Page 70 of Presumed Dead

“I’m not going to ask.”

“Thank you.”

“But you sound different.”

Ethan looked at the cabin ceiling and let out a slow breath.

“I am different,” he said. “What’ve you got?”

Caleb didn’t push. He gave him the update: the principal had moved again, the window had narrowed by two days, and the team would need Ethan back in operational tempo by the middle of the week. Ethan took it in cleanly. He wrote nothing down. He didn’t have to.

When the call ended, he sat for a long time in the dim cabin with the dinette light on and the water moving under the hull, and he thought about a woman who had stood on his swim platform and put her hands on his chest and kissed him with all the deliberate weight of a person making a decision.

He thought about the lights on.

And he thought about what it was going to cost both of them when he kept his promise and told her the rest, and he held that thought in his hands like something hot, and he didn’t put it down.

Chapter Thirteen

Ethan woke before the alarm and lay still a moment with the ceiling of the cabin above him and the taste of her still lingering.

He’d slept poorly because his body was reorganizing itself around something it hadn’t expected to be allowed. He’d lain in the dark for a long time last night thinking about the white knuckles on the pylon and the small surprised laugh and the way she’d closed the three feet of teak between them by herself, and somewhere in the middle of the second hour his body had remembered how to want something and forgotten how to sleep.

He got up, made coffee, carried it to the cockpit and stood at the gunwale, and at five forty-three Sloane Mercer came out of the office and walked to the end of Pier Two with the green thermos in her hand, and the world was right again for the count of about thirty seconds.

She turned at slip eight, looked across the slip water at his boat the way she had Friday morning, with the same steady honesty, and she lifted her coffee cup an inch off the rail, and he lifted his back, and what passed between them at that distance was the same as Friday and entirely different, because now there was a kiss inside it, and they both knew it.

She turned back to slip eight, drank her coffee, then walked back up the dock. She didn’t look at him again, and the not-looking now was the look itself, because she was carrying him through the morning the way he was carrying her, and they were both going to pretend they weren’t, because the marina was awake and Catherine was on her deck and George Halsey was firing the diesel on the Tarpon Lady, and a marina was a place where two people who had kissed each other on a boat the night before did not act like it.

His phone buzzed at six-twelve.

It was a number he hadn't seen in a while, sending a single line:

Coming into town. Late lunch, Sandbar. RC.

Ethan stood at the gunwale with the phone in his hand and his coffee going cold and his heart doing a different undignified thing entirely from the one it had done at five forty-three, because Ronan Cross did not text from unknown numbers about lunch, and Ronan Cross did not make lunch appointments unless the mission was coming to an end.

Ronan Cross had decided to come.

That was the message.

Ethan typed back, Roger - 12:30.

Then he sat down on the gunwale and looked at his cold coffee and tried to organize, in the time he had between now and lunch, the part of himself that was going to face Ronan Cross across a Sandbar table and the part of himself that was, for the first time in three years, in love with a woman whose dock the operation ran through.

The two parts of himself did not want to be the same man today.

They were going to have to be.

He spent the morning on the boat doing the things a man did on a boat when he needed his hands occupied and his mind clear.

He checked the oil, bled a stiff valve on the starboard water line, coiled lines that didn’t need coiling, and inventoried fenders he’d inventoried Sunday. He worked at it, visible and unremarkable, because Catherine was twenty feet away and Doyle Pruitt was on his cleats at slip nine reading a newspaper on his foredeck, and a man in slip seventeen on a Monday morning had work to do on his fixer-upper, and keeping his eye on Doyle Pruitt was on his agenda.

Underneath the visible work, his head did the operational work.

Ronan coming meant the file had shifted, and the shift was the kind a coordinator didn't entrust to a phone line. Ronan was a man who did one thing at a time, well. He’d done his three combat deployments well and run Shadow Ops out of Blossom Springs for two years well. He married Lila Bennett well. He met shadow operators only when needed, and the fact that he had decided to meet at the Sandbar in the middle of a Monday meant the principal had done something that put his face into a room Ethan needed to see.

It also meant Caleb had told him.