No Judgments: A Novel (Little Bridge Island Book 1)

A curfew has been instituted in Little Bridge from dusk to dawn for safety and security reasons. Anyone out after the designated times is subject to arrest by order of the Sheriff’s Office.

Nothing had changed on Sandy Point Beach while we’d been gone. Since Drew was the only resident who hadn’t evacuated, and the electrical crews were working to clean up streets farther inland, closer to the hospital and the majority of residences, this made sense. I still had to dodge downed power lines and piles of sand and seaweed on my scooter—not to mention the washed-up refrigerator and yacht—in order to get to his house.

But the view, when we finally made it, was worth it. The sinking sun was turning the few clouds that streaked the sky a rich, blazing fuchsia, and now that the last remnants of the storm had passed, the sea was finally starting to smooth out, so the clouds were reflected in the dark, glassy water beneath. The birds were still out in force, especially the gulls and pelicans, circling over the sand and surf, calling noisily to one another.

But other than that and the rhythmic whoosh of the waves, there wasn’t a sound to be heard, with the exception, every so often, of the plop! of a silver-backed tarpon as it broke the water’s surface, diving for unseen prey.

“Okay,” I said, when I’d pulled to a stop in his sand-strewn driveway. “I guess I see now why you’d want to live all the way out here instead of in town.”

“Not so crazy after all, am I?” He swung his long leg from the scooter’s seat and took his canvas tool kit from the scooter’s running board. “Come inside for a drink.”

“And risk getting arrested for breaking curfew? No thanks.”

“You’ve got plenty of time.” He pointed at the brilliant red ball sinking low in the sky just west of us. “Sunset won’t be for another half hour at least.”

“It’ll take me that long just to get back to your aunt’s house.”

“Nobody’s going to arrest a pretty girl going home on a moped—especially when they realize who your mother is.”

I smirked at him. “Thanks so much for that.”

“Come on. What harm will one drink do?”

Of course I was tempted. How couldn’t I be? A good-looking man whom I’d come to like and trust and, okay, maybe lust after a little was asking me to his home for a drink.

And what a home! Mother Nature seemed to be pulling out all the stops to apologize for her misdeeds the day before, making this sunset as dramatic and beautiful as any she’d ever created. The evening breeze was as fresh and cool as the afternoon had been hot and oppressive. Even as I stood there, trying to decide what to do, the wind tugged playfully at my hair and sent the sound of all four of Drew’s dogs’ eager barking down toward me. They seemed to be crying “Come on up! What are you waiting for? We miss you, Bree! We want to play!”

“Fine,” I said, and lowered the kickstand of my scooter. “But only one drink. Then I really have to go.”

“Great!” He looked as delighted as a kid who’d just found out he was having ice cream for dinner. “You think the view looks good from down here, wait until you see it from up there . . .”

He wasn’t wrong. The view of that scarlet sun slowly sinking toward the sea, unbroken by any man-made structures, was breathtaking, and I was reminded once again of why I’d found it so hard to leave Little Bridge. I really hadn’t meant to stay as long as I had. It wasn’t only because of the people—who, quirky and odd as they often were, were also some of the kindest and most giving I’d ever encountered. It was also because of the sheer natural beauty of the place, the unspoiled ocean views and skyscapes that even now I felt myself itching to paint.

It didn’t hurt that Drew had let out the dogs—who’d greeted us with near fanatical delight—and that they were now running up and down the beach after the yellow tennis balls that Drew was tossing them from the deck. This was upsetting the flocks of birds, causing them to rise indignantly from the clusters of seaweed strewn across the sand every time they came near. This actually made the vista even more special—at least to me.

“Okay,” I said, laughing, as Drew expertly threw his seventh ball. “You really do have a good life here.”

“You haven’t even seen the best part yet.” He disappeared into the house, then reappeared a moment later holding a bottle of red wine and two wineglasses. “I’ve been saving this for a special occasion.”

I glanced at the label and could not help feeling impressed. It was a small-batch California cabernet that Caleb favored, and claimed was hard to find.

I’d never have expected to see such a thing in Little Bridge, particularly in Drew Hartwell’s home.

“What?” I asked in a teasing tone as he began opening the bottle with a corkscrew he’d also brought from inside. “The famous Drew Hartwell drinks something besides beer?”

“Well,” he said, after pouring a generous amount into my glass, “like I said, it’s a special occasion.”

“And what’s that?”

“I finally got Bree Beckham over to my place to have a drink.” He raised his glass to clink mine.

I pulled my glass away, refusing to toast something so ridiculous. “Oh, right. You never even knew who I was until the night of your aunt’s hurricane party, even though I’ve been serving you breakfast every day for months.”

“That,” he said, taking a reflective sip of his wine, “is untrue. For part of that time I was unavailable.” The ghost of Leighanne rose silently between us. “And for the rest of that time, you seemed . . . preoccupied.” I took a sip of my wine, not wanting to think about my own ghosts. “But the truth is, I’ve had my eye on you for some time. I was never quite sure what was going on with your hair—”

I reached up instinctively to touch one of my pink curls. “What?”

“—but I like it. It brings out the brown in your eyes.”

“Is this your thing?” I asked. “Is this what you do? You bring girls out here and give them expensive wine on your fabulous deck during amazing sunsets in order to seduce them? And then you insult them?”

He grinned. “God’s honest truth, you’re the first. Is it working?”

“I’ll let you know. What was your shtick before you had the house? You’d drive your truck into town and park at some different lucky lady’s house every night?”

“What?” He looked genuinely baffled.

“That’s what everybody says. They say they used to see your pickup in front of a different house every morning.”

Comprehension dawned, and he laughed. “Yeah, of course! Those were the homes where I was doing carpentry work. I usually had a couple of beers with the home owners after. I wasn’t going to risk a DUI driving back home later. I’d usually just grab an Uber, or sometimes I kept my bike in the back of the truck and rode it home. Better to be safe than sorry.”

I blinked, shocked at how something so innocent had morphed into such a lurid rumor. Then again, Little Bridge was a very small town, and its residents loved to gossip.

“What about Leighanne?” I asked, carefully.

“What about Leighanne?”

“What was the deal with the saltshaker? I was standing right next to you in the café when she threw it at you.”

“Oh, that.” He sighed and looked toward the sea. “Yeah, that’s the thing about this place. People either get it or they don’t. You get it. Leighanne never did.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, people come here and they either love the island life or they hate it.”

“Who could possibly hate it?” I asked in genuine astonishment.

But even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I remembered. My mother. My mother had always hated Little Bridge. She’d hated it almost as much as my father had loved it.

“Someone like Leighanne could hate it,” he said. “I met Leighanne when I was working up in New York. Then after my parents died and my sister went into her third or fourth stint with rehab and it was clear I needed to come back to help out with Nevaeh—well, Leighanne volunteered to come with me. On paper, it should have worked—she said she liked dogs and was ready to leave the fast pace and cold winters of the city. But in reality—she couldn’t stand the dogs or stand it here. The lack of seasons and the slow pace, the fact that there were so few different restaurants and stores—it all drove her crazy.”

“Island fever,” I murmured, remembering what Nevaeh had told me.

He looked surprised—but whether it was because I knew the term or that Leighanne had been suffering from it, I wasn’t sure. “Possibly. All I know is, since there weren’t any stores in town that sold the kinds of things she liked, she kept ordering things online—like the Himalayan salt—to make herself feel like she was back in New York, I guess. I kept asking, ‘Why do we need this? Why do we need that?’ I guess, since they made her feel better, I probably shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No,” I said, remembering the angry look on Leighanne’s face when she’d hurled the saltshaker at him. “Probably not.”

“But I did, and I guess that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, because the next thing I knew, she’d packed up everything she’d bought—and I mean everything, including the salt—and moved out.”

I thought this over as I sipped the wine. It really was delicious.

“Maybe you just weren’t ready to share your space,” I suggested.

“Maybe.” His blue-eyed gaze was bright on mine. “Or maybe I am . . . with the right person.”

I felt more than a little conscious of how close we were standing to each other—his arm grazed mine as it rested on the deck railing—and also that his gaze hadn’t left mine for a second. The gentle wind from the sea seemed to be pushing both of us toward each other . . . or maybe it was the wine . . . or his words: Or maybe I am . . . with the right person.

Was that person me? I liked dogs. I liked Little Bridge. I liked him.

But I wasn’t ready for another relationship. Look at how my last one had turned out. I was as good at picking guys as I was at careers.

And anyway, what was I panicking for? He wasn’t interested in me. Not like that.

“Bree,” he said in a low voice, as his gaze lowered to my lips.

It was at that moment that all four dogs came bursting back up onto the deck, their run on the beach completed. Bob the beagle, who seemed to have taken a particular liking to me, dashed straight over and drove her front paws, claws extended, right into my thighs.

“Ow,” I cried, buckling over and nearly dropping my wine.

“Bob!” Drew roared, not just at the beagle but at all the dogs, since none of them were behaving with particular decorum. “No! You know better than that. Get in the shower, all of you!”

I was shocked when all four dogs—led by the black Lab, who despite Drew’s insistence that he was the alpha, seemed to be the actual leader of the pack—swarmed beneath an outdoor showerhead. Drew strode toward it, then switched it on. As warm water streamed down on the wriggling bodies, sand poured off them and down a drain on the deck that had clearly been installed for this purpose.

I laughed, amazed. It appeared that Drew had thought through every detail of his dream home on the beach, including his dog-washing duties.

“Sorry about that,” he said, returning to me and the glass of wine he’d abandoned when he seemed to feel that his dogs were clean enough. He’d switched off the water, and the dogs had trotted off to different sections of the deck to shake themselves dry. “Where were we?”

“Uh,” I said. “I don’t remember,” even though I did. You’d been about to kiss me.

And I’d been about to let you.

But before Drew could reply, Socks came slinking shyly over to us, one of the yellow tennis balls in his mouth. His black-and-white body was low to the ground in case his action garnered the wrath of his new owner—that was, after all, the kind of reaction he was used to—but his long, fringed white tail wagged slowly as he looked up at us, his dark eyes filled simultaneously with both hope and anxiety that one of us would take the ball from his mouth and throw it.

“Oh my God,” I said, looking down at the sadly abused dog. “I think I’m going to cry.”

“Yeah. He’s a good boy.” Drew reached down and took the ball from Socks’s mouth, casually—but affectionately—giving the dog a stroke on the head as he did so. “Get the ball, Bob.”

He tossed the ball to the far end of the deck, and Socks took off after it, his sleek body uncoiling like a spring, all muscle and joy.

“You can’t call them all Bob,” I insisted as I watched the dog expertly catch the ball in midair—probably one of the first times in his life he’d ever engaged in a game of one-on-one catch. “They really do each have their own unique personalities. Just because your parents named you and your sister basically the same thing doesn’t mean you have to do that to your dogs.”

“Are you sure it was law school you dropped out of and not psychiatry school?”

“Very funny.”

Socks brought the ball back and dropped it at Drew’s feet, dancing there excitedly, hoping he’d throw it again—which of course he did. Socks took off, as joyously as before, while the other dogs yawned and gazed at the newcomer disdainfully. They’d had their game of catch and were ready for supper.

“Are you sure you’re not just too lazy to think up individual names for them?”

“Too lazy?” He raised an eyebrow. “That’s pretty harsh for someone who claims we aren’t supposed to judge people who left their pets behind during a hurricane.”

“Point taken. But it would be pretty easy to personalize their names. This one”—I’d put my wine on the deck railing and was petting Socks, since he’d brought me the ball—“could be Bobby Socks.”

Drew groaned.

“And the beagle could be Bobby Sue, since she’s a girl.”

Drew threw me a disbelieving look. “I’m not renaming my dogs.”

“It’s not really renaming them. It’s just individualizing their names. The little terrier could be Bobby Lee. And the big one could be—”

Drew turned, grabbed me by both shoulders, and pulled me against him, dropping his lips to mine. For a second, I was so startled, I wasn’t sure what was happening. Then I realized he was kissing me.