pulled me against his sunbaked skin. I steadied myself on his chest just as one of his hands came up to tilt my head back.
As soon as he had clear access to my lips, his were on them and he was kissing me as if it’d been months since he’d last done it. Abandoning all my good intentions about fixing the motor first, I roped my arms around him and allowed him to haul me into the cabin.
About an hour and a quick skinny dip to cool off later, I was only wearing his shirt and was perched back at the motor. Lincoln kept shooting me heated glances as his gaze tracked the length of my bare legs and lingered on the skin where it disappeared beneath his shirt.
“Stop looking at me like that.” I tried to inject a warning into my voice, but I couldn’t quite manage it. Nor could I stop smiling.
“Like what?” he asked innocently, but he smirked as he averted his gaze and went back to work.
“Like you want to devour me or something.” The way that I kept catching him looking at me when I tried to sneak glances at him was making me look like a teenager. The secret peeks and smiles as we huddled over the motor weren’t helping either.
“I’ve already done that.” He grinned and held up his hand. “Twice. Just a little while ago. Want me to remind you?”
“No,” I said, laughing as I shook my head. “We need to get the motor running and we probably need to get back to shore at some point. We’ve already missed lunch.”
“Fine, but don’t forget I offered.” When he peered up at me from beneath the brim of his cap, the expression in his eyes morphed from heated to soft and genuine.
“So your dad taught you how to do this, huh?” he asked as my fingers wrapped around the float. It was soft and deflated easily, which meant I was on the right track.
I nodded, frowning for a fraction of a second before I sighed. “Yeah, but we don’t need to talk about him if you don’t want to.”
“I want to talk about you,” he said firmly. “Do you enjoy working on boats, or was it just something you did to spend some time with him?”
I worked on the float as I lifted my shoulders, sucking both lips into my mouth before releasing them with a pop. “It started as wanting to spend time with him, but it grew into more than that. I really enjoy the mechanics of it, and I enjoy knowing how things work.”
“Same here,” he said as he turned a screwdriver to secure the cap back in place. “My favorite toy as a kid was a broken vacuum cleaner. I used to put it together only to take it apart again.”
“It was a broken toaster and, eventually, one of my dad’s busted motors for me.”
Lincoln chuckled. “I should have known. I also graduated to busted motors and other spare boat parts once I started hanging out around the marina more often.”
“Cheers to that,” I said, lifting my free hand to drink an imaginary toast to our shared childhood hobbies.
While we got the boat started, we kept talking. It turned out we’d had a number of things in common as kids, though we’d gone in different directions when it came time to decide what to do with our lives.
“Mom wanted me to become a fisherman,” Lincoln said.
Fuel started filling the tube I had my fingers wrapped around, and it stiffened. That was my cue that we were almost good to go.
“Yeah? Being a SEAL is a far cry from being a fisherman.”
He shrugged, knocking twice on the motor when he was done with his part. “Yep, but it felt like the right move for me and it was.” Something dark entered his eyes, but he jerked them away from me to climb back into the boat. “How does that line feel? Can I give the ignition a try?”
I frowned as he turned his back and headed to his seat, not sure what had just happened. “Sure. I think it should take.”
Lincoln turned the engine over and it started. As I settled into my seat, I burned to ask him what was going on in that mind of his. I didn’t, though. I assumed it had something to do with the incident and I’d promised him I wouldn’t talk about it.
After we got back to shore, fully dressed again, whatever thoughts