Lilah froze, staring at the dock where upwards of thirty-odd boats had moored since earlier. Motors hummed—not hers, unfortunately, but the day was still young—and people with numbers on their shirts thronged the area, shouting instructions.
“That’s a lot of chaos,” she said, and she started twisting that ring again.
“I know. Isn’t it great?” Concerned, he eyed her as she stood there, not moving toward the dock. “It’ll be okay. Give me your hand.”
Smooth. Even he was impressed with how easily she slipped her hand in his, and for all intents and purposes, they were just a couple about to embark on a boat ride. Except her hand was shaking inside his. He was the world’s worst dog for noticing that at the same moment he reveled in the little zip of electricity being generated between them.
When they got to the boat, he helped her over the side, released her hand reluctantly, and dropped her bag into the cargo compartment.
Another boat roared away from the dock, and its wake rocked their boat, nearly throwing her off-balance. He reacted instinctively, slipping an arm around her and easing her back onto the cozy bench seat behind the driver’s seat.
“Easy. It takes a little while to get used to being on a boat.”
The craft didn’t have a lot of maneuvering room, a feature he suddenly appreciated as he viewed it from a logistics angle. There was little more than room for four and a small crawlspace between the pilot chairs with a wide mattress that would easily fit one SEAL and one dark-haired nervous wreck. But he kept that one to himself. Ace in the hole and all.
“It’s my first time,” she confessed, her eyes a little wide. “It’s a lot smaller than I was anticipating.”
Oh, man.
“You’re a boat virgin?” he asked with a grin and bit back the thousands of other comments that immediately sprang to his lips. “That’s fantastic. You couldn’t have picked a better guy to do this race with then. I grew up on the water, near Gulfport, Mississippi.”
Her face calmed. A little. “I’m originally from Iowa. I know dairy farms.”
“Great. Next time I need help milking a cow, you’ll be the one I call.”
At last she smiled, and it hit him crossways how much he enjoyed coaxing one out of her. Most chicks considered flirting an Olympic-caliber sport, and while he liked a stress-free woman with Sure Thing scrawled across her forehead as much as the next guy, there was something really fascinating about uncovering the mystery of why a woman with a hot little body like Lilah didn’t have men crawling all over her. Because she totally could.
Of course, he’d kept his arm firmly around her waist even though they’d wedged into the seat at the rear of the boat some time ago. So maybe she had better skills at getting a man salivating after her than he’d credited.
“So, first time on a boat. First time to the Caribbean too?” he asked. Might as well get all the virgin talk out at once.
She nodded. “First time to do anything even remotely like this. Including the part where I’m sitting here with a hot guy.”
Well. That was a nice complement, which he took as such since she didn’t have a flirty bone in her body, and his throat caught in unexpected pleasure. “We don’t bite. Unless you ask.”
Lame. What was wrong with him? Except she laughed like she’d never heard that one before, and he realized she probably didn’t often hear even the most common of pickup lines for whatever reason. Which was a shame—she should have guys telling her she was pretty and stumbling over pathetic attempts to get into her panties.
The lack of that in her life also meant she had no filter against pickup lines.
That was not good information to be swirling around in his brain.
“Curious about something,” he croaked and cleared the hitch of awareness from his voice as best he could. Probably it was a lost cause. “Why did you sign up for the Galloway Games if this is not the kind of thing you normally do?”
“Oh, Thora made me,” she readily volunteered. “I make one little comment about how my photographs are boring and I need to figure out how to take better ones. Bam. I’m doing this thing with her. Apparently, I spend too much time holed up away from people in my darkroom and I need to have experiences. Find some passion.”
As in… passion? Like the kind that happened between a guy and a girl?
God, she was going to kill him.
Complete and total agenda change.
“Hold the phone. One mind-boggling revelation at a time. You’re a photographer?”
That shouldn’t be important, but his gut was screaming at him that it was. Somehow cameras and sex had gotten all wound up together, and if there was anything that Fitz thrived on, it was making sense of raw data. Especially if it got him closer to unraveling the mystery of this woman who had thoroughly captured his attention. And the answer included sex.