tubes, knocking it over.

“Shit,” I said instead.

The firework shot from its near-horizontal canister, straight into the woods.

My heart started to race.  “Hell,” I whispered, straining my eyes as I watched the spot where it’d fallen.

A small flame licked to life.

I sucked in a deep breath.

Helly beat me to the punch.  “Fire!” she shouted.

I leaped off Ed and ran toward the fire.  I wasn’t really thinking, but it was a given that it was better to put it out while it was small…

I heard shouts behind me.  Fireworks continued to scream into the sky, exploding into sizzling sparkles.

I ran past my dad.

Wait.  What?

I almost face-planted as I did a double-take—Ed caught me just in time—but yeah, it was him.  My dad had specifically
not
been invited, and yet here he was, catching up to me as we ran toward the burning woods.

He gave me a grim smile.

Aw hell, Helly and Gary are so screwed.

The flames were eating an area a few feet across, consuming the dead leaves in a fast crawl.  We started stomping at the edge.  More partiers joined us, surrounding the fire, some of them emptying their Solo cups on the flames.

“Outta the way!”  Helly yelled.  She pushed her way in next to my dad, naked except for paint handprints, and provoking in me a terrible sense of inevitability.  She squeezed the trigger on the hose in her hand, and drenched the flames with a hard blast of water.

“And this,” she yelled, “is why we have fireworks on a
sandbar
, in the middle of the
river
. 
Gary
.”

Yep.  They were gonna make a great married couple.

A couple hot, sweaty, smoky seconds later, we had the fire out.

I turned to watch as Gary caught Rory by his shirt collar.  He punched him so hard the blond brother toppled to the ground.  Then he launched himself at Zack.

The fireworks were still going off, explosions loud as gunshots casting color and dancing shadows across the scene.  Ed put his arm around me.  Together, we watched as the drama unfolded.

Next to the smoking, dripping patch of forest, my dad was snapping handcuffs on Helly.  “—reckless endangerment, disturbing the peace, illegal fireworks, indecent exposure,” I heard over the clamor.  “Sit,” he growled, and then shoved her down to sit cross-legged on the scorched earth.

He turned and started toward the Gary/brother scuffle.

Helly’s shoulders were shaking. 
Shit, is she crying?
  This day was supposed to have been so special for her. 
What a terrible way for it to end…

But when I got closer, she lifted her head, and I realized those
were
tears streaming down her cheeks… but they were tears of laughter.

“—and assault,” I heard my dad say.  “Now go sit with your accomplice.  I’ll be back for you both in a minute.”

Gary sauntered past Ed and me, his hands similarly secured behind him. He plopped down in the grass next to Helly, who was still wearing nothing but body paint.  She’d have a story worse than Ed’s—
if
, that is, Dad managed to get her all the way to jail.

Glancing back over, I saw that my dad was after the brothers.  He was chasing them, and they were wholeheartedly resisting arrest—or handcuffs, at least.  They were doing loops around Gary’s helicopter while hooting and stripping off their clothes.  The fireworks were still going off, but the party had broken up amongst shrieks and laughter as everyone ran from my father.

“Drunk and disorderly!” he yelled above the melee.

I winced.  Feeling like the spawn of Satan, I looked an apology up at Ed.  He grinned at me, and shook his head.  I turned back to my friends.

Gary nudged Helly with his shoulder.  “Hey,” he said.

She looked over at him with a grin.  “Hey.”

He was giving her that look, that one that made me mentally
awwww
.  “Marry me?” he asked.

Crap, this is my cue!
  Digging in my pocket, I hurried over and flipped the little velvet box open in front of my best friend.

Helly’s eyes were wide as she stared at the ring.  The colored sparks cascading overhead caught in the many facets of the cut gems, making the ring sparkle and gleam in the dusky twilight.  “Is that…?”

“Blueberries,” I said, excited because Gary’d consulted me on it. Helly didn’t usually wear jewelry, so she was difficult to shop for—aaand kinda difficult in general.  “It’s low-profile so you can wear it fishing, and those are blue diamonds—oh my gosh, aren’t they pretty?—and each of those leaves was hand-sculpted.  Or shaped, or however they do that stuff…”  Shit, I was babbling in the middle of Gary’s proposal.

Helly looked up at me then, and those showering sparks glistened in her eyes.  She was smiling.  “You were in on this?” she asked.  “You knew he was gonna… You kept a
secret
?”

Was that really such a surprise?

“Mostly,” Ed said from next to me.

I jabbed him with my elbow.  “Would you just answer the man?  Geez.”

Her grin widened, and she looked over at Gary.  But she held her silence.

I was actually considering kicking her in the shin—of course she was gonna say ‘yes’, there was no question in my mind, and her making him wait was just plain
mean
—when she finally spoke.

“That depends,” Helly said.

“On?” Gary asked.  He was relaxed, seemingly unaffected by her prevarication.

“On whether you have a key for these.”

“It just so happens,” he said, “that I do.”  With a flourish, he held it up between them.  One cuff still clung to his wrist while the other dangled open, bearing witness to his claim.

“How the hell…?”  Gary’d asked me to carry the ring because Helly was ‘handsy’, and he’d had a premonition they’d be naked by the end of the night.  But how could he have known my dad would be here slapping cuffs on people? 
Could my dad have been in on it??  No way…

“Slipped it out of your dad’s pocket,” Gary said.  He turned a panty-melting smile on Helly.  “So that’s a yes, then?”

Helly grinned.  “Yes.  I’ll marry you.  Now let me go.”  She twisted to the right to give him better access to her wrists.

“Ha!  That wasn’t part of the deal.”  Gary climbed to his feet, slipped his hands under her arms, and pulled her to hers.

“But—”

“You think I’m gonna miss my opportunity here?”  He bent at the waist, and straightened with her hanging over his shoulder.  “Now we just need to find a chair.”  To me, he said:  “Hang on to that ring for us, would you please?”

“Gary…”  It was Helly’s warning voice.

He slapped her bare butt cheek, reddening the skin under the blue handprint, and laughed when she squealed.  “Shhh, we gotta give Suzy’s dad the slip.”  Gary winked at me, and then started loping along the darkened beach toward Helly’s place.

“I’ll get you for this,” I heard her mutter.

“I’m sure you will,” Gary laughed.

Ed nudged me with his elbow.  “We should probably get outta here, too,” he said.  “Your dad must have brought twenty sets of cuffs.  And he’s not being very discriminating about who he puts them on…”

Dad had finally gotten the brothers, but now Dotty was acting up.  She was emptying her paintball gun at him.  He was yelling, and trying to dodge, but not being very successful.

Harv stood at her side, having picked up another gun.  He hadn’t participated in the paintball shootout, but when it came to defending his wife…

I took a moment to mentally
awww
again—they were
such
a cute couple!—before fully realizing my dad was now covered with paintball paint.  And oh, but he looked angry.