Page 13 of Boats, Moats, & Root Beer Floats

“Stop that. I’m studying a ghost.”

“You mean, the evidence a ghost left behind,” he said quietly.

I swallowed at the lack of pretty much anything in his voice, just a quietness that screamed everything and nothing at once. My rejection stung him, almost as much as his come on terrified me.

Because what if we kept moving forward andI liked him?

I hadn’t gotten over the last man Ilikedand look where that got me.

To a castle at the smallest, most unreachable town at the top of the Scottish Lochs as far from California as I could throw the proverbial stone across the pond.

And Covin came from California. SoCal U. Another stone’s throw away, albeit a much shorter one this time. A less than ten minute walk from my place.

Of all the locations in California, what were the odds?

Of all the places in the world…

It didn’t matter if we had the best holiday fling possible. The chances of me running into him again once we were home were…high.

I didn’t know if I wanted more complications. I had enough of those. Plenty, that I ran as far as I could travel…and I was looping, looping, looping back to where I started.

My eyes squeezed shut but all that achieved was to land me back in the bedroom I scrambled away from this morning, back onto Covin’s bed. Where his hand, way too large, pressed to the small of my back, pinning me to his long frame that was anything but weak or sticklike or anything I might have imagined when I first met him, if I imagined anything at all.

Liar, liar, ovaries on fire.

At this rate, I’d be able to add a new skill set to my repertoire by lunchtime.

No, the man who held me to him, who told me not to move when I wriggled against his hold because he told me to do something and I wanted to test his limits for no reason at all but to annoy him—that man had plenty of muscle beneath his sheets.

When I forced my mind back to the kitchen and pried my eyes open from my daydream, Covin circled the fresh tower of salmon tins, snapping more shots. His thumb moved quickly over his keypad.

I leaned forward and peered over his shoulder. “Whatcha doing?”

He jumped high enough to clip my chin. My tongue sucked back into my mouth before I could nip a bit off with my own teeth. “Christ, you’re a little nosy wraith,” he muttered. “You’re always standing where you shouldn’t be.”

The tins rattled their agreement. We both peered at the tower suspiciously.

“Maybe we should name him.” I beamed as the tins stopped rattling. “He seems to like that.”

Hazel eyes shot with golden spikes turned on me. “What?”

Covin Drysdale would not intimidate me, despite his height. Or, bulk, even though his stature was that lean, ripped musculature sort that hid under clothes until suddenly therewasn’t all that many clothes to be had between us like there weren’t this morning. No, I refused to be intimidated.

I tipped my chin back and met his golden gaze that lanced through me head on, and pretended I could still function at close quarters.

“We could call him ‘Polty’,” I suggested.

Covin rolled his eyes, and the spell was broken.

Thankfully.

“Polty,” he deadpanned. “That’s the best you can come up with?”

I popped a hip purely because I knew it would annoy him. Polty jiggled the tinned salmon reserves. Or over-reserves. After this I knew I wouldn’t want to see salmon again, tinned or otherwise, for a long, long time. Like several incarnations away, though it seemed to be our sole food supply along with two crates of root beer I found earlier since my attempt at eggs lay cremated to ash and still sizzling slightly on the stove top.

“Fine, Dustman. What doyouwant to call him?”

Covin cleared his throat and I just knew we were in for a speech.

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