Chapter Twenty-One
He’d always thought fishing was for catching fish, but that was before a woman hooked his heart.
—The Temptress of Pecan Lane, by Mae Daniels
Saturday dawned with perfect fishing weather. A little overcast with a breeze rippling the surface of the water. Anna could still smell the breakfast campfire. She’d eaten so many pancakes, they were filling in the space between her ribs.
She’d been out of bed before Louisa, which had given her the opportunity to use Jackson for nose- and finger-warming.
Kaci would’ve been proud of her for asking for help.
Jackson certainly had been.
But now everyone was up and about, poles in hand, casting on the bank of the creek.
Jackson slid up next to her. “You want me to bait that hook for you, Anna Grace?”
She just looked at him.
He grinned. “No lizards, but worms are okay, huh?”
“Worms don’t bleed on my carpet if their tails fall off.”
He did that amused coughing thing. “Slime and dirt are okay, but no blood. Got it.”
“We’re camping. And fishing. I’m flexible.”
“Well, you give a holler if you need some help.”
If his dimples weren’t so utterly irresistible, she would’ve considered wasting the time by being irritated.
And if Louisa hadn’t been tapping her foot a few feet down, fishing pole weaving in the air, Anna would’ve considered asking the difference between lake and creek fishing. With so many lakes back home, she’d never had reason to fish in a creek.
“If she doesn’t want help, I do,” Louisa said.
Anna’s jaw clenched. She retrieved a can of worms from the tackle box and made her way down the creek in search of the right place to bait her hook and cast.
The last time she’d been fishing, she was a teenager. But she still remembered how to hook the worms, and it took a practice cast or two, but soon she was comfortable with the rod and reel Lance and Kaci had loaned her.
They spent most of the morning wandering up and down the creek.
The fish weren’t biting. Might’ve had something to do with Kaci and Lance and Jackson’s one-upping each other with more stories of their youth and all the laughter bouncing off the water.
Louisa told a few stories of her own, but she couldn’t compete with the three musketeers.
From its perch in the ocean-blue sky, the sun shone down over the massive oak and pine trees and glinted off the creek waves.
Louisa wandered closer to Anna until they had to watch for each other when casting and reeling in.
Anna would’ve moved farther, but a rocky outcropping of clay and tree roots blocked her way.
Jackson was on Louisa’s other side, down far enough to cast without hitting anyone, close enough to rebait Louisa’s hook on demand.
Louisa’s attitude annoyed Anna, even though she shouldn’t have had an opinion one way or another about how Jackson humored his sister’s helplessness.
Just because Louisa was still young enough to have the luxury of time to decide what she wanted to do with her life didn’t make her bad.
If Anna could’ve gone back to twenty-one, she would’ve done a few things differently.
Not married Neil. Experimented with classes in other degree programs to make sure chemistry was her true love.
Most days she was happy enough with her goals, but the schedule was a drag sometimes. Especially during some of the more boring lectures.
She cast with a frustrated grunt and turned her reel.
According to Louisa, all college lectures were boring. So maybe Anna’s problem wasn’t jealousy. Maybe it was simply that Louisa had a bad attitude that Jackson kept humoring.
If he wanted to treat his sister like a spoiled princess, that was his business. They weren’t in a real relationship. She had no right to care.
Something tugged at her line.
She snapped to attention. She adjusted the reel. Tension bent the tip of her pole.
“Got something there?” Jackson asked.
“Think so.” She kept reeling. Whatever she’d hooked was putting up a massive fight. “Feels like a nice one.”
Louisa backed away and gave her room.
“You go, girl,” Kaci said. “Bring him in.”
The fish thrashed to the surface. Anna laughed. “Got you now.” It pulled and tugged, but she held steady, and soon she dangled the fish out of the water. Its sleek silver body curved in a C when it wasn’t making its last-ditch efforts to escape.
“Hang on, big guy.” She reached for it, but bumped hands with Jackson. Ornery man. “I’ve got it.”
“Gonna take forever to get that fish stink off your hands,” Jackson said. He batted her hands away with a calculated twinkle in his eyes. “Besides, he might bleed. I got this one for you. He’ll be good all fried up for dinner.”
She swung the pole so the fish was out of reach. “Catch and release. We’ve got food for dinner.”
He hooked the edge of her pole and swung it back. “No fun in that.”
The fish flopped and twisted on the end of the line, gills flaring, eyes big and fishlike. Creek water flung off it.
“Catch and release,” she insisted. “Would you let go? I’ve got this.”
She tugged the pole again, and the fish swung wide.
Right into Louisa’s face.
She ducked too late. “Oh, gross! Get it off! Get it away! Gross gross gross! Ew!” She scrubbed at her face, shrieking.
“Ohmigod!” Anna gasped. “I’m so sorry.”
Jackson’s eyes flared wide. “Okay, Lou-Lou?”
Anna floundered to snatch the fish. She unhooked him and tossed him back. Kaci and Lance trotted over.
Louisa was in the midst of a fit that would’ve made Kaci’s momma proud. “How could you do that?” she wailed. “A fish touched me. On my face. Ew, ew, ew!”
“Gonna live, Lou-Lou,” Jackson said. He pulled off his T-shirt and handed it to her.
She swiped it over her fish-slime-infested skin. “God, I can’t smell anything but fish.” She gave Anna the stink-eye. “This is why you let the menfolk do man-things. So we ladies don’t get smacked in the face with a fish.”
Anna’s face burned, but worse, her chest felt as if it had been rolled in fishing line and was now being tugged tighter and tighter, as if she were the one dangling naked on a hook for all her friends to see.
She hadn’t done anything wrong. Not on purpose.
A roar of displeasure erupted in her veins, and she felt her nose flare. “You’ll go hunting. You’ll shoot an animal. But you can’t touch a fish?”
Louisa channeled an air of Southern belle outrage even while scrubbing her nostrils. “Touching’s for boys.”
The line around her chest squeezed tighter, cutting into her breathing space. She quaked with an energy she hadn’t expected and didn’t understand. “Seriously?”
“And dead squirrels and deer don’t smack me right in the kisser like Moby Fish.”
Anna’s jaw ached. “It’s just river water.”
“It’s just gross, and I shouldn’t have to touch dead things.”
“Sugar, down here, our mommas teach us the value of being helpless sometimes,” Kaci said to Anna.
“Sometimes.” Anna gripped the handle of the fishing pole so hard, she was probably leaving dents in the hard plastic.
“When does sometimes turn into a complete inability to take responsibility for yourself and your actions? When does sometimes cripple your chances at being able to hold a real job and pay your own bills and survive on your own?”
Louisa’s eyes snapped. “Honey, that’s why we go fishing for men.”
Jackson stepped between them, wariness and something else Anna had never seen darkening his eyes. “Pipe down, Louisa. Think you’re gonna make it.”
“I—”
Kaci cut Louisa off. “Anna, I’m pickled out with this fishing stuff. You got a book I could borrow?”
But Anna wasn’t looking at her. She was too busy having a staring contest with Jackson, and she didn’t like the quit picking on my sister message.
Sure, she would’ve expected the same from Beth, but Anna wasn’t the spoiled rotten brat Louisa was.
Jackson’s eyebrows knit closer together. You better quit talking now came silently from his pursed lips, like he didn’t appreciate her assessment of his sister.
“It is what men are for,” Louisa said. “Russ won’t give me a job, so I’ll just get married and have babies and let my husband take care of me. Nothing wrong with that. It’s what Momma did and what her momma did before her, and it’s what I’ll do.”
Anna’s heart ached. It ached for Louisa’s ignorance, it ached for the wedge splintering her good thing with Jackson, but mostly, it ached for herself. “Yeah, works great, right up until it’s over.”
Kaci tugged Anna’s arm, and this time, Anna looked away from Jackson.
“She’s young,” Kaci said. She steered Anna back to the campsite. “Give her time.”
“Won’t matter if he leaves me in a ditch with six babies,” Louisa called. “Russ and Jackson will take care of me.”
Anna wrenched herself out of Kaci’s grasp and spun back toward Louisa. “And forty years from now, do you want to be the person Russ and Jackson took care of, or do you want to be the person who left a mark on the world?”
“That’s enough.” The quiet warning in Jackson’s voice sent a chill down her spine. His eyes had gone completely dark, his disapproval directed square at her. The only message she got now was get the hell out of my business.
Her eyes stung. “Apparently not. You’re not doing her any favors, you know.”
Anna wasn’t doing herself any favors either.
It took Louisa near about three-point-two minutes to quit her hollering once Anna and Kaci were out of earshot. Lance had apparently gotten a boost of intelligence through getting hitched, because he’d tucked tail and followed the women.
Once Louisa finished with her say, she returned Jackson’s shirt and grabbed her fishing pole.
Which meant it was time for him to do something he wished he’d been smart enough to do over the summer.
He blocked her rod so she couldn’t cast. “I won’t,” he said.
She channeled Momma’s favorite disapproving blink. One long, two short, followed by another pointed long. “You won’t what?”