He's So Fine

“Hey, I don’t kiss and tell,” Tanner said.

Sam snorted, and Cole turned to him. “You don’t get to talk. You just went through a damn long drought yourself.”

“Maybe,” Sam said. “But now I sleep with Becca. Nightly.”

“No one likes a bragger,” Tanner said.

“I’m just saying,” Sam said, looking smug, even though only a few months ago he’d let his past mess with his head so thoroughly he’d nearly thrown his shot with Becca right out the window.

Ignoring them both, Cole caught a flash of something on the floor. The tiny scrap of black silk that had been masquerading as Olivia’s panties.

Feeling both Tanner’s and Sam’s gazes boring holes into his back, he scooped them up and shoved them into his pocket.

Tanner opened his mouth, but Cole gave him a do-it-and-die look, and Tanner shut it again. Good to know that once in a while the guy did use his brain.

“We good to go with the running lights?” Sam asked, clearly changing the subject on purpose.

“No.” Cole was still holding Olivia’s boot. Setting it aside, he thought he wouldn’t have minded seeing her long legs in nothing but those boots, doing anything other than running to his rescue. “I didn’t get a chance to finish the wiring.”

Tanner made a show of glancing at the diver’s watch on his wrist.

“Shut up,” Cole said.

“Didn’t say a word.”

“Didn’t have to,” Cole said. “I’m well aware we have clients arriving in less than half an hour.”

“If you know that, then why were you messing around in the water with our pretty neighbor? And Christ, even I know it’s too cold to mess around in that water, no matter how pretty the girl is.”

Cole let out a long breath. “The water part was unintentional, believe me.”

“I’ll call our clients and buy us an extra hour or two,” Tanner said, and pulled out his cell.

“They can wait,” Sam said, eyes on Cole. “Tell us what happened.”

“Nothing,” Cole said.

Sam and Tanner exchanged a look.

“Seriously,” Cole said. “Nothing.”

“Yeah, see, you keep saying that,” Sam said. “We’re still not buying.”

This was the problem with partnering with the two guys who not only had known you longer than just about anyone else, but also knew you better than you knew yourself.

They’d been together in some form or another since high school. Back in those days, Sam had been the wild one, reined in only by his foster mom—who happened to be Cole’s birth mom—but even Amelia could only do so much.

Tanner had been a juvenile delinquent in the making, and little had reined him in either, until at age seventeen he’d gotten a girl pregnant—which had so completely turned his ass around that he’d made Cole dizzy with how fast he’d both grown up and manned up. Or maybe the navy had done that.

Cole was the only one who hadn’t needed reining in. He’d always been the calm one, the peacemaker. Not to say that he was completely easygoing, because he wasn’t. He knew that. He had expectations of the people he loved, and one of them was that they stay alive.

Which had made it all the harder when tragedy had struck and they’d lost Gil. None of them had been the same since. Cole knew it. And Sam and Tanner knew it, too.

It was the only reason he shook his head and came clean with the truth. “It wasn’t quite light yet, and I was balanced on the railing, reworking the wiring. That asshole yesterday shredded it but good. And then something sparked…” He closed his eyes, remembering. “And I blanked out a moment, and that was all she wrote. In my head, I saw flames; I jerked and lost my balance.” He opened his eyes and met Sam’s and Tanner’s gazes. “Right into the fucking water, making me a bigger idiot than yesterday’s frat boy.”

Sam didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. His grim expression said it all. “A flashback.”

“It was only for a second. I came out of it, and I was in the water.”

Sam blew out a sigh and shoved his hands through his hair.

Tanner hadn’t moved.

Cole turned away, frustrated. He had no business still being so fucked up.

Two years. It’d been two years, and he was still mad as hell on the inside.

Furious.

And so effing tired of hiding it. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he said. “But after I went in, Olivia saw me and thought I was hurt, so she came in after me.”

“Clue in,” Tanner said, finally speaking. “You are hurt.” He pushed Cole to the bench and retrieved their first-aid kit from its storage spot.

Cole lifted his arm to touch his head, but stilled when a bolt of pain sliced through his shoulder at the movement.

Tanner moved close. He was limping this morning. It was the cold. That always bothered his leg. They’d made enough money in the past two years chartering that they could close on the cold days, but Tanner wouldn’t allow it. Neither Cole nor Sam could say a damn word to him about it without getting his head bitten off.

Cole was at least smart enough to say nothing when Tanner dropped to his knees in front of him with a wince of his own and prodded at the cut over Cole’s eyebrow.

“It’s not bad,” Tanner finally said.

“Told you—” Cole’s eyes flew open when he realized Tanner was cutting off his shirt. “What the hell—”