Mountain Man’s Sunshine Girl (Wildwood Valley Rapids #4)

Annaleise

Iwas seven minutes early. He was four minutes late. I’d already decided I didn’t like him.

I stood at the edge of the dock with my tote bag over my shoulder and my sunglasses on. My whole body was wound tight. That was the ridiculous part. I’d driven two hours to have nowhere to be, and I was standing here like I had somewhere to be.

My eyes kept dropping to my watch. Eight fifty-six.

The water moved past the dock in long, slow pulls, catching the light in a way that made it look like something alive.

A painted sign on the building behind me read Wildwood River Co.

in faded letters, and below it, a whiteboard listed the day’s trips in someone’s unhurried handwriting.

My float trip was on there. Eight-fifty, departure, back by late afternoon. Right next to a little hand-drawn sun that I was choosing not to find charming.

Eight fifty-seven.

I’d passed the four-year mark on exactly zero sleep, survived clinical rotations that would have broken someone with less sheer stubbornness, and sat for boards in a testing center that smelled like recycled air. I knew how to wait. I just didn’t like doing it when someone else was making me.

A bird landed on the far railing, considered me, and left. Smart.

I heard him before I saw him—footsteps coming around the side of the building, unhurried in a way that made my jaw tighten. Not jogging. Not even walking fast. Just moving, easy and even, like the day had all the time in the world and so did he.

I turned.

Whatever I’d planned to say didn’t make it out.

He came around the corner with a dry bag slung over one shoulder and a life vest in his other hand, and he moved the way the river moved—like nothing was pulling at him, like there was no friction between him and the world.

Tall, broad through the shoulders, dark hair pushed back from his face.

He glanced at the clipboard tucked under his arm—checking the booking, I realized, getting my name—and then his eyes came up to the water, doing some private calculation that had nothing to do with the fact that he was four minutes late.

Then he looked at me.

I felt it before I understood it. Some shift in the air, some change in the quality of the morning.

His eyes found mine and held. The expression on his face was…

it wasn’t a smile, exactly. It was something quieter than that.

Like I was something he recognized. Like I was exactly who he expected, and he was in no hurry to look away.

Nobody had ever looked at me like that.

I’d been looked at plenty. Assessed, catalogued, decided upon. My parents’ friends sizing me up like a report card. Attendings during rotations scanning me for weakness. Men at bars doing their own versions of the same math.

This was none of those things. This was just…looking. Open, unhurried, and completely steady.

It lasted maybe three seconds. Then he was moving again. Crossing the dock toward me while shifting the dry bag on his shoulder.

“Annaleise?” he asked.

“You’re late.”

Not my finest moment. But there it was.

He stopped a few feet away and met my eyes, not rattled in the slightest. Up close, he was even more—

I stopped that thought before it finished itself.

“Just a couple minutes,” he said.

Not apologetic. Not defensive. Just a fact, offered back to me with the same even calm he’d carried around the corner.

“The board says 8:50.”

“It does.” He glanced past me at the whiteboard, then back. His expression didn’t shift. “I’m Cade.”

He held out his hand. I took it, and his grip was warm and solid and brief. I had the uncomfortable feeling that he’d already labeled me—categorized me the way I’d categorized him. Except his category for me felt less like a complaint and more like…

Like something I didn’t have a word for yet.

“We’ll make up the time on the water,” he said, already moving past me toward the canoe pulled up alongside the dock. “Full day on the river. Good conditions for it.”

I watched him crouch down and check something on the hull. I didn’t know what he was looking for. His hands worked the boat with the kind of certainty that came from doing something a thousand times. And then he was done, with the easy finality of a man who hadn’t needed to think about it at all.

I wanted to still be annoyed. I was working on it.

He looked up at me from where he crouched, and something in his expression shifted—just slightly, like he’d caught something he hadn’t expected.

“You can leave your bag in the box up by the building,” he said. “Or I can stow it in the dry bag if there’s anything you need on the water.”

“I’ll keep it close,” I said.

“Sure.” He stood and moved to hold the canoe steady against the dock. “Whenever you’re ready.”

I looked at the canoe. I looked at the water. I looked at the man holding the boat like he had all morning and intended to spend it right here.

I took off my sandals, tucked them in my tote, and stepped in.

The canoe rocked once, gently, and then settled. Cade pushed off from the dock without a word, and the current took us, slow and easy, out into the wide green morning.

My watch said 9:02.

I tucked it into my bag and made myself leave it there.