Page 58 of Presumed Dead

“Second. The same goes the other way. If anything I do feels wrong — a sentence that doesn’t add up, a place I am that I shouldn’t be, a moment when I look at you in a way that makes you wonder — ask me. Now, not later.”

“All right.”

“And, Sloane.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For the two weeks.”

She didn’t answer. She'd said she wouldn't, so she didn't. But it would be a long two weeks.

She walked him to the side door. He didn’t reach for her hand or her elbow. At the door, he turned around and looked at her for a count of about three breaths in the warm gold light coming in over the kiosk, and what was on his face wasn’t an apology and wasn’t a question and wasn’t the small careful smile she’d seen at the corner of his mouth on Tuesday morning.

It was something she hadn’t seen on a man’s face in a long time.

She didn’t name it. She let it be.

He turned and stepped through the door. The side door closed behind him, and she felt an emptiness she hadn't felt in years. It was different from the emptiness of losing her parents. It was different than the ache in her heart when the Coast Guard told her Noah's boat was found but not Noah.

Ethan had said the piece he hadn't told her was about a person. She sent up a silent prayer; it was about Noah. Though he hadn't said he knew anything about Noah, she hoped that mystery would be over and he'd tell her they were actually here looking for him and they'd found him.

As she turned the lock on the door, the memory of Ethan's face and the way he looked at her rushed back to her. There was something about Ethan Vale, besides the mystery of his job and his presence here, that called to a part of her heart that had been dormant for a long time. That was what she'd take home with her tonight. Maybe he'd change her life in more than one way before this was all over. A girl could hope.

Chapter Ten

Ethan was up before the alarm; he'd been up before the alarm every morning since he was twenty-two. He made his coffee, carried it to the cockpit, and waited for her.

He told himself he was watching the dock. He'd been telling himself that for three days. The dock was his job, and a man on a job watched the people who worked it, and Sloane Mercer worked it harder than anyone.

That was the lie he let himself keep. The truth was simpler and worse. He waited for her in the morning because the sight of her walking out to the end of Pier Two with the green thermos in her hand was the best part of his day, and a man who had been undercover for three years didn't have a lot of best parts, and he wasn’t going to give this one up before he had to.

She came out at a quarter to six, wearing the same canvas jacket she wore every morning. Her hair was down, which it usually wasn’t this early, and she walked the long arm of the pier the way she always walked it, unhurried, like the dock was something she was greeting rather than crossing.

She stopped at slip eight, poured her coffee, and stood with her back to him and drank it.

And then she did something she had never done.

She turned around and looked at Pier Three.

She looked right at his boat, right at the cockpit, right at him, across the slip water in the gray light, and she didn’t pretend she was looking at something else, and she didn’t look away. She held it. He felt it land in his chest like a hand pressed flat against him.

He raised his coffee cup. A small thing. An inch off the gunwale.

She raised hers back.

Neither of them smiled. It was too early in whatever this was to smile, and the thing that passed between them across forty feet of water was not a smile, it was an acknowledgment, the first one either of them had let themselves make in daylight, and it was enough to keep him standing at the gunwale for a full minute after she’d turned back to slip eight, his coffee going cold in his hand, his heart doing something undisciplined and unfamiliar in his chest.

He’d told her the truth last night.

Not all of it. Enough of it. And she'd looked at him this morning like a woman who had decided to trust him before she was sure it was wise, and he was going to spend the rest of this operation trying to be worth the look.

He sat down on the gunwale and made himself drink the cold coffee.

This was the part Caleb would warn him about, if Caleb could see his face right now. The part where the job and the wanting stopped being two separate things a man could hold in two separate hands. He could feel them braiding together, and he knew exactly how dangerous it was, and he couldn't make himself want it to stop.