“Get everything you want.”
When the last snag in the rope came undone, she expected Waylon to swim for the shoreline.
He didn’t.
Instead, he tipped her chin to his with a finger and pressed his mouth against hers. Fletcher’s eyes fluttered closed, sinking into him. This kiss was a pull from a tequila bottle during one of her weeknight escapades with Ford, sweet and dizzying. The only thing getting her through the worst week of her life.
As they broke away, there was a fuzzy look in Waylon’s eyes like maybe he was falling in love with her, too.
“Thanks for saving me.”
Fletcher slid her nose against his. “We had a truce, remember? You don’t kill me. I don’t kill you.”
It all would have been very romantic, if it weren’t for the impending shark attack.
A snaggle-toothed gargantuan swam closer, curious about the public display of affection. It rose through the waters, corralling them in a figure eight.
“Up, up. Go up,” Waylon ordered, and Fletcher was more than agreeable.
She scrambled higher, climbing the post like a rope. Barely flinched at the splinters digging under her skin. Her legs coiled tightly around the beam, Waylon’s stacked beneath hers, high enough to be out of the chomping zone.
Except the shark reared its head out of the water, unconcerned with its inability to breathe air, and pried open its mouth, infinite teeth gleaming.
She was going to get eaten, and it wasn’t even going to matter that she and Waylon had feelings for each other because they were going to die, and not even by drowning.
Then Waylon punched the shark in between the eyes.
Stunned, the shark stuttered. It sank back into the water, and then, when its brain kicked back into gear, it turned and went, clearly more interested in easy prey. Below, its friends got the hint and retreated.
“Oh my god, that actually worked. I thought shark-punching was an urban legend,” Fletcher said, tinny and still shaking.
“How many city-dwelling sharks have you met?”
“I meant thank you.”
His chest heaved. “I guess we’re even.”
“I guess we are.”
If Fletcher closed her eyes, she could almost pretend that this weekend had gone the way it was supposed to. That this was nothing more than a tropical vacation. No hungry sharks, no evil coworkers, no battle royale.
But then, a week ago, Fletcher would have abided by her checklist, run point for Dyer at his beck and call, and drunk her fill of Manhattans with bourbon-soaked maraschino cherries whileclinging dutifully to the sidelines. She never,everwould have let herself trust Waylon Cartwright.
Some things couldn’t be planned.
Bringing her hand to Waylon’s face, she smoothed the pad of her thumb along the ridge of his cheekbone, right beneath the dull purple of his blackened eye. “How about that patented Fletcher Spence plan?”
“Let’s hear it.”
Above them, the dock groaned with the weight of footsteps. Fletcher’s whole body tensed, then relaxed. Jackie’s red-bottomed heels weren’t pacing above them. Instead, through the pinstripe gaps in the dock, Fletcher spotted a neon-green Croakie.
“Is that…Melv?” she asked.
She’d thought—
Well, frankly, Fletcher hadn’t thought much of Melv at all in the last twenty-four hours. After he’d ushered them out of the burning estate, their paths hadn’t crossed again. Any number of hideous deaths could have befallen the mild-mannered lawyer. Poisoned by a suspicious berry. Crushed in an elephant stampede. Golf-clubbed into oblivion by the editor in chief.
But he’d survived.
