Graham pulled the Phillipson tube out of the back of his station wagon, assembled the rod and strung it, tossing the tube and the bag back into the car and grabbing the rest of his gear before he stretched an arm to close the hatch. There was only one other vehicle in the little parking lot. An older Ford pickup, its dark blue paint a little battered, sat on worn tires on the gravel lot. Graham walked past the truck to the trailhead, his hiking boots first crunching on the gravel then softly padding over the leaf mould of the trail.
The river glistened through the trees and a woman strode down the path just ahead of him, brown ponytail bobbing against her neck in a familiar way. She stopped, turned, and recognition bloomed in his chest, a surge of absurd pleasure. The woman from the library. The tall one of the pair of students he had seen the other day.
“Hi,” he said, then felt foolish, realizing she probably had no idea who he was.
“Hello.” Her pretty eyes were a dark, clear blue. And wary. They flicked from his face to his boots to the rod in his hand.
He looked past her, further down the trail. She was carrying fishing gear. A lot of it. Maybe they were going to share the guide. But there was nobody on the trail ahead of them, all the way to the river. And only the one truck at the trailhead. Graham looked back at her. Her eyes were still watchful.
“Do you know when Sam is getting here?” he asked.
Her brows drew together. “Is this a joke?”
Yikes. Somehow he’d stepped in it. Why would it be a joke? He took a step back and raised his empty hand, mindful of what some of the women he worked with had told him. Being alone with a strange man is scary—you never know who’s going to be a bad guy. And if his attraction to her was showing through… Yeah. Yikes.
“No joke. I was told to come here and meet Sam.” He hefted his rod. “A fishing guide. Well.” He nodded at her gear. “Not that it looks like you need one with all that gear and the vest and whatnot...” He was babbling. He needed to shut up.
She folded her lips into her mouth in evident irritation. Looked away at the river and blinked a couple of times. Looked at him again. “Don at Slow Drift told you to meet a guy named Sam. To take you fishing.”
“Yeah.” Graham’s brain began to spin like a hamster wheel—and just as uselessly. “I’m sorry. Did I say something wrong?”
“Son of a—” The woman’s mouth compressed into a flat line. She took a deep breath, straightened her spine, and looked at him again. “I’m Sam.”
Professional. She needed to be professional. This had to be some kind of setup—payback for not taking that bachelor party out.
She was going to kill Don for this.
No. she had to stay cool, because to blow up in front of a paying client? That was just the kind of thing that would get around. She might quit Slow Drift after this, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to do anything to get a reputation in the tight-knit, communicative angling community.
She could just see the chat boards light up with tales of her losing it in front of a client in the worst possible way. Unstable. Unprofessional. Oversensitive.
Bitch.
Swallowing, she looked at the guy, whose intense air, expensive-looking jacket of dark green waxed cotton, black-framed glasses, and closely trimmed beard just screamed “Dude with money to burn on fishing trips.” Not someone she wanted to alienate.
She held out her hand. “Sam—Samantha—Halvorsen. I’m your guide.”
The guy shook it slowly, his bewilderment not fading. “Graham Evans. I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting…”
“A woman?” Sam’s attempt at a light tone fell flat. She sounded brittle and defensive, even to herself.
His eyes flew wide and his hand tensed in hers. “That’s not it.”
Oh. Right. Here we go.
“No, really. It wasn’t like…” Graham—Mr. Evans—floundered. Jesus. They hadn’t even established what they were going to call each other and this was already a total shit-show.
Sam waited, trying to summon something that resembled patience and professional gravitas. His hand was gripping hers far too hard. And far too long. Strange, then, that it didn’t feel overly familiar or creepy. He stared at it, then released his hold and shoved his fingers through the sandy blond hair that was long enough to brush the tops of his eyeglass frames.
“There must have been a mix-up.” He held up his hand as she folded her arms across her chest, the two rods held in one fist digging into her palm with the force of her grip. “My brother—he had a bachelor party? A fly fishing trip. Ian was impressed and recommended that I try it. The guy who took them out—I thought Ian said his name was Sam. I…”
Realization flooded through Sam and she closed her eyes. She wasn’t sure if it felt like relief or nausea. “Not Sam. Xan. Xander. He was the guy who took that group out.” She opened her eyes again.
“Oh.” Chagrin colored his face.
She pressed her lips together, assessing the dawning realization in his expression. “And your brother was awed by the mountain man.”
Graham Evans gave her a weak smile, a dimple showing through the sandy beard covering his cheeks. “Yeah. Something like that.”
Sam nodded, feeling like a door was slamming shut in her face. “Yeah. Great. Do you want to reschedule with Xan?” She could practically hear her checkbook crying, the money from this trip draining out like so much sand through the proverbial hourglass, her ability to make rent without eating all dollar-store ramen all the time looking more and more tenuous by the moment.
He looked bewildered. “What? Why?”
Sam waved toward the river. “You signed up for the mountain man experience. I’m…neither a mountain nor a man. And definitely no mountain man.”
His grip on the Phillipson rod tensed and he looked at the bamboo as if it held some sort of answer. “Yeah. Well. I’m not looking for what my brother was looking for.”
“What are you looking for?”
“In general? The opposite of whatever Ian wants. More specifically, right now I’d just like to go fishing.”
“I see.” She didn’t, but if it would make him keep the appointment, she would play along. She waved at the path leading to the river’s edge. “So. Want to learn to cast?”
Just like that, the day was back on. Graham had been afraid she would march to her truck and drive off, leaving him standing on the trail like an idiot with his…rod in his hand. And he really wanted to fish now. Something he’d never been able to say before. He nodded and she moved toward the river, Graham trailing behind.
“Why did you think the mix-up was a joke?” he asked the back of her head.
She glanced over her shoulder. “Why don’t you tell me what you’d like me to call you first?”
His face heated at her avoidance of his question. “Graham is fine. But my friends and family mostly call me Gray.”
“Okay, then Graham.” She stopped and he thought he saw a spark of wariness return to her eyes. But she was right. They didn’t know each other. Why would he assume she would feel comfortable enough with him to use his nickname?
But he did like the way she said his name. Properly, with two syllables articulated. Not the flat, single-syllable pronunciation that made him sound like a metric measurement on a kitchen scale.
“Why don’t you tell me some of your history with fishing so I can figure out where we should start?” she asked. They had reached the bank of the river and she was following a less well-trodden path along its edge.
Graham’s rod snagged on a tree branch and he swore under his breath. Tugging only made it worse, somehow. Sam turned, saw the difficulty, and stepped back, releasing the rod with ease. Without a word, she walked back along the river bank, moving with an unhurried stride.
Did she like hiking? She’d be a good trail companion. Quiet, leaving little or no trace of her passing on a hike.
“Well?” She glanced back at him. Crap. She had asked him a question. His history with fishing.
“Um. My father. My late father.”
“He was the source of the Phillipson rod?” She led him to a clearing a few yards away from the river.
“Yes. He loved fishing. He left me the rod in his will. Wanted all of us to love it as much as he did.”
“All of you?”
“My brothers and me. One older, one younger. The younger one was the one who recommended…the other guy.” Dammit. Why did he have to keep shoving his foot in every time he opened his mouth?
But Sam didn’t seem to notice his faux pas. Or ignored it. “And how long has it been since you’ve been out?”
He thought back, surprised when he calculated the answer. “About fifteen years.”
She nodded and attached a piece of yarn to his line. “Okay, let’s do some casting practice before we put the waders on. Let me see your form.”
While there was nothing risqué about her request, Graham’s face heated anyway. Maybe it was the intense concentration in those direct, blue eyes. Concentrating on him. He tried to remember his father’s casting advice, but…nothing. He could remember the water, the boom of the old man’s voice, but nothing specific. Hoping that muscle memory would take over, he stripped off some line, lifted the rod, bent his elbow, and cast the yarn across the clearing. He looked at her, but her expression was inscrutable.
“Again, please?” she said.
He tried again. Glanced at her. She nodded for him to go again. Several more casts later, he stopped and looked at her and licked dry lips, his heart thudding heavily. “Well?”
Her eyes flicked from the rod to his face, but she didn’t say a word.
Sam had seen a lot of bad casting in her career, but she’d never seen someone claim to have experience with this little form. And the Phillipson was a beautiful piece of gear. So sad to see it being flung around like that. She scratched her cheek, trying to come up with a diplomatic way to get started.
“I’m pretty terrible, aren’t I?” Graham said without embarrassment.
She licked her lips. “I’ve…seen better.”
“In my defense, it’s been a long time.” He looked at the rod in his hand as if he had never seen it before, examining its entire length.
“How about this—while I appreciate your desire to go old-school, let’s start with something easier to handle.” She took the Phillipson out of his hand and leaned it against a tree a little way away. “Here. Try this.” She handed him one of the rods she’d carried to the river, correcting his grip on the cork handle.
Grasping his wrist, she squeezed, saying, “Keep it locked. You’re not going to get anything out of getting your wrist into the action.” She adjusted his elbow, tucking it in by his side. “Don’t let this flail around. Lastly, remember you’re going to have to load the rod first. Strip off a length of line and then forward and back until you have it in the air. Then cast.”
His cheeks reddened and she released him, aware of the way he smelled—spicy soap over the pleasant, earthier odor of his waxed jacket.
She stepped backward. “Now. Try again.”
He glanced at her, a little humor in his expression mixed with evident nervousness. “You sure?”
“You’re paying to learn how to cast, but if you’d rather do something else, that’s fine.”
His face got even redder and Sam clenched her teeth. What was it about today? It wasn’t the first time she had gotten off on the wrong foot with a client, but she was almost always able to retrieve the situation, right the ship, move on.
“Sorry,” he said.
Wait, what? Why was he apologizing? Sam frowned. “Why?”
“I’m not exactly being the best student here. And I ought to know better, given my line of work.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’m a librarian at Montgomery University.”
Sam realized her mouth was open. She shut it. “Okay. That’s weird. I’m a grad student there.”
He rubbed his chin, lines fanning out from the corners of his gray eyes. “I know. Or, at least I figured. I’ve seen you in the reading room.”
Blinking, Sam tried to recalibrate, fought the urge to step back. “Okay. So, you know who I am, but you don’t know who I am. I’m confused.”
Graham shook his head, raising the hand that wasn’t holding the fly rod. “No, I mean, I recognized you when I saw you on the trail. That’s all.”
“Oh.” She never thought about being observed at school. But apparently she was. And by this man who, if he wasn’t a client, she would find quietly appealing.
“Well. Page the Small World Department and put them on the case. Want to try that cast again?”
Graham swallowed hard and tried another cast, this time including the rod loading stage. This wasn’t apparently as sloppy as his first few tries, but Sam corrected his form again. Her sure touch, impersonal as it was, made his pulse accelerate. He had an absurd desire to flail his elbow, flop his wrist, maybe sag at the knees for good measure, if it meant she would fasten her warm fingers on his skin again.
Pull it together, Gray. This woman was doing a job. And she was a student at Montgomery U. That was a double helping of hands off. He mimed another cast without thinking.
“Good. Much better.” Sam’s blue eyes shone with approval and Graham felt a surge of a different kind of pleasure.
“In other words, not a hundred percent terrible?”
Sam looked at him for what felt like forever, the only sound the rushing of the river. “You lose that self-deprecating thing that’s getting in your way and you might actually learn something.” Her face collapsed from a cool, expressionless mask to total mortification and she smacked her hand to her forehead. “I’m sorry.”
Graham swallowed. “Why are you sorry? I’m the one being thickheaded.”
“You’re not. I’m the one who’s supposed to be a professional here. And…” She paused, looking at the river, her eyes scanning the flow. “I’m not exactly doing the most bang-up job of it.” She sighed. “In fact, I’ve been off my game from the start.”
“You’re fine. I feel like I’ve been stepping in it from the beginning.”
Her mouth skewed to the side and she squinted at him. “Maybe we should start again?”
Graham twitched the rod. “Does that mean I should go back to casting like an arachnophobe trying to smash a spider with a broom made of cooked spaghetti?”
She tilted her head, humor lighting her expression for the first time, making her face even more attractive. “Maybe we don’t need to go that far.” She stuck out her hand again. “Samantha Halvorsen. Please call me Sam.”
Graham moved to shake, realized the rod was in his right hand, fumbled it to his left, and wrapped his fingers around hers. “Graham Evans.”
“No nicknames?” The humor was still there in her expression and he was glad that he had been absurd if it kept the laugh lines crinkling at the edges of her eyes.
He feigned a shocked expression. “Only for my friends and family. We’ve just met, madam.”
Her lips pursed, but her eyes twinkled with humor. “True.”
Realizing he was still holding her hand, he released it.
“Shall we try your…first cast?” she asked, continuing to play along.
“Right.” He put the rod back in his right hand, wrapping his thumb around the handle.
“No,” she said. “Fingers like this, the rod rests here. Thumb points toward the tip.” Her hands moved over his, shifting and correcting his grip. He told himself he hadn’t carelessly held the rod on purpose.
He was a terrible liar. Especially to himself.
Sam was ninety-nine percent sure Graham was being a doofus on purpose. But instead of being exasperated, she was amused. Unlike so many of the guys she had to deal with every day, he treated her like a professional. And he had an appealing vein of self-awareness and self-deprecating humor.
Don and Mike should take lessons.
Her shoulders settled and she almost laughed. She hadn’t even realized how tense she had been until this small, seemingly inconsequential interchange. Stepping back from him, she nodded. “Try a cast now.”
His eyes slid sideways at her, as if he was checking for something, then returned to the river. His arm bent and extended, rocking back and forth in a more fluid motion. He looked like he was getting some muscle memory back—it made sense if he had been raised in the sport.
Fifteen years. She couldn’t imagine not fishing for fifteen years. She’d fish every day if she could.
“Again, please?”
He rolled his shoulders, inhaled, and tried again. His form wouldn’t be featured in any expert casting videos on YouTube, but it was good enough to continue.
“Good.” He grinned and the reaction to her mild praise was enough to derail her for a second.
Get yourself together. He is a client.
Total hands-off territory here. No matter how appealing his too-long hair, glasses, and beard were. No matter how delicious he smelled.
Enough. Shut that right down.
She bent to get her fly box out of her bag, pulling out a woolly bugger and attaching it to his line. “Come on.” Moving to a point on the bank that overlooked a wider spot of the river, she took the rod and stripped off a length of line, letting it pool at her feet, then handed the rod to him. She pointed at a point close to the opposite bank where the water circled in a small pool before continuing on downriver. “Try to land the fly there.”
Graham swallowed. Sam forced herself to watch his stance, his posture, his arm. Not the more intimate mouth or throat. He cast short, the woolly bugger plopping halfway to the pool.
“Sorry.” His eyes slid sideways as he stripped the line in and Sam resisted the urge to touch his arm.
“Don’t apologize. You’re here to learn. Try again.”
He nodded, his mouth firming and his eyes focusing on the pool. His arm came up again, bent, rocked, and extended.
“Shit.”
Sam bit her upper lip, trying not to laugh. This time his cast had flown out hard, overshooting its target, and the fly had caught in a tree on the other bank. Reaching out, she wrapped her fingers around the line and gave it a strong tug. The fly was stuck fast, the tree branch bouncing as she pulled.
“What do I do now?” His eyes swiveled from her face to the rustling branch, responding to her tugs but not letting go of the fly. She let go of the line.
“No worries. Reel it in.”
“Really?”
“Really. I’ll let you know if the rod won’t take it.”
He began to wind, the reel clicking slowly. When the slack was gone, he gave a tentative pull on the rod. The branch it was caught on swayed, fluttering the new leaves that had just started to emerge.
“Harder,” she said. “Give it a good yank. Just keep the rod and line straight and the rod won’t break.”
He glanced at her, tightened the reel another few clicks. He leveled the rod and gave it a quick jerk. The tippet at the end of the line gave as she knew it would and he reeled in the excess.
“Crap. The fly is gone.”
“That’s fine. I can tie more.”
“You tied that fly?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Now I feel doubly guilty.”
“No big deal.” But her cheeks had grown hot at his concern for her. She took the end of the line, pulled another length of tippet off the spool attached to her vest, and tied it to the leader. Pulling the fly box out again, she selected another woolly bugger. Before she could tie it on, his hand extended toward her, palm up.
“May I?”
“Sure.” She gave him the fly and he examined it, his eyes large behind the black frames. She shifted, self-consciousness rising in her. “It’s just a basic fly. Some of the guys think it’s beneath their dignity to fish a woolly bugger.”
His eyes lifted to hers and that peculiar intensity she had seen earlier was back. “Some guys are idiots. This is really nice.”
Sam’s eyes lifted to his and fixed him in place, suspicion radiating off of her. “I thought you hadn’t been fishing in fifteen years?”
He raised his hands, rod in one, fly in the other. “I haven’t. But my father had strong opinions on tying. This is a really pretty fly.”
She glanced at the fly he held with such delicate care. “Okay. So, tell me why you think it’s well-tied.”
He looked at it again, touching it with a reverent fingertip. “The body is beautiful. It’s smooth on the hook shank and the…I can’t remember what this fuzzy stuff is called…”
“The hackle.”
“The hackle is even and light. Not lumpy.” He shrugged. “I don’t have the vocabulary, but it looks like a fly. Not a caterpillar.”
She barked a brief laugh. “Fair enough.”
“Sorry. I know just enough to have an ill-informed opinion.”
She took the fly from his fingers again and attached it to the line—tippet, he reminded himself. Terminology was coming back to him in fits and starts, his vocabulary creaking open like a rusted cellar door.
His gaze moved from her hands—he was too fixated on her hands—to the water, swirling and dancing in the morning light filtering through the trees. The slight chill in the air was invigorating and the gentle rustling of the trees, the soft rush of the river, and birdsong the only sounds. The quiet sank into his bones and muscles and his shoulders let go of tension he didn’t even know he was holding.
“This is really nice. It’s beautiful out here,” he said, looking back at her.
She released the fly, letting it dangle from the end of his rod, and looked at him with an amused expression. “People don’t do this because it’s a chore.”
He huffed a laugh, looking at the swirling water. “Most people, no. But Gray Evans as a kid? If it wasn’t a chore, it was a duty.”
The weight of her gaze settled on him like a blanket. “And yet you came back to it.”
His jaw tightened in an ironic smile. “I’m a much more well-rounded adult.”
“I think that describes almost anyone. But why did you feel the need to try again? And why now?”
“It’s complicated.”
“The Phillipson rod?”
“Yeah, but not just that. I wasn’t a kid who wanted to do much. I wanted to be left alone to read.”
“Hence the librarian thing.”
He looked sideways at her. “Sort of. It’s not like I spend my workdays reading.”
“Fair enough.”
Graham paused, considering his words carefully. He was dangerously close to spilling his entire guts to this poor woman. She was too good a listener, too kind. “My dad…I always felt like he wanted us to be him when he took us fishing. And my brothers pretty much did just that. Now? I don’t know. Maybe he really did just want to share something he loved. He’s gone. I can’t ask him.” That hollow ache at the loss of him, the renewed feeling of loss for his mother, threatened to sink his peaceful mood.
“But he did leave you the rod.”
“Yeah. His best one. To the son who dropped the hobby like a hot potato the minute he was on his own.”
“So, you think he was trying to send you a message?”
He lifted his hands, the empty one palm up to the blue sky. “I have no way of knowing. But it seemed like a good idea to at least try again on my own terms.”