I waved a goodbye, then skirted the snack table to finish my trajectory to the deck where I contentedly spent the next hour stretched out on one of the lounge chairs, engrossed in rereading my well-worn copy of my favorite classic book (The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux) and cajoling my helplessly pale skin to at least try to soak up some sun. It was a useless effort; I couldn’t tan if my life depended on it. Even if I did get any color, it would be gone by tomorrow.

“So why don’t you swim?”

I almost jumped in my cushioned chair. I’d been so caught up in the tragedy of the Phantom and Christine’s forbidden love story that I hadn’t even heard Travis approach.

He grabbed one of the deck chairs and flipped it around, straddling it backward right up against the side of my lounge. He folded his beefy arms on the chair’s back and looked down at me. He’d dried off, but he was close enough that I could still smell the chlorine on him.

I shook my head and quickly tried to concoct an answer that was anything but the truth. However, my train of thought completely left the station as I suddenly couldn’t help noticing that Riley was standing about twenty feet behind Travis, just at the edge of the deck, like a chiseled marble statue come to life. His pack of bleached-blonde hyenas was gone and he was staring at me again.

Except… no. This time he was staring at Travis. And if I thought his eyes were filled with hate when he looked at me before, they were brimming with unadulterated vitriol now. If I didn’t have prior knowledge of how thick Travis’s head was, I would have been baffled that he could manage not to feel that blazing green gaze burning straight through the back of his skull.

Travis glanced over his muscled shoulder to see what I was looking at, but he didn’t notice Riley or didn’t care. I don’t know how he possibly accomplished either.

He looked back down at me. “Uhuh, I see. Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought.”

I repressed a shudder and blinked to focus on him again. “Huh?”

“You don’t have a reason.”

It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about, but then the thought train came back into the station and hit me. I shook my head. “Oh, um, I just can’t swim. I never learned.”

He let out a jocular laugh. “It’s only like four feet deep!”