Page 4 of Level With Me
I’d saved her from ending up in that logjam further downstream—or worse. And now she was pissed about it? Heat flared in my chest, but I was still catching my breath, too. I willed myself to calm down.
She didn’t.
The woman was an angry vision of pink and gooseflesh, and now she was walking toward me, her feet slipping in the sand. Suddenly, my already faltering anger took a backseat to my more primal instincts.
Well shit, she was hot.
She wasn’t a young ingenue as I’d first thought. She looked to be about my age or a bit younger; mid-thirties maybe. Her thin running clothes clung to her body and her hair—dark blonde maybe, though it was hard to tell with it being so wet, stuck to her pale cheeks in wet strands. But the thing that grabbed me was her size. Besides her height, she was sturdy. She looked firm and strong and like she could maybe kick my ass—not really, given the punishing regime of gym training I’d used as a stress outlet since I was fifteen years old—though maybe. I bet she’d be athletic as hell in the bedroom.
Fuck me.
No literally, fuck me.
I looked away, hoping to God I didn’t spring a hard-on in this particular situation.
She stopped a few feet away from me. “I grew up on this river; I know what to do when you fall in a river. I wasn’t panicking. I didn’t need a knight in shining… hip waders.”
For a moment I didn’t say anything, not because I was too incredulous—I was—but because I was suddenly struck by a weird sense of déjà vu. There was something strikingly familiar about her. But maybe it was the way she was slicking her hair away from her face. That move was right out of my teenage fantasies, like how women in barely-contained bikinis emerged from pools in the movies. Except her pink top—already a thin, breathable fabric—was somehow sexier than a bikini the way it suctioned onto her skin, accentuating the curve of her breasts and the hard points of her…
I averted my eyes, cursing my caveman brain. “You didn’t look fine,” I said, recovering my common sense and coming back to the matter at hand. Remembering my irritation, too. “Is it every day you decide to go for an upside-down dip in a flooded river? Or just today?”
“I fell,” she said, her face indignant. “It was muddy, and I slipped. But I sorted myself out and I was heading for shore. My head was above water until you stepped in. Now we’re stuck on this island and I’m going to be late for work.”
I tried to restrain myself from laughing. “Late for work? That’s what you’re worried about?”
“I have an important meeting!” she exclaimed.
Now it was my turn to step toward her. “Where were you going to get out if I hadn’t grabbed you?” I asked. “There?” I gestured to a gnarled collection of logs downriver.
I saw the realization slide over her face as she followed where I was pointing.
“Or were you just going to wait a couple miles and get out in the next town?” I tacked on. I didn’t need to say that part, but I was making a point.
“It’s normally clear there,” she said. Her voice was a little shaky now.
“That’s what I thought.” I hung my hip waders upside down, letting the water splatter onto our feet.
I tossed them on the ground, walking back to the river’s edge.
“Goddammit,” I said, more at our situation than at her now. Though I was still irritated as hell at her ungrateful ass.
This was supposed to have been a relaxing, meditative morning of fishing—a moment to myself ahead of a tight-as-shit day. I had a client meeting this morning, for someone who’d paid an exorbitant fee to have me and my business partner Lila tear their business to shreds and build it back up again.
Shit, it’s a good thing I hadn’t told her where I was going this morning. She hadn’t even wanted us to take it at first.
“Why are you talking about taking a project out in the country?” she’d asked, like I’d told her I wanted to take a job on Mars.
“Because this is a winning project,” I’d said. “Goldman has scooped our last three clients from under our noses.”
“You’re being paranoid,” she’d told me.
“You know that’s not true.”
It used to be that we were the top choice for business consulting in Manhattan, with a waiting list of clients bidding for our services. We still had the waitlist, but we’d already had three from this upcoming year jump ship. Goldman had appeared out of nowhere, and suddenly people had another place to turn when their businesses were failing. His record, though shorter, was almost as stellar as ours. There were others, too, who were climbing up the ranks, but he was the only one close to catching up. With Goldman nipping at our heels, we’d had to pull out all the stops. Big splashy ads and cushy meetings to attract new business to backfill the ones flocking to him. We weren’t going under, but he was becoming a serious pain in the ass. The only edge we still had was our reputation and the fact that people liked that we were a married couple.
Even though we’d never been married.
“Lila, it’s a good job.” I wanted this job.
