Gail gulped in air. She pressed her butt against the high stone wall that surrounded Hemingway’s house and hoped she could fade into the background. She held her breath. But Jesse looked up, and Gail could see that he recognized her instantly. She watched surprise flash in his eyes, followed by irritation, just like when he’d caught her staring at him the day before. Clearly, Captain Jesse might have big, bright smiles for little old ladies, but only a suspicious frown for her.

“I’m just here for the tour!” Gail busted out with that pronouncement before he’d even reached the curb, as though she needed to explain herself. Which was silly. She had nothing to apologize for. She might have fantasized about her gorgeous neighbor just a tiny bit the night before, in the privacy of her bedroom, with the blinds drawn, but it wasn’t like she was stalking him or anything.

“You’re here for the 8:00 a.m. walking tour?” Jesse dropped the old woman’s elbow and stared at Gail warily. “The ‘In Hemingway’s Footsteps’ tour?”

“Well, yeah.” Gail clutched her straw shoulder bag to the front of her body, as if protecting herself. “What’s it to you?”

That’s when she heard it for the first time—Jesse’s laugh. Its rich resonance penetrated her flesh and bone, causing her to shudder with pleasure. The intensity of that reaction startled Gail. Why did this guy affect her like this? How did he reduce her to a fool while setting her on fire inside? She didn’t like it much. It made her feel as if she wasn’t in control of herself.

Jesse shook his head, letting go with a deep sigh. “Then the gang’s all here, I suppose.” He gestured to the elderly couple. “This is Pete and Lana Purdy of Little Rock, who are celebrating their sixtieth wedding anniversary, and this is—” Jesse stopped in midsentence, his scowl deepening. “I’m sorry, Gail, but I didn’t get your last name.”

“Chapman.” Gail released the grip she had on her shoulder bag and shook the couple’s hands. “Dr. Gail Chapman from Beaverdale, Pennsylvania.”

Jesse exploded with a strange sound somewhere in between coughing and laughing. It figured, Gail thought. Deep down, the erudite captain was just another eighth-grade boy who thought anything with the word “beaver” in it was absolutely hilarious. She ignored him.

“Oh, how marvelous!” Lana Purdy said, beaming. “Pete here had a GP practice for fifty-five years. Delivered nearly six hundred babies, didn’t you, dear? And what is your specialty?”

This happened a lot. Gail smiled down on the pudgy little lady with short white curls. “I have my PhD in literature. I’m an associate professor at a small liberal arts college.”

Lana smiled. “How perfectly lovely!”

“Just great,” Jesse said under his breath.

That was it. Gail had reached the limit of her patience with this guy. He might be sexy as hell, but that had already been canceled out by the fact that he cursed at inanimate objects, had the emotional maturity of a Little Leaguer, scoffed at her profession and walked around sporting a near-permanent scowl. The man couldn’t be much older than Gail, but somewhere along the line he’d become a curmudgeon. How sad for him.

Gail cocked her head to the side and glared at Jesse, and he met her gaze straight on, unabashed. She scrutinized his face for flaws—there were none—while he studied her, one dark brow arched over one of his dusky blue eyes. The two of them remained in this standoff for several seconds, while Gail wondered about a few things. Why was Jesse here, anyway? Why did he feel the need to introduce everyone? Did he fancy himself some kind of rude one-man island-greeting committee? And where was the tour guide?

Suddenly, Jesse’s expression changed. The curiosity disappeared, replaced by a calm determination. Gail knew he was going to say something to her. She had a feeling it would be something important.

“Cash or credit?” he asked.

HOLY HELL, WHAT A MESS this was shaping up to be.

Beaverdale Gail knew far more about Hemingway than he did, which wasn’t much of a shocker considering she had a PhD in American Literature and Jesse’s only qualification was that he was a nautical-suspense author filling in for a flighty ex-sister-in-law who’d once again been summoned to traffic court.

It occurred to Jesse that if he had any hope of making that extended deadline in two weeks, he’d have to find a way to stop anyone else from asking for more favors. Maybe it was time for one of his deadline lockdowns: disconnect the phone, unplug the DSL and lock all his doors and windows.

The little tour group had come to one of their designated stops, 328 Greene Street, the site of the original Sloppy Joe’s Bar and Grill. Jesse explained that it was once a ramshackle establishment run by Ernest Hemingway’s fishing and carousing pal, Joe Russell, and went into his summary of Hemingway’s legendary drinking. “He had a tendency to get into trouble when he’d had a few too many,” Jesse said. “He had his famous fistfight with the poet Wallace Stevens here.”

“Actually,” Gail cut in, speaking more to the Purdys than him, “Hemingway was at home that evening, completely sober, when his sister told him that Stevens was at a house party claiming that Hemingway was a horrible writer. Ernest was so angry he drove to the house on Waddell Street and pummeled Stevens into a bloody heap on the floor. The poet was hospitalized and had to be fed through a straw for days.”

“Fascinating,” Lana Purdy said.

Jesse stared at the professor in wonder. Clearly, she had a lot of free time on her hands back in Beaverdale. But Jesse was the local. He was the tour guide here. He may have gotten that one detail wrong, but he had a whole arsenal of useless Hemingway minutiae at his disposal and he wasn’t afraid to use it.

He turned to Lana Purdy, who seemed to be legitimately interested in all this garbage, bless her soul. “Intriguingly enough,” Jesse began, the sarcasm dripping from his tone, “Wallace Stevens wasn’t even a famous poet at the time. He was still making his living—”

“Selling insurance,” Gail said. She slowly raised her gentle brown eyes to Jesse’s. “But you were right about Ernest often getting into trouble here. He met up with his third wife on a barstool at Sloppy Joe’s.” She smiled a smile so slight that he could have missed it if he weren’t paying close attention. “It was love at first sight for both of them,” she added.

Jesse laughed hard at her typical female delusion. Gail had romanticized what was essentially a sexual sting operation, not unlike the one that had snagged him. “I’m not sure about that, Professor Gail,” he said, still chuckling. “It was garden-variety entrapment. The chick ambushed him, actually paying the bartender twenty bucks to introduce her to the very married Hemingway.”

Gail raised her chin. “I take it you don’t believe in love at first sight?”

Jesse smiled kindly at her. “I believe in criminal background checks, Professor. And credit reports and not chucking the God-given capacities of my frontal lobe just to get me some—” Jesse stopped himself, suddenly remembering that Dr. and Mrs. Purdy were hanging on his every word. “Just to spend time with a pretty woman.”

Gail made a dismissive clicking sound at the back of her tongue and rolled her eyes. It reminded Jesse of a thirteen-year-old being told to clean her room. She turned on her heel and started walking.

They continued their stroll through Old Town at senior-citizen speed, passing French pastry shops and sidewalk eateries and art galleries. Jesse didn’t mind the slow pace because it gave him plenty of time to watch Dr. Gail walk. As he spoke about the publishing projects Hemingway worked on while living in Key West, Jesse studied Gail’s appearance and tried to decide why, exactly, he found the woman so damn alluring. She wore a preppy cotton skirt that hit just above her cute knees, a simple tailored sleeveless blouse and a pair of sensible sandals. Her hair was back in a ponytail. She wore very little makeup. And she was lugging around a shoulder bag big enough to stuff a corpse in.

For the life of him, Jesse couldn’t figure out why he found that unremarkable getup so provocative. Maybe living here most of his life had made him immune to tight spandex minis and cleavage-enhancing halter tops. Maybe his imagination was getting the best of him again, deciding that beneath the professor’s old-school exterior was something untamed, something deliciously and thoroughly…well…wild.

“Actually,” Gail said, correcting what had apparently been yet another of his tour-related inaccuracies, “To Have and Have Not was a character study of Key West locals, but it was also a commentary on the distribution of wealth in this country during the Depression.”

“Fascinating!” Lana said.

“I’ll tell you what’s fascinating,” Dr. Purdy said, marking the first time he’d opened his mouth since the tour began. “How the hell could a man as pickled as Hemingway write his own name, let alone a whole slew of novels?”

Jesse decided it was the perfect time to discuss Hemingway’s creative process, but Gail beat him to it.

“He did most of his work in the first half of the day, between eight and one, when the air was at its coolest—and before he started drinking,” she said.

Jesse jumped in. “He usually wrote in the studio he kept on the second floor of the pool house, which we’ll see when we get back to the Hemingway House in just a few minutes.”

Gail’s warm brown eyes flashed at him. Obviously, she was enjoying their little battle of trivia as much as he was. Without warning, Jesse’s mind traveled to that small liberal arts college she mentioned, where she stood at the front of a lecture room, skirt slit up to here and blouse unbuttoned down to there, her loose blond hair swinging as she turned her back to write something on the board. In the fantasy, Jesse’s mouth began to water as he stared at the professor’s gorgeous bottom cradled in the tight skirt. In reality, he was focused on her smooth legs and small sandaled feet, and his walking shorts were starting to tent.