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

Time: 10:10 P.M.

Temperature: 75ºF

Wind Speed: 6 MPH

Wind Gust: 0 MPH

Precipitation: 0.0 in.

Of all the places I ever thought I’d be the night after one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to hit the Florida Keys, sitting beneath the stars on Drew Hartwell’s deck, eating freshly grilled steak, was not one of them.

But there I was, a dog on either side of me, and Drew Hartwell seated right across from me, dining by the light of what Drew had informed me—since I’d never seen it before, and so hadn’t recognized it—was the Milky Way.

“The Milky Way is our own galaxy, made up of billions of stars,” he said, as he poured more wine into my glass. “Normally you can’t see it around here because of light pollution. Man-made light at night prevents most of the population of the U.S. and Europe from seeing it.”

“Wow,” I said.

I didn’t mind that he was mansplaining the Milky Way to me, since I didn’t know anything about it. Also, I was a little bit drunk from the wine—we were on our second bottle—and it turned out he cooked a really good steak . . . just the right amount of salt and pepper, and no other seasonings—and a decent baked potato. He’d kept a little cooler himself, and there was cold butter for the potatoes as well.

Of course, there was also the fact that I was falling in love with him. Or that I’d maybe already fallen in love with him. Who knew when? It had probably happened the moment he’d stepped up and saved Socks from Rick Chance.

Or maybe it had happened before that . . . that day Leighanne had thrown that saltshaker at him, and he’d responded by doing exactly nothing. Who knew?

Daniella was going to be so disappointed in me when she found out. You weren’t supposed to fall in love with the guys you slept with, especially the first guy you slept with after a bad breakup, and especially guys who lived on Little Bridge Island. They were just supposed to be guys you messed around with for fun. You never fell in love with them, and you certainly never entertained ideas about changing all of your life plans (such as mine were) for them.

I’d broken all the rules, and now I was sitting here, like an idiot, by the light of the Milky Way, eating the guy’s steaks with his happy, well-fed dogs pressed all around me, listening to him talk.

God. I had it bad.

“One summer,” Drew was going on, “my dad took me out in our boat at night to fish for hogfish—this was back in the days when it was still legal to catch hogfish; they’re considered overfished in this area now so Fish and Wildlife have them on the protected list—and we dropped anchor out at that mangrove by the old train trestle. And we were just sitting there, you know, in the dark, when all of a sudden, I saw this blue glow coming from beneath the boat. I swear I thought it was a spaceship coming up from beneath the deep. But do you know what it really was?”

I grinned at him soppily. “I have no idea.”

“Bioluminescence. Living lights. They’re single-celled organisms called dinoflagellates that live in warm marine water. You can only see them at night in certain areas, and only when you disturb the water’s surface. Sometimes they’re floating there so thick, you can write your name in them on the top of the water with the tip of your finger. So that’s what my dad and I did. I mean, it doesn’t last long, but it’s pretty cool. I’ll take you out in my boat and show you sometime.”

“Wow,” I said, hugging my knees with pleasure. He was going to show me sometime. I was going to stick around in Little Bridge long enough for him to show me that. “I’d love that. That’s a great story.”

“So when are you going to tell me your story?” His eyes were very bright in the candlelight.

I was too drunk on love and wine to be startled, but I was a little confused. “What story?”

“About what really brought you to Little Bridge.”

“I already did. I told you, I needed a break.”

“Yeah, you did say that. You said you were taking a break to work through some things. What kind of things? I know you dropped out of law school. Why?”

Suddenly my happy little cloud of endorphin-induced joy burst. It was bound to happen, of course.

I just hadn’t thought it would be this soon.

“There were a lot of reasons,” I said, slowly. “My dad passed away from cancer this past Christmas . . . I told you that. After that, I just sort of realized my heart wasn’t in it. School, I mean. I was still going to class, but not as often as I should have, and my grades started to slip—”

“That’s natural.” Drew’s blue eyes had narrowed with concern for me. “You’d just been through the death of someone close to you.”

“Yeah. And I probably should have asked for the semester off. But I didn’t think of it. No one in my family has ever asked for time off for anything except our annual family vacation here—to Little Bridge—so it just never occurred to me . . . until things got to be too much.”

Tears filled my eyes. I knew what was coming next, and I absolutely did not want to go there.

But I also knew I had to. He’d been honest with me, so I knew I owed him the same.

“What about that guy you were talking to on the phone the other day—Caleb, I think you called him?” he asked. “The one who wanted to fly in a private jet to come get you? Is he one of the things that got to be too much?”

I exhaled shakily.

“Yeah,” I said, staring down at my empty plate. It was easier to look at my plate than at Drew’s face, even though I knew I had nothing to feel ashamed of. None of it had been my fault. I don’t know why it was still so hard for me to talk about it. “Well, Cal and his best friend, Kyle. See, what happened was . . . we were all in law school together. The two of them graduated last spring, but since I wasn’t going to class so much anymore after my dad died, we were still hanging out together all the time, especially me and Cal. I had my own place, but it was in the law school dorm—you remember what I told you, about my mom and her Mean World Syndrome. She was totally paranoid about me having my own place. And it turned out she was right . . . except that the person I ended up needing to be afraid of wasn’t some rando from the street, it was Cal’s best friend, Kyle.”

Drew’s spine straightened so abruptly that I heard a cracking sound. I gave him a wan smile. “It’s okay. Nothing happened. I mean, something happened, but nothing prosecutable. Because I wasn’t actually physically harmed, only psychologically. I just had trouble sleeping for a while. I had to get up a million times a night to make sure my bedroom door was locked. But really, the worst part of it was, that afterward, no one believed me. Or at least, no one believed me about how upsetting it was, because it was Kyle who did it, and Kyle was always doing stupid things when he was drunk. And what he did this time was, the night of the Super Bowl, he got so wasted that he ended up spending the night on Cal’s couch. I was sleeping over, too, but in Cal’s room. Cal went out the next morning to get bagels and juice and stuff for breakfast while I was still asleep. He’d only been gone for about five minutes and I’d fallen back asleep, before Kyle came stumbling into our room, still drunk, I think, and completely naked, and jumped onto me—”

Drew leaned forward and enunciated each word with staccato precision. “Just tell me where this guy lives, and I will go up there and kill him.”

Now I was laughing. It was nice to laugh about something that had, for so many months, been such a source of anxiety and fear. “It’s crazy, right? Like we lived in a frat house, or something. I was like, ‘Get off of me, you perv,’ and all of that, only he wouldn’t. I could barely move, because he’s about six foot three and weighs a ton, and I was all tangled up beneath the sheets. I couldn’t so much as raise a fist to punch him. Even when I told him if he didn’t get off, I’d scream, and the neighbors would call the police, he just laughed, because of course Cal’s apartment is completely soundproofed. Also, like I said, he was still drunk from the night before, trying to kiss me and get under the covers with me. So finally I did the only thing I could think of, which was say that if he got off me, I’d go out with him. Don’t ask me why, but that’s what finally sank into his alcohol-soaked brain, and why he finally got up and left—because I promised I’d sleep with him if he took me on a proper date, and that a quickie while my boyfriend, his best friend, was gone wasn’t the best way for us to start the new, beautiful relationship he apparently thought we were going to have.”

Drew was shaking his head. “So tell me that when your boyfriend got home, he tore the guy a new one.”

“No. I told Cal about it as soon as he got back—by then Kyle had left for his own room and was taking, as he put it, a cold shower, and I was shoving everything I owned into one of Cal’s suitcases, because all I could think of doing was getting the hell out of there—and Cal just laughed it off. He said I was overreacting.”

Drew blinked. “Overreacting?”

“Yeah. He said I knew perfectly well that Kyle had a substance-abuse problem, and we all needed to cut him some slack, because he was doing the best he could. He said it was really petty of me to be so judgmental of someone who was struggling so hard to get his life together.”

Drew frowned. “Tell me that you judged that guy with extreme prejudice.”

I looked down at my empty plate. “Honestly? I didn’t know what to do. Not at first. I mean, I’d just lost my dad. And . . . and this other thing had happened, as well. I didn’t want to lose my boyfriend, too.”

“What other thing?”

“After my dad passed away, a friend of mine got me one of those DNA ancestry testing kits for Christmas. She thought it would cheer me up. We could both do one, she said, and compare our results. So we did. Right before the Kyle thing, I got my results, which was another reason I was doing so badly in school. They revealed that I’m fifty-two percent British, Irish, and Scottish . . . which was expected, since my father’s ancestors are from there. But the rest of my results were almost all Scandinavian.”

Drew shrugged. “I don’t get it. You have something against our Nordic friends?”

“No. But my mom’s ancestors are strictly Sephardic Jews, with roots in North Africa and Spain. She’s always bragging about it.”

He looked puzzled. “What are you saying? Your mom’s a liar?”

“Not about that. About me. I’m not her biological daughter.”

He blinked at me. “Whoa.”

“Yeah. As soon as I asked my mom about it, she confessed that she had fertility issues, so she and my dad had used an egg donor to conceive me. They never told me because . . . well, apparently there just never seemed to be a good time, and I can be overly sensitive.”

Drew gave a wry smile and lifted his glass. “To family,” he said. “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.”

I clinked my glass to his. “To family.”

We both sipped.

“No wonder you ran away,” he said. “Not only had you lost a father, but you must have also felt as if you’d lost a mother, and then, after what happened with this Kyle person—”

“I felt as if I’d lost my boyfriend, too,” I said. “Especially when he blamed me for being so judgmental of Kyle. My mother said the same thing, too, at first.”

Drew whistled. “Well, good riddance to all of them.” He reached out to pour more wine into my glass. “You did the right thing, especially coming here. This is the best place in the world to heal from old wounds and start life over. But the school thing—is that forever? You definitely don’t strike me as a quitter. You had a rough semester, but you’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, so you could easily make up the work if you wanted to go back.”

My eyes filled with tears once more. He’d tossed me so many compliments at once—and not the kind Caleb always had, about my beauty, but about my character and intelligence—that I hardly knew how to handle it. I lifted my wineglass and brought it swiftly to my lips, hoping the bowl of the enormous glass would hide my suddenly shining eyes.

“I don’t know. I guess I grew up thinking I should be a lawyer because my mom and dad were, and helping people is something I’m definitely interested in. But in my heart—”

He nodded. “I get it. In your heart, you’re an artist. No one who’s seen those paintings of yours could ever think otherwise.” He raised his glass toward mine. “Cheers to having the sense to follow your true path.”

I laughed—a half sob, half laugh, because I was still fighting back tears—and leaned forward to clink my glass to his. “Thanks. But that’s the problem. I don’t know what my true path is. So far it seems to have led me toward waitressing and a hurricane.”

He looked slightly hurt. “And me.”

“And you,” I said, this time laughing without a hint of tears.

“On the other hand,” Drew said, gazing up at the stars, “now you have two moms. Not many people can say that.”

“That’s true,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure my egg donor mom is the one from whom I inherited my artistic talent. I was able to see her application. It was an open donation, meaning that she checked off that she had no problem with me contacting her once I came of age.”

“That’s great,” Drew said, looking interested. “Did you look her up?”

I shook my head. “No. Not yet. My mom really pressured me to. I think she thought maybe it would make things better between us. But I just haven’t felt ready. Maybe when things get more . . . settled.”

“Hmmm.” He grinned and reached for me, pulling me against him. “If there’s anything I can do to help you settle things, let me know.”

“Aw.” This so warmed my heart, I leaned up to kiss him.

I’d only meant it to be a playful kiss across his cheek. But he turned his head so that the kiss landed on his mouth.

And just like every other time, the second his lips met mine, fireworks seemed to go off inside my shorts. It was all I could do not to launch myself at him, I so badly wanted to be in his arms . . . and his bed.

I needn’t have worried, however, since he was apparently feeling the same way about me. A second later, he scooped me up from the deck chair and carried me back into his room—no trouble tripping over tools this time, since we’d lit plenty of candles to light the way.

Unfortunately, in our ardor, we forgot to put away the leftovers, so the Bobs climbed up onto the table and feasted on what was left of our steaks.

But that was all right, we decided when we discovered our empty plates, much later. They deserved a treat, too. The way we were feeling, the whole world did.