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she’d been curious about for months. “Last summer, when Lucas first came back. It was you who told him that Sid liked to run on the beach, wasn’t it?”
    He looked surprised and a bit guilty. “A little nudge never hurts,” was all he said.
    Rubbing a fingernail along a rough spot on the table, Will waited for the tension to squeeze her gut. The feeling she always had around Randy, as if she were being suffocated and needed to get away to breathe again.
    She wouldn’t say she felt comfortable, but she wasn’t choking for air either.
    Damn it. If she let herself like him…
    “You were good earlier,” he said, jerking Will from her thoughts. “When Beth got sick. I was worried at first, when you froze.”
    She had frozen. Not because she wasn’t good in a crisis. That had never been a problem for Will. The reaction had stemmed from the realization of how scared she was for her friend. How much she cared about Beth. Will hadn’t let herself care that much about anyone in a long time.
    “You were the one who held it together like a pro,” she said, opting to deflect the topic away from herself. “Have you done rescue work or something?”
    “When you spend your life walking on the edge, you learn how to handle stress and stay calm.” Randy lifted one shoulder. “To some it looks like adrenaline junkies are always flying by the seat of our pants, but that’s not the case. It’s not luck or skill alone that’s kept me alive this long. It’s brains, presence of mind, and being able to process a situation in seconds.”
    Will had never thought much about how adrenaline junkies must think, but what Randy described was very close to how she’d been living for the past few years. A life on the edge, always worried someone might recognize her, learn her secret. The remote nature of Anchor had allowed her to relax a bit, but now that security was being threatened by the magazine coverage.
    Time to go back on alert, and be prepared to move on if necessary.
    “Guess I’d better go.” Randy pushed his chair back and rose to his feet, a shadow falling across the table as if something enormous had risen from the sea.
    Will rose with him. She needed to get back behind the bar. “Here’s hoping we don’t get any more surprises like this one for a while.”
    “Hey,” Randy said, pausing until she made eye contact. “Thanks.”
    “For what?”
    “For not making me feel like a leper for once.” Will didn’t know what to say to that, so she remained silent. “You have a good night,” he said, then flashed the smile that did stupid things to her brain.
    As Randy walked away, Will’s heart beat double time. That was supposed to happen when he walked into a room, not out of it. Time to resurrect the roadblocks. Going soft over Randy Navarro was a complication Will could not afford. Her life was already complicated enough.

    The lunch crowd had dwindled to less than a dozen by mid-afternoon on Monday. With a good ninety minutes of peace before the dinner service started, Will took the opportunity to do a readout on the register.
    The totals looked better than she’d expected. A good sign for the season to come. She was jotting down the numbers in the notebook she’d been keeping for end-of-the-week analysis when two strangers stepped up to the bar.
    A petite blonde with a clear presence about her climbed onto a bar stool. A man with long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail sat down beside her, his nose in his cell phone.
    “I can’t get a signal,” the man said, holding the phone in the air over his head and squinting at the screen.
    “There’s no cell service on the island,” Will informed him. One of Anchor’s best features, in her opinion. “What can I get you?”
    Mr. Cell Phone looked stunned, while the blonde turned in her seat to examine the back half of the dining room. “Did you say no cell phone service?” Ice-blue eyes stared in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right? Even third world