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off. Knock his socks off. Then his pants.
    He might be a little thrown off, but not for long. I’d show him. I loved him and he loved me. We could definitely make this work.
    “I’m coming out,” I said a moment later.
    “GOOD MOVE!” Peter squawked. “AND NO FUNNY BUSINESS!”
    I unlocked the door. Then I sailed my Victoria’s Secret bra and thong onto the megaphone, right into Peter’s dumbfounded blue eyes.
    “Don’t shoot,” I said, wearing nothing but my smile.

Chapter 15
    IT WAS THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY when I decided to clean Peter’s boat.
    Peter liked to go fishing by himself on Fridays after work. It was his way to blow off steam, clear his head, transition from the stressful workweek to the weekend. He’d usually come back in at around nine, and we’d end up having a late dinner of freshly caught wahoo or sailfish or blackfin tuna.
    So as a surprise, I wanted his boat to be shining when he came home after his shift.
    My hair up in a bandanna, wearing stylish yellow kitchen gloves and holding a soapy mop bucket, I boarded his twenty-five-foot Stingray at around eleven that morning. It was a white cabin cruiser, squat and powerful, almost like a speed-boat but with two berths for sleeping and a small galley under the bow.
    An enormous seagull cried from atop the mast of a smallsailboat across our canal as I stood on the softly swaying deck. As a breeze came off the electric blue water, I suddenly felt a strange lifting sensation in my stomach, guilt mixed with pleasure, like a child playing hooky. My life consisted of pretty much nothing but playing hooky, didn’t it? I was loving every millisecond of it.
    I smiled as I glanced at the CD in the boat’s topside boom box. It was by the seventies one-hit wonder Looking Glass. As silly as it was, the old jukebox staple about a sailor torn between the sea and his beloved bar wench, “Brandy,” was our wedding song.
    I didn’t even know why. I guess because it was fun and goofy and yet deep down seriously romantic, just like Peter and me.
    Looking at the powerboat’s sleek lines, I thought for the millionth time how much Peter impressed me. As funny and fun-loving as he was, he was an even harder worker. And because he came from meager circumstances in, of all places, the Bronx, New York, his accomplishments were nothing short of amazing.
    Without the benefit of a college education, he’d managed to buy this boat, not to mention this beautiful house in paradise that he’d redone himself. All the while becoming hands down the most well respected, competent cop on the island since the moment he’d transferred down from the NYPD seven years before.
    Peter was the real deal, the big-city go-to cop that all the other cops called when the shit hit the fan. Unlike my ex-boyfriend, Alex—who had proven himself to be nothing buta completely self-centered jock, faithless and irresponsible, unwilling to deal with anything his talent didn’t easily overcome—Peter was a traditional guy who actually sought out the hard stuff, took on every challenge the world had to offer, the more difficult the better, knowing it to be the thing that, in fact, made him a man.
    There was no doubt that I loved my Saint Peter. I loved him as much as you can love someone who is not only your lover and friend but your hero. If he hadn’t existed, I would have had to invent him.
    “Brandy,” the groovy seventies singer’s voice crooned as I hit the boom box’s Play button, “what a good wife you would be. But my life, my lover, my lady, is the sea.”
    By noon, I had finished polishing and waxing everything topside and I headed belowdecks. It was hot even by Key West standards, and down in the cruiser’s dim, claustrophobic cabin, the warm, icky, hazy air stuck like Saran wrap on my sweat-drenched skin.
    I was putting away some paper towels under one of the galley’s lower cabinets when I noticed something curious lashed with bungee cords to the underside of the sink.
    It was