Fishing for Keeps (Lake Mercury Lovers #5)
1. Chapter One
Chapter One
Trent
By late August, I can predict everything that's going to happen at this marina before it happens.
The guy in the brand-new fishing hat will ask me which side of the pontoon is the front.
The bachelorette party will rent six paddleboards and use zero of them for paddling.
Somebody's kid will drop a phone in the lake, and somebody's dad will nearly drown trying to recover it. And at some point before noon, a tourist will return a rental boat with an empty tank of gas and no idea why it’s no longer running.
And I love every minute of it.
My dad started renting boats out of this marina before I was born, and when he and Mom retired south, I took over the counter, the fuel dock, and the fleet.
Some guys leave Mercury Ridge and spend their whole lives trying to find something better.
Me? I figured out early that there's nothing better.
There's just this lake, this town, and a front-row seat to the funniest show on water.
Although, lately, the show's gotten a little too romantic for my taste.
Joel's living with Rayna. Ace can't finish a sentence without saying Chrissy's name. And Forrest—quiet, careful Forrest—kissed a fish scientist under the fireworks in front of half the county and grinned about it for a week straight.
My best friends are dropping like flies. That leaves me and Liam holding down the bachelor table at Thursday pizza, and honestly, Liam's terrible company right now. All he wants to talk about is the upcoming derby… that we never win.
I'm topping off a rental pontoon at the fuel dock when I hear the wet, wheezing cough of an old outboard giving up on life. I look up.
There's a little aluminum bass boat about forty yards out, dead in the water and drifting sideways on the breeze, aimed directly at my rental fleet like a slow-motion torpedo. A woman stands in the middle of it, waving a paddle over her head.
"Little help?" she calls.
I know that boat.
Everybody in Mercury Ridge knows that boat.
I hop into the work skiff, fire it up, and idle out to her. Up close, she's got honey-brown hair falling out of a ponytail, a sunburn starting across her nose, and the wild-eyed expression of a woman who has been losing an argument with a carburetor for a while now.
She's also, hands down, the prettiest thing I've seen on this lake all summer.
"Engine quit on you?" I ask.
"The engine and I have quit each other," she says. "It's mutual. We want different things."
A laugh jumps out of me. "How far did you make it?"
"From the cottage on Half-Moon Cove." She pushes her hair out of her face. "It ran great for ten whole minutes. Then it made a sound like a dying goose and now here we are."
"Here we are," I agree, tossing her a line. "Tie that off to the bow cleat. The metal thing. Front of the boat."
"I know what a cleat is," she says, catching the rope. Then she pauses. "Okay, I learned what a cleat is from a YouTube video last night. But I do know."
I tow her in slow, and the whole way, I keep glancing back at her. She sits with one hand resting on the old boat's gunwale, careful, like the thing is made of glass instead of forty-year-old rusted aluminum.
When we reach the dock, I tie her off and offer a hand. She takes it and steps up, and her palm is warm in mine, and my heart somersaults in my chest. I decide to think about later. Or never.
"You're driving Gus Barlow's boat," I say.
Her chin comes up. "You knew my grandpa?"
Granddaughter. That's who she is. Gus talked about her every summer—Josie-girl this, Josie-girl that—but the last time she was here, we were all kids.
"Everybody knew Gus," I say. "It's Mercury Ridge. Everybody knows everybody. But yeah, I knew him since I was a kid. He used to sit right there at the end of the dock, catch more fish than every tourist on this lake combined, and tell the worst jokes I've ever heard."
Her smile is small and a little sad. "The worst."
I put a hand over my heart. "I'm Trent. I run the rentals. And you're Josie."
Her eyes narrow. "How'd you know that?"
"Wild guess," I say. "Also, it's painted on your cooler."
She looks down at the cooler, where JOSIE is written in her grandpa's blocky marker handwriting, and she laughs, quick and bright, and I feel it like sunlight on the back of my neck.
Uh-oh, says a voice in my head that sounds suspiciously like Ace.
"So, what's the plan for the Lucky Penny?" I nod at the boat. "Because no offense, but that motor sounds like it’s sputtering for dear life.”
"The plan is to get it running so I can sell it," she says. "The boat, the cottage, all of it. I'm only here for a few weeks to get everything squared away."
The five most dangerous words on Lake Mercury: only here for a few weeks.
I should know better. I have watched three grown men fall face-first into that exact sentence since June.
"Tell you what," I hear myself say. "I keep a whole rental fleet of cranky motors alive. Leave the Penny with me a couple days, and I'll get her purring."
"Really? What do you charge?"
"For Gus Barlow's boat?" I shake my head. "Pizza. You come to Mercury Slice on Thursday night and hang with the locals. That’s it. That's the whole bill."
She studies me for a long second, like she's looking for the catch.
"Fine," she says at last. "Thursday."
She heads up the dock toward the parking lot, and I stand there watching her go, grinning like an idiot at nothing.
A guy in a brand-new fishing hat wanders over. "Hey, man. Do you have any pontoons for rent?"
"Yep," I tell him, without looking away from her.
Yeah. I'm in trouble.