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at full power.”
    Anne’s spine stiffened, her eyes narrowing a little. “You think there’s something you can throw at me that I can’t take?”
    “Yeah.” Mack waited just long enough for her to simmer and held her eyes. “Me.”
    “Really.” All her belly muscles went taut, in a happy way, her core bracing for a challenge. Her fingers itched for her boxing gloves. “You want to try me, Mack Corey?”
    His smile was sharp and predatory. “Yes. In fact.”
    Her mouth went dry, for no reason she could understand. Something alive surged through her, so alive she didn’t know what to do with it. Her hands flexed. “I’ll go as many rounds with you as you care to name.”
    “You know, I always thought you would, Anne.” He leaned into her, and just like that, twenty years as neighbors and friends got shifted to another angle—that of a man’s big body leaning over a smaller woman’s, one forearm bracing against the tree. “But I’m not planning on boxing.”
    Her heart started to pound so hard it was like that one last minute before she walked out of prison into the flash of cameras everywhere. How had their whole world just tilted this way? Had the last child to leave their friendship-joined nests left them that off-balance? “Good,” she managed, looking him in the eye. Because this was the man who had taught her that—how to look a jury in the eye and think fuck you and not back down. She’d honed it through twenty years of looking him in the eye and holding her own. “Because I’d wipe the floor with you.”
    “The floor’s for teenagers. They’re always in too much of a hurry to get things right. A bed now, or a table, or a counter—a man can do something with that.”
    Her lips parted on the punch of breath that went through her. If they were boxing, then that blow had snuck right in under her guard and gotten her in the gut. “Are you drunk?”
    “See.” His grin grew sharper, victorious and angry both. “You’re already ducking and weaving.”
    “That’s because I’m getting in a position to punch your head right off. Are you sure you want to mess with me without putting on headgear?”
    “Are you sure you’re not going to call foul and leap right out of the ring?”
    So much energy zinged through her, it was as if long-amputated nerve endings had suddenly received some drug injection and reconstituted themselves. Sensitive and burning. She wanted to itch at them, or at the very least rub her arms, but she wouldn’t give him the victory. “I can’t believe you’re going to ruin a twenty-year friendship because you got drunk and horny.”
    “I can’t believe it either,” he said, and his other arm came up, so that now he had her entirely caged, like those damn French chefs liked to do when they were flirting with their girlfriends or wives. Which they seemed to do every single second they weren’t messing up her wedding cake arrangements. “Our friendship isn’t that goddamn weak.”
    She drew a breath that came out almost on a laugh. Because, well—it wasn’t. She could haul off and slap him right now, and he’d still be on that beach tomorrow morning. He’d still text her ten minutes from now, with the mark of her palm still red on his jaw, because he’d overheard a rumor on the other side of the room that he thought she should know, so that her business didn’t suffer.
    Well, maybe not text, since they’d learned their lesson about subpoenaed records, but he’d get the information to her somehow.
    “See? What’s the worst thing that could happen, if I got drunk and horny?” Mack challenged. “Beyond me getting to hear you say horny , which, to be honest, sounds way more vulgar than fuck you. I love the way you say fuck you. ”
    Anne formed her lips around a very sincere F, and then caught herself, her eyes narrowing. He was watching that F-shape of her lips with every appearance of eagerness, and she’d be damned if she’d give him the