“It seemed like a fun idea.” There was a tiny note of question in the last word, as if she finally had him on shaky ground, but he clearly didn’t mean to give up the truth. She’d had enough of lying men.
Chloe shook her head in disgust. “I need to find my shorts,” she growled, bitterly aware that a phrase like that should be uttered under much happier circumstances. “Good night. I’m sure I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Wishing she’d brought a flashlight, Chloe walked along the waterline, squinting into the darkness. Where the hell could her shorts have gone? Had she missed the sand completely and they were even now floating toward Europe? The perfect end to a shitty evening.
She finally spotted the shorts and hurried to grab them. No wonder they’d been hard to spot. The pale gray material blended right into the sand. As she checked them over carefully for clawed animals, Max’s voice emerged from the darkness.
“I didn’t want you to drown.”
Chloe frowned and turned toward him, shorts clutched to her stomach. “What?” She couldn’t make out his features in the ten feet of darkness between them, but she could see that he’d stopped walking and stood with his hands shoved into his pockets.
“I didn’t want you to drown. Or get eaten by a shark.”
“Okay.” He was talking, at least, but she couldn’t see the logic. “So you came along to keep me from drowning. Why couldn’t you just say that?”
The edge of his jaw looked hard as rock now. “Because people don’t like to be told what to do.”
“Max—”
“People don’t want to hear that swimming at night is idiotic. In fact, if you tell someone they’ve got a really stupid idea, they become determined to prove you wrong.”
“So you made it seem like a great idea instead?”
“I just thought I’d find a way to distract you.”
She narrowed her eyes at his words and took a step forward. Now she could see his mouth set in a flat line. “What about the beach fire? You didn’t really come over just to flirt, did you?”
“Your pit was too close to the sea grass. It needed to be deeper, and I wanted to be sure you didn’t build it so high it would stay hot all night long.”
“I see. I suppose I can understand being haunted by Smokey the Bear. Lots of people have a fear of fire.” She crossed her arms. “So what about the diving?”
He took his hands out of his pockets, then put them back in before rocking back and forth on his heels.
“Max?”
“What about it?”
“You didn’t want to go.”
His mouth tilted at an incredulous angle. “I asked to go.”
“Jesus, Max!”
“What do you want me to say? I’m a professional diver. You actually think I don’t like diving?”
“You did not want to dive with us, so why did you go?”
“Because diving is incredibly dangerous,” he bit out. “And you were diving with a guy with unknown credentials. Who picks a dive guide off the grocery store bulletin board?”
Whoa. Well, he wasn’t being charming anymore. Chloe told herself that was progress.
“Sorry,” he muttered, kicking at a clump of wet sand. “I didn’t mean to raise my voice. I don’t know what got into me.”
Chloe suspected she knew what had gotten into him. Panic. But now she was getting truly angry. “So you didn’t want to dive?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t want to toast marshmallows?”