Four Weddings and a Swamp Boat Tour - Erin Nicholas Page 0,65
“They look like turtle eggs floating in the water. They just swallow them. They don’t taste them.”
“Those can’t be good for them,” Paige said, wrinkling her nose.
“I mean, they’re basically dinosaurs.” Mitch shrugged. “As Bailey says, you don’t get to be eight million years old by not being adaptable. I’d think if something like marshmallows could kill them, they wouldn’t still be walking around millions of years later.”
“Yeah. You’ll get to meet her at the wedding, if not before. She sometimes stops down to say hi even when Chase isn’t here.”
“And she’s really into alligators?”
“It’s her job. She works for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and specifically studies alligators and frogs.”
“And she’s fine with the marshmallows?”
“Nope. She wants us to stop doing that. But she admits that it would take more than a blob of sugar to really hurt these guys.”
Paige laughed lightly. “Got it. Well, let’s not get the blobs of sugar out today. I don’t need the dinosaurs coming over here.”
He just hugged her closer to his side.
“How many people can fit on one of the bigger airboats?” she asked after a moment.
“About twenty or twenty-five.”
“Do you have any idea how many people Maddie and Owen are inviting to their wedding?”
“No idea.”
“Huh.” Paige chewed her bottom lip, studying the cove they were floating in.
“But we could get about sixty-five people on one of the pontoon boats.”
Paige pivoted quickly on her seat to face him. “What? Really? You have pontoons?”
“Yep. They’re covered too.”
Her eyes widened. “So, we could hang things from the cover? Decorations?”
“Sure. Probably.”
“Is there a sound system?”
“There is. We use them for sunset cruises and bachelor or bachelorette parties, birthday parties, that kind of stuff.”
“That would be perfect.”
“We can’t take them down every waterway. Some are too narrow, but if you just want to get a boatload of people out on the bayou, that would be a way to do it.”
“Yes!” She pivoted back to look around. “Could you get it down to the place where Maddie almost shot the alligator?”
She felt Mitch shift, and when she glanced at him again, he was looking at her with a mix of amusement and puzzlement. “Who told you that story?”
“Sawyer.”
“Really?” Mitch looked sincerely surprised.
“Yeah. He came into the office before one of his tours. I asked him how he met Juliet, and he told me about how he found her literally hanging off the dock one morning. And how she and her brother came down here to rebuild the dock after Chase and his buddies crashed an airboat into it.” Paige narrowed her eyes, studying Mitch. “Why do you look totally amazed by this?”
“Because Sawyer just isn’t… chatty. He’s not the one I would have expected to be telling you stories.”
Paige gave him a little smile. “Maybe I’m very charming.”
His smile was a lot more wicked. “Oh, I find you very charming. I’ll tell you any story you want me to tell.”
“I’m going to keep that in mind.” She wanted to hear all of his stories. She shouldn’t. That would make it so much harder to keep him in the casual-fling category. But looking into his eyes right now, she could admit, to herself only of course, that he’d already jumped over to the oh-shit-I’m-in-trouble category.
“And then Sawyer told you about Maddie and Owen?” he asked, clearly intrigued by Sawyer’s talkativeness.
That made Paige feel good. She wasn’t one to sit around and gossip and trade stories for fun. At least not before now. But today, she’d been asking for a purpose. Still, it did make her feel good to think Sawyer had been comfortable talking to her after only knowing her for a few hours. And she’d enjoyed the stories. Even if they hadn’t been fuel for her ideas about the weddings, it had been fun hearing someone talk about how they’d met their true love.
Paige almost rolled her eyes at herself. She wasn’t into love stories. She’d heard dozens over the years. Her family was love-crazy. Every single couple had a story that had been told over and over again.
But now that she thought about it, she really did like the story of how her grandparents had eloped. And how her dad had first developed a crush on her mom in third grade when she brought a caterpillar to school for Show and Tell.
She realized that she couldn’t remember the details of how her other grandparents had gotten engaged. She knew they’d met at a dance but didn’t remember how