Chapter 5
It tookthem fifteen minutes to get back to the boathouse, and Frank’s cheeks hurt from smiling by the time Grace’s kayak nudged the dock. One of the young guys was quick to help her out, and after she shot Frank a quick glance over her shoulder, she briskly headed inside.
He laughed again.
Sure, she was a newbie to paddling, but she’d handled it all with a hell of a lot of courage. And she was kind of adorable in her big-ass life jacket. She was just a little bit of a thing.
A little bit of a thing with a nice, curvy behind. He’d noticed it in an abstract way at breakfast, but when she was draped over the kayak out on the lake it had been harder to ignore.
He hadn’t even tried not to look. It hadn’t hurt anything, and it had felt kind of good to appreciate a woman’s form.
Now he let himself have one last, surprisingly thirsty gaze at her long legs and lovely hips, delightfully presented in the swim suit that peeked out from under the life jacket. Then he hauled himself out of the water and took care of stowing his kayak away.
“She did all right out there, didn’t she?” The question came from one of the counsellors as Frank leaned his oar back in its spot on the wall.
“She sure did.”
“You had good eyes. We thought, uh, she had more experience than that.”
“She was fine,” he said brusquely. He wasn’t their commander. It wasn’t his place to dress them down for the minimal instruction they’d given a total beginner. And Grace had a way of carrying herself that hid any discomfort.
He caught himself up short.
Huh.
Yeah, she did. And he’d spent yesterday thinking the worst of her for being manic and forceful, but she wasn’t really either of those things.
Sarcastic, lippy, and pessimistic…shewasall of those things. But he knew how to handle that kind of personality.
And he kind of liked it.
Grace stepped out of the boathouse, dressed again, her tote bag swinging loosely on one shoulder. The only sign of her adventure on the lake was her damp hair piled high on her head in a loose bun.
“What’s next?” he asked, holding his hands wide.
She looked at him up and down. “Do you want to change into something dry?”
“Nah, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
He shrugged. “We could find some drinks and sit in the sun for a while. There’s a breeze. I’ll dry out soon enough.”
So that’s what they did. They stopped at the picnic table he’d been sitting at when he’d realized she didn’t know the first thing about how to paddle a kayak, and he grabbed the bottle of beer he’d abandoned. It was warm now, so when they got to the main lodge he traded it for a cold one.
Grace ordered a gin and tonic, with extra lime and extra tonic in a highball.
“Complicated order.”
She smiled faintly. “I’m a complicated woman.”
He learned more about how complicated she was over the rest of the afternoon, after they found a sunny spot behind the main lodge. Somehow, in short, self-deprecating bursts, she revealed a bit about her divorce—mutual and a long time ago, but still a source of some understandable resentment—and a lot about her life choices since then, which she’d learned to prioritize around the equal and hard-to-balance values of frugality and luxurious reward.
“I bet you’ve travelled a lot with the navy,” she said as she sipped her drink. “Anywhere amazing?”
“More intense than amazing, although I always enjoy visiting Hawaii and Japan.”
“Japan is on my list.”
