When I lift my head, shaking water from my eyes, I spot the lifeless form only a few strokes away. With a powerful kick of my feet, I cross the final distance. Despite my hope, the logical part of my brain informs me I am about to grab hold of a dead body.

Which is why I scream when the head pops up at my touch.

The man—because I see now that it is a man—jerks back at my holler, raising his hands above the water, as if surrendering.

“It’s okay. I won’t hurt you,” he assures me in a rumble of a voice.

“You’re not dead!” I shout, as if him being alive were an inconvenience.

His eyebrows creep up. “Would you prefer I was?”

“No.” I suck in a deep breath, winded from my sprinting swim. “I …” Words slip away from me as I glance behind him. At this new angle in the water, I spy a pontoon boat floating outside the mouth of the inlet.

Unnecessary adrenaline keeps my heart pounding hard and makes it difficult to organize all this new information.

“Hey.” The deep voice recaptures my attention, and I meet the set of soft brown eyes in an otherwise blockish white face. “Hi.” He greets me again, his smile easing the harder angles of his jaw. “You were swimming up to a dead body?”

“I wasn’t sure you were dead,” I correct.

That only has him smiling wider. “You’re here to save me?”

As understanding of the new situation dawns, I struggle to keep afloat—literally and figuratively. My body tries to remind me it’s been a few years since I trod water for any length of time.

“Do you need saving?” My breathlessness comes from a combination of the swimming and his focused gaze.

At some point, we must have drifted closer, pushed around by the subtle lake waves.

The swimmer’s hand rises from the water, catching a strand of my hair on the ascent. The black threads spill like ink about my pale shoulders, my skin turning a ghostly shade from the chill of the lake. He stares at where the lock wraps around his finger in a tentacle-like grasp.

“People rarely admit to needing help.” His gaze laughs as his grin goes lopsided. “Please, continue saving me. Likely as not, I need it.”

If I had time, I’d put in the needed mental energy to identify the subtext of his words. But a movement over his shoulder distracts me.

The good news: I don’t need to come up with a response to his oddly philosophical statement.

The bad news: our conversation pauses because I’m transfixed by the sight of a head breaching the lake surface behind my not-dead acquaintance.