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“You mean they’re eating us? Like piranhas?” She hugged her knees to her chest, properly horrified.
“They’re just nibbling,” he explained through his laughter. “Looking for plankton or moss.”
She proclaimed in mock indignation, “I don’t have moss or plankton on my toes.”
He leaned in close to whisper, “But I bet you still taste really, really good.” Her cheeks instantly heated. “Now put your feet back in.”
She wriggled her toes. “If I lose these, it will be your fault. And you’ll owe me big time.”
“All right, I’ll owe you. What do you want?”
She gazed at him for an endless moment, and the laughter went out of him as she stole his breath.
“I’ll tell you if they bite off my toes.” Then she plunked her feet down in the water, splashing and scaring the fish away.
“You did that on purpose,” he teased. “Be still and let them come back.”
With her thigh pressed against his, the heat of her body arced through him like an electrical current. He laced their fingers, his thumb stroking patterns on her skin… and he nearly sighed with relief when she didn’t pull away.
“Wait for it,” he whispered as the fish circled closer.
“That is so cool.” Her voice held such awe, as if she were witnessing a miracle. “It’s like…” She bit her bottom lip, thinking hard. “Like feathers tickling your toes. Or dragonfly wings against your cheek. Or champagne bubbles bursting in your mouth.” She laughed again. “Or Pop Rocks.”
He watched her, not the fish, totally mesmerized by the fun-loving, gregarious woman inside her. “Weren’t those the candy things that exploded in your stomach if you drank them with soda?”
Her eyes sparkled. “That’s an urban legend.”
Racking his brain for ways to keep her smiling, he said, “Want to hear a Maverick legend?”
She flipped off her cap and lay back against the rock. “Of course.”
“When my sister was about six years old, my parents sent us out to find a puppy for her.”
She turned her head. “I thought you said you didn’t have pets.”
“There was one pretty big caveat—the puppy had to be a stuffed toy. But that cost money, so we needed ingenious ways to follow Mom’s edict. Without stealing. She’d tan our hides if we did that.”
“With the rolling pin.”
“Yup,” he said, grinning. “With her white-haired-old-lady rolling pin.”
Smiling back, she said, “So what did you all do?”
“Will entered a street-boxing match. He won, of course, then took his prize money to buy Lyssa a Saint Bernard big enough to ride. At the same time, Matt, who was all about mechanics and robotics, mastered one of those arcade grab machines where you use levers to pick up toys. He got three stuffed puppies.”
“You guys are wonderful.”
“Wait, there’s more. Sebastian charmed a salesgirl into selling him a puppy with a missing eye. He got it for a quarter, then he sewed up the eye and told Lyssa that she had to take very good care of her one-eyed puppy. Then Evan, like the financial wizard that he’s always been, played the stores off each other, telling the clerk that the store over there sold the same thing for a cheaper price. In the end, he price-matched them down to almost nothing.”
“And you? What did you do?”
“I rode a bus to a really expensive neighborhood and shopped their thrift stores. The stuffed animals looked like they’d never been used, by kids who had way too many toys. I got them for a song.” He grinned. “Lyssa ended up with a dozen stuffed animals. They were all over her bed, and she insisted on sleeping with every single one every night.”
“Even the Saint Bernard?”
“He stood guard at the bottom of her bed. I think she might still have some of them.”
“Thank you,” Tasha said suddenly, the words seeming to fall from her lips before she could stop herself.
