“Not until you’re twenty-one, young lady.” Mrs. Hartwell took the bottle from her niece. “Very nice,” she said, glancing at me with raised eyebrows after scrutinizing the label. “Hardly worth wasting on this bunch. I might have to hide this for my own personal use.”

“Please do,” I said. “It’s for you.”

Mrs. Hartwell snorted, looking embarrassed, and called to her husband, who was in a sunken part of the yard by the grill—or I should say multiple grills, with multiple men, all of whom were busily barbecuing by the light of numerous tiki torches.

“Ed,” Mrs. Hartwell screeched. “Ed, Bree Beckham brought us some champagne!”

Unsurprisingly, since Ed Hartwell hardly ever spoke except to yell at someone, there was only a grunt in reply. It sounded approving, however.

“Well, let’s go get this on ice,” Mrs. Hartwell said, and began moving at the speed of light. “And get you a drink, too, of course.”

She headed down the steps, into one of the biggest backyards I’d ever seen on the island—which, being only two miles by four miles, was in a constant and desperate battle to preserve green space.

The Hartwells had done a good job of conserving it. The yard was lush with native growth, mostly different varieties of palms, some of which towered as high as twenty feet overhead, forming a cooling canopy against the moody night sky. The air was thick with the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine, ylang-ylang, and grilling meats and vegetables. Exotic orchids in multiple colors, white, purple, yellow, and orange, grew from the trunks of some of the palms, the flowers swaying softly in the warm evening breeze.

Mrs. Hartwell placed my bottle of champagne in a silver bucket that held ice and a number of other bottles of wine, most of them open, that sat on an ornately carved Moroccan bench by the pool. Kidney shaped, and lushly landscaped so that it looked almost like a naturally occurring pond (only turquoise colored), the pool glowed iridescently in the darkness of the yard, a shimmering sapphire amid the bright ruby and topaz tiki torches.

At Mrs. Hartwell’s urging, I helped myself to a plastic glass of white wine from one of the opened bottles while Nevaeh, who’d trailed behind us the entire time, stood beside me, chattering nonstop.

“And over here is where we’re keeping the rabbits,” she was saying, guiding me toward an area of the yard that was near what appeared to be one of the most picturesque potting sheds I’d ever seen, painted white with blue trim to match the house. “We volunteered to foster animals from the ASPCA during the storm. They always make sure to find foster homes for every pet in the shelter during a hurricane. They gave us two rabbits. What do you think? Aren’t they just the cutest?”

After my vision had adjusted, I saw that the rabbits were comfortably snuggled into newly constructed wooden hutches, their pink and brown noses twitching away as they nibbled at a head of lettuce someone had dropped inside their pen. I agreed that they were, as Nevaeh had said, the cutest.

“We’ll bring them inside when it starts to rain,” Nevaeh prattled on. “I’ve made a pen in the laundry for them out of baby gates. I want to keep them forever—along with the parrot and the tortoise—but Uncle Ed says we have enough animals. I don’t know why, we only have a couple of stray cats that come around because I feed them. They actually live under the church down the street. I know I’ll change his mind. Oh my God, Katie!”

This was directed at a young girl who’d just arrived at the party, Nevaeh’s best friend, Katie, who like Nevaeh was dressed in a halter top, short shorts, and some sort of silky robe. Like Nevaeh, she’d also flat-ironed her hair to a sheen. Both let out a delighted scream at the sight of each other.

Since Mrs. Hartwell had long since been snatched up by another partygoer, I drifted away as Katie and Nevaeh shrieked over the coincidence of their wardrobe selections, having noticed that Angela was standing beside a nearby table laden with chips, dips, and other party favorites.

“Hey, girlfriend,” she said, when she saw me approaching, and gave me a welcoming hug. “Check out the spread.”

When I turned to look at the impressive array of food—much of what had been in Mrs. Hartwell’s shopping cart that afternoon, only now it was transformed into tantalizing trays of gooey nachos, simmering brisket, cool and spicy fish dip, truffle popcorn, strawberry trifle, and watermelon salad—Angela leaned over to whisper into my ear, “And check out what’s behind us.”

I turned to look. The Hartwells owned an outdoor pool table, around which seemed to have gathered most, if not all, of Little Bridge Island’s most eligible bachelors (and bachelorettes). It would have been hard not to notice that one of the former was Drew, since he was currently breaking. Under the misty yellow glow of the party globes that someone had strung above the pool table, I could see that he’d pushed the sleeves of his chambray shirt up to his elbows, revealing his darkly tanned forearms. These flexed tautly as he leaned across the green felt to take a shot, as did his left butt cheek, clearly outlined by the thin fabric of those super-faded chinos.

Well, a girl could look, couldn’t she? Even if she was most definitely not interested in buying, and was, in fact, off the market.

Except that Drew chose that exact moment to look up from beneath the chunk of dark hair that had fallen across his eyes, almost as if he’d felt the direction of my stare. That ice blue gaze met mine.

Crap.

I glanced quickly away, feeling myself blush.

“So how’s the food?” I turned to ask Angela, taking a quick sip of wine. I wished I’d thought to put ice in my plastic cup, to cool my suddenly burning cheeks . . . and other places that happened to feel hot.

“The food?” Angela hadn’t noticed the look Drew and I had exchanged, whatever it had been, thank God. “It’s great. You should try the spinach dip. Oh, and the brisket is good, too.”

“Great.” My blush was deepening. Damn it! One of these days I was going to track down my biological mother and ask her if blushing ran in the family. Neither my mom nor my dad had ever blushed in their lives and had always teased me (good-naturedly) for doing so. “Is he looking over here?”

Confused, Angela glanced in Drew Hartwell’s direction, from which I could hear nothing but the murmur of casual conversation and, for some reason, a whining dog.

“Is who looking over here? What are you—”

“Nothing. Good. Never mind.”

Angela started to laugh. “Oh my God. You have got to be kidding me. Drew Hartwell?”

“No. Absolutely not. He just caught me looking at him, and I don’t want him to think—”

“Oh, right. Because nothing could be further from the truth?”

“Exactly.”

“Then why are you so dressed up?”

I knew it had been a mistake to listen to Patrick.

“It’s just a dress,” I said. “It’s a party, so I wore a dress.”

“A hurricane party.” Angela shook her head in amusement. “No one dresses up for a hurricane party. Everyone’s all sweaty from boarding up all day, so they just throw on whatever so they can get their drink on. Man, I should have known this was going to happen when you were outside this morning, talking to him for so long.”