Rob rummaged through the hall closet that held all manner of things he didn’t know what else to do with. An old tennis racket slipped and knocked against his elbow. He bit back a curse and rubbed the sore spot, seeing what he was looking for in the back corner. Grabbing the cardboard tube, a plastic case, and a tote bag, he detoured into the master bathroom and tossed a container of sunscreen into the tote. Moving to the kitchen, he added a couple of water bottles and a half-package of cookies. Lastly, he went to the basement and got a couple of folding chairs, blowing dust off of them before he hauled everything out to the car. Kari was just locking her front door as he closed the trunk on his motley collection of stuff.
“Where are we going?” She had a large pad of paper under her arm—bigger than the one she had used to create the motifs she painted on the wall—and a package of colored pencils in one hand.
“It’s a surprise,” he said, opening the passenger door for her with a little flourish.
“It’s a good thing I trust you,” she said, seating herself in the car. The statement made a tiny bloom of pleasure unfurl in his bloodstream, coursing throughout his body. He couldn’t remember the last time he had enjoyed getting to know someone like this.
“Are you a generally trusting person?” he asked, sliding behind the wheel.
“No. Not at all.” The bloom transformed to something more effervescent, more insistent. So. Her trust was not lightly given. It was special.
It was for him.
“Well, I hope your faith is justified with where I’m taking you.” He started the car and about twenty minutes later he was paying the entry fee at a state park in Gaithersburg.
“I didn’t even know this was here,” Kari said, looking out the window as they wound their way around to a little parking area near a large swath of grass that sloped gently away from the lake that was the centerpiece of the park.
“It’s a nice little gem. Does this look like it will provide inspiration enough?” He waved at the lake with its scattering of canoes and kayaks, the trees, the edge of the water where a couple of small children played, their parents nearby on a blanket, finishing what must have been a family picnic.
“More than enough. Thank you.” Her fingertips gently skimmed his forearm and Rob almost forgot how to breathe. “But what are you going to do?”
“I brought my old fishing rod. I’m going to drown some fake worms.”
Kari’s face lit up in a way that was completely unexpected. “You fish? You and Sam are going to get on like a house on fire.”
“She fishes?”
“She more than fishes,” Kari said. “She’s a fly fishing guide.”
Rob whistled. “That’s a really big deal. I’m just a guy who plonks weird rubber creatures in the water and doesn’t expect the fish to get fooled much. Fly fishing is on a whole other level.”
“She’ll just love that you appreciate the water. She was a weird kid about water of all kinds. Drove my mother crazy.”
Rob, about to unbuckle his seat belt, paused. “Why?”
“The shipwreck. Mor was terrified of water.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but your family history is very odd.” Rob reached into the backseat and snagged a worn, faded baseball cap, clapping it on his head. It had the Maryland Terrapin reared up on its hind legs and read, “Fear the Turtle” in block letters over the creature’s improbably snarling face.
“You have no idea,” Kari said, unbuckling her seat belt and grabbing her art supplies. Rob got out of the car and opened the trunk. When she joined him, he handed her a tote bag and a folding chair. A shipwreck, secrets, strange legacies—it wasn’t as if she’d trade her life for someone else’s. She just wished sometimes that everything was a little simpler.
“Snacks and seating,” he said, pulling components of a fishing rod out of a cardboard tube and assembling them. “Oh. And sunscreen.”
“Thank you. Nice forethought,” she said, amused at the Coppertone and the half-package of Oreos and bottles of water. In truth, she was still full from lunch. But it was a sweet thought.
“Let’s get you set up, Marie Cassatt. I’m looking forward to seeing what you can do with a set of pencils.”
She eyed him with approval as they walked across the grass. “Nice. Most men would have said Picasso or Monet or someone like that.”
“Never forget I have an outspoken, opinionated, gloriously feminist daughter who has handed me my ass on a nearly daily basis ever since she was tiny.”
She nodded. No, she couldn’t forget Mia. Even if she wanted to. And she didn’t want to. Maybe they could get to know each other a little. That might be nice. Rob’s affection for his daughter made Kari curious about who Mia was, unfiltered by Rob’s pride and adoration. The person who inspired all that parental love.
Kari stopped a few yards from the shore, far enough away to get some perspective while Rob continued walking to the edge of the water. Rubbing sunscreen on her skin, she mentally framed her composition, a tall tree on the on the opposite shore of the lake to anchor the upper right, the little dock jutting into the water to form the lower left of the frame. Rob shot her a grin, setting down what she figured was a tackle box and doing something with his rod. Rigging it out, she supposed.
Smiling to herself, she opened her pad to a fresh page and pulled out a pencil.
Rob brought his arm back and cast, the reel sizzling as the line fed out, the wobbly, bright red worm landing in the water with a fat plop. There was almost no chance he’d get so much as a nibble, but that wasn’t really the point. The sun was warm on his skin and the sound of a pair of children happily running around and making up some sort of game was pleasant. His breath caught in his throat as a great blue heron soared overhead. Someone in a canoe pointed as the bird drifted past, a silent ghost in the sky. Even the kids’ voices halted until it disappeared somewhere to Rob’s left where the shore curved out and the trees blocked it from his vision.
His reel ticked over as he brought his line in for another cast as the kids’ chattering returned and canoes and kayaks glided over the water. He wondered what Kari was sketching and even if she would share it with him. Mia flat-out refused to show her poetry to him and he swallowed his pride and respected her decision even if his curiosity nearly ate him alive.
He smiled as he cocked his arm back and cast again. They were a lot alike, Mia and Kari.
I like her. You should date her.
Cheeky little Mia. Pushing at him even when she had no idea she was doing anything at all.
Rob continued to cast, surprised at one point when something tugged at his line, then unsurprised again when his hook came up empty. Could be anything or nothing. Time went away. That was the point of fishing, as far as he was concerned. It was a form of meditation. Like painting a wall. A repetitive motion, breathing steadily, watching what unfolded in front of him. Color spreading across sheetrock, the sun traveling across the sky.
“Ahem.” The voice at his elbow made his arm jerk up against unexpected resistance. Turning his surprised gaze back to the tense line and the bowed rod, he tugged again, expecting a dead weight that would tell him he’d “caught” a branch, a root, or piece of garbage.
The line tugged back, a sure indicator that whatever he had was not mere dead weight. “Holy crap. I’ve actually caught something.”
“Holy carp, you mean?” Kari’s voice sounded amused, but he was too wrapped up in reeling the fish—yes, he was sure it was a fish now—to do anything other than huff a distracted laugh. The fish jumped then, a bright splash of water and coiling of muscle sheathed in iridescent scales. Rob laughed, reeling the tired fish in.
“Hey buddy. I’m sorry. I never even meant to hook you,” he murmured to the glistening animal, its sides heaving, gills gaping. Releasing the hook from the fish’s cheek, he lowered it back into the water, hovering his hand beneath the fish’s body until it revived and darted away with an angry flick of its tail.
Rob stood, shaking water from his hands, to see Kari curled around her sketch pad, eyebrows drawn together, pencil moving with a furious speed. “Can I see?” he asked.
“One minute,” she said, her teeth biting down on the corner of her lower lip. The action was unconscious and sexy as hell. He wanted to bite that lip, suck it into his mouth and release it slowly. Would she moan? Or was she the silent type? Would he have to interpret her reactions from tiny cues?
Somehow, he thought that was the way Kari would be in the bedroom. The thought made his breath shallow and his throat tight.
Oh, he had no business thinking those thoughts.
Why not? His inner demon prompted.
Because he’d determined he was no good at relationships.
But the woman he’d spent the last couple weekends who was starting to turn her sketch pad for him to examine, her eyes a little shy and maybe a little proud, might be giving the lie to that theory. He turned the idea over in his mind, forcing himself to think about the thoughts he always avoided. He did have good platonic relationships. He had one now with Kari. But those breakups had been so explosive. So hurtful. Maybe he was just afraid of being hurt. Of hurting Kari. Both ideas were awful. He looked at the pad. With just a few strokes, she had caught the moment where the fish came out of the water, swinging toward his outstretched hand. His face was surprised, mouth open slightly. Or maybe that was just because he had spoken to the fish as he took it in.
“You’re really good,” he said.
“Thanks.” She ducked her head, her fine hair falling across her cheeks, veiling her face.
“That can’t be all you did.” He wanted to take the pad from her hands, to leaf through her work and linger over it, but he wouldn’t be so presumptuous.
“No, it isn’t.” She flipped a page back and handed him the pad.
Kari didn’t look at the sketch. Instead, she looked at Rob’s face as his gaze swept over it. His eyes scanned the page, taking in the whole scene: the lake, the heron overhead, a kayak in the distance, the sweep of green grass down to the water. And then his gaze sharpened. He looked at her, his eyes smiling, lines fanning out from the corners.
“You drew Mia there with me.”
She nodded. She had drawn a young version of Mia, the little girl as she was in some of the photographs in Rob’s living room standing beside him, tiny hands holding a fishing rod, a miniature duplicate of her father.
“She’s…she’s always with you. So it seemed right somehow.”
“Always with me?” His brows drew together.
“You always talk about her. She’s always present in your mind.”
His mouth twisted in a sheepish smile and he looked back at the drawing in his hand. “Sorry.”
“No, don’t apologize. It’s sweet. Your relationship is so nice. I miss my dad. We had a different way between us, but I miss him. I like seeing the two of you together.” Her father had been a quiet, shy man—pretty much the opposite of gregarious Rob. But he’d supported her the way Rob supported Mia. She always knew he loved her.
“Nice of you to say.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Can I buy this from you?” Rob looked from the pad to her face, his expression eager.
“What?”
“Pay you money. So I can have this. Frame it. Put it on my wall.”
An absurd, nervous laugh—perilously close to a giggle—rose up out of Kari’s chest. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Because I like it and I want to look at it.”
Kari goggled at him. He looked sincere, but he had to be pulling her leg. “It’s just a sketch.”
“And people frame sketches and put them on walls all the time. It’s called hanging art. I’ll give you whatever you want for it.”
“I told you I don’t make things for money.”
In fact, she remembered quite clearly that she had said she did it for love.
He squinted at her and she had the prickly, uncomfortable feeling that he had remembered her exact words too. “I don’t want to insult you or make you do anything you don’t want to do. I just really, really like this.”
He was serious. It was finally sinking in. “If you really want it, you can have it.”
He looked from the drawing to her face. “Why won’t you let me pay you for it?”
“I wouldn’t even know where to begin to explain why.”
“Try anyway.”
She huffed a frustrated sigh. “First of all, it’s just an amateur sketch. Second of all, it makes me feel weird to try to put a price tag on something I enjoyed doing so much. Third of all…I have no idea how to value it.”
“How about we stop by the big craft store on the way home and look at frames. I’m not paying you less for the art than the frame it should go in. That will at least give us a point to start from.”
“I can’t believe you’re serious about this,” she said, covering her eyes with one hand.
“Absolutely serious. Let’s go.”