Bungalow Nights(43)

After ordering beers, he and his cousin both stared morosely into the distance. The waves came in long shallow spreads, fanning like spilled milk against the sand. The music switched to The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”

“I hate that song,” Bax muttered.

Eyebrows raised, Vance glanced over. “Okay. Does that mean you’re ready to talk about what’s eating you?”

“I blame it on my parents.”

Vance stared at him in shock as the longnecks were delivered. Baxter had always got on well with his folks, just like Fucking Perfect Fitz. Vance had been the family’s only agitator. “What did Uncle Roy and Aunt Alison do to ruin an iconic song of the 1960s for you?”

“I don’t mean they ruined the song for me. I mean they may have ruined me. Consider how badly they’ve skewed my worldview. They’re devoted to each other. Your folks, too. “

“How dare they,” Vance said, his voice mild.

Baxter pointed at him with his beer. “You can laugh, but I’m right. All that marital bliss can make a man expect things. Want things for himself.”

Vance groaned. “Are you going to tell me about the BSLS again? I already know you have a wedding with all the trimmings inked in on it somewhere.”

“Not before thirty-one,” Baxter said.

“There you go,” Vance answered, and clacked his beer bottle against his cousin’s. “You don’t need to stress about that for another couple of years. You can be the freewheeling happy bachelor you’ve always been for quite some time more.”

His cousin sent him a fulminating look, then glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the ladies. “I’m not happy.”

Vance followed the direction of his gaze to where the three women were gathered at a round table, including the spritelike blonde. Well. He’d sensed undercurrents that first day at Captain Crow’s and now it was clear to him. Baxter had something going with Addy—or rather, Baxter wanted something going with Addy but had been shut down. Beach House No. 9 was quite the hotbed of romantic tension this month, wasn’t it?

“I’m sorry, cuz,” Vance said. “You should be more like me. Unmoved by the influence of our parents’ marital accord. Embracing the single life with gusto.”

“Oh, really.” Baxter narrowed his eyes. “Wasn’t it you who were engaged not long ago?”

“Yes, but—”

“Are you saying it wasn’t because you saw the example of your folks’ marriage—”

“Blythe wasn’t about that,” Vance said, his voice going tight.

“Oh?” Baxter took a swig of his beer. “What was Blythe about?”

“Fitz.” Shocked that his brother’s name had come out of his mouth, Vance busied it by taking a long swallow from his bottle. Then another. When he finally set the beer down, he noticed Baxter was staring at him. “What?”

“You said Blythe was about Fitz.”

Shit, Bax had heard that. Vance sighed. “The first time I met her, you know what I thought?”

His cousin shook his head.

“I thought she was just Fitz’s type. He always goes for those impenetrable cool ones.” He huffed out a short laugh. “Maybe I have a new career as a matchmaker.”

“Yeah, the impenetrable, cool ones don’t seem a natural fit with you.”

Vance thought of Layla. Clutching at him when she had her bout of Ferris-fear. Slow-dancing, her warm body moving against his. Her simple enjoyment in the mani-pedi, pointing her toes for him to admire. She was a natural.

“You’re right,” he told his cousin, staggered for a moment by a truth he’d never allowed himself to see. “Blythe wasn’t a good fit for me at all.”

“So why’d you go for her then?”

“Fuck, I don’t know,” Vance admitted, still nonplussed. “We’d been dating awhile, though we never actually slept together.” His motivations had not been driven by sex, and Blythe, in her still-waters way, had seemed fine with that.

“Oh.” Baxter’s eyes were wide.

“Yeah. Never went to bed with her.” The confession made him feel uncomfortable and maybe even idiotic. He started to say something else, then stopped.

“Spit it out, V.T.” Baxter nudged his leg with the edge of his rubber thong. “Because none of this sounds like you.”

On another sigh, Vance tried again. “We were going along, dating slow and steady, and then I was called back up. I thought, ‘Hey, why not?’ I knew Mom and Dad would love her. They’d consider her a steadying influence—”

“Screw that,” Bax said, straightening in his seat. “You had your wild times, but where you’ve been and what you’ve done since you enlisted...”

“The fact is, she was Fitz’s type,” Vance said, “so I think I saw her as my way back into the family fold.” He hadn’t been able to articulate that to himself at the time, but now, from a distance, he saw that it was true. Jesus. “Lousy reason to get engaged, huh?”

What had motivated Blythe to go along? She wasn’t the only woman who acted on the impulse, though. He’d had army buddies who’d made the same impetuous offer and received the same impetuous agreement from ladies they’d not known half as long. Hell, more than one couple of his acquaintance had entered into a quickie, day-before-deployment marriage.

Thank God it hadn’t gone that far for him and Blythe. And before long she’d realized Vance didn’t have his older brother’s chops and rejected him.

Baxter drained his beer and signaled the peace sign at their waitress to order two more. “If I wasn’t so miserable myself, I’d try to broker a settlement on your side of the family. Get some of you to wake up and others of you to start talking.”

Vance laughed as the waitress put new beers in front of them. “God, you can be officious and arrogant.”

“Prissy and pasty, too,” Baxter muttered. “However, I have developed a bit of kink in my sex life.”

“Whoa. Way better than talk of porn stars. Though I’m not sure I believe it.”

“Believe it,” Baxter said, then glanced over his shoulder toward Addy again.

Well, well, well, Vance thought. This should be interesting.

But his cousin’s eyes had gone to slits. “Who the hell is that?”

Vance looked around. Addy was on the dance floor, laughing up at some dark-haired guy who had his hands on her hips and was trying to encourage them to move. “I don’t know.”

“I do. That’s a firefighter. A dirty, no-good, f*cking first responder. Teague something.”

“They’re just dancing, Bax,” Vance said, and remembered with guilt how he’d pulled Layla away from another man on the Fourth of July at this very spot.

“A f*cking first responder. Everybody knows that gives a guy an advantage.”

Baxter had to be really upset, Vance thought, because he normally avoided cursing. Such verbal activity had never made it onto the BSLS. “Look, it’s no big deal.”

“Oh, yeah? Now he’s got Layla out there.”

Vance swiveled in his chair. His “natural” was certainly out on that dance floor, with her glowing, facial-ized face, her buffed fingernails and her moon-and-star toes. She’d changed into a rib-sticking tank top and a tight pair of jeans. The firefighter touched her like he’d been touching Addy, his palms on either side of Layla’s sweet hips, encouraging them to swivel.

“Fucking first responder.” Vance started to rise.

Then fell back onto his stool. She doesn’t need me supervising her night out. He repeated it twice more for good measure.

The words, though, didn’t do much good reining in his reckless instincts. They still urged him to peel that other guy’s hands off the girl, then sling her over his shoulder and take her home to his bed.

“We should go to their table,” Baxter suggested. “Give that guy the eye. Let him know they don’t need some dude with a hose to put out their fire.”

“I’m sure they’d really appreciate that,” he said dryly, trying to remember he’d matured from the days when he’d bumped chests with a high school rival for Marianne Kelly’s attention. In typical Vance Smith style, he’d brawled with the dude in the middle of biology class, instead of waiting until after school and choosing some off-campus location. They’d both been suspended for three days. For the remainder of the semester, his father had confiscated the car keys of his truck—though that didn’t stop Vance from totaling it ten months later.

Now Vance turned back around to face the ocean, while Baxter had given up all pretense of not watching the object of his affection. “Hell,” he muttered. “He’s buying all three women more drinks now. They’re smiling and laughing, even that serious one, Skye.”