Page 30 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

“I’m not going to cry.”

“Delgado’s going to cry.”

“Delgado will absolutely cry.”

The light’s doing that last-act thing, going long and rose-gold, catching the salt haze so the whole beach glows. A pelican—Carl, I’ve decided; sue me, it’s Carl—planes down the swash zone without a single wingbeat, showing off. And Noah’s watching me with the sun full on his face, arms crossed, feet planted in thesand I made him stop wearing boots on, and he’s not scanning the parking lot, he’s not reading vectors, he is one hundred percent right here.

“You know,” I say, standing, brushing off my knees, shy for no defensible reason, “you’re not as grumpy as you pretend to be.”

“Don’t spread it around.”

“Too late. Marnie has the franchise rights.” I step over the dune line stakes, right up into his space, and he uncrosses his arms to make room for me against his chest like it’s standard procedure now, because it is, and I tip my head back to say something dumb about franchise revenue splits?—

And it isn’t banter anymore. Just like that. The gold light and his heartbeat under my palms and his eyes gone still and deep, and the sentence I haven’t said is all the way up in my throat, three words with the tide behind them, and his head bends toward mine?—

His phone buzzes.

Not the text buzz. The pattern—three hard pulses, repeat—that I’ve been taught means duty channel, means priority, means now.

He goes from mine to metal in one breath. Phone up, eyes already sweeping the beach. “Vance. Go.”

I can hear Rafi’s voice, tinny and clipped. Words come through in fragments:marina—the Alacrity—moving cargo, right now—task force is forty minutes out and it’s happening in ten—Code 808, Noah. I need eyes I trust.

“Copy.” But his jaw’s doing the load-bearing thing, and he holds the phone against his chest and looks at me, and I watch two entire duty rosters go to war behind his eyes.

“Go,” I say, and I put both hands flat on his chest, over the drumming, so he knows I mean it.

“Protocol says you’re covered when I?—”

“I’m not asking what protocol says. Delgado’s at the cottage post tonight, right? So walk me home—it’s four hundred yards, it’s still practically daylight—hand me to Delgado like a certified package, and go catch the boat that started this whole thing. That’s the mission, Noah. That’smycase. Go win it.”

He walks me home fast, his hand around mine the whole way. At the porch he takes my face in both hands and kisses me once, hard, like punctuation, and looks past me to the tree line where Delgado’s silhouette lifts a hand.

“Doors locked. Beacon on. I’m twenty minutes, maybe thirty.” His thumb drags once across my cheekbone. “Hold that thought from the beach.”

“Which thought?”

“You know which one,” Noah says, and then he’s gone into the dusk, taillights swallowed by the lane, and I stand there on my own porch hugging the almost of it, grinning at nothing, three words still queued and waiting for the beach at golden hour, where they belong.

I make tea, because tea is what my hands know. I pull up my data and lecture the spreadsheet a little, for normalcy, and I’m mid-sentence in a note about datalogger four when gravel crunches in the drive, and my first thought—my honest, stupid, singing first thought—is that the marina thing must have been nothing, because he’s back early, and I still have the sunset sentence loaded.

My second thought is that Delgado never got the chance to whistle.

Chapter 12

Noah

The drive to the marina takes six minutes, and I spend all six of them doing the thing she’d tease me for: running the picture backward, looking for the flaw.

Code 808 is real—Rafi’s voice had the right weight, and theAlacrityis a legitimate target, flagged all summer. Task force is forty minutes out, cargo’s moving in ten. The math demands local eyes. My eyes. It’s a clean call.

So why is my thumb drumming the wheel at every stop sign on Harbor Road?

Because the timing’s a coincidence, and I’ve spent ten years learning what coincidences cost. Because the sun picked tonight to go down slow and gold with her laughing against my chest, and the phone picked that exact minute to buzz. Because good luck and bad luck arriving in the same hour is how every disaster I’ve ever debriefed begins.

Delgado’s on the cottage. Perimeter’s live. She’s four hundred yards from a beacon, behind locks I installed myself.

Four hundred yards, I remind myself. Backup on site. Locks I installed. A woman who fed the beacon fresh batteries every Sunday.