Hot as Hell (Deep Six 0.5)(21)

Maddy Powers…

Well, at least now he had a valid excuse to forgo a sail to the Dry Tortugas.

More like an excuse to be a lousy, no good fraidycat, an annoying voice whispered. To which he promptly replied Oh, go suck a bag of dicks, why doncha?





Chapter 2


6:21 p.m.…

“Hi!” Maddy waved to the park ranger waiting to greet her as she trudged up the steep beach of Garden Key, the main land mass among the batch of remote islets in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico that made up Dry Tortugas National Park. Tortuga meant “tortoise,” a name given to the islands by Ponce de Leon in the fifteen hundreds. A couple of centuries later, the U.S. tried to make Garden Key useful by building a fort there, but faulty engineering, illness, and the Civil War thwarted that effort, and the structure was abandoned before its completion.

Garden Key was the only place in the Dry Tortugas that was inhabited. If you considered the lonely park ranger who lived in the little cottage on the edge of the beach an “inhabitant.” From what Maddy had read, the park rangers assigned to the island only did three-month stints to ensure the isolation and loneliness didn’t get to them.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Brrr. The things one learned from the movies.

“Hello!” the ranger called, ripping Maddy’s mind away from the scene in The Shining. “Welcome to beautiful Garden Key and the Dry Tortugas!”

As Maddy extended her hand to the young park ranger—the operative word here was young; if the ranger was much more than twenty years old, she’d eat her snorkel gear for dinner—she let her eyes roam over the facade of the unfinished garrison known as Fort Jefferson. Its red bricks stood out in harsh contrast to the aqua waters surrounding it, and the little lighthouse, painted black and perched atop one corner of the hexagonal curtain wall, brought to mind an old sentry, battered by the wind and rain but still standing tall. She couldn’t wait to give the scholarship girls a grand tour tomorrow after breakfast. She’d studied up and knew all the good stories sure to inspire awe in the imaginations of her charges. But for now…

“I’m Maddy Powers,” she said, giving the ranger’s hand a firm shake before turning to watch the three teenagers trudge toward her, carrying the sleeping bags and pup tents the pilot of the floatplane had passed to them from the aircraft’s small cargo hold. “Looks like we’ll be your company for the night.”

“Glad to have you, ma’am.” The ranger nodded, grinning and flashing a killer set of dimples.

Maddy faked an exaggerated wince. “Oh, please call me Maddy. I’ve been travelin’ with seventeen-year-olds all day, so I already feel older than dirt.”

The young man made a face, and the tips of his ears lit up like the Fourth of July. Lordy, would you look at that? “I’m s-sorry,” he stammered. “I meant no disrespect, ma’am, and I can promise you th-that…”

He trailed off when he realized he’d “ma’am-ed” her again, which might have something to do with the stink eye she pinned on him. He suddenly found the sand at his feet immensely interesting and starting digging for some mysterious object with the toe of his hiking boot.

Maddy chuckled and resisted the urge to brush his hair out of his eyes and tell him he should give up trying to grow that scraggly excuse for a beard. Instead she nudged him with her elbow—Maddy met a lot of strangers but her natural amiability meant they rarely stayed that way for long. “No, I’m sorry. I have four older brothers, so takin’ folks with dangly bits to task is pretty much all in a day’s work for me. And then when I’m forced to get up before the butt crack of dawn—that’s four a.m., in case you were wonderin’—and pick up teenage girls who conspired to create an evil morning person”—she made quote marks with her fingers—“trifecta, I tend be even more persnickety.”

Her momma told her she had a gift for gab, and when she paired it with her friendly smile—like she was doing now—she was pretty good at putting folks at ease. Then again, it wasn’t ease she saw on the young ranger’s face when he blinked at her.

Are those some of his IQ points I see floatin’ out of his ears?

Uh-oh. She was pretty sure they were. And the look on the man’s face was one she knew well. It was the same one her big, dumb brothers donned anytime a woman with cleavage and fluffy Texas hair walked by. In a word: love-struck.

Or is it two words when there’s a hyphen in the middle?

Whatever. Either way she was caught off guard and—

“Oooh,” Louisa Sanchez said as she made her way to Maddy and the ranger. “I think Se?orita Maddy has an admirer. Would you look at him blush!”

“Louisa,” Maddy scolded. “Mind your manners or our host here, Ranger…” She glanced at the green lettering stitched above the park ranger’s breast pocket. “Your name is Rick? So, like, Ranger Rick? Ha! Where are Scarlett Fox and Boomer Badger?”

“Who?” Ranger Rick blinked and cocked his head, the joke having landed as softly as a cow falling off a catwalk.

“Oh.” Maddy shook her head. “Um…you know, of the children’s magazine? Ranger Rick the raccoon?”

“Who?” Rick asked a second time, the tips of his ears turning red again.