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“You remember the ducklings’ names?”

“I have five siblings.” He crouched down next to her, which she hadn’t expected, a man in a good sweater folding down onto a garden path to be eye level with a bronze duck. “Piper made us read it to her until the spine fell off.”

She could get used to this, spending casual time with Sam. But she shouldn’t. She was already treading into dangerous territory.

“Okay,” she said, standing before she said something she’d regret later. “Now the swan boat.”

“We are absolutely not,” Sam said.

“Sam. There is a boat shaped like a swan. A man in a straw hat pedals it. We came all this way.”

“We came for a funeral.”

“Which is tomorrow, as you reminded me. Today there is a swan boat, and you are a grown man who owns a company, and no one back home will ever know.” She was already walking toward the little dock. “Unless you tell them. Are you going to tell them?”

He followed her, but she didn’t think he was all that happy about it.

And he rode the swan boat, an action that delighted her. He could be serious and professional all he wanted, but he could also relax and just be himself for a few hours.

He was too tall for it, of course, and his knees came up to his chin. A four-year-old in the next row stared at him with open suspicion the entire time, and Alli laughed so hard at the look on his face that she had to wipe her eyes.

For eleven minutes on a pond in the middle of Boston, he did not look like a man whose assistant had been murdered and whose father was a monster and whose whole month was on fire. He looked like a man on a boat. He looked, once, right at her, when she was still laughing, and something in his face was so unguarded that she had to turn and watch the water instead.

Don’t. He is your boss. You need this job. Don’t screw this up.

Sadly, her little pep talk didn’t help much. She was still as enamored when they were done.

“Okay,” Alli admitted as they walked toward the hotel. “You were right about this city.”

“I told you.”

“You’re unbearable when you’re right.”

“Then I’m unbearable most of the time.”

“I won’t disagree.”

He laughed, an actual one, low and surprised out of him, and it did something to her chest that she chose not to examine too closely.

They found dinner in a small place on a corner that served fresh seafood and bread pudding that was to die for.

He told her about his first time in the city when he was sixteen; she told him about her first live shot that was so bad her news director had put it on a loop for the Christmas party for three years running.

“I don’t believe you,” Sam said.

“I have it on tape. I will never show you.”

It was all so easy. That was the dangerous thing. It was so easy she kept forgetting to be careful, and every time she remembered, she’d catch him looking at her a beat too long, and she’d know he’d forgotten too.

By the time they walked back, it was full dark and cold enough that she was glad of her coat, and the city had gone quiet. Sam walked on the street side without seeming to decide to. Their hands kept not quite touching between them.

They reached the door of her hotel room, and she wanted to scream in frustration. It was too good, and it shouldn’t be any of that. It should be dull and routine, but there was nothing about this man that said boredom.

“Thank you. For today. For the swan boat. For the ducks and everything else.”

“You made me get on the swan boat.”

“And it was the best part of your year, admit it.”