Romance on the Edge 01 - Hooked

was down in the engine room. Mom was handing him tools.” A slight smile touched her lips. “They were arguing over who should be down in the hold. Mom was better with mechanics than Dad was.”
    “Why was your dad in the engine room? What happened to make him go down there?” He picked up a pair of sweatpants, recognizing them as the pair she’d had on the other night. The ones he’d almost stripped her of. Neatly he folded and placed them on top of the individual piles she’d made.
    She narrowed her brow in thought. “There’d been a problem with the lights flickering. You know how a boat lists to the right as it climbs a swell and then lists left as it falls into the gully of the wave?” She continued when he nodded. “Well, each time the Mystic listed left the lights flickered off, then back on when we’d listed right.” She smoothed the fabric of the fleece sweatshirt in her hands. “Sasha and I thought it was cool. Part of the Mystic’s mystique.” She set the sweatshirt on the pile of clothes.
    “Electrical short?”
    She took a renewing breath and grabbed another article of clothing. “That’s what I think. Makes sense. The boat was also gasoline powered rather than diesel.”
    Which would have made it a powder keg if an electrical fire started.
    “There wasn’t enough evidence that Kendrick had intentionally sold my dad a boat with faulty wiring.” She reached for a pair of socks and mated them. “Did you know that I had to continue payments on the Mystic after she sunk?” She gave an ironic laugh. “It took me ten years to pay Kendrick off.” Her lips tightened into a hard line. “Worse than rubbing salt in a raw wound.”
    “Didn’t your dad carry hazard insurance?”
    “There hadn’t been enough time to obtain a policy. The kicker was that Dad had put up the set net sites as collateral. He’d only made the deal with Kendrick two days earlier.”
    “Two days?”
    “Yeah.” She met his eyes with a raised brow. “Interesting don’t you think?”

C HAPTER T WENTY- T WO
    “Yo, Captain,” Peter hollered from the deck. “You awake up there?”
    Sonya jerked her head up from the wheel. “Yeah, I’m awake.” She shook her head and yawned, her jaw popping, and engaged the hydraulics on the large reel which hauled in the net. She’d been resting between the length of time it took for Gramps and Peter to pick the net clean and her needing to operate the reel.
    The sun had risen hours ago. The clock on the control panel confirmed it was just after seven in the morning. The fews hours she’d caught before the fishing period had started, after returning from doing laundry, seemed to have hindered more than helped.
    Wes was convalescing at the cabin with Grams nursing him to death this time. Lucky bastard. He was probably getting a hot cooked breakfast right about now. Sonya’s stomach grumbled, but she couldn’t drum up any excitement over another cardboard-tasting protein bar. She grabbed a handful of Nutter Butters instead, hoping that if she ate something it would help her stay awake.
    Their catch, so far this morning, had been fair, but then she wasn’t fishing aggressively. She knew herself well enough to recognize that she was too tired to fight the line and the cutthroat fishermen today. Instead she’d stayed in view of the docks and the more mannerly-minded group of drifters. Besides, she didn’t want Gramps overdoing it as Wes wasn’t onboard to help pick up the slack. She’d tried to talk Gramps into taking a turn at the wheel and letting her pick fish, but he’d given her a silent stare that was surprisingly loud.
    Peter signaled for her to pull in another length of the net. She engaged the hydraulics and the reel slowly began to spin. Suddenly there was a screeching snap, followed by the reel lurching, and then grinding off its track, careening right for Gramps. Sonya slammed the throttle forward, taking the weight of the net off the runaway reel, but not before she heard Gramps howl in pain.
    Shit, shit, shit.
    Gramps lay pinned between the reel and the pole positioned across the middle of the deck.
    “Peter!” Sonya screamed.
    “I got him. Keep the tension off the reel!” Peter pushed his shoulder against the reel and heaved until Gramps crawled out from under it, cradling his left arm with his right. Deep lines of pain bracketed his mouth, and his skin was as white as a ghost fish. Sonya throttled the boat forward as Peter rushed to secure a rope