He proposed two weeks later. Teaching me how to fish, he asked me to reel in the line so he could change the bait. Only instead of a hook, my ring was tied to the end of the line, and I turned to find Peter down on one knee.

We were married in a city hall wedding six months after that.

I knew the whole thing was crazy. I knew that I was too young, that things were happening too fast, that I was being impulsive. But the craziest thing of all was that it kept working.

"Jeanine?" Peter said.

I opened one of my eyes.

"Yes, Peter," I said.

"I thought you mermaids never wore s.h.i.+rts."

"That's only under the sea, silly," I said. "On land among you mortals, we have to keep the devastating, beguiling power of our b.o.o.bies in check or nothing would ever get done."

"Except you?" Peter said.

I closed my eye. "Now you're getting it."

"Jeanine?" Peter said, laying down the sea pole.

"Yes, Peter?"

"You know what I'm in the mood for?"

"Devastating beguilement?"

"How'd you know?" he said.

"Mermaids know," I said, standing and taking my husband by the hand.

Chapter 14.

BACK TO THE PRESENT, and I'd just put in a load of whites when I heard the beeping. I padded into the kitchen and turned off the microwave timer before I headed to the rear of our cozy beach bungalow and into the master bath.

Then I took a monster breath and held it as I turned and lifted the pregnancy test off the toilet lid.

Time and my heart stopped at the exact same moment as I stared at the display window with its two identical blue lines. My breath whooshed out of me as though I were a seven-year-old blowing out birthday candles.

Because I'd already read the math on the box.

One blue line plus one blue line equaled one pregnant Jeanine.

Over the past two weeks, I'd been in panic mode. More and more as another day pa.s.sed and I didn't get my period. I kept thinking about those three pills that I'd somehow missed. I must have experienced brain freeze in the middle of last month's cycle.

Peter had elected me the head of the contraception department, and I'd definitely dropped the ball. Talk about a whoops.

I also thought about what a baby would do to my twenty-three-year-old body, my twenty-three-year-old future.

But as I stood there, staring down the two blue lines, something odd and unexpected happened. A warmth started in the center of my chest and for a quicksilver second, I could actually feel my baby, skin on skin, soft in my arms.

Why not? I thought, suddenly dazzled with the life-affirming awesomeness of it. Why couldn't Malibu Jeanine bring a Malibu baby to the luau? h.e.l.l, why not two? I'd always wanted kids. Peter and I had planned for some in the vague future anyway, so why not start early?

Life was crazy. You had to roll with it. If the last two years and Key West had taught me anything, it was that. Mi vida really was loca. Besides, plans were for making G.o.d laugh.

I dropped the test, sending the trusty stick flying, when there was a pounding on the door followed by a deafening electronic squawk.

What the?

"THIS IS THE POLICE!" Peter called through a police megaphone. "WE KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE! COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP AND YOUR PANTIES OFF!"

I couldn't stop laughing. He was always so crazy and funny, a holy terror of a rascal. All he did was make me laugh. When he wasn't making me do even better stuff. I knew right then that Peter would make the best dad on earth.

Should I tell him about the test? I thought. No, I quickly decided, hiding it under the sink. In two weeks we were going up to the Breakers in Palm Beach, where we'd spent our honeymoon. I'd drop it on him at dinner. Blow his doors 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ning when he came home after his s.h.i.+ft.

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-but with two berths for sleeping and a small galley under the bow.

An enormous seagull cried from atop the mast of a small sailboat across our ca.n.a.l 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 Gla.s.s. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 s.h.i.+t hit the fan. Unlike my ex-boyfriend, Alex-who had proven himself to be nothing but a 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 b.u.t.ton, "what a good wife you would be. But my life, my lover, my lady, is the sea."

By noon, I had finished polis.h.i.+ng 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 a gray plastic box, hard and flat like one that a tool set might come in. I was surprised by how heavy it was as I grabbed its handle and slipped it out. I sat on the cabin steps, set it on my lap, and popped its clasps.

My entire body went slack with a sharp intake of breath as I stared down at what was inside it. I pulled off my bandanna and wiped the sweat out of my eyes.

I'd been expecting some sort of first aid kit, but sitting in the gray foam padding was a gun. It was matte black, greasy with oil, a little larger than a pistol. A nasty-looking hole-filled tube surrounded the barrel, and there were a few wraps of gray duct tape around its grip.

The words "Intratec Miami 9mm" were stamped in the metal in front of the trigger. In the foam beside it were two thin rectangular magazines, the reddish copper jackets of bullets winking at their brims.

Being the daughter of a cop, guns didn't faze me. I actually used to duck-hunt with my dad, so I knew how to use the shotgun and two nine-millimeters Peter kept in the locked gun cabinet in our bedroom closet.

But wasn't it a little strange to have a machine pistol on the boat? Wouldn't a shotgun make more sense? Why hadn't Peter told me about it?

I tightly closed the lid of the box and put it back where I found it before heading back into the house.

Inside, I was startled to find Peter by the kitchen sink in his police uniform home early.

"Peter?" I said.

Then he turned around, and I saw the scowl on his face. I covered my smile with my hand as I saw that his entire front, from chest to crotch, was covered in the residue of white, rank-smelling puke.

"Go ahead. Laugh it up," he said with a wide grin. "Look what a nice drunken lady tourist gave me over by the La Concha hotel. Nice of her, wasn't it? Smells like she had the clam chowder for lunch, don't you think? Did I ever tell you how much I love being a Key West cop?"

I quickly decided that now probably wasn't the most opportune time to have a sit-down about Peter's choice of firearms. It was probably just a rah-rah-cop gung ho throwback to his bachelor days anyway. He probably used it to shoot beer cans with his buddies when they went fis.h.i.+ng.

"Let me get a garbage bag," I said as the puke stench hit me. "On second thought, I'll get some lighter fluid and a match." I laughed.

"What are you talking about, Jeanine? I thought you said I look hot in my uniform," Peter said, mischief gleaming in his blue eyes.

I knew that look.

"Don't you dare," I screamed, running as he came quickly around the kitchen island with open arms, puke emanating from his s.h.i.+rt front.

"Come here, Brandy. Where are you going, Mermaid?" he said, laughing as he ran after me into the backyard. "Time to give your husband some sugar, baby doll. Stay right where you are. We need to hug this thing out."

Chapter 16.

ON THE EDGE of the manicured lawn, I sighed as a cello, flute, and violin trio played Pachelbel's Canon in D with perfect, aching precision.

Work, work, work, I thought, filling another long-stemmed gla.s.s with two-hundred-dollar-a-bottle Krug brut champagne. The aristocratic wedding guests at the reception we were catering seemed every bit as elegant as the crystal as they laughed and hugged around billowing, white-draped tables arranged on the emerald grounds.

Even to a jaded veteran caterer like me, the wedding on the sprawling front lawn of the Hemingway Home was breathtaking. The famed Spanish colonial in the background had its hurricane shutters flung wide, as if Papa himself might come out at any moment onto the second-story veranda with a highball and offer the lucky couple a toast.

The bubbly that I dispensed in perfectly folded linen was '92 Krug to be exact, the year the sleekly beautiful, dark-haired couple, a convertible bond arbitrager and an art dealer, both from New York, had met. Between refills, I watched them as they smiled, hand in hand, on the western fringe of the lush lawn, taking pictures to capture the Key West Lighthouse in the background.

One day I'd probably finish my English degree, I thought, as I sighed again. But until then, I had no problem chilling out here in wedding world, where it was forever Sat.u.r.day afternoon, complete with cla.s.sical music, popping corks, raised champagne flutes, eggsh.e.l.l and ivory, eternally blue skies.

Of course, I would have preferred to spend all day fis.h.i.+ng with Peter, but he'd been working overtime on Sat.u.r.days for the last two solid months with a DEA task force. It was undercover work, which I knew was dangerous and I hated, but I also knew my husband. Peter was a hard-driving superstar cop, more than capable of taking care of himself and his buddies. It was the bad guys who needed to worry.

"Your wedding was better," my boss and Peter's coworker Elena Cardenas said, hip-b.u.t.ting me as she pa.s.sed with a tray of sesame chicken.

"Yeah, right," I said, rolling my eyes. "Which part did you like more? When Peter faked throwing me off the bar's dock or his drunken rendition of 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light'?"

"Hard to decide," the full-figured blond Cuban said with a laugh. "At least he didn't appear to have a pole up his keister like this groom. Anyway, Teo is up to his neck and running low on champagne at the bar. Could you run and grab another box of Krug out of the van?"

"Aye, aye, captain," I said.

"And remember, watch out for the Jump Killer," Elena called as I went toward the iron street gate.

The Jump Killer was on my mind and probably that of every young woman in South Florida that summer. An ongoing Channel 7 news story told about spooky abductions up in North Miami, missing prost.i.tutes, an unsuccessful attack in which a man tied up a woman with parachute cord. The words serial killer were being used, though no bodies had been found. Gee, thanks for reminding me, Elena, I thought as I walked down the deserted street toward the van.

I was coming back up the faded sidewalk with the champagne when I spotted a man in the beat-up black Jeep across the street.

He reminded me of the tennis player Bjorn Borg, with long, dirty blond hair and wraparound sungla.s.ses. He also sported a blond Jesus beard. I glanced at the winds.h.i.+eld, and though his face was pointed away, I got the impression that as I approached he was watching me from behind the gla.s.ses. He took something out of the pocket of his cutoff denim s.h.i.+rt and started playing with it. It was a gold lighter, and he started clicking it in rhythm to the clink of champagne bottles as I walked past.

I swallowed, suddenly afraid. The guy was definitely creepy. As I picked up my pace and made it back to the gate, the Jeep roared to life and peeled out, its big tires screeching as it took the first corner.

What the h.e.l.l had that been about? I thought, hurrying back toward the white tent.

Teo didn't so much as grunt a thank-you when I dropped off the heavy case by his busy bar, which was par for his course. I couldn't decide what I disliked more about the young, handsome Hispanic with frosted hair: the several occasions I spotted him coming out of a bathroom rubbing his runny nose or the way he constantly tried to look down my s.h.i.+rt. If he wasn't Elena's cousin, I would have complained. I was definitely losing my patience.

I found Elena with her business partner, Gary, the chef, in our staging tent. She smiled as she pulled a tray of puff pastries off the portable oven's rack.

"Hey, you made it back," she said, winking at Gary. "See any dangerous-looking parachutists?"

I actually was about to tell her about my evil Bjorn Borg sighting, but the way she said it, like I was a complete idiot, checked me. It would only lead to more teasing. I liked Elena, but sometimes her tough-chick sarcasm was a little hard to take. I decided to keep the creepy encounter to myself.