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“’fraid he beat you to it by at least a hundred and eighty years.”
Bloody Victorians, they had to have already thought of everything. “Go on, tell me. Give me the whole story.”
“He worked with Mackintosh. His designs were shown at the Great Exhibition and then used by the Royal Navy and several notable explorers. I don’t know much more than that.”
“How come you even know that?” he huffed.
She shrugged. “I enjoy reading about exploration and stuff. Boat Cloaks went out of fashion after the Titanic sank. People became more interested in lifeboats and using rubber to make actual boats.”
“Ah! So, they weren’t coats, they were cloaks.” He waggled a finger at her in triumph, smile returning. “You said cloaks. Whereas this is an actual coat. See? Sleeves.” He stuck his arm through one of them to make the point. Her response, a blank stare, was decidedly lacking in admiration for his feat of engineering.
“Does it work?” she asked, nodding at the rising water.
“Of course it bloody works. We tested it and everything, Ash and I.” In a swimming pool not a river, where the water was warm and not so likely to cause cardiac arrest if you wound up submerged for too long, but ultimately, water was water. “Takes but a minute to self-inflate, and it might be cosy with two, but it’s not like we have to paddle far to get to the shore.”
“Paddles?” Her expression had shifted from concerned to incredulous. “And where are you hiding those, exactly?”
Yeah. Matter of fact, they hadn’t got as far as incorporating those into the design yet. The truth was that the boat coat had been stewing for the last year and a half. It’d been an obsession for a couple of weeks while they’d been holed up in a villa in the Algarve while the band—meaning Xane and Spook—worked on tracks for their second album. Since he and Ash were only needed part of the time, they’d found other things to occupy themselves. If it’d also made for a good reason to hang out around the pool and on the beach, then sure, that’d been an additional benefit.
“Two ticks,” he told Jodi. From the kitchen he grabbed the mop, which he beheaded, and a wooden breadboard, then whipped the roll of bondage tape from Xane’s bunk. “Voila,” he announced, reappearing at her side with his completed oar. “Genius in action.”
“It’s held together with gaffer tape,” she remarked dryly. “Will that hold?”
“Definitely,” he said, chucking the bondage tape aside. Xane would probably kill him for running down the roll. Although, come to think of it, was it even Xane’s? It could be Spook’s. Their Swedish pal probably enjoyed binding victims to chairs and tormenting them by not getting them off. The notion certainly struck him as a more palatable option than Xane and Steve playing kinky games with his bestie. “Gaffer tape holds everything together. Now, are you ready for this?” As he had to stretch over the steps to hold the coat outside the bus, it was up to Jodi to do the honours and pull the cord. The first tug did nothing. “Harder,” he prompted, provoking a smile and a giggle.
“Yeah, did you forget what I was tugging there?”
“Lady, don’t ever pull a cock like that, not unless you want to cripple the poor sod to which it’s attached.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” She offered him a cheeky grin, with her tongue touching her teeth. Paul rolled his eyes and groaned, accompanied by Bertha. Meanwhile, it occurred to him he’d left Jodi unattended while he made the oar and she hadn’t attempted to leg it. “You didn’t run,” he said.
“Nope.”
“How come?”
“You’d follow. Don’t want to get wet. If you were going to axe-murder me, hand me over to the authorities, or do anything else nasty, you’d probably have done it by now.”
All logical assumptions.
“That, and it’s dark and wild out there. Maybe I figured, better the monster you know.”
“True. You never know what sort of weirdo you might meet on a backwater country lane.”
“Precisely,” she agreed with a nod.
The more the coat boat inflated, the more difficult it became for Paul to hold on to. Pretty soon, one of them was going to have to wade back into the water just to keep a grip on it. Having rolled the legs of his joggers up to his thighs, he ventured down the two topmost steps. That gave him reach enough to hold the dingy while it inflated the last few millimetres. Once the hiss of inflation ceased, he pulled himself into the craft. It sank lower in the water, but held. Eighteen months in storage didn’t seem to have materialised any punctures.
“Before you get in, just open that cubbyhole,” he pointed to a spot behind the driver’s compartment, “and pass me the bag stowed in there.”
“What’s in it?” she asked, nevertheless obeying.
“Emergency supplies.”
“So, phone charger and wallet.”
Paul snorted at her guesses but didn’t get into the details of the actual contents.
“Slight problem, buster. I’m not seeing how I get in without getting wet.” She tossed him a tea towel with which to dry his legs along with the bag and her jacket, which was draped over the gear stick.
