Swing and a Mishap (Summersweet Island 2)

“Remember Todd, the veterinarian?” my mom asks when Emily finishes.

“The one with the stutter?” Emily questions.

“No, that was Adam, the surf instructor. He was very good at oral.”

“Mom!” I complain, starting to realize maybe Birdie is right and our mom and I share entirely too much.

“Anyway, Todd and I went on three very sensual dates,” she continues while I try not to vomit when my mom says the word sensual. It’s almost worse than moist. “After the third date, we started sharing personal things. I told him about you girls, and his penis just turtleheaded itself back up inside poor Todd’s body, never to be heard from again. Sad, really. We had such a connection, and I felt like it could have gone somewhere.”

An unladylike snort comes out of me when my mom says that. Where I’ve spent my entire life dreaming about fairy tales and castles and a knight in shining armor, my mom has been perfectly content hopping from one man to the next after our father walked away. Laura Bennett decided then and there that no one would ever walk away from her again. She’s never kept a man around long enough for him to go anywhere, and they are always stunned stupid when she kicks them to the curb because she’s bored.

“It’s happened a few other times over the years,” my mom continues with a shrug. “I never cared, but that’s me, and you’re you. And you deserve to have a man who not only spoils you in life but spoils you in the bedroom. But Shepherd is a very stubborn man. Once he gets something in his head, I don’t know how easy it will be to get it out.”

“Fuuuck me,” I mutter with a huge sigh.

“Not likely.” Emily snorts, quickly sobering when I glare at her. “I’m kidding! Tess and Birdie have told me a few things about the way that man looks at you while you’ve been out and about around the island the last few weeks. There’s still hope.”

“Oooh, yes!” my mom agrees with a big smile and a nod, grabbing my phone right out of my hand so she can hold it. “I forgot about that. Oh, Emily, you should have seen the way that man stared at her cute little tush every time she bent over when they worked here that one night. And Katrina Ogden told Kelsea Moore who told Dee Trejo who told me that when they were playing cornhole out on the beach in front of Dockside Eddy’s one night after dinner, poor Shepherd kept adjusting himself in his pants every time our sweet Wrenny walked away from him!”

“Who got a woody from cornhole?”

Everyone ignores the shout from Ed in his golf cart as Emily picks up where my mom left off.

“I got a text from Jilly Bradel that said she was sitting on her boyfriend’s front porch two nights ago and saw Shepherd and Wren kissing goodnight in Shepherd’s driveway,” Emily says to my mom, sitting forward again in her bed and bouncing up and down in excitement, while I wonder if it’s possible for a person’s face to actually go up in flames. “You know how her boyfriend is on leave from the Army and he’s renting a long-term cottage right next to Shepherd? Anyway, she said Shepherd was all calm and cool with his hands in his pockets as Wren drove away, but Jilly said as soon as Wren’s golf cart was out of sight, it was like that man just lost his composure. Bent over at the waist with his hands on his knees, body heaving with all the rapid, deep breathing he was doing that Jilly got concerned he was gonna pass out. Although she didn’t seem too concerned about the possibility of having to perform CPR on Shepherd Oliver—let me tell you.”

A spark of jealously flies through me, and I momentarily forget my mom and my best friend are talking about how Shepherd has behaved around me when I wasn’t looking, like I’m not sitting right here.

I will take out Jilly Bradel at the knees with a baseball bat if she even looks at Shepherd again.

“He definitely wants to put his bat in her grassy infield.”

I really wish it was my best friend who said this last thing.

My mom laughs at her own joke, while Emily kindly informs her Shepherd dropped me off at a spa on the mainland yesterday while he ran some errands, and since I was all massaged out at that moment, I decided to get waxed.

“Okay, we can work with this.” Emily nods, her face suddenly all business. “Wrenny, it’s time for you to bring out the big guns.”

“I… I thought I had,” I reply nervously. “It took two shots of vodka from the portable bar in the sand next to the popcorn machine when Shepherd was busy setting up the movie projector just for me to get up the nerve to kiss his neck and graze my teeth over his earlobe.”