Swept Away (Wildfire Lake 3)

He hums at my ear and kisses my neck.

I offer him a plate of food, and I’m both relieved and disappointed when he releases me to take it. “Let’s eat on the back deck.”

He reaches down and pulls his one chilled beer from the fridge, then replaces it with one from the cupboard.

I smile. “Who says men can’t be trained.”

“Ha. Now if some genius could figure out how to make it happen with women…”

By the time I meet him on the deck, he’s pulled off his boots and rolled up his uniform pants and sits on the edge of the swim platform, his feet in the water. I turn off all the lights so we can appreciate the starry sky and the water under moonlight. I sit beside him, dropping my feet in the cool water.

The last dinghy carrying Bodhi heads toward the body of the lake.

“Looks like everyone is back at their boats,” he says.

“I hear a bit of melancholy in your voice tonight too. What’s wrong?”

He sighs. “It’s just Piper.”

“What about her?”

While we eat, he tells me about Willow and Dale being at Piper’s house and how Karen didn’t come home until 3:00 a.m.

“Piper’s playing with fire,” he says, “and she’s still lying to me. I don’t know what to do to get through to her. Karen isn’t helping. She’s more interested in being twenty again than being a mom. I suggested that Piper stay with me when Karen’s going to be out late, and you’d think I’d told her she was looking old for her age or something. She was totally offended, saying I was insinuating she was a lousy mom.”

“That’s got to make Piper feel like shit,” I tell him. “There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re an afterthought or a nuisance to your only parent—except having no friends. Poor thing’s trying to deal with both. She’s lucky to have you.”

“She doesn’t see it that way.”

“It only seems like that on the surface. Besides, if it weren’t for you, she could very well be deep into drugs or sleeping around by now. That’s how I spent my youth, going to extremes in search of good feelings.”

“I guess there’s hope for her, then. You turned out incredible.”

I smile. “I’ll see what I can do about reaching Piper on a deeper level while she’s working here for the summer.”

“That would be amazing. She loves you. Keep me posted, would you? If you could give me a glimpse inside her head or tell me if she’s headed toward trouble, that would be a huge help.” He scoops white rice onto his plastic fork, then stabs a chunk of mango. “It’s just the lying. If I knew what was happening, I could deal with it head-on, but the lying… It makes me crazy.”

“Says the man who’s perpetuated a living lie.”

“This is different.”

“Everyone who lies thinks their lie is different.”

He bobs his head side to side, as if he sort of agrees, and we slide into comfortable silence for a few minutes. The night is finally taking an edge off the heat. The marina is quiet and serene. Another day down. One less day to worry about dealing with Bodhi. I think about Piper and Karen. About myself at Piper’s age and how so many of my mistakes could have been prevented with an adult like Xavier in my life at the time. It makes me think about the sacrifices he made by following Piper here.

“You never told me much about what happened with Keith,” I say, bringing up his partner. “Just that he was killed on duty.”

Xavier finishes a bite as he considers the comment. “Over the years, he got progressively more lenient with criminals. I don’t know why. Maybe it was watching Piper grow up, maybe it was related to a rift in his marriage.” He shrugs. “All I know is that he was letting more and more criminals go instead of taking them in, which only made things worse on the street. It was becoming a real problem between us when he died.”

I finish up my rice and mango and turn toward him, sitting cross-legged on the swim platform and sipping my sparkling water. “How did that cause his death?”

“There was this kid, a small-time drug dealer and repeat offender who was working himself up the food chain. He was a nice-enough kid, I guess, and Keith took a liking to him. One night, we caught him in the middle of a deal with tons of product and paraphernalia on him. He’d definitely upped his game, and we should have taken him in, but Keith let the guy go. We had a pretty big argument about it afterward. Keith thought he was giving the kid a chance to go back and make a better choice next time. I thought we were enabling more drugs to flow in the streets.”

Xavier puts his plate aside and leans back on one hand, using the other to hold his beer. “A week later,” he says, “we came across that same kid, who was higher than a kite, and when Keith tried to talk to him, the kid shot him.”

The force of that image shocks me.

“That’s why I like things to be upfront,” he says, “so there’s less chance of something biting you in the ass, or in that case, shooting you in the face. That’s why I harp on Piper about her friends. Why I try to get her to talk to me and be honest. It doesn’t help that her mother isn’t exactly setting a good example. When Karen finally got home this morning, she tried to tell me she was out with friends, but she smelled like sex. What she was doing is immaterial. The problem is she wasn’t home with Piper, allowing Piper to have less-than-ideal friends come over.”