He chased her. “Hand the sea glass over, and no one will get hurt.”
“Never!” She raced along the beach away from civilization. Her tired legs responded to the test, obediently drawing from her stores of stamina. It was hard to sprint on sand, but she was doing it, a fact that filled her with a heady sense of strength.
She could hear Zander close behind her. She wanted to believe she was faster. It was probably closer to the truth to assume he was humoring her. She followed the shore’s long curve, then slanted up the beach, away from the water.
She glanced over her shoulder, tendrils of hair streaming in front of her eyes. He was gaining. She shrieked and tried to increase her speed just as one of her feet sank into a wet patch of sand. Her balance pitched forward, and in the next instant she landed with a gigglingoomph. One of her feet tangled between Zander’s legs and he fell, too. She rolled partway onto her back and found him above her. He’d braced the weight of his upper body on one of his arms.
“I warned you,” he said with a huff of amusement.
She grinned. “I’m the winner of today’s very important touch football game, and I’m dead set on keeping my trophy at any cost.” Pleasantly cool sand supported her overheated limbs.
“At any cost?” he asked.
“Any.”
They were both breathing hard.
His face was near and their position ... oh. Their position was very intimate.
Adrenaline shot down her body to her toes.
Her sense of caution reared awake and began issuing warnings.
She waited for Zander to move away.
He didn’t. By slow degrees, seriousness overtook his features. Then raw need flared in his dark blue irises, followed immediately by conflict. His focus flicked to her nose, her lips, then down toward her knees.
What should she do? Her thoughts split apart like a firecracker. Her body clamored to kiss him. Her emotions were drawing her to him—
“What’s this?” he asked in a tight voice.
“Hmm?”
He was looking at her waist. With effort, she recovered enough from her daze to lift her head. She saw that her shirt had flipped up at the hem when she’d landed, exposing a few inches of her abdomen above her jeans. A portion of the raised pink scar she’d received during her kayaking accident was fully visible.
Her heart seemed to spiral into the cold, dark depths of a well.
Fiasco. He’d seen the scar, and it was too late to hide it from him. Shoot, shoot, shoot.
“It’s just a scar,” she said. “No big deal.”
“No big deal?”
She levered her elbows underneath her and edged backward. “It looks worse than it is.”
“It looks worse than it is.” His gaze seared hers.
She sat, then rolled forward onto her feet and straightened tall because she couldn’t bear to talk to him about this from a position of weakness.
He, too, rose to standing. Color stained his cheeks. He’d shed his sweat shirt early in their football game and was wearing a black T-shirt that revealed his tattooed arms. His hands hung at his sides, but they didn’t look relaxed. Tension arced along every tendon. “When did you get that scar?” he asked.
She pressed her back teeth together and resisted the urge to cross her arms defensively. She double-checked to make sure her shirt had fallen back into place. It had. “I got it early last summer—”
“When exactly?”
“The end of June.”
“How?”
