So there was a natural barrier between me and that electrical-charge-inducing skin of his.

But for another thing, he kept his hands to himself—well, except for the fact that he had to hold on to something, and that something was me. He didn’t have any other choice.

Still, after swinging one of his long, lean legs over the seat and making himself comfortable behind me, he asked, politely, “Is this okay?” before settling his big tanned hands on my hips.

And it was okay. Surprisingly so. I nodded and said, “That’s good,” relief flooding through me. I’d been feeling a lot of anxiety about what was going to happen when he got on the scooter.

But suddenly it all seemed to ebb away. I even sort of liked having him back there, his long hairy legs wrapping around me, radiating so much masculine energy. With the bright sunshine beating down on us, and the wind still whipping at us, it made me feel almost happy . . . and definitely secure. Even when he kept pointing at hazards in the road that I could plainly see—such as someone’s deflated swan pool floatie—and calling, “Look out!” in my ear, I could only laugh.

“Oh my God. You are literally the worst backseat driver.”

“Well, you’re the worst front-seat driver. You were headed straight for it!”

“I was not.”

“You were, too. Has anyone ever told you that you need glasses? Because you do.”

The streets were actually a lot easier to navigate going back into town than they’d been on my way out to the beach. That’s because all the people I’d seen out in their yards, cleaning, had also been busy picking up the refuse that had fallen across the roads, including tree debris. There was nothing they could do about downed power lines, but we saw a few crews from the electric company working on those. It was amazing to me how many people hadn’t evacuated. All those times I’d ridden my bike across town, to and from the Mermaid, ahead of the storm, the place had seemed deserted.

But it hadn’t been. The residents of Little Bridge had merely been hunkering down, waiting for Marilyn to pass, so they could begin the hurricane-recovery process.

In some places, however, this was going to take more than a little bit of sweeping and cutting. When I pulled up in front of my apartment building, I was horrified to see that the frangipani wasn’t the only tree that had been lost to the storm. An enormous mahogany that had graced the yard of a neighbor had fallen across the road, crushing a car parked beneath it, directly in front of the entrance to my building’s courtyard.

“Oh, God,” I said, dismayed by the sight.

Drew chose to be optimistic. “It’s probably not that bad. I’m sure your apartment is fine.”

He was wrong. Beyond the gate was an even greater disaster. The storm surge from the harbor had reached the apartment building. I could see the dark line where the water had risen, only about three inches up the pink stucco walls.

Still, the leaves and branches of the frangipani—not to mention the dirt where it had been planted—had been churned around the courtyard like bits of food in a dishwasher, except with nowhere to drain.

Now frangipani—and mud—was stuck to everything . . . except for my neighbors, Patrick and Bill, who had the door to their apartment open and were carefully removing from it everything that had been drenched in the flood.

“Bree!” Patrick cried when he saw me. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

All three of their dogs had rushed over to greet us when we entered the courtyard, and now Drew and I were fending off happy pug tongue lashings.

“Hi,” I said, gently pushing away Brenda Walsh, their eldest pug, as I hurried over to greet the couple. “I’m so sorry. Is it bad?”

“Could have been worse.” Bill, holding a sodden box of what looked like record albums, returned the kiss I gave him on the cheek. “Here it was only a couple of inches. At the Cascabel, it was four feet! All that beautiful art deco lobby furniture was absolutely ruined. Not to mention, the elevators stopped working. We had to carry the babies down all those flights of stairs in the dark.”

I ignored the told-you-so look that Drew flashed me.

“I’m so sorry,” I said again. “That must have been terrible.”

“You made the right decision not to stay there with us,” Patrick said. “Honestly, we should have known better. But we were just so enchanted with the idea of not evacuating this time.”

“Brandon Walsh!” Patrick shouted at the pug that was slowly and deliberately humping Drew’s leg. “You stop that this instant!”

“Oh, that’s all right.” Drew gave his leg a soft shake, and Brandon (all three pugs were named after characters from the old television show 90210, of which Patrick and Bill were fond) trotted jauntily away. “I have dogs myself.”

“Do you?” Patrick was giving Drew an appraising look. I knew exactly what he was thinking just from his tone and the way his eyebrows were raised: that Drew and I were sleeping together. Patrick had been teasing me from the moment I’d moved into the apartment complex, practically, for not having had a Little Bridge hookup, and now he suspected he’d finally caught me with one. “I don’t recall having seen you around here before—and believe me, with those shoulders, I’d remember. Are you the reason Bree chose not to spend the hurricane in luxury at the Cascabel with us?”

“No, he’s not.” I hurried to change the subject. “He’s just here to help me break into Lydia’s apartment. Sonny’s guinea pigs are in there. His cousin Sean was supposed to look after them, but he evacuated, and I have no idea if they’re dead or alive.”

Bill looked alarmed. “R2-D2 and C-3PO? Well, what are you doing just standing there? Go save them!”

Drew seemed amused by the exchange. I sent him an aggravated look and pointed at my landlady’s door. “You heard the man.”

Still grinning, he said, “Yes, ma’am. Right away,” and crossed the tree-branch-strewn courtyard, then bent to examine Lydia’s lock.

While Drew’s back was turned, Patrick elbowed me. “So?” he whispered. “What’s the deal? Spill, sweetie, spill.”

I rolled my eyes. There is no deal, I mouthed.

Liar, Patrick mouthed back. I can feel the sparks. He silently mimed the moment from his drag performance when one of his characters—Joan of Arc—is engulfed in imaginary flames.

Ignoring him and the uncanny way he’d sensed the truth about what was going on between Drew and me (was it that obvious?), I said aloud, “I’m so glad my roommate and I had enough sense to move our stuff off the floor so it wouldn’t get ruined.”

Patrick, recovering from his make-believe conflagration, threw me a sour look as Bill cried, “Oh, I know. What were we thinking, leaving all this stuff on the floor?” He nudged one of the boxes of record albums with his foot. “Normally we’d have remembered, but this time we were in such a hurry to get to the hotel, we completely forgot.”

Drew, over by Lydia’s front door, straightened up. “This is a dead bolt,” he said, flatly.

“So?”

“So, I can’t break into a place with a dead bolt. And this one is top of the line, with side panels.”