Some Like It Deadly by Heather Long Page B

the side of the pool and grin at him. “This is definitely a perk.”
    “The pool?” It delighted him that she liked it.
    “The pool. The day. It’s beautiful.” The sun glinted off the water droplets sliding down the curve of her cheek.
    Yes, she was. “It’s why I bought the place.” He braced his feet against the warm concrete and let the heat soak in against his back. The coffee and the company had done wonders for his hangover.
    “You like swimming?” She leaned back into the water and slicked her hair away from her face.
    “I do, but it was for days like this. Days when I could just be out here and be alone, not worry about someone staring at me or watching for me to do something or make a mistake.” It sounded very Dickensian. “That came out wrong.”
    “You like your privacy.” She flexed her arms, then pulled herself out of the water to sit on the side, feet dangling. “I get it.”
    A long thin, pink line bisected her left shoulder blade and disappeared behind the razorback of the suit. Rising, he walked over and crouched next to her. Tracing the scar, he frowned. “What happened here?” Her muscles went rigid under his touch and he hesitated, curling his fingers toward his palm. “Sorry,” he murmured.
    “Just surprised me, is all.” She shook her head and her shoulders relaxed a fraction. “And that?” She twisted to glance at her shoulder and laughed. “Oh, I’d almost forgotten I had that.”
    Shifting to sit next to her, he dropped his feet into the water and braced his palms on the pool edge—that should help him keep his hands to himself. “I sense a story there.”
    “Not a very exciting one. Actually, it’s a pretty stupid story, now that I think about it.” The combination of her self-deprecating tone and rueful expression elicited an altogether tender response that he didn’t want to examine too closely.
    “Now you have to tell me.” He nudged her shoulder with his. “You got my deep, dark secret out of me last night.” He never talked about his father, the subject guaranteed to put him in a black mood, but in this moment, sitting in the sunshine next to Kate, the shadow passed by with nothing more than a twist to his heart.
    “To be fair, you need to understand that I grew up on an army base with three older brothers and their four best friends. These hooligans got into everything.” She made a face and he grinned. He really didn’t know much about the woman behind the efficient assistant beyond her sharp intelligence and occasionally saucy bites of wit. “As the youngest and a girl—” she grimaced, “—I was often excluded from some of their more exciting adventures.”
    “And that didn’t sit well with you.” An educated guess, but he knew he was right.
    “Hell no, it didn’t sit well with me. I could do anything they could do.” All feminine outrage, then she grinned. “But they were older and had a lot more freedom. They used to do this thing called creek dogging.”
    “Never heard of it.” He slid off the side and into the water, the cooler temperature bracing against his sun-heated skin. During his convalescence, he hadn’t gotten to spend much of time in the water—or in the sun, for that matter. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed both.
    “Basically, you run wild in a creek area—climbing trees, going over the sides of bridges, whacking snakes and pretending it’s the wilderness. Risking your damn fool neck.” Damn that sounded fun. When was the last time he did something just for the fun of it? His expression must have revealed something, because she raised her eyebrows at him and laughed. “You’d probably have liked it. It was always about dares. One would dare another to do something crazy and they’d escalate. Anyway, there’s this one bridge, about twenty feet up from the water? The water is also deeper there because it was where two creeks met and created a little rapid effect. The guys hooked a rope up on one side