Page 63 of One Second After Another

Luca didn’t move from his spot at the rear of the foyer where he leaned against the wall. “What do you mean?”

Penny shook her head, the wavy strands of her white-blonde hair moving with the action. “Cross. I told him I would see him soon. He didn’t say that he thought I was lying, but—”

“He rarely has to.”

The kid just had a ... look.

The goodbyes hadn’t been easy, and Naz also hadn’t lied. His sister and her family didn’t stay long—less than an hour from arrival to departure, actually. Naz managed to pull the short reunion together for his wife, but he couldn’t do more than was safe. Being anywhere Penny was until this finally ended was more than dangerous.

It was stupid.

But there Luca was—just fine.

“But I get it,” Penny said, turning around to face Luca as she shrugged almost helplessly. “I wouldn’t believe me, either.”

Luca raised a single brow, asking, “You seem less angry now.”

“At you?”

“Well—”

“They shouldn’t have come here.”

“I have little say in what Naz and my sister do.”

After locking the lodge’s front door—not that it would do much to keep them safe if someone really wanted to get through it—Penny came to stand in front of Luca at the other side of the foyer. Her silence said a lot. He figured, so did his.

Eventually, she said, “I know, Luca.”

“For what it’s worth,” he murmured, leaning closer until their lips grazed with every word he spoke, “I believed you. When you told him you would see him soon—I believed you.”

“Maybe you’re just a fool.”

She kissed him once.

Soft and teasing.

Luca dragged in a shuddering breath when Penny pulled away, replying, “I heard that happens sometimes.”

Penny dared to smile—a sight that warmed his heart like nobody would ever know—when she asked him, “What happens?”

“That love makes fools of us all.”

She stilled, gaze darting to his. He swallowed the ache rising from his chest into his throat, refusing to move until she said something. Anything at all.

“Is that what this is?” she eventually asked. “When I can’t breathe, when there’s nothing but you, and when I see you in my dreams—is that what this is, love?”

He couldn’t answer that for her, only say, “That’s what it is for me.”

She took a second—pulled in a hitched breath when her hand came up to lay flat against where his T-shirt stretched across his chest.

Then, she was kissing him again. Only this time, there was nothing to tease.

• • •

THE TASTE OF CHLORINE hit the back of Luca’s throat when he came to lean against the sliding glass door leading into the pool. At the far end of the room, still in the calm, crystal blue water, Penny used her folded arms as a perch for her shin on the side of the pool. Her icy hair hung in wet waves down her naked back as her shoulders rose and fell with steady breaths. It was the only way Luca could tell she was even awake considering she didn’t move or speak otherwise, and he couldn’t see her face.

She faced the windows overlooking the rear of the property where the basement of the lodge was exposed. He wasn’t close enough to appreciate the view like she could at the moment, but he also didn’t need to in order to know what she was seeing. The inky sky dotted with bright, twinkling stars. A mountain of treetops hat lifted and lowered for miles. Lush, green land that went on forever—an endless possibility, really.