It was the kind of day that happened maybe four times a summer, when the bookings thinned out between weekend rushes and the river belonged to whoever showed up first.
We’d shown up first. We always did.
Aria and Nash were with Flint, Wells’s business partner and the quietest of the Wildwood River Co. guides. I just hoped they wouldn’t be too much for him. Our daughter had inherited my stubbornness and Wells’s confidence, which meant she was four years old and already impossible to negotiate with. But Flint had a way with her. He was quiet and watchful and infinitely patient, and Aria had decided somewhere around her second birthday that he was her favorite person outside of us. She called him “Fint” because the L gave her trouble, and he answered to it without correction, every single time.
I’d asked him once if he minded. He’d looked at me like the question didn’t make sense and said, “She can call me whatever she wants.” That was Flint. No wasted words, all of them meaning exactly what they said.
Nash was easier. Our son was two and a half and happy with anyone who would let him throw rocks into things. Flint would let him throw rocks into things. The river, a bucket, the gravel lot—Nash wasn’t choosy about the target, and Flint wasn’t choosy about the mess. They’d be fine for a few hours.
Wells paddled us upstream past the commercial routes, past the gorge entrance, past the flat stretch where he did skills checks with new customers. He took us to a bend I hadn’t been to before—wider than Hadley Bend, where Bishop’s property backed up to the water and Breanna still set her firefly traps on warm nights. But it was shallower, the water spreading out over smooth river stone and catching the sunlight in a way that turned the whole surface gold.
The banks were thick with mountain laurel, the blooms just past peak but still heavy enough to scent the air. No trail access, no sight line from the road. Just the river and the sky and the two of us.
He beached the raft on a gravel bar and killed the momentum with one clean stroke of the oar. The same efficiency, the same economy of motion. Five years, and it still did something to me—the way he moved on the water, the way his body worked like it had been designed for exactly this.
I stepped out into the shallows. The water was warm—mid-seventies, the way it ran in late June when the sun had been on it all morning. It came up to my calves, clear enough to see every stone on the bottom, and the current was barely a whisper. A slow, easy pull downstream, nothing like the gorge.
Wells stepped out after me. He was watching me the way he’d been watching me since the day I pulled into his gravel lot fiveyears ago—like I was the most interesting thing on his river and he’d already decided the river came second.
“You brought me to a secret bend,” I said.
“I brought you to the best bend.”
“That’s what you said about Hadley Bend.”
“Hadley Bend is Bishop’s. This one’s mine.” He walked toward me, and the look on his face was the one I’d been collecting since the first morning—confident and warm and completely undone underneath it. “I’ve been saving it.”
“For what?”
“For a day when I had you on the water with no kids, no guides, no schedule, and no reason to go back.”
The hum started in my chest. Not the old hum—not the one that had driven me from one adrenaline fix to the next, running from stillness, running from the hospital bed, running from the girl who couldn’t breathe. That hum had gone quiet the day I sat on the porch of the Wildwood Valley Inn and called my mother and told her I was staying.
This was the other hum. The one Wells had given me. The one that saidyou are exactly where you’re supposed to be, and the man standing in front of you knows it too.
“No reason to go back,” I said. “I like the sound of that.”
He reached for me, and his hands found my waist—warm, callused, steady. The same hands that had gripped the oars through Dead Man’s Pocket, that had caught our daughter the first time she tried to climb out of her crib, that had held mine in the delivery room when Nash came fast and I’d squeezed hard enough to leave bruises. Hands that had never once let go of anything that mattered.
He kissed me like he had all the time in the world, slow and deep, his tongue sliding against mine while the warm river water lapped around our calves. I melted into him, fingers curled in his wet hair, tasting sunlight and river stone on his lips.
For long minutes, there was only that—kissing, breathing each other in, the gentle current tugging at our legs. Then his hands tightened on my waist and he turned me around, pulling my back flush against his chest. One strong arm banded across my ribs, holding me steady. His other hand traveled down my stomach and slipped inside my swimsuit bottoms.
I gasped as his calloused fingers found my swollen clit. He was never in a hurry on the water, and he wasn’t in a hurry now. Two thick fingers circled me with perfect, unhurried pressure, stroking the exact rhythm he knew would make me fall apart.
“Wells—” I moaned, head falling back against his shoulder. The water rippled around us with every small movement of his hand.
“Right here, darlin’,” he murmured against my ear, voice low and rough. “Let me feel you come on my fingers.”
He rubbed me faster, firmer, fingers gliding over my slick clit while the heel of his palm pressed against my mound. My knees started to shake. The shallow water sloshed softly around my calves as my hips rocked into his touch. I was already so wet, aching, and the contrast of the warm river and his hot fingers had me whimpering.
“Oh God… Wells, I’m?—”
“Come on,” he growled, nipping my earlobe. “Give it to me.”
I shattered with a sharp cry, thighs clamping around his hand as the orgasm crashed through me. My whole body tensed, pulsing hard against his fingers while the river water swirled and splashed around us. He kept stroking me through every wave, drawing it out until I was trembling and gasping his name.
Before I could catch my breath, he tugged my swimsuit bottoms down my legs and left them floating around one ankle. He bent me forward with a firm hand between my shoulder blades. I braced my hands on my knees, ass tilted up toward him, the shallow water still only mid-calf.
