“My grandpa was a fly fisherman. He left the book to me, and I keep trying to read it.”
“Trying?”
“Not a lot of downtime lately.”
“What’s lately?”
“Six years?”
“Military?”
He considered her. “Not anymore.”
“I grew up in a military family, so I get it.” She pointed to the worn spine. “It looks well loved.”
“My grandfather said Maclean understood something most people miss.”
“Which is?”
Dakota set the book down, turned it so the light caught the cover—the river, the mountains. “That some people can’t be helped. Can’t be saved. But maybe our saving them isn’t the point.”
She frowned. “What is the point?”
“Love. Our job is to love. Even when it’s hard. And even when it hurts. Even when they betray us.”
Oh brother. Less than an hour into the flight and he was getting philosophical. He lifted a shoulder. “Or maybe he just liked fishing.”
But Jayden was looking at him, her eyes a complicated brown with layers of gold.
The plane bumped, turbulence as they climbed, and it knocked her gaze away.
“Well, I’m going to read a story about women nurses in Vietnam.” She pulled up her tablet and opened her reading app.
“Were there women nurses in Vietnam?”
“There are always women nurses in combat. But no one ever sees them.” She put her seat back. “It’s why they’re forgotten.”
The plane climbed into the darkening sky. Below them, the Pacific stretched endless and black.
She slipped in her earbuds and opened her book.
He did the same.
And didn’t read a word.
TWO
Dakota had made a tactical error.
He realized it as he stared at page forty-seven of A River Runs Through It for the third time without absorbing a single word. The problem wasn’t the book. The problem was the woman sitting beside him, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her arm near his.
They’d been quiet for twenty minutes since their conversation about his grandfather. A comfortable quiet, the kind that didn’t need filling. She’d picked up her tablet. He’d opened his book.
He hadn’t read a page. Mostly because the air seemed charged, a tingle between them.
Even when they betray us.
Good grief. She was a stranger on a plane, and somehow he’d let her see the part of him that still ached for his grandfather’s fishing cabin, for sunrise on cold water, and a time when regret didn’t burn a hole through him.
