Chapter 13
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.
That Ethan had been on the phone Sunday night sounding different. That a woman on the marina had walked over to his boat at dusk.
Ronan wouldn't say it out loud. Ronan never said it out loud. He would look at him across a basket of fries, and Ethan would feel the weight of it in the room without a word being spoken, because that was how Ronan Cross delivered the harder half of every conversation he had ever been part of.
Ethan accepted that. It was the cost. He’d known it would be a cost the moment he’d let her step onto his swim platform, and he wasn't going to flinch from it now.
He primed a rail he’d already primed and watched Doyle Pruitt turn a page of his newspaper.
Doyle hadn't been off his boat all morning. Doyle had been on his boat since Saturday afternoon, with the small uneasy stillness of a man waiting for something to land. Ethan had watched him for a count of about an hour from the gunwale on Sunday and seen exactly what he was seeing now, which was a man who’d had a story rejected somewhere upstream and was waiting to find out what the rejection was going to cost him.
The principal had moved twelve million on Friday. Doyle had stopped getting calls.
Whatever Ronan was bringing to lunch, it was the next piece of that picture, and the picture was getting clearer in a way that meant a working dock was about to become a different kind of place.
At eleven-thirty, she crossed the boardwalk with a roll of receipt paper in her hand and a question on her face she’d clearly been carrying since the morning.
He came up off the swim platform when he saw her coming. He didn’t bother pretending he hadn’t been watching for her, and she didn’t bother pretending she hadn’t come.
She stopped at the head of his slip, without stepping onto the pier.
“I need to talk to you for a minute,” she said. “Not about anything serious. Just for a minute.”
“All right.”
“Not on the boat.”
“Okay.”
He stepped off onto the pier, and they walked back up the slip together at her pace, which was the marina-owner pace, slow and observant, and they didn’t touch, and they didn’t talk until they were past Catherine’s deck and back on the broad boardwalk where the angles were public and visible and nobody could read anything off them they shouldn’t be reading.
“Two things,” she said, looking at the water and not at him.
“Two things, okay.”
“One. I’m all right today. Better than all right. I want you to know that, because I don’t want last night to land in your head as something either of us is supposed to be carefully managing the morning after.”
“Okay.”
“I’m saying it because I was up at three in the morning telling my ceiling I was all right, and I figured the ceiling didn’t need to hear it as much as you did. There. That’s one.”
He felt a smile move at the corner of his mouth before he could stop it. He let it.
“Two,” she said.
“Two.”
She turned and looked at him then, and the gold light was on the side of her face, and her eyes were the steady blue they got when she was about to say a hard sentence.
“Whatever is coming,” she said, “I’d like you to remember that I knew it was coming, and I kissed you anyway. That goes both ways, Ethan. Not just yours. Mine too.”
He didn’t answer for a moment, because the answer that wanted to come up was the answer a man didn't say on an open boardwalk at eleven-thirty in the morning, and he had to put it back down where it lived and find a smaller one.
“I’ll remember,” he said.
“Good.”
She held his eyes for another beat, and then she nodded once and walked back to the office, and he stood on the boardwalk and watched her go and understood with a clarity that surprised him how much he was going to do to deserve what she’d just said, because what he still hadn't told her and he needed to when he could, would change her life.
He went back to his boat and got cleaned up for the Sandbar.
He walked the long way, down the marina driveway instead of crossing over the grassy area between, because a man going to lunch did not drive a block.
The Sandbar at twelve-thirty on a Monday had three couples and a charter captain at the bar and Jace Marriott behind it polishing a glass with a towel, and Margo at the host stand with a stack of menus and the assessing look of a woman who knew everyone who came through her door and assessed each one anyway.
She looked up when Ethan came in. Her face did the small, specific lift it had been doing every time he’d walked in here for a week.
“Hello Ethan, welcome.”
“Hi, Margo. Thank you.”
“Friend of yours is at the back booth.”
“Thank you.”
“Jace already chatted with him; he's all yours now.”
Margo didn't push. She handed him a menu he didn’t need.
“Thank you, Margo.”
She smiled at him sweetly, but he saw the look of Sloane Mercer’s friend and was therefore one of the few people in Blossom Springs Ethan could not lie to without it costing him something.
He went back to the booth.
Ronan was sitting with his back to the wall, in a faded blue work shirt and a ball cap pulled low, with an iced tea sweating on the table in front of him and his hands flat on the wood, looking at the menu. He looked up when Ethan slid in across from him.
“Vale.”
“Cross.”
“You look tired.”
“I look fine.”
“You look tired.”
Ronan took a sip of his tea and set it down without taking his eyes off Ethan, and Ethan returned the look without flinching, because flinching was for a man without a reason to be tired and he had one and he wasn't going to apologize for it.
“Caleb told you,” Ethan said.
“Caleb didn’t have to tell me. Caleb told me you sounded different on the phone Sunday night. I made the inference. That’s what I do.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Not yet. I’m here to deliver information, not lectures.”
Margo brought Ethan an iced tea. "Would you two like to order or visit for a bit?"
Ronan grinned, "We'll visit for a bit if you don't mind."
"Not at all. I'll stop back later."
“Talk to me about the file, Ronan.”