LOST WITH YOU - Lisa Ann Verge Page 0,44

and then pulled at the greenery. She set the paddle into the belly of the canoe as she threw a leg over the gunwale to join him.

Under the vines, something gleamed in the dappled light. Cream-colored, smooth, clearly man-made. As he ripped off more vines, she glimpsed a demarcation line on the object. Below the cream color, the gleaming object was a deep brown. She glimpsed the curve of a broken handle.

She caught her breath. “That’s a whiskey jug.”

It hung upside down on a stake pounded into the ground choked by vines. Dylan stopped ripping away those vines long enough to run a finger over a raised marking just visible on the jug’s base.

He said in a voice thick with wonder, “Pops’ marking.”

Her heart jumped. She pressed a hand against her chest. They stared at the mark in the silence, while the river lapped around their ankles. Light shivered as a breeze sifted through the treetops. She gaped at the whiskey jug, cradled by a tangle of ripped-off vines, trying to process the impact of the find. Dylan couldn’t take his eyes off it, as if he expected it to disappear if he dared to look away. There was no question: This jug looked exactly like the others that lined the shelves in Dylan’s cabin.

“Pops was right here.” Dylan spoke in a choked voice. “He took the same path as those fur traders.”

Her journalistic instincts kicked in. When Dylan MacCabe had finally conceded that finding the Owl’s Head Rock landmark would be the only indication that bootleggers had walked this ancient smuggling route, there amid the greenery appeared the treasure he’d been hoping to find all along. Mentally, she took a picture of the dazed look on Dylan’s face. How would she describe the awe and surprise and half comprehension that battled behind his handsome face?

She shifted her stance for better balance, overwhelmed herself. She knew Dylan had believed Pops all along, but she realized that finding the proof of his grandfather’s stories had struck him to the pith, anyway. He looked like a mighty oak hit by an ax, teetering and ready to fall. It wasn’t every day a man stared at the history of his own family, a history that stretched back more than a century, more than three centuries. In his head, Dylan was standing beside all his people. A loving family, both here and gone.

Then her calm shattered, and a simple thought peeled her raw.

She’d given up a house and possessions…but what else had she sacrificed, when she’d chosen to live in her van?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Twenty-One Days Out

“Casey, watch right!”

Casey braced her feet on the ribs of the canoe just as the river dropped. Relegated to the back seat for the whitewater run, she twisted the steering paddle with a jerk. The bow of the canoe crashed into the foam. The cold spray blinded her. She sputtered and shook her hair out of her face. On whitewater, Dylan had told her, she couldn’t be blind for a second. She wouldn’t have a moment to think.

Thank goodness.

“Casey, watch left.”

The canoe jerked, swerved, skidded sideways as she changed the angle of her paddle again. Through the mist, she caught a glimpse of a fallen tree jutting into the stream just as they skimmed by it. Dylan had taken the forward position, and now he bobbed like a skier lurching from mogul to mogul. He surveyed ahead for eddies and haystacks and all the other colorfully named sources of danger, his paddle gripped in his hands. Spray darkened his hair and sent streams of water careening down his body.

This was the picture she wanted for American Backroads, Dylan at the prow against a screen of spray. Pity there was no time or opportunity to dig out her phone, unwrap it from all the plastic, and take the shot. She fixed her gaze on the back of his head instead, straining to hear his commands above the water’s roar. She wielded the paddle as a rudder, which gave her a sense of control that she’d badly needed since yesterday’s discovery of Pops’ whiskey jug and her own wrenching self-realization. But the river mocked the idea of control. Her feet gripped the keel of the birch bark canoe. The world was awash in tumble and roll, both outside and within her.

“Left, Casey! Watch left!”

She plunged the paddle deeper and twisted the shaft. The canoe lurched as spray splattered her thighs and soaked her feet. The canoe heaved, the bow rose out of