“And you must be the grandmother.” I gulp. “Pleased to meet you?”

6

Callie

My heart sinks. So much for making a good first impression! Now I’m knee-deep in pond water, while Zelda clears her throat politely.

“Zelda! Callie! I see you’ve already met.”

Dash appears, offering me a hand to chivalrously help me out of the water. “Babe. When you said you were excited to go swimming here, you weren’t kidding,” he adds with a grin, taking in my dripping wet appearance. “Next time, just tell me, and we can head straight to the beach.”

I force a laugh. “I guess I was just clumsy!”

Clumsy, or shoved by a not-so-sweet Georgia peach.

I look around for her, but she’s disappeared, leaving me alone to face Zelda with weird green moss clumped on my shoulder.

“Grandma, this is the girl I was telling you about.” Dash presents me in all my dripping glory. “I’ll, um, get you a towel.” He exits before I can stop him, leaving me alone with Zelda.

“It’s nice to meet you,” she says, in a tone suggesting it’s anything but nice.

“You too!” I reach to shake her hand, and she pauses a moment, wrinkling her nose as she finally gives me the limpest, most speedy shake of all time. “Dash has told me so much about you!”

“Has he now? That’s funny, because he hasn’t said a peep about you.”

I feel Zelda’s eyes on me, roaming from my damp curls all the way down to my ratty travel sneakers. I gulp, wilting under her gaze.

“Well, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to get to know one another,” Zelda finally says. “I must see to my guests, but I look forward to learning all about you.”

She waltzes off, leaving me to wonder why that sounded an awful lot like a threat.

First things first, I tell myself before worrying about the sinister promise. I’ll worry about Zelda when I’m not dripping all over the tile.

I look for Dash and that towel, but he’s been cornered over by the bar area by a half-dozen debutantes. He waves a ‘help’ at me, but I figure some chit-chat isn’t going to kill him, so I head inside, and follow one of the cater-waiters to the kitchen.

The massive, luxurious, restaurant-quality kitchen.

“Sure, because why settle for one range when you could have two?” I ask, grabbing a clean dishtowel from a pile and patting myself down as best I can. I wander to the windows, which open out on the party, and look around the genteel scene, wondering how the hell I managed to wind up so entirely out of my comfort zone in just a few hours.

Although maybe I should have been braced for this. I mean, was I really expecting a weekend with Dash to be simple and easy?

Fool on me.

“Did you see what she was wearing?”

Voices drift through the open windows. A group of women have moved within earshot, gossiping.