Read Her Forbidden Love (Indigo Island Book 2) for Free Online

couldn’t believe it. She was probably batting her eyelashes, too, she realized, mortified. Fortunately she had her sunglasses on. He was just so hot.
    “I’d love to,” he said, sliding Tade into the front seat next to her as Dorsey’s heart thudded in her chest. “But unfortunately I have to go back to the pool. Hey Dorsey, I’d really like to see you later, though?”
    “Ah, sure, of course, me too,” she said. Sounding just like a sixth grader. What had happened to her?
    “I’ll find you,” Jack said with a wink before turning to walk back to the pool.
    “Me too, me too, kissy kissy,” Tade teased Dorsey as she drove around to the back of the inn, the ocean side, where the sun danced and sparkled on the calm surface of the sound. The calm stillness of the ocean was a complete contrast to the crazy longing she was feeling inside.
    Dorsey reminded herself to focus on her job and let Tade help her to navigate her crutches across the oyster-and-shell-encrusted cement walkway leading to the back door of the inn, stopping to point out embedded fossils along the way. As they moved past the lawn-bowling court, Dorsey tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow up a hundred years earlier in a huge home at the edge of the ocean, daughter of a cotton farmer. Waited on by slaves.
    “You know, back when this was a plantation, we wouldn’t be on the island during this time of year,” Dorsey explained, reciting Steve’s speech that she had heard while she waited with her throbbing foot. “We’d be inland, in the mountains in Asheville or near there. It’s malaria season, a dangerous and uncomfortable time to be on the Sea Islands. That was before the invention of air conditioning, and pesticides and malaria pills.”
    “Yeah, well, the folks who were here year-round then are still here now, you know?” Tade said. “The Gullah people are just outside the gates. Most people here never even see them. But it’s really their island.”
    “Don’t tell Steve that,” she said. “He likes to think it’s his island.”
    “I know. He was here last summer, too. But he doesn’t get it. Indigo Island doesn’t belong to him, or the club. It belongs to them. He’ll find out,” Tade said.
    “How do you know so much about the people here?” Dorsey asked.
    “I have a friend on the backside. She tells me things. Lila met her.” Tade dashed ahead of Dorsey and up the steps to the large porch.
    The inn was a replica, a yellow stucco splendor recreated from historic drawings of the original plantation home, once the grandest on the eastern seaboard. Now it was home to an ever-changing horde of tourists like Tade and his parents, who had all begun to look the same to Dorsey since they’d begun arriving throughout the day. White couples. Mid-thirties to late forties, typically from the Midwest or South. Two or three kids, preschool to middle-school aged. They were a type. Mom would play tennis or join Dad at golf. Dorsey didn’t know yet how many kids would get stuck in the Kids Club since only Tade had shown up today.
    “I think the inn looks like a house made out of butter,” Tade said, as Dorsey slowly climbed the brick steps to the veranda, a long, covered porch winding around the first floor like a decorative apron. “Like they painted it with melted butter. I think ghosts live here, too.”
    “Why would ghosts want to live here? It’s way too hot for them,” Dorsey said, as Tade held one of the huge mahogany doors open for her.
    “Ghosts live where it’s not settled. That’s where there’s room,” Tade said, removing his pint-sized sunglasses as the two of them stepped into the air-conditioned lobby.
    “This feels good.” Goose bumps covered her arms from Tade’s ghost speech. She blamed it on the air conditioning. “You just don’t realize how hot it is until you come in here, into the air conditioning. Can you imagine before AC? So how long will your parents be gone today?”
    “Who