Almost Just Friends Read online

  “Guilty,” Brodie said easily. “Wasn’t cut out for the life. Or for walking about battle rattle when just trying to grab grub.”

  “Battle rattle?” Piper asked.

  “Yeah. When you, like, have fifteen minutes to get food, so you run into a takeout place with so many weapons and tools that you rattle. Get it? Battle rattle.” He smiled at the look on her face. “Yeah, you’re in the presence of two serious badasses.”

  She looked at Cam, who shook his head, like he was nothing but a sweet teddy bear.

  Uh-huh.

  “Your chariot awaits,” Brodie said, gesturing to the two . . . vehicles . . . off to the side on the sand. They were three-wheeled buggies that looked like they went really fast. She swallowed hard. “Um.”

  “They’re trikes,” Cam said. “Don’t worry, they stay on the sand.”

  “Well, unless you take a jump and get some air,” Brodie said. “Which I highly recommend.”

  Thirty minutes later, after a lesson and brief training about things like jumping and tacking—which supposedly was the art of slowing down by steering into the wind—Piper was in her own trike and doing a great job of pretending not to be terrified. Then she was flying along the beach while seated only a few inches off the ground, the wind in her face, whipping her ponytail, and she felt like she was going faster than she’d ever gone in anything ever before. Up and over the sand hills she went, no longer bothering to hide her whoops of sheer adrenaline-rush joy every time she got a bit of air beneath her tires.

  To her left, another trike came into her view. Cam. She glanced over and found him looking hot as hell in dark sunglasses and a wicked smile.

  She smiled back.

  He kept pace with her for a long moment, then pulled ahead to lead her into a series of hills. There was a gust of wind and she felt the trike hurtle forward. She heard a roar from the tires on the sand and the wind around her, and found herself grinning from ear to ear at the rush.

  When it was time to return to the shack, she pulled in next to Cam, who helped her out.

  “Well?” he asked.

  She grinned. “That was possibly the most thrilling ride of my life.”

  He pulled off her helmet, the look in his eyes saying that he knew he could give her an even more thrilling ride.

  She had no doubt. But she hadn’t managed to raise her siblings and give them all relatively decent lives by following a whim, sexy as that whim might be. She’d been afraid of commitment with Ryland because . . . well, she still wasn’t one hundred percent sure. But she thought it had something to do with the knowledge that committing to him would mean becoming something she wasn’t—a person capable of further dividing her heart, handing yet another chunk of it off to someone and in turn giving them power to hurt her.

  But looking into Cam’s gaze, she couldn’t see him ever trying to make her into something she wasn’t. Life with him would only get better.

  But they weren’t going to go there. And if that caused a little teeny, tiny spark of sadness, she shoved it aside. This wasn’t the time to dwell. She needed to live in the moment, which normally she could do only by writing a reminder in a journal. Easy enough to do, since her journal was ever present. Right now it was in her purse. “Do you have your keys to the truck?”

  “Yeah. What do you need? I’ll get it for you.”

  Okay, she had two options: admit her crazy or keep it to herself. But maybe to prove that this wouldn’t—couldn’t—last, she gave him the truth. “I need to write something in my journal.”

  “Sure,” he said without blinking an eye, and turned toward the stairs to get to the parking lot.

  She stared after him, dumbfounded. Just the fact that he’d go get it made it possible to stop him. “Actually, it’s okay. It can wait.” Then she stepped into him and pressed her face in the crook of his neck to just breathe him in for a moment, willing herself to remember.

  Live in the moment.

  After all, there was no sense in thinking about the future, because as she knew all too well, not everyone got one. So why ruin the here and now by running ahead of herself? Besides, she thought with a happy sigh as Cam’s arms came around her, the here and now was pretty damn amazing. “Thank you,” she whispered against his skin, and then, unable to resist, she kissed his throat.

  He took a deep breath, and his arms tightened a little. She thought he’d kiss her, but he didn’t, maybe because Brodie was suddenly there, taking their helmets, grinning, asking them how their ride was.

  “Great,” she said, stepping back from Cam. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. It was your man here. He dragged me in on my day off. Said I owed him.” His smile was lopsided and very genuine as he looked to Cam. “And I do. I owe him my life. Several times over.” And with another quick salute, this one not sarcastic, he turned and vanished into his shack.

  She looked at Cam, but he didn’t say anything, just took her hand and walked with her back to the truck.

  “Did you enjoy yourself?” he asked when they were on the highway.

  “Yes, in case you couldn’t tell by the grin on my face.” She squeezed his hand. “Thank you, for reminding me to take time to fly.”

  He brought her hand up to his mouth and brushed a kiss against her palm, which hit her heart. And also decidedly south of her heart. “What did Brodie mean, he owes you his life?”

  His eyes were on the road now, but she sensed a rare hesitation.

  “You can’t say,” she guessed.

  “There’s a lot of my military past that I can’t talk about.”

  There was something in his tone now. Wariness? “I understand,” she said.

  He glanced at her. “You do?”

  “Of course. Your missions are probably mostly classified.”

  “This one wasn’t. It’s just hard to talk about. He was on a training mission that went horribly wrong. His parachute didn’t open correctly. He got separated from his unit, landed in unfriendly waters, and then it became a rescue situation.”

  “And you were the one who rescued him,” she guessed.

  “My unit, yes.”

  “You’re a close-knit bunch?”

  “Very.” He shot her a smile. “A unit spends more time together than most families ever do. We get into, and out of, a lot of shit together.”

  “So what does a day as a Coastie look like?”

  “At the unit, or deployed?”

  “Both,” she said, giving in to her ridiculous curiosity about him since he seemed willing—somewhat—to answer her questions.

  “If we’re at the PSU—our Port Security Unit,” he clarified, “we start at 0500. It’s training, training, and then more training, most of it brutal. Muscle memory’s everything. We conduct muster, shoot guns, meet with the division, shoot more guns, clean boats, drive boats, and shoot even more guns. Then we go to the range to shoot again until we can’t hold our arms up.” He glanced over at her. “Sensing a trend?”

  “Definitely. When do you eat and sleep?”

  “Oh, all that’s just the first part of any given day. There’s also division-specific training and inspections. We eat or sleep whenever there’s a spare second. Then wake up and do a wash and repeat.”

  Hard life. “And when you’re deployed?” she asked.

  He rubbed a hand over his jaw. A rare tell, she’d discovered. He wasn’t uncomfortable often, but he definitely wasn’t a fan of talking about himself.

  “Sometimes it’s almost a relief, because there’re no inspections. Rule number one: keep weapons clean at all times. A dirty weapon’ll get you killed. There’s mission planning, equipment checks, reports. And then rule number two: sleep when you can and eat anything other than an MRE when you can. We take eight- to twelve-hour shifts, either driving boats, working in a TOC—tactical operation center—or manning an overwatch with mounted machine guns protecting high-value assets.”

  “High-value assets.”

  “Such as a navy ship, or G