Page 41 of Crocodile Tears
“You think feeding crocodiles raw chicken is romantic?” I asked incredulously.
“Well, it's certainly a unique kind of date,” Deacon amended.
“This isn’t a date.”
He had such a slappably smug look on his face. Oh, how he loved to get a rise out of me.
We picked up our quartered pieces of raw chicken and began lobbing them over the barrier of swamp grasses. I encouraged Doris farther to the left as Deacon threw Clyde’s food slightly to the right, keeping the two of them apart long enough thatthey didn't accidentally snap each other's legs off in their feeding frenzy.
“Wow, they are even more intense than I remembered,” Deacon murmured. “And when I was a kid, they seemed like ten times this size to me.”
“Doris is particularly moody and ravenous,” I said. “So I’m hopeful that we might have a clutch of eggs from her this year. We might need to resegment the moat into multiple enclosures if that's the case,” I added. “We have it trisected right now in case we need to separate the two of them for some reason, but they normally have free range of all three.”
“This is so cool,” Deacon said more to himself than to me. His lips were parted, his eyes wide, his wonder reminding me that it wasn't in fact an everyday occurrence for most people to feed crocodiles.
“Do you remember?—”
“Yes,” he said, and I laughed.
“You don't even know what I was going to say.”
He gave me a sideways glance. “Do I remember the time you snuck us behind the scenes of the cheetah enclosure and I almost had my hand bitten off, but we managed to jump over the fence and get out again without anyone ever noticing?”
I blinked at him. “Howdid you know I was going to say that?”
“Because I know you,” he stated with a grin, and my insides turn even mushier.
Damn my hormones. It was entirely unfair when someone as attractive as Deacon said these things. Far stronger women had turned into hot butter at the sight of him.
“To this day, no one knows we did that,” I mused. “Nowadays, with the electronic locks and cameras, we would’ve never gotten away with it.”
“Our secret,” he whispered conspiratorially, and his eyes roved my face for a split second before looking away.
That kiss flashed through my mind again, and I wondered if he was thinking the same thing. And then I had to go and be so cringey about it. But the way Deacon was looking at my mouth now . . .
Well shit.That was just plain cruel. Leave it to Deacon Harrow to prove me wrong and make feeding crocodiles sexy. If anyone could do it, it was him.
“Here, wait,” he said with a secret smile as he fished his phone out of his pocket. “I need to show you this.” He scrolled through his photos and turned the screen to me. “Who does this remind you of?”
It was a selfie of Deacon and a surfer dude with a lazy smile and a mop of blond hair over one eye. I let out a cackle, knowing instantly who this surfer reminded him of. “Our petting zoo llama who spit in your ice cream that one time.”
“Yes!”
I doubled over, laughing so hard I had to wipe tears from my eyes. “You found the human version of Garrett? He’s still here, you know.”
“What? No way.”
“Yeah, he's like, what? Eighteen now,” I said, looking skyward as I did the math. “An old man and just as grumpy as ever.”
“Garrett the llama,” Deacon recounted with a belly laugh. “I knew you’d know.”
I didn't understand how something could be comforting and unsettling at the same time, but Deacon managed it. After all these years and after such a short time as friends,howcould he still know me better than almost anyone?
“Ah, good times,” he said, going to put his phone away as it slipped from his grip. “Shit!”
He lurched forward, managing to catch it and volley it back into the dirt behind us, but in the process he tumbled forward, down the steep lip, plummeting toward the crocodile moat.
Chapter Twenty-One
