by Jill Shalvis
Tanner smiled easily. “My mistake,” he said.
She nodded and told herself to breathe, idiot, breathe.
Cole’s eyes were on hers, steady and sure in a way she admired, since she wasn’t feeling either at the moment. “You’re locked out of your place,” he reminded her, bending to pick up her sole boot. “I can—”
“No worries,” she said quickly. “I’ve got a hide-a-key.” Another big fat lie, but one of her dubious skills, on top of knowing a little bit about everything, was that she was a really good liar.
Taking the stairs with the big, built, intimidating Sam and Tanner still standing at the base of them wasn’t easy, but Olivia was nothing if not an actress from birth. She lifted her chin, kept hold of her smile, blanked out her expression, and…
Hightailed it out of there.
Once on the dock, she ran down the length of it like the devil himself was on her heels. She tried to banish the image of Cole from her mind—standing in his bare feet with his tousled brown hair and those warm eyes that were somehow both sharp and soft at the same time, holding her boot, looking for all the world like Prince Charming with the glass slipper.
Good thing she knew better than anyone that fairy tales didn’t exist.
Never had.
Never would.
Chapter 5
Cole turned from the stairs to find Sam eyeballing the boat interior and Tanner eyeballing him. “Keep looking at me like that,” Cole told him, “and you’d better be buying me dinner afterward.”
“You fell in?” The words were heavy on the doubt, which made sense given the three of them were as surefooted at sea as a Navy SEAL, even if only Tanner had actually been one.
Cole thought of the stupid spark when he’d been rewiring the running lights, the one that had given him the flashback that had started this whole adventure, and how badly he didn’t want to admit that. Far less humiliating to let them think he’d been clumsy in front of the pretty woman. “Yeah. I fell in.”
“And then you convinced her to get naked,” Tanner said, and shook his head, impressed. “Fast work for a guy who usually moves like he’s been dipped in cement.”
“It’s called hypothermia,” Cole said. “I was trying to make sure we didn’t get hypothermic.”
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days?” Tanner asked drily.
“She thought she was saving me,” he repeated.
She’d certainly woken him up. He’d been walking around in a fog lately, a fact he hadn’t even fully realized until Olivia had plunged into the water on top of his head and nearly drowned them both.
Getting her out of the water and dealing with the aftermath, sitting and talking beneath the blankets, looking into her dark chocolate gaze and seeing all sorts of secrets there to be mined…he’d felt more alive than he had in a damn long time.
Even if his head was aching like a son of a bitch. And so was his shoulder, now that he thought about it.
“You could’ve just picked up the phone to get a date,” Tanner said. “It’d have been a hell of a lot easier.”
“Yeah?” Cole asked. “And that’s worked so well for you? When was the last time you got laid?”
“Hey, I don’t kiss and tell,” Tanner said.
Sam snorted, and Cole turned to him. “You don’t get to talk. You just went through a damn long drought yourself.”
“Maybe,” Sam said. “But now I sleep with Becca. Nightly.”
“No one likes a bragger,” Tanner said.
“I’m just saying,” Sam said, looking smug, even though only a few months ago he’d let his past mess with his head so thoroughly he’d nearly thrown his shot with Becca right out the window.
Ignoring them both, Cole caught a flash of something on the floor. The tiny scrap of black silk that had been masquerading as Olivia’s panties.
Feeling both Tanner’s and Sam’s gazes boring holes into his back, he scooped them up and shoved them into his pocket.
Tanner opened his mouth, but Cole gave him a do-it-and-die look, and Tanner shut it again. Good to know that once in a while the guy did use his brain.
“We good to go with the running lights?” Sam asked, clearly changing the subject on purpose.
“No.” Cole was still holding Olivia’s boot. Setting it aside, he thought he wouldn’t have minded seeing her long legs in nothing but those boots, doing anything other than running to his rescue. “I didn’t get a chance to finish the wiring.”
Tanner made a show of glancing at the diver’s watch on his wrist.
“Shut up,” Cole said.
“Didn’t say a word.”
“Didn’t have to,” Cole said. “I’m well aware we have clients arriving in less than half an hour.”
“If you know that, then why were you messing around in the water with our pretty neighbor? And Christ, even I know it’s too cold to mess around in that water, no matter how pretty the girl is.”
Cole let out a long breath. “The water part was unintentional, believe me.”
“I’ll call our clients and buy us an extra hour or two,” Tanner said, and pulled out his cell.
“They can wait,” Sam said, eyes on Cole. “Tell us what happened.”
“Nothing,” Cole said.
Sam and Tanner exchanged a look.
“Seriously,” Cole said. “Nothing.”
“Yeah, see, you keep saying that,” Sam said. “We’re still not buying.”
This was the problem with partnering with the two guys who not only had known you longer than just about anyone else, but also knew you better than you knew yourself.
They’d been together in some form or another since high school. Back in those days, Sam had been the wild one, reined in only by his foster mom—who happened to be Cole’s birth mom—but even Amelia could only do so much.
Tanner had been a juvenile delinquent in the making, and little had reined him in either, until at age seventeen he’d gotten a girl pregnant—which had so completely turned his ass around that he’d made Cole dizzy with how fast he’d both grown up and manned up. Or maybe the navy had done that.
Cole was the only one who hadn’t needed reining in. He’d always been the calm one, the peacemaker. Not to say that he was completely easygoing, because he wasn’t. He knew that. He had expectations of the people he loved, and one of them was that they stay alive.
Which had made it all the harder when tragedy had struck and they’d lost Gil. None of them had been the same since. Cole knew it. And Sam and Tanner knew it, too.
It was the only reason he shook his head and came clean with the truth. “It wasn’t quite light yet, and I was balanced on the railing, reworking the wiring. That asshole yesterday shredded it but good. And then something sparked…” He closed his eyes, remembering. “And I blanked out a moment, and that was all she wrote. In my head, I saw flames; I jerked and lost my balance.” He opened his eyes and met Sam’s and Tanner’s gazes. “Right into the fucking water, making me a bigger idiot than yesterday’s frat boy.”
Sam didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. His grim expression said it all. “A flashback.”
“It was only for a second. I came out of it, and I was in the water.”
Sam blew out a sigh and shoved his hands through his hair.
Tanner hadn’t moved.
Cole turned away, frustrated. He had no business still being so fucked up.
Two years. It’d been two years, and he was still mad as hell on the inside.
Furious.
And so effing tired of hiding it. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he said. “But after I went in, Olivia saw me and thought I was hurt, so she came in after me.”
“Clue in,” Tanner said, finally speaking. “You are hurt.” He pushed Cole to the bench and retrieved their first-aid kit from its storage spot.
Cole lifted his arm to touch his head, but stilled when a bolt of pain sliced through his shoulder at the movement.
Tanner moved close. He was l
imping this morning. It was the cold. That always bothered his leg. They’d made enough money in the past two years chartering that they could close on the cold days, but Tanner wouldn’t allow it. Neither Cole nor Sam could say a damn word to him about it without getting his head bitten off.
Cole was at least smart enough to say nothing when Tanner dropped to his knees in front of him with a wince of his own and prodded at the cut over Cole’s eyebrow.
“It’s not bad,” Tanner finally said.
“Told you—” Cole’s eyes flew open when he realized Tanner was cutting off his shirt. “What the hell—”
“Hold still,” Sam said, and crouched in front of him as well, the two of them looking at his shoulder with twin frowns as Tanner peeled the shreds of the shirt away.
“Can you lift your arm?” Sam asked.
“Yeah,” Cole said. “Of course I can—”
The words caught in his throat as he tried to do just that and got halfway before the stab of pain nailed him again. “Oh, shit,” he said, starting to sweat.
“But you’re not hurt, right?” Tanner asked.
“Fuck. You.”
Tanner snorted. “No thanks. I’ve seen you naked and cold, too.” He rose and went to the freezer. A minute later he was back with an ice pack, which he tossed to Cole, smacking him in the face.
“Hey.”
“Oh, sorry,” Tanner said. “Was that a stupid thing to do? As stupid as, say, hoisting a woman out of the water and onto the deck platform when you’ve been told by your doctor to knock that shit off if you want to avoid surgery for the rotator cuff tear? Jesus. You and your damn hero complex.”
This pissed Cole off because Tanner had a hero complex the size of his own big, fat head. The guy was currently playing hero to a long list of people who depended on him: his mother, his ex, his son…“So I should’ve what,” Cole asked, “let her drown?”
Tanner pulled a sling from the first-aid box and put it on Cole. “Look familiar?”
Cole stared at the thing he’d worn for months after the rig fire. “Shit.”
Tanner rose. “I’m going to go file today’s float plan,” he said, “which is changing. I’ll captain this one, and you—” He pointed at Cole. “You’re off duty.”
Cole ignored this. As a male, he was allowed selective deafness. “I’ve got the float plan done already.”
“Off. Duty,” Tanner repeated, and didn’t move a single inch when Cole rose to his feet, putting them nose to nose.
“He’s going to make this harder than it needs to be,” Tanner muttered to Sam.
“Fuck you,” Cole said.
Tanner lifted a hand, palm out, as if to say See?
“This is bullshit,” Cole said. “I’m fine.”
“You really think you can run this boat today, or even at any point for the rest of the week?” Tanner challenged.
“Watch me.” Cole rolled his shoulder, felt the wave of pain nearly steal his breath, and had no additional comment. He turned away, but Tanner ducked in front of him and forced eye contact.
“Yeah, hi,” Tanner said, waving at him like a prom queen. “I’m going to watch you all right. I’m going to watch you do jackshit for the next three to four days, minimum. Now repeat that back for me.”
Cole narrowed his eyes.
Tanner smiled. A badass, try-me smile. “Try again.”
Cole opened his mouth, most definitely not to try again and possibly to tell Tanner where to shove it, but Sam took over. He put his hand on Cole’s good shoulder, wisely stepping between them since they’d all at one time or another been known to swing first and ask questions later. “Look at it this way,” Sam said. “You get a few days to sit around and watch Oprah and eat bonbons while we have to work our asses off.”
“Oprah doesn’t have a show anymore,” Cole said. “And what the hell are bonbons, anyway?”
Sam shrugged. “Hell if I know.”
“A chocolate,” Tanner said. “Ladies used to eat them in the eighteen hundreds or some such shit.” He seemed to realize that both Sam and Cole were staring at him and he shrugged. “Hey,” he said defensively, “blame Cara.”
Cara was one of Cole’s three sisters, and she’d always had a thing for the bad boy, any bad boy. Saying Tanner qualified for that category was like saying the sun was a tad bit warm at its surface.
But Tanner took one look at Cole’s face and lifted his hands. “It’s not what you think,” he said. “It’s from the fancy fact-a-day calendar she gave me last Christmas. It was today’s fact.”
Cole shook his head and shoved past the two idiots he was tethered to by stupid loyalty.
“Where are you going?” Sam asked his back.
“If I’m off, I’m off,” he said.
“He’s butt-hurt,” Tanner said. “Needs a good pout.”
“I’m not butt-hurt,” Cole said. But shit. He totally was.
“Look,” Sam said, stopping him. “You’re injured, you’re off. It’s nothing personal. It could’ve just as easily been one of us.”
“I’m not that hurt.”
“You want to risk a client’s life on it?” Sam asked. “Come on, man. You know damn well you sometimes have unrealistic expectations of people, and this time it’s about yourself. You’re down for the count. Go home. Rest. That’s all. It’s easy enough, but if it’s not, we’ll be happy to hogtie you to your couch. Just say the word.”
Tanner smiled evilly, clearly on board with that.
Shoving free of them both, Cole headed up to the dock.
“You’re a jackass,” he heard Sam say to Tanner.
“Who? Me?”
Ignoring them both, Cole kept going. He realized he was disproportionately pissed off, but it’d been that stupid, frustrating flashback.
He felt…itchy.
Unsettled.
Angry.
And he didn’t want to think about any of it. Not what had happened, not his reaction.
And most definitely not why.
What he did want was to go check on Olivia and make sure she’d gotten into her place and warmed up.
The sun was just rising over the top of the mountain peaks when he hit the dock. This did not mean the day was warm.
It wasn’t.
The temp was forty-five degrees, maybe, and as the salty breeze blew over Cole’s still bare chest, he refused to shiver, or go back for a sweatshirt, not to mention shoes. Hell no. Instead he went to the street where he’d parked his truck.
He was pulling out his spare duffel, which had a stash of clothes, when he heard a soft intake of breath followed immediately by the unmistakable click of a camera lens.
He whirled around and found the devil in the form of a barely five-foot-tall old woman named Lucille.
Lucille ran the local geriatric band of merry bluehairs and the gossip train with equal aplomb, and rumor had it that her internal elevator didn’t serve all her floors. Today her rheumy eyes were sharp as a tack, her lips hooker red. This somehow worked with her capri yoga pants and snug athletic top, neither of which hid the fact that gravity hadn’t been especially kind to her.
“What are you up to?” he asked her suspiciously.
He had good reason for the suspicion. A few weeks back she’d managed to catch him and Tanner stripping down behind their warehouse after surfing. Instead of apologizing, or, say, leaving, she’d stood there gumming her dentures while trying to talk them