Troubles in Paradise (Paradise #3)(12)
“Oh yeah?” Huck said, blood pulsing in his ears. “Blond gal?”
“Ass like a valentine,” the loudmouth said, and it took every ounce of Huck’s willpower not to stab the guy in the forehead with the gaff.
When Huck confronted Kimberly, she admitted to it right away but said it was more like second base, maybe not even. She couldn’t remember and wouldn’t have been able to pick the guy out of a lineup. “The men are an occupational hazard, Sammy. They don’t mean anything.”
“Men?” he said, and he realized then that Kimberly hooked up with her customers all the time, maybe even every night. Was the baby she lost even his? She had made him a laughingstock, an absolute fool for love.
He told her it was rehab or he was leaving. She agreed to rehab, and once she was safely inside the facility, Huck served her with divorce papers, which broke her heart but broke his heart even worse.
Once Huck left the Keys for St. John, it was only a few weeks before he met and fell in love with LeeAnn Small, who was Kimberly’s opposite in every way. Maia liked to throw around the word queen—Beyoncé is a queen, J. Lo is a queen—but in Huck’s life there had been only one queen and that was LeeAnn. She was statuesque, bronze-skinned, dark-eyed. She had a rich laugh and a slow smile that she shared with Huck like a secret.
On their first real date, at Chateau Bordeaux, Huck told LeeAnn about Kimberly. LeeAnn tsked him—because who couldn’t have predicted how that story was going to end—and then said, “If you’re looking for more crazy, you’re in the wrong place.”
LeeAnn didn’t fish but she checked the wind, watched the sky, passed along fish sightings from their West Indian neighbors that Huck would never have heard about otherwise. She introduced Huck to the people at restaurants who would buy his catch. She never gave him a hard time about how long he spent on the water or tinkering on the boat. And, man, could she cook—conch ceviche, Creole fish stew, fresh tuna steaks with lime and toasted coconut.
LeeAnn was tough, stubborn, uncompromising, but unlike Kimberly, she stuck to a moral code and was utterly beyond reproach. Huck was a little scared of her at times. She was a nurse practitioner and the most competent person up at the Myrah Keating Smith Community Health Center, where she treated everything from ankles sprained on the Reef Bay Trail to jellyfish stings to STDs. LeeAnn was strict with Rosie, but despite this—or because of it—Rosie broke the rules again and again and again, eventually getting pregnant by one of the rich men she waited on at Caneel Bay.
There were six golden years when Huck lived in the house on Jacob’s Ladder with LeeAnn, Rosie, and Maia. He can remember sitting down to dinner in the evenings and seeing their bright faces and hearing their chatter or their squabbling and thinking how blessed he was to be among them.
He missed that sweet spot in his life now that it was over.
LeeAnn died of congestive heart failure.
Rosie died in the helicopter crash with Russell Steele.
Now here’s Huck, five years after LeeAnn’s passing and one month after Rosie’s passing, in danger of falling in love with Irene Steele, the wife of Rosie’s lover.
As his friend Rupert would say, You can’t make this shit up!
It comes as no surprise to Huck that the Invisible Man, Russell Steele, was just another Caribbean pirate. Evading taxes and laundering money were nearly as common down here as snorkeling and drinking rum. Irene has now lost the villa in Little Cinnamon as well as her home in Iowa City, and the latter, Huck understands, is the greater loss by far. Most people down here are from somewhere else. They have another place they call home. It must feel pretty rotten to have that taken away, to be left with little more than the clothes on your back, the shoes on your feet.
Irene isn’t bankrupt. She has twenty thousand dollars in an account down here, money from her magazine job.
“Twenty thousand isn’t nothing,” Huck says. They’re standing out on the deck of Huck’s house, elbow to elbow on the railing but not touching, gazing out at the water and the faint outline of St. Croix in the distance. A lot of people would call them lucky—people in Iowa City whose cars were buried under three feet of snow, for example.
“It’s not enough to live on for very long,” Irene says. “Both you and I know that. I need to find a decent place to live with reasonable rent and I’ll need to buy a car.”
Huck is relieved that she seems to be talking about staying on St. John, even though they both know that her money would last a lot longer if she lived almost anywhere else. “You can stay here as long as you want,” Huck says. This turn of events doesn’t seem all that bad to him. He likes having her here. He likes being the person who can put a roof over her head and food on her plate, though he would never, ever reveal this to Irene.
One trait all the women in his life have shared: They were “born on the Fourth of July.” Independent.
Irene bows her head. Her hair is out of its braid; it’s wavy and long as it falls around her face, a chestnut curtain shot through with strands of silver. When she looks up, she says, “I’m grateful for your friendship and the job on the boat—”
“You’re an asset on the boat, AC,” he says. “I need you on the boat. Today alone was hell on me.” That morning, Huck had a Master of the Universe type on board—guy in his early forties, world by the balls, gung ho, let’s go—and his four sons. The older three were complete hellions from the second they stepped onto the boat still in their basketball sneakers.