Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Bower
“Was that Mia out there helping you the other day?” Grandpa asked.
Yesterday Kids Camp had ended not a moment too soon. How did parents do it? Four hours with the hooligans, and I was exhausted. I couldn’t imagine what twenty-four hours was like.
“Yeah, she was helping.” She’d been good. Really good. The kids had actually listened to her. Mia had used that teacher voice, something I hadn’t heard from her before. It kind of turned me on. So authoritative and demanding. Even Jared had listened to her.
“She should work here at the resort. She’d be good for the kids,” Grandpa said.
I couldn’t tell if Grandpa was teasing. There was a seriousness in his tone that caught me off guard.
Just in case, I told him, “She’s a teacher back home.”
“Oh?” asked Grandpa. “Did you catch up with her?” He gave me a look that said he saw right through me.
I shook my head. I’d hardly call any of our recent conversations catching up.
They’d been lust charged and flirty—at least from what I’d felt on my end.
But there was no way she normally ate a Popsicle like that.
It could’ve been considered lewd conduct.
She had to be feeling just as sexually charged as I was.
Grandpa dropped the conversation about Mia. Luckily. I wasn’t in the mood to talk about Mia and my emotions. Or lack thereof. Besides aroused, I didn’t know what I was feeling.
She wasn’t wearing a ring on her finger anymore.
We still hadn’t talked about that. What did that mean?
Was she not engaged anymore? Did she just take it off for the vacation?
Surely that thing got snagged on everything.
I couldn’t imagine it was comfortable for her to wear.
Something that size and cut had to have bothered her skin every day.
I knew that about her. How did her fiancé not know? Or did he not care?
No more thinking about it, I reminded myself.
“I’m headed out to pull the weeds from the south end of the shore.
” I pulled down the key ring for Agate Harbor’s only pickup truck.
The wheel wells were rusted, and the paint was peeling off the hood, exposing the silver shell.
It started up on the first time only half the time, but it always purred like a kitten once it got going.
“You don’t need to do that,” Grandpa said. “We pulled weeds in the spring—that area should be good until fall.”
I squeezed my fingertips into my palm, the metal teeth of the keys I held in my right hand biting my skin. I was familiar with what it took to maintain a resort like Agate Harbors—I’d gone through the file cabinet of invoices and seasonal checklists as soon as I’d returned.
The weeding had already been done in the spring, but I needed something physical to do—something with my hands.
Sleep had been evasive since Mia had arrived.
I found myself unable to be still for any amount of time before she crept into my thoughts.
It wasn’t just how beautiful she’d gotten in the nine years I’d been gone; it was just Mia—the way she took up space in a room, the way she looked at me—like I was a prize. It was addicting to be around her.
Being stationary meant thoughts of Mia—and that I couldn’t have. The only time I saw her was when I ran into her around the resort, and the way my brain was addicted to her, wanting more and more of her time, I realized I needed to do something to distract myself.
I was going to distract myself from Mia with weeds.
Grandpa took one look at my clenched fists and nodded. “Go take care of those weeds.”
The truck was right outside the lodge, and I hopped in, holding my breath, hoping that it’d start on the first time. Ever since I’d been back home, loud noises made my heart race and my mind turn into a sack of shit.
The flashbacks started once I’d gotten home and had been happening with increasing frequency. I liked to call them immersive experiences. One minute I was in reality, and the next I was immersed in parts of my past.
I hadn’t realized that my service had affected me so deeply until the first Friday night back at Agate Harbors.
We always did a little firework show for the guests, and the loud explosions had sent me down a deep spiral.
They’d brought me back, the firework noises reminding me of the gunshots I’d heard day and night while serving in and around combat zones.
Dean had found me huddled up inside one of the walk-in freezers at the bar and made me promise I’d go back to my cabin to escape the noise the next Friday.
I did just as he’d asked—and I was fine, perfectly fine, a contributing member of society. I just couldn’t do fireworks, and I prayed every time I started the old truck that it wouldn’t backfire and pop. I didn’t need another breakdown. The first one had been embarrassing enough.
The engine roared as soon as I turned the key, and I let out a sigh of relief before driving it over to the building near the steps of the marina.
We kept all our maintenance equipment in there, hidden away from the guests and locked up.
We didn’t need any guests—or now my grandma—getting ahold of any of the mowers or power tools inside.
What I needed was on the other side of the building, where all the tools hung on hooks and the mowers were parked in a neat row.
I pulled a weed razor and a weed rake from their hooks on the wall.
From one of the shelves, I grabbed a blue tarp that I’d use to put the wet weeds on to dry.
Pulling weeds from the depths of the lake was a time-consuming process that today I was going to fully enjoy.
With a single toss, all three of the supplies I’d gathered landed in the bed of the truck. I brushed my hands off on my jeans as I walked over to the driver’s side. I was ready for some hard, manual, Mia-forgetting labor.
“Whatcha doing?”
Long legs with black bike shorts and a small white tank top leaned against the driver’s side of the truck. Mia. Her hair was in a ponytail, as it always was, and her freckles had gotten more pronounced since I’d seen her a day ago. Agate Harbors brought out the best in her.
So much for forgetting about her. I couldn’t unsee who was leaning against the Agate Harbors truck.
I coughed into my elbow, trying to clear the surprise of seeing her from my throat. “I was going to go out and weed today.”
“Oh.” Mia twisted her finger around the end of her ponytail. “I’m sorry to bother you. I guess I’ll leave you to it…” She pivoted away from the truck, her back to me as she walked away.
“Wait—”
She turned around, her ponytail swinging with her, settling on one of her shoulders.
I blinked a few times. My mind raced and then went blank. I wanted her to stay—I needed her to help me with something, anything. “Hey!”
Mia took a step back. “I’m right here. No need to yell.”
Shit. I was flustered and apparently incapable of controlling myself. I looked back at the building, trying to remember what was inside. Nothing. I was drawing a complete blank.
“Can you lend me a hand?” I asked eventually.
“Depends on what my hand’s going to be used for…”
I laughed. Probably too loud, motioning her to come over to the building I’d just walked out of. I punched in the keypad again, the bolt sliding open. The building illuminated with the motion-activated lights. I glanced around looking for something, anything that she could help me with.
A generator. It was a standard one, weighing in at about a hundred pounds, just heavy enough that she might not question whether I could handle it myself. I didn’t need one for weeding, but she didn’t need to know that. I just needed her to be around me for a little while longer.
“Can you help me carry this out to my truck?” I asked.
Mia looked down at the square generator. “Do you want me in the front or the back?”
I blinked, my brain short-circuiting.
“Bower?” Mia asked. “Do you want to carry the front or back?”
I shook my head. Snap out of it. “The back—I’ll take the back.”
She nodded, bending with her knees, grabbing hold of a set of handles.
I hurried around, grabbing the other set.
With a nod of my head, we both lifted at the same time and began carrying the generator toward the truck.
I tried to keep my hands low so that our height difference wouldn’t cause her to carry more of the weight.
This was all entirely unnecessary. We were only carrying this generator because I wanted Mia to be around me at all times.
We lifted the generator onto the tailgate, and I pushed it back into the truck bed, closing the tailgate now that I had all the “necessary” supplies.
Mia backed up, her face and neck flushed the most perfect shade of pink. There was no way I was letting her leave.
“Say,” I began, “I’m gonna need help unloading the generator once I’m down at the shoreline. I can call Dean to meet me down there…” A lie, a complete and total lie. I could lift the generator myself—and fuck, I didn’t need the generator to begin with.
“Oh!” Mia jumped. “I can help!”
“Really?” I took off my hat and watched her bite her lip between her teeth as I ran my fingers through my hair. “We might be down on the shore all day…”
“I’m on vacation, Bower,” she said. “I’ve got nothing but time.”
I brushed past her on my way to the passenger side of the two-door truck, yanking at the door’s handle a few times before it opened. “Hop in.”
I gestured to the ripped fabric seat that probably smelled like the lake.
This wasn’t what she was used to—not with a fiancé who could afford a rock the size I’d seen on her finger two weeks ago—but this was what I had to offer.
A seat in a run-down truck that could bring you anywhere within Agate Harbors’ property lines.
I held my breath until she sat down, and I shut the door. My fingers flexed as I rounded the front of the truck to the driver’s side.
As I climbed into the truck, I was enveloped by her smell that’d already permeated the cab. Fuck. I needed her to stay near me as long as possible.
Once again, I paused before I turned the key I’d inserted into the ignition, this time holding my breath too, knowing Mia was right beside me for this.
The key turned smoothly, and the engine roared to life.
My body relaxed, and I drove the truck back to the lodge—to my grandparents’ house, where I knew there’d be food.
“I forgot something…” I said before I threw the truck into park, left it running, and ran inside. The less I said the better. Around Mia I had a problem of saying too much of the wrong thing.
Chloe was sitting at the table with Grandma, both enjoying a cup of coffee. They stared at me with matching surprised faces as I grabbed a cooler from the pantry and started throwing in dry food and then moved to the refrigerator, adding cold food too.
“Is everything okay?” Chloe asked.
“It’s great!” I yelled before I slammed the cooler on the table, shaking both their cups of coffee. It took me three tries to zip it closed and four steps to make it back out the door.
Mia was still inside the truck, peering through the windshield, watching me. I stopped for a moment, willing my heartrate to slow and my shoulders to drop. This was my chance to impress her, show her what she was missing with that fiancé of hers.
I might not have been able to give her a ring like his, but I could provide her with a whole lot more than a sparkly diamond. I had the shores of Agate Harbors—memories that’d outlast a silly ring. Like Ruby had said, I just had to remind her.