Page 41 of Sucker For You

She shrugged deeper into her cashmere.

“Right. Come on.” He pointed at the gauntlet of hawkers flanking their approach to the Monterey wharves. “One of these guys is probably selling fleece sweatshirts. With all the tourists coming to the beach, thinking it’ll be sunshine and white sand like Malibu or La Joya? Once they get a taste of the central coast, the market’s hot for hoodies. Or some tie-dye, at least.”

“But I don’t. . . need—ah!” She shied back from a woman wearing and selling enormous quantities of beaded jewelry, who’d approached to shake the wares in her face.

“Not today, thanks.” Wes waved the vendor off with a firm smile, before swerving into a hawker’s shack. He held open a faux-tribal curtain for Isabel to follow him inside and pointed at the walls: kitschy bumper stickers, plastic sandals, tie-dye dresses and sarongs, cheap electronics, and sweatshirts in every conceivable combination of colors and graphics. “Look. They’ve got a half-off special for the fleeces.”

They did.

A minute later, he’d plucked two slouchy sweatshirts stamped with paw-holding sea otters from a stack. He tossed them ontothe counter and dropped a SIM card from the electronics booth on top. “How much?”

The bored teenager behind the kiosk’s register told him.

“Jesus.” Ignoring Isabel’s fumbles for her wallet, he flipped open his own. “Tourist prices are as bad as real estate here. But: this is an investment. Nothing sayswe’re a couplelike taking pictures in matching otter sweatshirts. And it’s Sunday, so this gadget’s a must. My family has regular Monday-night video calls. Not hopping into those is sacrilege.”

Oh.

“Yes,” she agreed for the clerk, as if she had any idea. She didn’t. She likely wouldn’t be joining the Monaghans’ conversations. Not really. But her imagination was treacherous, and the description of what calls with Wes’s family might be like came too easily:laughing, loud, teasing, casual, unruly, outrageous, probably wonderful—

Like this tie-dye dress hanging against the wall.

When Wes strolled over to pluck at its flounces, she hurried back through the shack’s curtain to the sidewalk, burying her hot face inside her new sweatshirt while she tugged it over her wind-tangled hair. He must have seen her staring, and for him to catch her wanting something so frivolous—or even wanting anything at all?

Wanting was dangerous.

Not as dangerous as anger, but still.

“Are you a secret hippie, Buttercup?” Wes’s own sweatshirt muffled his laughter as he yanked it on. They exited the kiosk ranks, moving toward the ramshackle infrastructure of seafood restaurants and kayak rentals that led to Old Fisherman’s Wharf. The air was thick with brine and sardines and motor oil from a fish market, and with funnel-cake batter from a booth sellingsweets. It stuck in her throat. “You’ve got an eye for tie-dye, and if you’re not wearing flowers in your hair right now, I’ve seen you with seaweed. . .?”

Fortunately, the next surf shack they approached was a dive shop. Fins, masks, and snorkel tubes spilled over display bins. The racks groaned with neoprene. Boogie and wakeboards lined the canvas walls. Oxygen tanks for SCUBA were arranged behind the register, along with maps of Monterey Bay’s popular shore and boat dive sites. Distracted, Wes swerved inside.

“Maybe they’ve got locations marked for the canyon’s hydrothermal vents. We could triangulate some possible positions for MORI’s secret octopus garden and then—oh. No,damn.” He lowered the map he’d grabbed, shaking his head. “The springs around Davidson Seamount clock in at. . .”

“They’re nearly one thousand, two hundred meters below sea level.”

“Even suited up for SCUBA, we couldn’t dive that deep. The pressure would crush us like neoprene pancakes.” He folded the map and returned it to a wire basket.

The bay’s pearl-octopus nursery was out of reach.

For them, yes. But also for anyone else who might have intruded on the lavender cephalopods, the females tending their eggs through the dusk of their short lives in lightless water.

The disappointment that tightened a small, hard knot in Isabel’s stomach was irrational.

She turned toward the exit again, but was foiled by bins of snorkel fins.

“I still saw that octopus in the kelp, though,” Wes said. “Doesn’t that mean there’s probably a decent-sized population nearby? If I spotted one, there were dozens that I didn’t. You wouldn’t have noticed them at night, but—”

“. . . if I’d dived during the day?” She paused in edging past the bins. “Oh.”

“Yeah. I mean,wecould dive.” He prodded a fin. “We could have our first date today. Or a first dive. Dive bar, or sandbar?”

“We really could just. . . go?” She blinked at the flexible plastic, at neoprene. “Now?”

“Well—unlike you, I don’t tend to jump into the nearest body of water with all my clothes on.” A fresh grin teased along his mouth. “Give me a few minutes to swap on some trunks? My mom would kill me if I showed up to our date in cargo shorts.”

He had a point.

Not about the cargo shorts, but about the wet clothes. She couldn’t afford to ruin the few pieces she had, after she’d already wrecked her dry-clean-only cocktail dress. Isabel chose a value pack of snorkeling gear, plus a two-for-one special on a sarong and a swimsuit off a rack (the crossed shoulder straps were secure, and the navy patterning would blend her body with the water), and went to the register.