The guy snorted. “Want to bet?”
Excellent. Finally, some fun. “How about fifty bucks?” Alexei said.
“How about a hundred?” the guy countered, obviously thinking Alexei was kidding.
“Done,” Alexei said, sticking out his hand for the man to shake. “I bring you back some proof there’s a monster and you owe me a hundred dollars.”
“Sure,” the man agreed. “And when you can’t get any proof, you owe me a hundred. I hope you’re good for it.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Bethany hissed, leaning closer over the bar.
“I’m going looking for a monster,” Alexei said cheerfully, downing the rest of his beer. “Want to come?”
*
In the end Bethany went with him, more to keep an eye on him than out of any belief that he was going to find anything. She didn’t even want to think about where he was going to come up with a hundred dollars to pay off Duke, who wasn’t exactly known for his forgiving nature. She was starting to second-guess her maybe-not-so-brilliant-after-all plan to have Alexei take care of her father. The man was clearly three pretzels short of a snack bag.
Although she had to admit, at least he’d gotten Calum up and dressed and fed with a minimum of fuss and a relatively small amount of cursing the last few days, and then walked Lulu without being asked, although it was a little odd the way he kept up a one-sided conversation with the dog. So the next day, as soon as the lunch rush was over, she’d called in her relief bartender for a couple of hours and asked Mrs. Masters from next door to come over for a bit while Bethany drove Alexei down to the wharf.
Calum complained bitterly about being forced to watch the neighbor’s soap operas, but Bethany figured without a minder, there was no telling what kind of trouble Alexei might get into. Even with one, she wasn’t feeling all that complacent. She had a feeling he could get into trouble in an empty room with all the doors and windows locked and one arm tied behind his back.
Maybe both arms.
She pulled the truck up to the wharf and put on the parking brake, overwhelmed for a moment by a flashback to the days she and her mom used to drive over to meet her father at the end of a long day’s fishing. When they’d first moved here from Scotland, he’d taken whatever jobs he could get, going clamming or lobstering when he couldn’t get a job on a fishing boat. Eventually he’d saved up enough money for his own boat, which should have made things easier, except it was right around then that her mom had started getting sick.
Nothing was ever easy after that. Still, right up until the point where she couldn’t get out of bed, Bethany’s mom had insisted that if she was going to keep their only vehicle during the day, she’d go pick up her husband when it was time for him to come home. Margaret McKenna might have been the only person in the world as stubborn as the man she’d married.
She had also been the only one in the world that Calum listened to, and sometimes actually behaved for. Bethany shook off the feeling that she might be starting to be that person for Alexei. That was just nuts. He meant nothing to her, and she sure as hell meant nothing to him. She’d be crazy to think otherwise, and while she had her flaws, Bethany was anything but crazy.
“You okay?” Alexei asked, sounding more curious than concerned. “You’re gripping that steering wheel like you’re trying to choke it.”
Bethany relaxed her white-knuckled fingers and took a deep breath. She never got tired of the briny scent of the ocean, flavored with the slight tang of fish. She’d missed it, when she’d been going to law school in Boston. She hadn’t missed Calum’s temper and bad moods, or their constant disagreements while they were stuck together in that small house after her mother died, but she’d sometimes gone to the harbor just to breath in air that smelled like home.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Just childhood memories rearing their ugly heads. You know what it’s like.”
He raised one shaggy eyebrow. She’d never noticed before, but they were slightly pointed in the middle, which added to his general devilish air. “I do not, actually,” he said, his Russian accent stronger than usual. “My childhood was…unconventional.”
Ha. And why didn’t that surprise her? “Raised by wolves?” she asked, getting out of the truck and slamming the door hard so it would close.
“A few,” he said. “Also some very nice bears.”
She glanced at his huge body, long brown hair, and braided beard. Somehow, that wouldn’t surprise her at all. “Right,” she said. “The Marlin is usually docked down this way. If the damage isn’t too bad, they might be trying to do the repairs in her berth, instead of putting her into dry dock. Cheaper and faster.” Fishermen couldn’t afford to miss too many days on the water. Most of them were barely making a profit as it was.
Various men greeted them as they made their way down the pier.
“You seem to know a lot of people,” Alexei said after one particularly exuberant “hallo!” “Do they all come to your bar?”
“Plenty of them,” Bethany said. “But you have to remember that I grew up on these docks. Fishermen are a pretty close-knit community. There are some newcomers, of course, but half these guys brought me cookies when I was a kid, or showed me how to bait a line. When my dad sold his boat to buy the bar after my mom died, most of them showed up out of loyalty and kept him in business. A few of them even helped me with my algebra homework.”
Not well, of course. But she’d kept her grades up, even through the grief of losing her mother at fifteen, because even then she knew that getting into a good college on a scholarship was her ticket out of town and away from her father.
She came to a stop in front of a familiar spot.
“Wow,” she said. “I guess Joe wasn’t exaggerating after all.”
The boat in front of them was listing slightly to one side, its usually neat red and white paint marred by scratches and gouges. A sizeable hole gaped in the splintered wood plank deck, although fortunately the damage seemed to be restricted to the area above the waterline.
“That doesn’t look like a drunken accident to me,” Alexei said, his grin suspiciously bright. “And I ought to know.”
“I’ll bet,” she muttered. “Hey, Robbie, you here?”
A grizzled head wearing a warm navy blue cap and a wispy beard popped out of the ship’s cabin. “Bethany, darlin’, what are you doing here? Did your father send you here to gloat? He always was jealous of my Marlin.” A crooked smile belied his harsh words, but it didn’t touch the shadows behind his eyes.
“Just checking in on you,” she said. “This giant person is Alexei. He’s helping me look after my dad for a few days. Permission to come aboard?”
“Not sure why you’d want to,” Robbie said glumly. “But sure, come on up.”