A cabin sat hunkered down in a clearing ahead of us. It looked like it was about two seconds from collapsing in on itself.
“This…is it?” I asked as Jay pulled up in front and parked.
“Home sweet home,” he winked as he got out, came around and opened my door for me.
“You have to be kidding,” I said.
“I know it’s not
the Ritz-Carlton, duchess,” he smirked as he led me up the steps. “But you’ll be all right.”
“You got sassy while you were away,” I quipped back. Jay just smiled that smile that melted my heart, and opened the door.
I’d expected the inside of the cabin to be as bad or worse than the outside—wet, moldy and filled with spider webs— but to my surprise, it was actually quite cozy, dry, not even dusty, with no spiders in sight.
Again, Jay locked the door behind us, which only revived my curiosity about what was going on.
“Okay, spill it,” I told him. “What is going on? Where have you been? What’s with this secret hideout? Why are you locking everything behind us? There’s like…no one out here.”
“Do you want some tea?” he asked, stepping past me to the half-kitchen that shared space with the living room.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve got some ginger snap tea that’s pretty good,” he replied, putting the kettle on the stove. “Why don’t I make you a cup?”
“Spill it, Jay,” I said firmly, crossing my arms over my chest.
Jay turned, came over to me and took my hands in his, causing a warmth to spread through my entire body. His eyes held me in place like he owned me and in an instant, I was taken back to that evening by the sea.
“Let’s sit,” he said, leading me over to a loveseat by the cold fireplace. The way he was looking at me was making me anxious.
“Come on, Jay,” I pressed him. “You’re killing me.”
“Okay. This might be a little hard to believe…but here it goes.” Jay took a deep breath and then continued. “For the last five years I’ve been keeping my distance from you because I didn’t want to put your life in danger.”
“My…life in danger?” I replied. That was not what I was expecting to hear. “What kind of—what?!”
“A week before I met you, a couple of new boats came into Green Harbor,” he explained. “Remember Dane’s Wharf?”
“How could I forget?” I asked.
“Well, it turns out Dane had some financial problems,” he continued. “He gambled away his life savings, as well as his kids’, and he had to resort to…other methods to make the money back.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Drugs.”
Jay nodded. I didn’t have any direct experience with that sort of thing, of course, but everyone in New England knew that it went on. Fishermen would use their boats to smuggle drugs in and out of the country, usually from Canada, and keep up their fishing business as a front.
“I was tying up one night after a long haul and ran into Dane and his new ‘friends’ loading some stuff into the trucks.”
“Oh, no…”
“Rough boys,” Jay nodded. “Told me I had two choices: either work with them and keep my mouth shut or die.”
“Oh, no, Jay…” I replied as a fresh dose of anxiety hit me like a gut punch. Suddenly images of Jay being entangled in something like a crime movie flickered through my mind, each one causing my heart to skip a beat.
“They said they’d kill my family if I talked,” he continued. “And when I told them I didn’t have a family, they said they’d kill anyone I loved.”
He stopped and focused his eyes intently on me. I immediately understood.