Page 37 of Ford

“She’s still pretty young. She has another thirty in her.”

“You’re making it worse.”

Again the laughter, and he wanted to grab it out of the air and tuck it inside, never let it go.

They stopped at the boardwalk and she eyed his bike.

“I brought an extra helmet…”

“I have my car.”

Yeah. Probably for the best.

He well remembered the feel of her arms around his waist, her body tight against his.

Teammates!

“I’ll follow you home.”

She nodded and held on to the towel ends around her neck. She unzipped her wet suit, and a key dangled from her own lanyard. “Ford, I should probably tell you—”

Suddenly he was right back to over a week ago, about to land on her doorstep and make a fool out of himself. Tell her that he needed her, not only in his ear, watching his back, but in his life.

Except, that wasn’t fair. Not to her, and not to him. She had a future as a Rescue Swimmer, months of training, then deployment to who knew where, and any kind of relationship would be complicated.

She was worth complicated.

But it wasn’t fair to her. Not when she needed her complete focus on passing. On staying alive.

He would sacrifice his very breath to give her what she wanted most.

So, “No, Red,” he said, interrupting her. “Don’t…”

Because maybe he was making a leap here, but he thought he saw the same dangerous impulse in her pretty eyes to dive back into the almosts and maybes between them.

Her mouth closed. She nodded.

Looked away, back to the ocean, the scrape of the waves upon the shore. “When do we leave?”

“We’re meeting Ham and my sister’s contact, a guy named Roy, in Prague in twenty-four hours. There’s a flight leaving in three.”

“Pick me up at my house in an hour.”

“Thanks, Red.”

She held up her hand in a fist bump. “Let’s go get your sister.”

The voices in the kitchen woke her, and for a moment, RJ simply stared at the room, trying to place her surroundings.

High ceilings, birds chirruping outside an open window bracketed by lace curtains, straining the light into intricate patterns on the wood floor that was carpeted with a blue Turkish rug. A small wooden table was shoved into the corner, a short bookshelf held a smattering of paperbacks, and an overstuffed red chair propped a book on its arm—The Hunger Games, in English—lying open and facedown.

RJ was curled onto a long sofa bed, pulled out to accommodate two, and as she raised her head, she realized she’d been drooling, having hit the pillow hard and completely crashing only a few hours ago.

To her knowledge, York hadn’t slept at all, and probably not Coco, who would have climbed in beside her—

Coco.

Oh my. She’d found Coco. Not that her foster sister had been hiding, really, but after the fiasco with Wyatt, she’d sort of washed her hands of the family.