Surface Tension Read Online Free PDF Page B

be in any particular hurry to get their money out of the boat, and I paid them each a small percentage of the business every month. Sure, things had been a little slow lately, but it would pick up. That was the nature of the business. And now I had a salvage claim to pursue against a multimillion-dollar vessel.
    I was about to shut the machine off when a familiar voice started speaking on the third message.
    “Hey, Seychelle, I just heard about the Top Ten ” B.J.’s voice sounded unusually subdued. “I stopped in down at Sailorman to buy a rebuild kit for that head of yours, and everybody’s talking about it.” He paused, and in my mind I could see the way his eyes must have wrinkled as he tried to figure out what to say next.
    “Sey, I know it must have been pretty bad out there.” I blinked back the pictures. “If you want to talk, I’ll be at the Downtowner around six. We could grab a bite. Later.”
    For some reason that did it, hearing the sympathy in his voice. He was the first person who seemed to realize that the events of that morning had hurt. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by memories of Neal, alive, there in my cottage, making love on the floor, sitting up in bed talking all night, drinking beer and eating pizza by the window over there, listening to him whistle in the shower. I remembered that night we had slept in a sleeping bag on a little sandy cay down in the Dry Tortugas, swimming in the phosphorescent water at midnight and making love as the velvety trade winds dried the seawater on our skin. When we woke at dawn, Neal held me and kissed me, his tongue tracing the shape of my lips. His blue eyes glistened with unshed tears when he told me I tasted like rain.
    The pressure inside my chest was building to the breaking point, and sour-tasting muscles pulled at the corners of my mouth, the back of my throat. I forced it back inside and blinked away the blurriness. Picking up my keys, I headed out the door.
    First I locked up the boat and set the alarm from the electronic keypad I’d installed on the side of the wheelhouse. I checked to make sure Abaco had water, and then I crossed the grounds and passed through the side gate that led to the street side of the Larsens’ house, where my old white Jeep was parked in the gravel drive. Neal had nicknamed her Lightnin’ because she wasn’t any ball of fire. I’d bought her in my lifeguarding days, and since I usually didn’t drive a whole lot, she’d served me well in spite of her ever-growing collection of rust patches. Her original owner, back in ’72, had seen fit to put a Jesus on the dashboard, and none of the rest of us who’d owned her had been brazen enough to remove the thing. Now faded and cracked from years in the Florida sun, the pale pink figure stood in mute testimony to the effectiveness of ’70s adhesives.
    I just wanted to get out of the cottage as much as anything else, but as soon as I got behind the wheel, I realized I had better get over to see Jeannie Black, my lawyer. If Maddy had made up his mind that we were selling Gorda , I needed a cash infusion right now. Somebody did own the Top Ten , and that somebody should be very grateful that I just pulled his megayacht out of imminent peril. Just how grateful, in terms of dollars and cents, was for the lawyers to figure out, but I certainly had not gone through all that out of the goodness of my heart. I intended to get every dollar I could out of it.
    Jeannie didn’t look like much; actually, at well over 250 pounds, she looked like too much, but she had served me well in the past. She’d been a lawyer on the fast track in a high-powered firm when her twin boys were born. She never even told her boyfriend, who she knew had no interest in fatherhood, that she was pregnant, believing she could handle it all herself. But single motherhood turned out to be far more difficult than law school. She eventually decided to quit the firm, stay at home with the twins, and work out of her own