his head toward the river. “I’ll be back in a while. I need to swim in much colder water.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Two days later, Dylan sat at the stern, his paddle at his feet, frowning at the laminated map spread open on his thighs. They’d reached a major fork in the river. As far as he could tell, there was no indication of this divide anywhere on the map.
At the prow, Casey dipped her paddle into the water, counteracting the drift of the canoe with deft strokes. In the long silence, she glanced over her shoulder with a twist of her waist.
“Could you use a new set of eyes on that map, Dylan?”
“Yeah.” He leaned forward, extending the map as she stretched back, grasping the edge. “Tell me you see something different.”
She pulled her paddle across her knees and flattened the map atop it. He dipped his oar to take over her job of steadying the canoe in the middle of the river. The vessel barely wobbled with the exchange. She was getting good at maneuvering, maybe better than Garrick, who tended to fidget and talk nonstop, a New Yorker who was uneasy in the quiet of the great wide open. By contrast, Casey was becoming a perfect partner in all the important aspects…except he couldn’t stop thinking about stripping off her clothes.
She said, shaking her head, “I don’t see the divide, either.”
And yet this gulf feels like a thousand miles between us. “It looks like we’re left to our own devices.”
“All right.” She leaned back, showing off enviable flexibility, as he snagged the map back from her. “My article for American Backroads will say that this is where the adventure began. So, what’s your thought process? Eeny, meeny, miny, moe?”
“I can do better than that.” He stowed the map and pulled a compass out of a pocket of his swim trunks. He didn’t really need to look at it, but it was easier to watch the swinging needle than to meet Casey’s deep-brown gaze. “We’re heading generally northeast, so let’s take the left fork.”
She faced front and picked up the paddle. “Left fork it is.”
She stroked over the port side, her stronger side. He compensated by veering the bow of the canoe toward the left arm of the river. In only moments, they fell back into perfect synchronicity. Wisps of dark hair that had fallen out of her ponytail now danced along the nape of her neck. The tie of that fetching yellow bikini poked against the soft cotton of her T-shirt. He wished the sun was out, and it was muggy, so she’d strip off the top and grant him a glimpse of all that bare flesh, even if it just stoked his rising frustration.
Get a grip, Dylan.
“From the map,” she said as the canoe glided into the narrower branch, “gauging by how many days since we left the lake, I imagine Owl’s Head Rock shouldn’t be more than a few miles away, right?”
It was eerie, sometimes, how Casey knew exactly when it was time to distract him. “Hard to tell. The French fur trader who drew the map didn’t exactly do it to scale.”
“Did your grandfather give you any indication at all of the distances between landmarks?”
“I talked to Bill about it once. He’s six years older than me, so he had more time to listen to Pops’ stories. He said he remembered Pops telling him once it was a four-or-five-day ride.”
“We’ve been out four days.”
“The problem is, we don’t know the pace they took.” He glanced at the cloud cover and scented a hint of rain. “We’ve had good weather so far, and we’ve been ripping through the miles, so we’ll likely find it soon.”
“Wouldn’t rumrunners make the trip as fast as they could?”
“More often, they’d be careful, stopping to scout if they thought the feds were waiting for them beyond every curve of the river.”
“So what you’re saying is that it’s hard to tell.”
“Like everything about this expedition, prepare to be surprised.”
Her shoulders visibly stiffened. He clenched his jaw and watched the trees on the banks go by, wishing he hadn’t said that. He hadn’t meant to refer to the conversation in the cove, to all the awkward moments of sizzling awareness since. He’d chosen to sleep outside the tent, in open areas that caught the river breeze. The mosquitoes weren’t too bad this time of year—which was why he’d waited for August to do this trip—and he’d minimized the annoyance even more by sleeping close to