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emerged into
the living room, Grey was there wearing a t-shirt and the same
board shorts he’d worn to jiu-jitsu the night before.
    “By the way,” she asked as they exited
the house, “how does your head feel?”
    No sooner had she set foot outside the
front door than she nearly tripped.
    The edge of her right flip-flop hit
something solid and she pitched forward, awkwardly catching herself
with a hand on the doorframe.
    Grey grabbed her upper arm a second
too late.
    “I’m fine,” she said, and pulled away,
trying to pretend like his touch hadn’t raised her body
temperature, leaving her feeling faintly and deliciously
fevered.
    “You sure?”
    “Yeah.” She dropped her gaze to the
porch floorboards. The object she’d tripped over was a newspaper,
tightly rolled and secured with a rubber band.
    Grey picked it up before she
could.
    “You wanna set this
inside?”
    She took it from him, examined it like
it was an artifact from a distant galaxy. “I don’t get the
paper.”
    Grey shrugged. “Maybe the paperboy
threw your neighbor’s copy onto your porch by mistake.”
    “Maybe. I’ll take it over later, when
we get back from the beach.”
    She tossed it into the house without a
second thought, unable to explain why every square inch of her skin
prickled as she closed and locked the front door.

CHAPTER 7
     
     
    Grey was going to have to write a
thank you note to the guy who’d shoved his gross, sweaty foot into
his face at jiu-jitsu. Sitting on the beach with Kerry, he couldn’t
remember the last time he’d had such a good day, even if his head
did ache a little, now that he was out in the hot sun.
    She was wearing her swimsuit – the
blue one she always wore, with the top that tied behind her neck
and went all the way to her hips, and the little shorts-style
bottom. The fabric was dry so it wasn’t mind-blowingly clingy like
it had been a couple days ago, but it was still hard to keep his
eyes off her.
    Her legs were slim and toned. Even
when she was resting, he could see the carefully-shaped little
swells of her biceps and triceps. After yesterday evening, he
understood why she worked to be strong – jiu-jitsu was hard. Grey
had had no training but had still had a weight advantage over the
guy he’d been rolling with. He’d been new too, but still. Someone
as tiny as Kerry would need every advantage she could give herself,
both with technique and strength.
    “You said you’ve been training
jiu-jitsu for a year, right?”
    “Yeah.” She pulled her gaze from the
shoreline and looked at him instead.
    “How long does it take to get good at
it?”
    She shrugged. “Years. Forever, maybe.
Why, are you planning to come back?”
    “I might.”
    She raised her brows. “I was just
teasing.”
    “What – you don’t want me
around?”
    “I just didn’t think you’d be
interested in coming back, after what happened.”
    He snorted. “Well, now I know what you
really think of me.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You think I’m too scared to come back
just because I got a face full of someone’s nasty foot? I face
danger daily, you know. In fact, I’m what some might call a
badass.”
    It worked – she smiled. A little, for
about a split second. He’d take what he could get.
    “You do those things because you have
to. Jiu-jitsu is strictly voluntary – for fun. I didn’t know if
eating someone’s foot and winding up with a concussion was your
idea of a good time.”
    “Hey, this is a small town – you have
to take fun where you can find it, sometimes.”
    Her smile flickered to life again, and
she shifted, stretching out on her towel. Every tight little muscle
in her body rippled, holding him spellbound.
    “Wanna get in the water?”
    Her eyebrows plunged down below the
lenses of her big sunglasses. “You’re supposed to be relaxing,
remember? No strenuous activities.”
    “Come on. It’s roasting out here.
Because I’m a badass, I didn’t want to complain, but the heat is
making