rate.
“All’s well that ends well, right?”
The captain appeared and made the rounds, greeting passengers and making small talk. It was part of Asher’s duty to mingle with the passengers as time would allow. He reluctantly dropped her hand. He didn’t want to leave her, but he didn’t want to ignore his position with the team, either.
“Go,” Daisy whispered, as if understanding his dilemma.
Asher noticed that the captain was making small talk with the Browns and joined them.
Janice smiled as her husband continued with the story. “And overboard she went. Good thing Asher kept his wits about him. Both Janice and I were frozen. We didn’t know what to do.”
“You did help, dear,” Janice reminded him.
“He did,” Asher said. “David helped me pull Ms. Lancaster out of the river.”
“Ms. Lancaster,” Captain Martin repeated, slowly shaking his head. “I should have known it was her. She seems to have a talent for trouble.”
Asher had to agree, although none of what happened was anything but coincidence.
“Thankfully, the cruise ends in a few days and she’ll be disembarking.”
A day Asher both dreaded and welcomed.
“I’d best check on the young woman myself,” the captain continued, as the Browns left. He frowned and added, “The company would frown upon a lawsuit.”
“I don’t believe Ms. Lancaster has any intention of taking legal action,” Asher assured him.
“That’s good to hear.”
When he glanced over to where Daisy had been sitting, he saw that she was gone. He could only assume she’d returned to her stateroom. As tempting as it was to check on her, he resisted. At first, he’d been determined to keep out of her way, but it seemed the universe was drawing them together.
His attempts to avoid her had been a miserable failure and he’d felt he had to explain himself. Now he felt closer to her than ever. The last thing he intended when they’d met the night before was to kiss her again. She’d asked where they were headed now. Asher wished he knew. One thing was certain: If he let her weave her way into his heart, this relationship was guaranteed to fail. Outside of this attraction, their lives had shockingly little in common.
He knew it.
She knew it.
They were both smart people who recognized the odds of making anything come of this shipboard romance. Nevertheless, this attraction they battled seemed electric. Every time they were together, Asher found himself smiling. He genuinely liked Daisy as a person.
Furthermore, he strongly suspected she was a different person in Chicago than the woman he had come to know in the Amazon. It would be far better for him to hold on to the memory of her as he knew her now. In Chicago she was Everly, confident, capable, and savvy, but here in the Amazon with him, she was Daisy, lovable, funny, and disaster-prone. Daisy was the woman he was attracted to, and he wasn’t sure he would feel the same way about Everly.
When the time came, he’d bid her farewell, put her out of his mind, and move on with his life.
So why did he feel like forgetting Daisy was going to be much harder than he wanted to accept?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The last days of the cruise flew by far too quickly to suit Everly. As part of the itinerary, the Amazon Explorer took a tributary off the Amazon River that led the ship back to the port in Manaus.
Janice and David Brown were staying on for an additional week and trekking deep into the rainforest to stay in an elaborate tree house. Everly had to give Janice credit; the older woman was willing to follow her husband to the ends of the earth and was determined to experience every adventure with him.
The cruise had been far and away better than Everly could ever have anticipated, and that was due in a huge part to Asher. She’d learned more about the fragile ecosystem of the rainforest and experienced adventures that would last her a lifetime. But it was only a small part of what had made this trip such a success. Everly had made good friends with the Browns and the Kotzes. Professor Kotz promised on their next trip to the States, they would visit America’s Windy City and connect with Daisy.
The one drawback was that she’d be leaving Asher behind. On the flight in, Everly had dreamed of finding a Latin lover, never expecting that she would meet a man who would turn her world upside down. Now that she knew Asher, she