Chapter One

Georgia Childress took an odd sort of pride in all the dinks and rust spots her fifteen-year-old chalk-yellow Volvo station wagon sported. Maybe they weren’t exactly badges of honor, but each one had its own little story to tell, even if they did occasionally remind her of some of her more blond moments while driving—when she could have paid more attention behind the wheel. And at the end of the day, it told a little bit of a story of who Georgie was, like it or not.

The good news is nothing all that bad ever happened during those episodes. Even the time she backed out erratically and scraped bumpers with the mayor (four-inch-long black streak on the front right bumper) ended up being okay; Mayor Petrilli liked Georgie enough to hire her to pet sit her two yellow Labs when she went on vacation for two weeks. Granted she did insist that she not take the dogs in her car, but nevertheless, it was all good.

And that time she backed into her best friend’s brother Max’s ten-speed bike (ten-inch scrape caused by the bike’s hand brakes along the center of the trunk), it worked out. Yeah, it did cost her a few hundred dollars in bike repairs, but he didn’t stay mad at her. At least not for long.

Georgie had just gotten back into her car after taking a late-day stroll along the beach. Whenever she had a chance to take a break and sink her toes into the warm, fine sand along the shoreline, she did so. It was her happy place, listening to the repetitive swoosh of waves upon the shore, the persistent cawing of seagulls swooping for fish. Walking along the beach helped her put life into perspective and gave her a sense of inner peace.

Summer was on the wane, and soon the beach landscape would take on an entirely different complexion and not be so welcoming to bare feet and tank tops. Although Georgie was happy to stroll beachside even with snow falling from the sky—unfortunately becoming rarer here in North Carolina—she was happiest on a day like today. Wisps of cotton candy clouds laced the late-afternoon sky as the sun cast its warm melon glow across the sand.

It’s one of the reasons she moved back to Verity Beach in the first place. Something about the ocean called to her. She loved the ocean so much, she sometimes swore she must have been a mermaid (better that than, say, a sea manatee or a man-of-war jellyfish) in a past life. Although, yeah, that whole broken engagement in DC thing certainly impelled her homeward as well. Nothing like being dumped weeks before your marriage to the man you thought loved you to send you scurrying back to a place of comfort and familiarity.

Georgie knocked the sand off her feet and slid them back into her flip-flops. She needed to get to the grocery store and pick up something to make for dinner, and it was getting late. Her tummy was rumbling and she freely admitted she was a slave to that demanding organ.

She put the key in the ignition, switched the radio to her favorite station, and threw the car in reverse, accelerating out of her space maybe a little faster than necessary. Until she heard a loud crunch and slammed on the brakes.

“Crap,” she said, throwing open her door—and dinging a half-inch mark in the car door next to hers in the process—as she walked to the back to see what happened.

She scrunched up her chin and pursed her lips as she took in the sight. A surfboard was lopped in half, one side partially dangling by some strands of wood but hanging at a perpendicular angle to the other half of it, which seemed to have smushed into the back end of the car next to her, leaving an ugly dent in the vehicle.

Which was evidently owned by a cute guy with a huge scowl on his face.

“Hey lady,” he shouted, shaking his fist. “What the fuck? You murdered my board!”

Georgie knew that was her cue to apologize profusely, even as she stared at the guy, whose wet suit was stripped down to his lean hips, exposing a beautiful, tanned chest with strong pecs, dusted with golden hair that complemented the dirty blond hair on his head and the sexy needs-a-shave scruff on his handsome face. He stood before her in bare, sandy feet. She loved sand-covered bare feet on a man.

“Oh my God, I am soooo sorry,” Georgie said, reaching to lift the surfboard as if she could force the two pieces back together. She could not. “I don’t know how I missed seeing that.”

He was nodding his head as if in a catatonic state while flailing his arms in a fit of pique. “Any more than you could have missed an atom bomb dropping and the commensurate mushroom cloud,” he said, his golden-hazel eyes wide with what might have been incredulity. “I mean what about the damned board could you not have seen when you were backing out? It’s six freaking feet long. That’s like not seeing a football team in your rearview mirror.”

Georgie knit her brow, mortified but also indignant because it was as if he thought she’d done it on purpose.

“Except this was sideways, not up and down.” She shifted her hands in a horizontal then vertical manner to demonstrate.

He cocked his head as if he was trying to grasp if she’d actually said that. She liked his hair: dirty blond and a little long, like he was about two months late for a haircut. The bottom edge of his hair curled up around his neck in a way that simply asked for you to run your fingers through it to smooth it out a bit. He wore a leather strand around his neck and a shark tooth was suspended from it. Lucky tooth to be located so close to his sexy chest.

“I’m not going to dignify that daft reply with a response.”

“Look, again, I’m so very sorry,” she said. “I don’t know how I missed it. I was backing up. There was a glare in my mirror, I think. The sun was reflecting off of something and it blinded me for a second, and then, I don’t know, your car was back there and it was at a weird angle I guess, and shit, look what I did to that too.” Georgie nodded at the damaged car.

She grabbed her purse from the car and quickly whipped out a checkbook. “Perhaps I can write you a check and we can not report this to my insurance? I don’t know that I can afford another increase this year.”

He sized up her car, which, much to her embarrassment, was downright riddled with pockmarks. It was the only time she didn’t feel so great about all the dings.

“Gee, ya think?” he said.

She rifled through her bag for a pen. “Just tell me how much it’ll be to replace it and well—” She licked her finger and tried to wipe away the marks on the back of his car, but she knew damned well they weren’t tiny bumper marks but an actual dent. “Well, that too.” She pointed at it. “Again, I feel bad about that. I don’t know what happened.”

He shook his head, and if she wasn’t mistaken, he looked as though he was about to throw up. He had that green-around-the-gills appearance of someone so upset it was a distinct possibility. “You can’t pay me enough.”

She stopped and looked up, pen in hand at the ready. “Well, now, that’s silly. What do you mean I can’t pay you enough?”

“It’s one of a kind,” he said. “I made it myself.”

Georgie blanched and her lip curled into a snarl. What were the chances? She couldn’t plow into a run-of-the-mill Walmart-special surfboard. No. It had to be a bespoke one.

If that didn’t beat it all.

“Well, crap,” she said. “Now I feel even worse.” Her eyes started to moisten, and damn if she didn’t hate when she cried. She tried to wipe away the nascent tears with her shoulders, as if pretending she was itching something on her face. But the thing is, she was one of those criers. A big ugly messy one, once she got going. And sure enough, it was like her eyes were leaking, the tears started coming so fast. And with that came a couple of forlorn sobs so pitiful she was sure she sounded like a dying hyena.

She set her checkbook on the roof of the guy’s car then dug back into her purse in search of a tissue and pulled out one with a clumped-up wad of chewing gum stuck to it. After she bunched the thing up, she blew her nose, taking care not to stick the still mint-scented gum to her nostrils.

“Here I was going to enjoy this lovely day and that sunset, and it was so beautiful, it reminded me of peppermint and Christmas and deliciousness and now—” She thrust her lower lip out as she looked at him, and he had that look that men sometimes get when they wish they could find an off switch for a woman but know that one doesn’t exist: quizzical yet annoyed, all tinged with anger.

She hated that look; it reminded her of her father right before he would light off on her mother and scream and yell and pound his fists into the wall, sometimes so hard he put holes into the drywall. And that memory made her eyes water up even more, particularly because it evoked her parents’ broken marriage, which then stirred up memories of her own marriage, which never happened, and the next thing she knew she was slumped against the bumper of her beat-up old station wagon, bawling her eyes out and this strange man with the broken surfboard was leaning over her trying to calm her down.

“Look, lady, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll figure it out.”

Between sobs, she tried to speak. “But you made it. I can’t even buy you another.”

“It’ll be fine,” he said, awkwardly rubbing her hair as if she was an excitable poodle that needed to be calmed down. “I was going to make a new one anyway.”

She stopped crying for a minute and gave him a hopeful smile, which contrasted mightily with her tearstained cheeks. She suspected she looked like a kid who’d shattered his mother’s family heirloom vase into a thousand pieces only to have the mom say not to worry, she can glue it back together. “You were?”

He furrowed his brow as he glanced at his murdered surfboard. “Yeah, in fact that was what I was planning to start working on this week,” he said. “This one was getting old. Worn out.” He kicked his toe along the sandy pavement.

She looked to see if maybe he’d crossed his fingers.

“Are you sure?”

“Um, yeah. Yeah. Of course.”

She used her shoulders to swipe at another tear, realizing too late that she didn’t even have fabric from her tank top to catch the tears and snot, and they both streaked across her still-tanned shoulders in a most inelegant manner. Oooh, she must’ve been a sight for sore eyes.

“Well please, let me write a check so you can fix everything, okay?” Her fingers trembled as she scrawled out an amount on her check, not even bothering to ask his name, instead leaving that line blank. “If you need anything more, my phone number’s there.” She pointed at her check.

His eyebrows ski-sloped toward his nose. He did not look particularly happy.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, shoving the check into a hip pocket of his trunks that were peeking out from beneath his wet suit. He leaned over and looked at her face intensely, making Georgie uncomfortable, like he thought she might be unstable enough to walk straight into the ocean and keep on going till she was completely submerged, never to be seen again. “You okay?”

Come to think of it, that wasn’t such a bad idea. If she were part mermaid, this would be the time to prove it. But that wasn’t her style. She was certainly not a quitter. Besides, she hated being the center of anyone’s attention, and certainly not that of the man whose board she destroyed, so she shrugged it off, waving her hand dismissively. “Hey, the good news is”—she nodded toward the board—“that didn’t happen out there.” She pointed toward the ocean. “And it’s not covered in your blood, right? Way better my little fender-bender did this than a shark bite. Amiright?” She cracked a grin as she tried to make light of the situation.

The bummer on top of everything else was that the yummy orzo lemon meatballs she had planned to make after she went to the grocery store were no longer going to be on the menu for dinner. She’d lost her appetite with all the drama. So much for that.

Instead she smoothed out the pout that threatened to freeze on her face, then cupped her hand in a tiny wave as she climbed back into her car, pulling away ever so carefully to avoid any more disasters.