Tattered Innocence Read Online Free

hadn’t spoken in months. He barely
accepted her congratulations at graduation.
    “My baby,” she’d called Hall as she clutched
him to her after Mama delivered him on the kitchen floor. With Mama
and Daddy at work all day and Granny too tired in her seventies to
chase a little boy, Rachel had relished mothering Hall. He’d never
balked at the mother-son quality of their relationship—until
Bret.
     
     
    Jake swiped the mop across the Queen’s weathered teak deck, shaking his head at Rachel as
she disappeared into the conglomeration of sun-baked car hoods
along Riverside Drive. She’d actually distracted him from Gabs for
thirty seconds.
    He glanced at Leaf under a makeshift awning
on the next boat and almost called him Gramps, like he had a
hundred times. But the only things Leaf had in common with Gramps
were his age and a penchant for saving electricity. He liked the
old guy, but not how he resurrected grief he didn’t want to
feel.
    Leaf’s ponytailed head bobbed. “I like your
new girl.”
    Jake smiled in spite of himself. “You
would.”
    Leaf pulled an orange out of a dirty plastic
Winn Dixie bag and tossed it to Jake. “Found these today on my
rounds.” The guy cruised the neighborhoods on his rattletrap
Schwinn, looking for free food.
    “Hang on.” Jake jogged down the companionway
and back up. “Catch.” He tossed the beef jerky into Leaf’s bony
hand. “Trade you.”
    Leaf squinted at the ingredients. “Stuff’s
poison.”
    “Stuff’s protein. Eat it.”
    Rachel walked toward them, her arms loaded
with grocery bags. He should tell her about the cart at the end of
the dock she could use to carry supplies. Naw. More interesting to
see what she’d say when she found out. He grinned as he watched her
stride up the pier.
    Details he hadn’t intentionally recorded
paraded through his mind as he sloshed the mop back into the
bucket. Rachel spoke an octave lower than Gabs. Sitting across from
her at the Dolphin View, he’d noticed her eyes, like her hair, were
brown, flecked with gold. She came across confident, but freckles
dusted the tops of her cheeks and nose with vulnerability.
    She’d convinced him that she loved sailing.
But she wanted out of New Smyrna Beach, too. What was that about?
He glanced up at Rachel’s angular frame and riotous curls as she
pushed through the gate at the end of the pier. He shrugged. The
girl was Gabs’ polar opposite. Good.
    Leaf motioned his head toward Rachel as she
headed up the dock with another load of groceries. “You should be
grateful to have her.”
    “Yeah. But I’m not.”
     
     

Chapter 3
     
    Jake had barked orders for the three days
since Rachel started working for him. She should be ticked.
Instead, she wanted to thank him for chasing away a thousand
thoughts she didn’t want to think. Since sunup, they pinged around
the boat doing last minute chores. The menu had been posted, bunks
made, the electric and water lines disconnected.
    Rachel stuffed the last sail cover into a
nylon bag and tossed it into the bin under the port cockpit bench,
her last task completed. She wiped sweat from her forehead with the
back of her arm. Sadness crawled back into her chest.
    The old man on the sloop in the next slip
pared a mango with his pocket knife and flipped peels into the
water one at a time.
    I don’t have to be happy about doing the
right thing. But at least I’m one step closer to the sister Hall
used to be proud of. She blinked, and for a moment, she was
sprinting beside a kindergarten Hall, helping him balance on his
two-wheeler for his first solo after the training wheels came off.
Sprinting away from Bret was one last thing she could do to launch
Hall into life.
    In the wait for their guests’ arrival, like
the pause between the pep band’s tuning and the first note of the
fight song, Rachel peered over her clipboard at Jake. He rubbed a
smudge off the ship’s stainless steel wheel with the hem of his
T-shirt, grief and determination