packs to the canoe. Over the rim of her cup, she’d followed his broad, flexing back as he’d loaded the vessel, wondering if he understood how much his pained confession had complicated her feelings even more.
Dylan said, “Let’s take a break.”
She startled at his voice, dropping the rhythm of her paddling. They hadn’t exchanged more than a few words since they’d set off from their camp hours ago, and she’d slipped into the meditative rhythm of a long haul.
She said, “Is it lunchtime already?”
“Almost.”
She glanced up at the narrowing sliver of sky above, trying to make sense of the position of the sun.
“There’s a cove up ahead,” he said. “It’s a good place to stop and an even better place for a swim.”
So he wasn’t trying to push her endurance anymore. That was good, because her arms felt like overcooked linguini. “We’re still in familiar territory for you, then?”
“At the edge of it. Pops only took us camping on weekends, so we never went deeper into the park than a day or two.”
“Did he ever attempt this trip himself?”
Her question was related to the expedition, neutral ground, but in truth, her curiosity about Pops felt very personal. Everything about Dylan’s raucous family intrigued her, even his sister’s odd warning.
“Pops talked once or twice about doing it.” Dylan must have twisted his paddle, because the canoe veered toward the north shore. “But he grew up poor. Taking weeks off from work to relive his youth, and risk the voyage, just wasn’t something he could bring himself to do.”
“A different generation,” she said. “I get it.”
“Were your grandparents like that?”
Her ribs tightened. Why did he keep asking her personal questions? She was the reporter here. Yet she couldn’t help remembering the pictures on the wall of the house she’d grown up in, sepia-tinted photos of ancestors she’d never paid much attention to, until she no longer had a chance to ask her parents about them.
“So I’ve been told.” She lifted her paddle to let the canoe glide past an outcropping and into a crescent-shaped cove of sun-splashed water. “Is this the place?”
She waited for him to make a remark on her deft little dodge, but he just said, “Yes,” and propelled the canoe deeper into the cove.
“Pull up to that space between the boulders on the bank,” he said. “It’s just slim enough for a canoe or two.”
She stepped over the gunwale when the canoe neared shallow water and dragged the vessel up the bank. Dylan leaped out of the back with the grace of a cat, sinking thigh-deep in the cove. He waded up the incline to dry land, where she ceded the bow to him and the strength of those tanned, flexing arms.
“Swim first,” he said, once he’d tied the canoe to an overhanging bough. He grasped his T-shirt at the back of his neck. “Let’s eat lunch after.”
Shirt off, Dylan straightened up to unfold the crunch of his rippled abs. She pressed her thighs together against an involuntary throb, but didn’t look away as he tossed the tee into the canoe, strode into the water, and ducked his head to make a shallow dive.
She fumbled to find the hem of her own T-shirt. Underneath she wore a navy blue tankini with little white polka dots, the only other swimsuit she’d packed. It had seemed the wisest choice, so much more staid than the yellow bikini. Now she watched Dylan rise out of the water in the middle of the cove, water sluicing down to the dimples in his lower back…to a shamrock tattoo placed right above the swell of one fine, hard buttock.
A new opening to the article popped into her head.
Shirtless, muscle-bound, and with an Irish shamrock tattooed on his ass, Dylan MacCabe didn’t look like the kind of guy to spend hours in libraries…
She dismissed the line with a mental shake. Jillian would enjoy that opening, but the goal wasn’t to entertain her therapist.
Kicking her shorts aside, she unclipped her hair so it brushed her shoulders and headed into the cove. The water felt silky as it climbed up her thighs and lapped at her hips. She bent her knees to dip in over her head, pausing in the gurgling silence before rising up to slick her hair back. Sunscreen and mosquito repellent slid off her skin, skimming a halo of iridescence on the water.
She opened her eyes to find Dylan standing motionless, his hands at his sides, his blue eyes fixed on her.
Her nipples beaded against