Mountain Man’s River Rush (Wildwood Valley Rapids #2)

Chapter 1

LINCOLN

The gravel lot was empty except for a mud-splattered truck and a guy hauling a raft up the bank like it weighed nothing.

He had it flipped upside down over his head, arms braced wide on the hull, and he was carrying it from the waterline to a rack near the building with an easy, unhurried stride.

The muscles in his back moved under a sun-faded T-shirt that had probably been dark green once.

His shorts were wet to mid-thigh. River sandals.

No hat. Hair that was brown and too long and plastered against his neck from the water or the heat or both.

He racked the raft, flipped it right-side up with one hand on the grab line, and turned around.

He was good-looking in the way that mountain men were good-looking—like he’d been assembled from the same raw materials as the landscape and nobody had bothered to sand down the edges.

Strong jaw, sun-darkened skin, eyes that were lighter than the rest of him.

He looked like the kind of man who smiled easily and meant it about half the time.

He also looked like the kind of man who was done for the day and did not want to be bothered.

Too bad.

“Are you with Wildwood River Co.?” I asked, already walking toward him. I’d left my car door open. The engine was still ticking.

He looked at me the way you look at someone who shows up at a restaurant five minutes before closing. Not rude. Just assessing how much of his evening this was about to cost him.

“I am Wildwood River Co.,” he said. “Or a sixth of it. We’re closed.”

“Your website says you run Class IV trips.”

“We do. At eight a.m. Not at—” He glanced at the sky, gauging the light the way people in the mountains did instead of checking a watch. “Five forty-five in the evening.”

“What about right now?”

He stared at me. Then he laughed—short, surprised, like I’d said something in a language he understood but hadn’t expected to hear.

“Right now, I’m putting boats away. The river’s not going anywhere. Come back in the morning.”

I didn’t want to come back in the morning.

I’d been driving for two hours with the windows down and my music too loud, and the whole way here, the road had been climbing into mountains that got greener and steeper and wilder with every mile.

My blood was doing the thing it always did when something big was close.

The hum. The pull. The feeling that my body already knew what was coming even if my brain hadn’t caught up yet.

I’d found Wildwood River Co. online three days ago.

Their Class IV trip was called the Tempest Run—a five-mile stretch of continuous whitewater through a narrow gorge with names like Jawbone, The Churn, and Dead Man’s Pocket.

The description on the website was filled with language like experienced paddlers only and guide reserves the right to refuse participants based on skill assessment and this is not a float trip.

I’d read it four times. My heart rate had gone up every time.

“I’m not a walk-in looking for a sunset float,” I said. “I want the Tempest Run. I’ve paddled Class III in the Nantahala and the Ocoee, and I’ve done Class IV on the Gauley. I know what I’m getting into.”

Something shifted in his face. Not the dismissal I was used to—the one where people heard what I wanted to do and immediately started talking me out of it. This was interest. Reluctant, irritated interest, but interest.

“You’ve run the Gauley,” he said.

“Upper and Lower. Last October.”

“Water levels?”

“Twenty-six hundred CFS. It was a release weekend.”

He was looking at me differently now. Still annoyed, still clearly ready to be done with his day, but the assessment had changed. He wasn’t deciding whether I was serious. He was deciding what to do about the fact that I was.

“The Tempest Run isn’t something I send people on alone,” he said. “It’s guided. I’m in the raft with you, reading the water, calling the lines. That’s not negotiable.”

“Fine.”

“And it’s not happening tonight. The light’s wrong, the water’s up from the rain we got Tuesday, and I haven’t scouted the gorge since the level changed.

” He pulled a paddle off the rack and inspected the blade, running his thumb along the edge like he was checking for damage.

“What I’m telling you is that I take this section of river seriously, and if you want to run it with me, you’re going to let me do it right. ”

The way he said “with me” landed differently than it should have. Like the words had a weight he hadn’t planned on, and he’d noticed it a half second after they left his mouth.

I noticed it too.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Wells.”

“Wells. I’m Lincoln.”

“Lincoln,” he repeated, and something about the way he said it—the way his mouth closed around the second syllable like he was tasting it—made my skin warm in a way that had nothing to do with the August heat.

“What time tomorrow?”

“Eight. Be here by 7:45. Bring a swimsuit you don’t mind getting thrashed, shoes that stay on your feet, and nothing you can’t afford to lose.

” He racked the paddle and reached for another one.

“You’ll sign a waiver. I’ll do a skills check in the flat water below the put-in.

If I don’t like what I see, I’m putting you on a Class II instead. ”

“You’ll like what you see.”

I said it without thinking. The words came out with a double edge I hadn’t intended—or maybe I had. His hand stopped on the paddle for exactly one second. Then he resumed the inspection without looking at me.

“Seven forty-five,” he said.

“Seven forty-five.”

I walked back to my car. My heart was hammering, and not because of the rapids.

The hum was louder now—the one that lived in my chest, the one that had been there since I was nine years old and a doctor told my parents that my lungs were clear and I might not need the inhaler anymore.

The whole world had cracked open like a window someone had finally unlocked.

I’d spent the first nine years of my life unable to breathe.

Severe asthma—the kind that put me in the hospital twice before I was six.

The kind that meant no running, no sports, no sleepovers at houses with cats or dogs or carpeting.

My parents had wrapped me in so much caution that by the time my lungs decided to work properly, I didn’t know how to live without the bubble.

It took me until I was sixteen to start breaking away.

It started with a rock-climbing wall at a friend’s birthday party.

My mother had called the venue beforehand to ask about their ventilation system.

I’d gone anyway, scaled the wall, and stood at the top with my lungs wide open and my hands shaking.

I understood for the first time that being alive was supposed to feel like something.

Since then, I hadn’t stopped. Climbing, kayaking, skydiving, cliff jumping, mountain biking on trails that made my father’s face go pale when I described them. My parents had shifted from preventing me from living to pleading with me to be careful, which was the same thing in a softer voice.

My mother texted me the weather forecast every morning. My father had started every phone call for the last four years with “You’re not doing anything dangerous, are you?” And I started every answer with a lie.

I wasn’t reckless. I was deliberate. Every risk was researched, every activity was planned, every adrenaline rush was earned.

But underneath the planning, underneath the careful competence I’d built around the need for speed and height and roaring water—there was something I didn’t look at very often.

I never stopped moving. I never sat still.

I went from one adventure to the next the way some people went from one drink to the next, and the reason was the same.

Stillness was the thing I couldn’t face.

Stillness was the hospital bed. Stillness was the nebulizer mask and the sound of my mother crying in the hallway and the endless hours of waiting for my chest to stop tightening.

If I kept moving, I didn’t have to remember what it felt like to not be able to breathe.

I started my car. The engine turned over, and through the windshield, I watched Wells rack the last paddle and stand there for a moment with his hands on his hips, looking out at the river.

The light was doing something golden and impossible to the water behind him, and he was backlit against it like a man standing at the edge of something he owned and loved and would protect whether anyone asked him to or not.

He turned his head and looked at my car. Looked at me through the windshield. Held it for a beat longer than someone who was just watching a customer leave.

I pulled out of the lot with my hands tight on the wheel and the hum in my chest louder than it had ever been.

Tomorrow, I was going to run the hardest rapids this river had. And the man who was going to guide me through them had just looked at me like I was the most dangerous thing on the water.

Good.