Ride the Tide (Deep Six #3) - Julie Ann Walker Page 0,16

tanks. But her fingers were long and slim, so very feminine. And she knew just the right amount of pressure to—

“It’s not a war,” Chrissy countered. “It’s a mutual dislike brought on because one of us, I’m not saying who”—she pointed directly at him—“was a complete and total dillhole.”

“It was a damned misunderstandin’, woman!” he insisted for the ten billionth time. “And for the record, you might dislike me, but I don’t dislike you. Never have. Never will.”

“Whatever.” She waved a hand, unwilling to let the import of his last statement sink in. “The point is, we need to team up to get Alex and Mason together.”

He grunted. “Good luck with that. Mason isn’t only built like a boulder, he is one once his mind’s made up. The man’s immovable.”

“Nothing’s immovable. You just have to find the right leverage.”

Wolf might agree with Chrissy that Alex Merriweather, with her sunny smile and eager mind, was exactly what Mason needed to pull him out of the funk he’d been in since his divorce. But Wolf wasn’t one to go sticking his nose into other people’s affairs.

Okay. That wasn’t exactly true. He had a huge passel of relatives back in Oklahoma, and everyone knew everything about everyone else. But that was different. That was family. When it came to his friends, his teammates, his business partners? He’d learned to keep his opinions to himself.

Or else couch them in someone else’s words of wisdom.

“Ever heard it said that minding your own business will take you far in life?” he asked.

She pursed her lips—those wonderful lips he knew could be soft and warm, so giving and greedy—and declared with a finger in the air, “I’m imposing a ban here and now. No more sounding like a fortune cookie when I’m around.”

“Fine.” He shifted slightly in the captain’s chair because thoughts of her mouth made him hard. “Put simply, you go muckin’ around in their love lives, you’re lookin’ for trouble.”

“I don’t want to muck. I just want to afford them as many opportunities as possible to be alone.” She pointed out the window to where Mason and Alex sat side by side on the trampoline. “Mother Nature will take care of the rest.”

Unconvinced but willing to play along, he said, “Just to be clear, you’re suggestin’ we team up in helpin’ Mason and Alex take a trip to Boner City?”

“Please.” She rolled her eyes. “Let’s remain adults about this. It’s Pound Town.”

Despite the tension vibrating in the air like a downed power line, he couldn’t stop the laugh that burst from him. And yet his humor was short-lived. “I might agree with your plan in theory, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you. Like I said, Mason is one tough nut to crack.”

“Since we’ve already established that when it comes to burgeoning romance you have the emotional IQ of a dumbass ant, how about you worry about your own hopes and leave mine well enough alone?” She smiled cattily, then quickly spun on her heel.

Before she could reach the door, however, he stopped her. “How many times I got to apologize before you forgive me?”

Turning, she offered him a one-shouldered shrug. “Who knows? I’ll tell you once you get there.”

Then she was gone, and all the air that had been sucked out of the room to make space for her presence rushed back in, making him light-headed.

* * *

10:53 a.m.

Mason sat a foot away from the only person on the planet he thought about day and night, and it was a lesson in torture.

And the silence is deafening, he thought uneasily.

But it wasn’t an empty silence. It was filled with all the words he needed to say but couldn’t. It was a charged silence that skimmed over his skin like electric fingers. It was a heavy silence that pushed down on his shoulders until they ached.

It was a silence that Alex had apparently had enough of, because she looked over at him and blurted out, “For your information, when you tell someone you need to talk to them, that usually requires you to open your mouth and form actual words. I know that’s sort of akin to getting blood from a stone with you, but still…spit it out. The longer we sit here, the twitchier I feel. And it’s been proven that stress hormones can cause all sorts of adverse effects on the body.”

“I…” He tried, but his throat was as tight as the crowds around Fenway Park on game day.