Winter in Paradise (Paradise #1)(56)

“You should quit,” Huck says. “Move down here. I’ll hire you as my first mate. You’re one hell of a good fisherperson.”

Irene laughs again, not happily. “Not a chance,” she says.



He gets back in her good graces once he sets down the grilled mahi. He waits until Irene takes a bite.

“Wow,” she says.

“Really?” he says. “Good?”

She takes another bite and he takes the hint: she’s not there to plump his ego. He tastes the fish: yes, perfect. Huck is something of a fanatic about grilling fish. In his opinion, you have a sixty-second window with fish. You take it off a minute too early, it’s translucent and not quite there. But this is preferable, in his mind, to a minute too late. A minute too late and the fish is dry, overcooked, ruined. Three generations of Small women—LeeAnn, Rosie, and Maia—have been schooled in Huck’s feelings about grilled fish, and they all reached a point where they were as discriminating as he was. Huck’s fish is always on point, because he stands at the grill like the Swiss Guard and doesn’t let anything distract him. He’d worried that tonight would be an exception, because there are a host of distractions here, but, praise be, the fish is correct.

Irene eats only the fish—the pasta salad and greens remain on her plate—then she helps herself to seconds. “I have no appetite,” she says. “Except for this fish.”

“Because you caught it yourself,” Huck says. “Because you pulled it out of blue water.” He catches her eye. “Angler Cupcake.”

She pours more wine. They’re at the end of the first bottle and without hesitating, Irene opens a second. Okay, then, it’s going to be that kind of night. Huck has questions, but he won’t ask them yet.

“Powder room?” he asks, standing up.

Irene says, “Through the living room to the back corner down a short hall.”

Huck takes his time wandering. The house is grand but the furnishings are impersonal. He had hoped to see something of Rosie, some indication that she spent time here. There are no photographs; there’s no art at all, really. It looks like any one of a thousand rentals. On the other hand, Huck is glad about this for Irene’s sake. How unpleasant it would be for her to have to live, even briefly, in the love nest Russell Steele once feathered with his mistress.

Huck isn’t sure when he started taking Irene’s feelings into account. Probably when she took the second helping of fish.

As Huck washes his hands, he stares at himself in the mirror and asks himself the hardest question.

Did Rosie know the Invisible Man was married? Huck desperately wants to believe the answer is no, but… come on! Russell Steele shows up here a week or two per month; the rest of the time he’s ostensibly “working,” but he’s never here at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Is he “working” on Thanksgiving or Christmas? No! He’s with his family, his other family, his real family.

Rosie was sweet, but she wasn’t naive.



When Huck gets back to the deck, Irene is standing at the railing with her wine, staring at the water.

It’s time now, he supposes. He joins her.

“Tell me about your children,” he says.

She shakes her head. No, she doesn’t want to tell him, or she doesn’t believe he deserves to hear. But then she says, “Baker is thirty. He lives in Houston. He’s married to a heart surgeon and has a four-year-old son named Floyd. He’s a stay-at-home dad, runs the household, does all the things I used to do when the boys were small. He day-trades in tech stocks, too, on the side, but Anna makes most of the money.”

“Do we like Anna?” Huck asks. Something about the way she said the woman’s name makes him curious.

“Oh,” Irene says. “She’s fine.”

“That bad?” he says.

“She’s an excellent surgeon. She makes all the Houston Best-of lists, and her patients love her. But you don’t have that kind of demanding career without some personal sacrifice.”

“The sacrifice in her case…?”

“She’s never home. She isn’t much of a mother to Floyd. She’s a bit dispassionate. It’s hard to pierce her armor, to get any kind of human response out of her at all. Now, in her defense, she deals with life and death all day, every day, so telling her about finger-painting projects or playground squabbles falls on deaf ears.”

“That’s too bad,” Huck says. “I love hearing the day-to-day details about my granddaughter Maia’s life. She and her friend Joanie are starting a bath bomb business. They’re making them in tropical scents to sell to tourists. I had to order citric acid crystals from Amazon—the package will probably take several months to get here. But I treasure all the little stuff. Because then they get older and they stop telling you things.”

“Amen,” Irene says.

“I didn’t mean to hijack the conversation,” Huck says. “Tell me about your other son.”

“Cash,” she says. “Short for Cashman. The boys were given the maiden names of my two grandmothers. Cash owns and operates a couple of outdoor supply stores in Denver. Savage Season Outdoor Supply, they’re called. Russ gave him the seed money. Russ wanted to see Cash do something with his life other than be a ski instructor.”