“Don’t start giving me that ‘you can’t pour from an empty cup’ bullshit,” she snarled.
“A word of advice—don’t ever say that in front of my moms or they will corner you and spend a week lecturing you on self-care.”
He made a left and a right before pulling into the lot at the boat launch.
“I can’t believe you right now,” she said, crossing her arms. She sat there stubbornly as he unloaded the kayak, the cooler, and lugged both down to the water.
She had her arms crossed over her chest when he opened her door.
“Take me back to the house.”
“Nope,” he said, reaching across her and releasing her seat belt. “Come on, slugger.” He plucked her out of the vehicle, dragged a life jacket over her head, and threw her over his shoulder.
“I am going to kick. Your. Ass,” Maggie growled, enunciating each word.
He dropped her neatly into the boat, handed her a paddle, and kissed the hell out of her. She bit him on the lip—hard—but he kept right on kissing her. It didn’t take long before she forgot her mad and kissed him back. He teased her with teeth and tongue until she was limp and glassy-eyed before breaking the kiss.
“I’ll pick you up downstream,” he said, taking his hat off and plopping it on her head.
“I don’t have my phone!”
“Good.”
She looked at him like he’d just told her he burned down orphanages for fun. “What if there’s an emergency?” she demanded.
“There’s a walkie hooked to the cooler. Channel twelve if you run into any trouble. I’ll answer.”
“I meant what if there’s a work emergency.”
“Maggie, unless the house burns down or someone accidentally chops their leg off with a circular saw, there’s no such thing. I’ll pick you up downstream.”
“How? Where?” She was holding the paddle upside down and frantically stabbing at the water with it, trying to force the kayak back on land. It was adorable.
“You can’t miss it.” And with that, he shoved the kayak into the current and watched her float away.
“You are in so much trouble,” she shouted as she disappeared around the first bend.
41
“How do you steer this stupid thing?” Maggie asked no one as the river hurled her downstream. Silas was going to regret sending her to her death. She’d make sure of it. She’d haunt his ass.
“Uh-oh,” she said as the blue-green waters of the Payette River lined her up with a big, wet boulder that stuck out from shore like a menacing monster, crushing novice boaters for their insolence.
“Oh, no,” she chanted, thrusting one end of the paddle into the water. “Oh, shit.” It didn’t so much turn her away from the looming boulder as spin her around backward.
She braced for the impact, holding her nose in preparation for being tossed into the churning waters.
The impact was more of a bump, and the water, she realized as the kayak lazily turned with the current, was more meandering than churning.
Okay. So she wasn’t dead. The world didn’t end. But she was still mad.
The nerve of Silas Wright. To literally drag her away from work like she couldn’t take care of herself. Like she was some poor, fragile, stupid little girl who needed her hand held.
Comfortable in her grumpiness, Maggie flopped against the padded seat and looked up. There was a cloud above her, above the forest on both sides of the river, that looked distinctly like a white, fluffy penis.
It was hard to hold on to the mad while looking at a cloud penis. She reached for her phone, thinking she could send Dean a picture. Then she remembered it was somewhere back at the house that she’d been abducted from and got mad all over again.
“I can sit and float in my rage or I can learn how to use this thing and get back to work and murdering Silas faster,” she said to the yellow butterflies that silently flittered around a flowered shrub onshore.
It took her a few minutes, but she was pleased with how easily paddling came to her. She no longer felt like she was going to flip over every time she shifted her weight.
“Let’s do this,” she said with grim determination and dug one end of the paddle into the water and pulled.
She lasted ten minutes of hard paddling before she was sweating and in need of a break. Her arms and shoulders burned, and she made a note to search upper-body workouts online. If she ever got kidnapped and thrown in a kayak in a river again, she wanted to be able to last longer than ten minutes.