The new water fellow! So Fred had hooked them up, as she had planned. But was still stuck with them, which he knew was decidedly not in the plan.

Jonas stilled the urge to cackle. Oh boy, oh boy! I didn’t miss anything! He raced up to the group, nearly trampling a busload of Girl Scouts.

“Hey,” he panted. “What’d I miss?”

The small circle froze in midargument and turned to him.

“Well, the Prince of the Black Sea isn’t a big believer in the scientific method,” Fred began, blowing a lock of hair out of her eyes with an irritated puff. “Wanting instead to just jump in the harbor and start kicking ass. Because it’s just that easy, don’t you know.”

“That is not what I—”

“And Thomas, here, thinks we need to do a tad bit more research first before we get an injunction, and when Artur found out an injunction was essentially a strongly worded piece of paper—”

He waved the rest of her explanation away. “Never mind. I get the gist.” He stuck out a hand and the water fellow, looking bemused, shook it. “Hi. Jonas Carrey. Fred’s best friend. Her oldest, best, dearest friend. The one from whom,” he added, testing New Guy, “she has no secrets.”

“I know they’re Seafolk, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Oh, good. Everyone’s on the same page.”

“I don’t think everyone is,” Fred grumbled. She was looking rumpled and out of sorts in a “Nantucket” T-shirt, cutoffs (the legs of which did not match in length, he noticed with an internal groan), and sandals. He shuddered at the state of her sandals, but as usual, Fred made it work. Or, rather, nobody looked at her clothes when they looked at her.

Certainly these two gents didn’t give a crumbly crap that Fred was disheveled and hadn’t had a pedicure since the first Pirates of the Caribbean hit DVD. In fact, they were looking at her the way Jonas looked at a plate of freshly steamed edamame sprinkled with sea salt.

fib

He tried to intervene. “C’mon, Artur, you gotta give it more than half a day. The whole reason Dr. Pearson—”

“Thomas.”

“—Tom—”

“Thomas.”

“God, you’ve been around Fred a day and look what’s happened to you! Okay, okay. Artur, the whole reason Thomas is on the team is so he can do all the grunt paperwork.”

“Hey, thanks. You really know how to make a guy feel welcome. Why are you on the team?”

“Because we’d have to kill him to get him off,” Fred muttered. She looked awful, even for Fred; now that he was closer he noticed the enormous dark circles, almost like bruises, under her eyes. He had a pretty good idea what had kept her up all night. “Don’t knock it, Thomas. He can go out for sandwiches and stuff. He knows every waitress between here and Comm. Ave.”

“That’s true,” he said modestly, inwardly bristling at being reduced to Sandwich Boy.

“This endless rambling grates on me unendurably.”