I looked back. Neither of us said anything. The river moved around the hull, the thrush working through its phrase again. I was very aware that I had paddled this woman to the quietest stretch of river I knew and done it without a single reason I could have defended out loud to anyone.
Cade would have understood. The others would have given me a hard time about it for six months. They wouldn’t have been wrong to do so.
“How’d you know about this place?” she asked. Her voice was quiet, fitted to the size of the space we were in.
“Been running this river a long time.”
She held my gaze. Those green eyes were doing something I didn’t have a description for. I’d stopped looking for one. She had a way of looking at a person that made you feel recognized—not assessed, not measured, just…seen. She looked at me like she’d been working something out for days, and had finally landed on the answer.
Suddenly, she leaned across the canoe and kissed me.
It was soft and deliberate and certain—no hesitation in it, no checking to see how I’d take it. Just the thing, handled, which was exactly how she moved through everything, I was figuring out. She didn’t pretend to be unsure of things. I didn’t know how rare that was until right now, sitting in a canoe in the most private bend of a river I’d spent fifteen years learning, with her hand finding the front of my shirt.
I brought one hand up and cupped her face and kissed her back.
The honeysuckle was everywhere—on the air, on the bank, trailing into the water on both sides of us. The canoe shifted beneath us, gently, and held. Her fingers curled into my shirt, and I knew this was going somewhere. I couldn’t wait to see where.
I’d run this section of river more times than I could count. Fifteen years, every season, every water level, every kind of light. I knew every bend and every hazard and every place the current did something unexpected.
I had never once stopped here for anything.
4
SURI
Iknew what I was doing when I got in that boat.
I’d known on the walk down to the outfitter, sandals in one hand, the evening still warm and the honeysuckle already on the air before I could even see the river. I’d known when he handed me the paddle without a word, and I took it without making a thing of it. I’d known in the quiet bend when I leaned across the canoe and kissed him.
I wasn’t pretending otherwise.
The canoe held still in the quiet water, the current barely working under the hull. The south bank was close enough that I could see the hemlock roots holding up the soil and the honeysuckle coming all the way down to the waterline. The river moved beneath us as Kyron Gibbs looked at me like I was worth the time it took to see.
I’d kept people at a careful distance my whole life. I was very good at it. I knew exactly how to be warm enough that no one noticed the wall, and how to fill conversation with enough surface that no one thought to look for what was underneath it. It had never felt like a strategy. It had just felt like how I was.
He’d taken that apart in a few days without trying.
I didn’t wait for words. I kissed him again, harder this time, tasting river air and heat on his tongue. He pulled back just enough to pick up the paddle and turn the canoe toward the south bank with a few quiet, deliberate strokes—no wasted motion, no announcement, like everything else he did. When the canoe nosed into the soft mud, he stepped out first, water swirling around his river sandals, and offered me his hand.
I took it. My own sandals sank into the soft, root-woven earth as I climbed onto the bank. The honeysuckle curtained us from the main channel, but the open sky still arched overhead and the river whispered past, loud enough to cover small sounds but not loud enough to hide us if anyone drifted by. The thrill of it shivered down my spine.
He pulled me against him, one big hand sliding under the hem of my tank top to press warm against my lower back. “You sure?” he murmured against my mouth.
“I knew what I was doing when I got in that boat,” I whispered back. My fingers curled into his T-shirt.
He lowered me onto the mossy bank like I was fragile. The earth was cool and giving beneath my back, the scent of honeysuckle heavy enough to drown in. Kyron knelt between my legs, his hands slow and deliberate as he slid my shorts and underwear down. He left my tank top and sandals on—something about the half-dressed urgency of it made my pulse hammer.
He looked at me for a long moment, then lowered his head.
The first touch of his tongue on my clit was warm and wet and shocking. I gasped, hips jerking. He made a low, pleased sound against me and did it again, slower, tongue tracing, exploring, learning exactly what made my breath hitch.
One of his hands held my thigh open, while the other slid up under my tank top to cup my breast, thumb brushing my nipple until I whimpered. The open air, the distant call of a bird, theknowledge that anyone rounding the bend might see us—it all wound the pleasure tighter.
“Kyron—” His name came out shaky.
He sucked gently on my clit and slid one thick finger inside me, curling it just right. I came hard, thighs trembling around his shoulders, a broken cry escaping before I could bite it back. The orgasm rolled through me in long, pulsing waves while he kept licking, gentler now, drawing it out until I was panting and boneless.
He kissed the inside of my thigh, then my hip, working his way up. When he reached my mouth, I could taste myself on him. My hands shook as I tugged at his shorts. He helped me push them down, and I wrapped my fingers around him for the first time.
