He gave her a look. They all loved summer, despite the increase in their workload, but something in the way she’d said it must’ve caught his attention. She shook her head. She wasn’t about to tell him that she hoped the summer went on forever if it meant that Lily didn’t leave. She didn’t want to think too much about that herself.

Lily was here, and if she could read the signals—which she could—Lily wanted her just as much as she wanted Lily. No point in thinking about anything else—especially when there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about the future. She’d learned that lesson the hard way—along with the even harder lesson that good things always came to an end. She’d enjoy this while she could and try her best to see that Lily did too.

With a wave, she pulled onto the access road for the trek down the mountain and radioed Nat. “Fielder, leaving Bear Mountain trail, over.”

“Copy that,” Nat came back. “I’m headed over to Lake George.”

“Hold the boat,” Chase said.

“Better hurry.”

Chase laughed and kicked up the speed on the Jeep. “I’ll make it.”

She had the best reason in the world to be on that ship—a woman she couldn’t get out of her mind.

* * *

When Chase pulled in at the lodge, she didn’t see a soul, and the lot was empty except for Lily’s BMW. With a curse, she hopped out of the Jeep, took the stairs up to her quarters two at a time, took another one-minute shower, pulled on a clean short-sleeved uniform shirt and pants, grabbed her utility belt, and raced back down to the Jeep. After locking her service weapon in the lockbox bolted behind the seat, she took the downhill tract faster than she should have—counting on skill and luck not to blow a tire or break an axle—and broke a few speed limits getting into the village. As she rounded the turn onto the beach road where the big tour ships took on passengers, she let out a sigh of relief. The William Henry was still in port, although it looked like everyone was boarded and the crew was getting ready to pull up the gangplank. She quickly slotted her department Jeep into a spot that said Official Vehicles Only reserved for village police—hopefully they’d extend her the professional courtesy of not ticketing her—and jogged across the boulevard through throngs of tourists and down the dock to the ship.

“Hold up,” she called when she was twenty feet away. One of the crew had just begun unwinding the chain that moored the end of the wide gangplank to the dock. “Coming aboard!”

The sailor—a young brunette Chase knew from the social scene around town—looked up, saw her coming, and smiled. “Cutting it close there, Chase.”