LITMIR.BIZ

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      He was interested in her take on the differing accounts of Captain Cullen—as a heartless ravager of any and all ships in the Caribbean, or, in contrast, as a gracious seaman who always returned the passengers of the ships he overtook to a safe port. Was that a product of the Confederacy favoring him and the Union deriding him? Was it part of the pirate mystique? A combination of the two?

      Even being raised in Texas, Gavin knew South Carolina was a whole different element of Southern culture. First to secede, they still flew the state flag with as much pride as the American one. With the first shots fired in the Civil War, they’d started out, and somehow remained, true rebels.

      He’d love to hear her theories almost as much as he’d love to get her alone, aroused and naked.

      Hey, he wasn’t actually a wretch, but he was a man.

      And it got old pretending to be stimulated by women who weren’t interested in the things he was. Women who wanted to know how much things were worth, instead of what they meant.

      “Why do you like me?” she asked suddenly.

      Oh, boy. He fought against banality and pretty words. She was probably soft on Yeats, but a specific reference escaped him. “Why not?” he answered.

      “Why not indeed?” She kept her face turned slightly away, so he couldn’t see her eyes. “On the upside, I don’t have big boobs or a tendency to call historical treasures stuff.”

      “No. Everything about you is tiny.” An instinctive smile broke across his face. “Except your mouth.”

      “It helps when attempting to control teenage boys. Do you want to know why I don’t like you?”

      He really wasn’t sure he could take any more judgment from her, however justified. “My ponytail. I bet you hate long hair on men.”

      “No. The hair’s … fine. It suits you.”

      “I’m not really big on shoes. Are you one of those women who uses shoe shopping to replace sex?”

      “Definitely not.”

      “Then it must be because I’m an amoral, grave-robbing opportunist.”

      “That certainly plays a major part.”

      That wasn’t it? He had faults besides his scoundrel image? Good grief. “What’s the other part?”

      “Parts, plural. I don’t like people who think because I’m small I’m also weak.”

      Finally a question he could answer with absolute honesty. “I never, for one second, assumed you were weak.”

      “I’m so glad. I also don’t like that you’re all over the place.”

      “All over the place?” he repeated, trying to recall the last time a woman had caught him so off guard.

      “At times you appear overindulgent and self-absorbed,” she continued. “Then you say something intelligent, almost insightful. It’s interesting.”

      He definitely couldn’t have her thinking he was interesting. Her astuteness could ruin everything.

      They’d reached the stairs leading from the beach to the pier, and she slipped on her shoes. “Thank you for your time. I’m sure we’ll be seeing—”

      “Sure you don’t want to come back to my place for a while?”

      “Your place?”

      “Yeah. The boat.” He inclined his head toward the marina. “I could tell the guys to take off for an hour or so.”

      “Gee, a whole hour?”

      “Or so.”

      Her eyes frosted over. “No, thank you, Mr. Fortune.”

      “Call me Gavin.”

      “Not Dr. Fortune?”

      “No way. That makes me sound like a comic book supervillain. How about Dr. Kensington?” He pursed his lips. “No, that makes me sound like an uptight English lit teacher.”

      “I neither have a doctorate nor am I uptight.”

      “But you sound like you do. I have two, and I don’t.”

      “Two what?”

      “Doctorate-level degrees.”

      “From where?”

      “Cambridge and Princeton. Oh, and I got a masters in European history from Oxford. Just for fun.”

      Brenna burst out laughing. She giggled until tears leaked from her eyes. “Of course. Just for fun,” she managed to say when she calmed enough to talk. “Thank you.”

      “For what?”

      “For killing any attraction I might have been delusional enough to feel for you.”

      With that, she climbed the stairs and strolled down the wooden slats toward the parking lot.

      He’d figured she wouldn’t take either his real credentials or his fake tasteless proposition seriously, but he hadn’t expected to be so disappointed in her reaction.

      And the Yeats came back to him.

      Here we will moor our lonely ship

      And wander ever with woven hands,

      Murmuring softly lip to lip,

      Along the grass, along the sands,

      Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands.

      IN THE LIBRARY TWO DAYS later, Brenna leaned against the front counter, no doubt distracting Sloan from her work. But everybody was working. Maybe she should get a summer job.

      Of course, she was supposed to be focusing on The Carolina project for the historical society. And that thought led her right back to the place she’d sworn to quit going. “He’s an insufferable egomaniac and an amoral, grave-robbing opportunist.”

      “You forgot gorgeous,” Sloan said, never pausing as she tapped her fingertips on the computer keyboard.

      “Looks don’t figure into this.”

      “Sure they do. Helen said he’s hotter than the Fourth of July sun.”

      Helen was another society member, who was also a business partner of Brenna’s father. The two of them were the best real estate agents on the island.

      Generally, Helen was a fine judge of man candy, and technically, she wasn’t wrong in this case, though Brenna was loath to admit it.

      She’d seethed for two days over her encounter with Dr. Gavin Fortune, whose mystery had only deepened. It took some digging, but with the help of the society’s resident computer expert—a teenager named Penelope Waters—she hadn’t found proof of advanced degrees, but a buried secret.

      Fortune hadn’t always been his name. He’d had it changed several years back. When Brenna had asked what his name had been before, she’d gotten a strange answer from Penelope.

      “Nobody knows,” she’d said. “The records were sealed by a federal court judge.”

      Beautiful, mysterious and possibly brilliant. What were the odds?

      Too bad he was a complete ass.

      “Helen also says he has a thing for you,” Sloan continued.

      “Well, he can keep his thing to himself.”

      “He seemed pretty disappointed to find Helen as the new historical society representative for his recovery project.”

      “I’m sure he was. He wouldn’t dare pull the kind of crap on Helen he tried on me.”

      Sloan finally looked away from her computer screen. “What kind of crap … exactly?”

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