“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.