knew what real regret was. Was so intimate with its haunting grip that it was easy to see it mirrored in someone else.
Pushing herself to her feet, she surveyed the campsite. No one else was up yet. And the group had at least two loud snorers, going by the sounds coming from two different tents.
The rustle of the breeze through the trees and occasional birdcall were the only other sounds. Back home, Wednesday was trash collection day. Birds were nice enough, but part of her missed the comforting familiarity of the machinery and cussing that accompanied the collection.
Her skin felt tight, and her eyes gritty. She needed a shower. She couldn’t see herself—and she was glad—but as she’d braided her hair, she’d felt its usual smoothness replaced with kinks. Testimony to the hair appointment she’d had to miss thanks to the cocktail party. It would probably be a halo of fuzz around her head by the end of the trip.
“C’mon, you’re the captain. Do something useful.” She muttered the direction under her breath. Might as well get the coffee started. No doubt at least half the group would need coffee before they would be able to face whatever this day held for them. Lacey lowered the bag containing the cooking equipment from the tree branch it was slung over, her arms complaining with every tug, and extracted the small camping stove and coffee pot.
What was the whole point of this thing? She felt aimless without a goal. Without a target. Get a book on the NYT Best Seller list. Move fifty thousand copies in the first week. Land author interviews on Good Morning America. Figure out the right twist to get a social media post to go viral. All those things were straightforward and measurable. She knew when she had achieved them, and she knew when she failed.
Canoeing through the wilderness with a ragtag bunch of colleagues for who knew how long with no known scoring system measuring her performance? That was a form of torture.
She placed the coffee pot on a smooth stump and had just filled it with filtered water when there was the sound of another tent zipper opening. She glanced up to see Victor’s head poke through the flap, followed by the rest of his body.
Standing, he stretched, his frame dwarfing the two-person tent he was sharing with Richard. He must have slept curled up or with his head and feet pressed against opposite ends of the shelter.
“Morning.” Lacey stood and tried to sound casual. She felt oddly exposed after the conversation the previous night. Not that she had shared anything that personal. Not compared to him. But still. She had a strict rule about keeping her personal and business lives as separate as the east was from the west. The only other time she’d broken it was when she’d agreed to work for Rachel and her Aunt Donna on their books.
“Morning.” Victor brushed a hand through his hair. “Looks like it’s going to be a nice one.”
He was right. The air was crisp but hinted at warmth to come. The breeze stirred through the trees, promising some relief when they were out on the lake. The stillness was almost deafening. Her body was primed for noise after years of cars, sirens, and the buzz of people stacked on top of and beside each other in all directions.
Even worse, far from looking out of his comfort zone, Victor looked completely at ease in his surroundings as he shoved his feet into his boots and laced them up, his T-shirt stretching across his shoulders as he bent over.
Stop it, Lacey! “How’d you sleep?”
“Not bad. Even if Richard snores like he’s in hibernation.”
As if to underscore his point, a loud rumble came from the tent behind him and Lacey stifled a laugh. “Do you camp a lot?”
Victor shrugged. “Not since I was a teenager. But there were training camps when I was rowing. After sharing a dorm with five men, sharing a tent with one isn’t really a hardship. You?”
“A bit when I was younger.” An understatement if ever there was one. Great chunks of her childhood memories involved “adventuring” as her father called it. It was only in her twenties that she’d realized it had been one of her parents’ ways of trying to save on the electric bill. And that her tendency to leave every light on in her condo was her sign of defiance.
“That looked like a deep thought.”
Lacey jumped. Victor was suddenly a whole