Mountain Man’s Firefly Girl (Wildwood Valley Rapids #1)

Chapter 1

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The guy behind the counter was going to be a problem. I could tell before he opened his mouth.

He was big—tall and broad through the shoulders in a way that made the space behind the counter look like it had been built for someone smaller.

Dark hair pushed back off his forehead, a jaw that could have been cut from the same granite as the mountains outside, and hands that were currently doing something with a logbook and a pen that suggested he wrote things down by hand on purpose and not because he didn't know how to use a computer.

He looked up when the screen door slapped shut behind me, and his eyes found mine. My heartbeat did something I was going to ignore.

I'd driven all the way from Raleigh. My car smelled like gas station coffee and the hand sanitizer I'd spilled in the cupholder somewhere around Burlington.

I'd left campus at noon, skipped lunch, and spent the last forty-five minutes on a two-lane road that wound through the mountains like it was trying to lose me.

I was tired and hungry, and my hair had been in the same bun since six a.m. I was not in the mood for the face.

The face. I knew it by heart. Every outfitter, every guide service, every outdoor rec counter I'd walked up to—the same face.

The polite shift. The quick flick of the eyes—down, up, settle on a neutral expression that almost hid the fact that they'd already decided what I wanted before I said a word.

She wants the sunset float. She wants the gentle rapids. She wants someone to paddle for her while she takes pictures for social media.

I didn't want any of that. I wanted information, and I wanted it specific.

Wildwood River Co. was the last outfitter on my list. I'd tried three others between Boone and Asheville. The first one had tried to sell me a couples’ package.

The second had nodded along while I talked and then handed me a brochure with a girl in a bikini on the front.

The third had listened to my whole explanation, paused, and said, "So like a nature walk, but on the water? "

I'd walked out of that one without responding.

This place was different from the others, at least physically.

No neon signage, no inflatable kayak propped by the door.

The building was wood and stone, lived-in, with a covered porch that looked out over a gravel lot and, beyond it, a slope of green that dropped toward the river.

There were racks of paddles along one wall, a whiteboard with trip schedules written in neat block letters, and a topographic map of the river pinned behind the counter that had been marked up so many times the original print was barely visible.

It looked like a place that took the water seriously. That was either a good sign or a setup for a more sophisticated version of the same disappointment.

The man behind the counter set his pen down. "Help you?"

Two words. No smile. Not unfriendly—just unhurried. Like he had all day and planned to give me exactly as much of it as I needed.

I walked to the counter and put my hands flat on it, the way I always did when I was about to have this conversation. Grounded. Ready.

"I need access to a stretch of river with specific conditions," I said.

"East-facing bank, open canopy—minimal overhang from hardwoods, no dense rhododendron tunnel.

Slow current, ideally a wide bend where the water spreads out and goes shallow at the margins.

Water temperature in the low seventies if you've been monitoring it, though I can take my own readings on-site. "

He didn't blink. Didn't do the face. Didn't look at me like I'd spoken in a language he didn't recognize.

"What's the access for?" he asked.

And here it was. The moment where I explained my work and watched a grown man try to figure out how to respond to a twenty-three-year-old woman talking about insects with unreasonable enthusiasm.

"Firefly field survey," I said. "I'm collecting population and behavioral data on Photinus species along riparian corridors in the western part of the state.

I need to be on the water at dusk—ideally in position thirty minutes before sunset and staying through full dark.

The habitat conditions I described correlate with peak signaling activity.

I've been working from satellite imagery and topo maps to identify candidate sites, but I need someone with ground-level knowledge of the water to get me to one that's actually accessible. "

I waited. This was usually where it fell apart. The nod that meant he'd stopped listening. The suggestion that I "check with the park service." The well-meaning offer to "set something up" that would never actually happen.

He turned to the map behind him. Studied it for a few seconds. Then he tapped a spot upstream of the marked trip routes—a wide bend I could see even from where I was standing, the contour lines spreading apart where the river flattened out.

"The stretch you're looking at off the satellite—that's Dawson Bend.

East-facing, open canopy. But the bank's undercut on the inside of the curve.

Water temp runs warmer than the rest of the river because it's shallow and sun-exposed, but the substrate is mostly bedrock, not the silty margins you'd want for larval habitat.

" He looked at me. "You'd get adult activity there, but you wouldn't get density. "

I stared at him.

He turned back to the map and tapped a different spot—farther upstream, past the last marked trail.

"This is what you want. Hadley Bend. East-southeast exposure, canopy opens up on the south bank where a storm took out a stand of hemlocks eight years ago.

The regrowth is low—wildflowers, grasses, young hardwoods.

Water spreads wide and goes ankle-deep at the margins, and the substrate is silt and leaf litter over clay.

Temp runs seventy-one, seventy-two this time of year.

I don't monitor it officially, but I've been on that water enough to know. "

He said all of this the way a mechanic would describe an engine—no performance, no flourish. Just information, delivered because it was relevant.

My hands were still flat on the counter. I realized I was gripping the edge.

"Hadley Bend isn't on your trip routes," I said, because I'd studied every map of this river I could find, and that stretch hadn't appeared on any outfitter's published itinerary.

"No. Current's tricky getting up there—there's a Class II chute about a quarter mile below it that's not worth running with customers who don't know what they're doing.

I go up there on my own sometimes. Evening runs, checking conditions.

" He paused. "The fireflies come up thick at that bend.

I've never timed it against sunset, but it tracks with what you're describing. "

Something was happening that I did not have time for. A loosening. A crack in the wall I'd built out of every conversation like this one I'd ever had. Three outfitters on this trip alone, but eleven more over the years, stretching back to undergrad. And none of them had gone like this.

He was looking at me with an expression I couldn't categorize. Not the face. Not the flicker and shift. Something steady and unhurried and completely without agenda—or with an agenda I didn't recognize because no one had ever had it before.

"I can take you up there," he said. "Tomorrow evening. I know the line through the chute, and I know the bend. You'd be in position by seven, which gives you thirty minutes before sunset this time of year."

There it was. The offer. The intrusion. The man deciding to put himself into my space.

Except he hadn't said it the way they usually said it. He hadn't leaned in, hadn't smiled, hadn't wrapped it in something personal. He'd said it like a logistics problem with a solution he happened to be.

"I can manage a Class II chute," I said, even though I wasn't sure I could.

"I know you probably can." He held my eyes. "But I know this stretch of river. You'd spend an hour finding the line on your own that I can put you on in fifteen minutes. That's an hour of daylight you'd want for setup."

He was right. I hated that he was right.

"What's your rate for a private guided trip?" I asked because I was a grad student and my field budget was a joke. This was the part where the number would make the decision for me.

"I'll figure something out."

"That's not a number."

"It's not." Something moved at the corner of his mouth—not a smile, but the architecture of one. "I'm Bishop. I own the place. I can set my own rates."

Bishop. The owner. Not a counter guy, not a seasonal guide—the man who built this operation, who knew the river well enough to correct my site selection from memory and describe substrate composition at a bend that wasn't even on his commercial maps.

I should have felt reassured. Instead, I felt the ground shifting under me in a way that had nothing to do with fieldwork.

"Tomorrow," I said. "Seven o'clock. I'll bring my own gear."

"I'd expect you to."

I turned toward the door. My face was warm, and it wasn't from the drive.

"Breanna," I said without turning around. "Breanna Ingalls."

"See you tomorrow, Breanna."

The way he said it—like he was already sure there'd be a tomorrow, and one after that, and one after that—made my hands tighten on the door frame.

I stood there a beat too long, waiting for an explanation he clearly wasn't going to give. Then I walked out into the late afternoon heat, screen door slapping behind me, and sat in my car for a full minute before I started the engine.

My hands were shaking. Not from nerves, but from the ground-tilting realization that for the first time in fourteen conversations, somebody had actually heard me.

And he was a problem. I could already tell.