Unsettled with my daddy’s behavior, and, even more confused with my own thoughts and feelings about my brother, I found myself back in my car and driving into the bayou. I knew where Chase’s place of business was located. I’d been there, when it had been nothing but a ramshackle shack and an old wooden dock, when he’d first left and nothing glowed in the bayou except that one small light.
It was then and there that I felt so goddamned lonely and, looking at that small light through the blur of the rain, unwilling to acknowledge my tears, I knew my brother must have felt even worse, so isolated and cut off. I wanted to just say it served him right for leaving, but there was that inconvenient love that bubbled up inside me that only made me madder. I couldn’t condemn him completely.
I knew how he felt.
But, I also couldn’t understand how he could have given up Majestueux with its comfort and beauty for…that. I had been a teenager, lost and betrayed by a brother who had been my buffer and protector. He had made everything easier somehow.
Years later, I’d been back when I’d first graduated, standing pathetically in a downpour, hovering on the edge of the bayou like one of those old oaks with their twisted trunks and gnarled branches frozen in a moment of agony. From their limbs draped in moss, gray and dusty and tattered, like my thoughts.
His mercury vapor lights had been on looming over the parking lot making the crushed clamshell lot glow powdery white, but cloaking the bayou beyond in shades of black. The air was heavy with spring in bloom—jasmine and wisteria and honeysuckle and the ripe, vaguely rank aroma of the swamp. The anger and bitterness of ten years of absence rolling like an avalanche of pain and sick disloyalty.
I’d closed my eyes and backed away, wishing my brother and I were running through the bayou with the Outlaws again with nothing between us all but friendship and trust. Ours was a relationship that had been fractured. Was it mendable, salvageable?
The road was in good shape. Chase probably maintained it for his customers as he ran a profitable business. A kernel of pride that I hadn’t allowed myself to feel, slipped in. He’d done something spectacular here. It shouldn’t have surprised me. My brother was resourceful and damned smart.
I’d forgotten the effect of the bayou after spending so much time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city teeming with life, going out with my friends, crewing until my arms and thighs burned and attending to my classes which were, as academics had been in high school, a breeze for me. Then, I’d been splitting my time between the orchard and Anna Kate as my thoughts and emotions festered into something as graveolent as the bayou. All that while, I’d hungered for Sky.
There was something about the bayou that remained largely uncivilized, a lush no man’s land that had been rife with pirates and smugglers, now populated with hard working men and women whose ancestors had carved out a place here—a unique, rich culture that was found nowhere else on this planet.
Passing the old fishing village AnnClaire was rumored to have leveled, I caught arcs of light that sparked off the channel that opened up and flowed past Imogene’s. In the jumble of debris and fragments of a once busy village, now gone to rot, protruded some of the boards, crude grave markers of what a woman’s scorn and black voodoo magic could wrought.
Further down the road, I saw the sign, intricately carved and stuck into the ground. Sutton Bait and Tackle. I turned off and followed the dirt and gravel road up to a makeshift crushed shell parking lot.
I got out of my car and looked around. His truck was parked off to the side with quite a few cars here, a throng of people on the dock and milling around inside the shop. I looked out to the swamp, the channel a long, straight shot. The murky green water beyond the dock was as calm as glass, a partially submerged log lying at the edge of a thicket of cattails and with the innate intuition of a man who had grown up here, I recognized it as a gator.
The predator of the bayou and unrivaled in its dominion.
The structure was like Chase, simple, neat and practical with a wide porch that led up to the shop area. Beside and not far from the business was a dock with several boats tied up, and at the very end a brand new seaplane. Chase’s business had been vandalized and he’d had to replace all his equipment. I envied him that freedom and wondered if he’d teach me to fly, but pushed that onto the back burner. I wasn’t even sure we could work things out. Most of his touring boats were gone, but there were several canoes floating and bobbing against the moor lines.
Across the channel, not far to the south, the jagged stump of a dead cypress had become home to a nest of herons, and one stood motionless, while the other foraged among the sheets of delicate green duckweed and rafts of water hyacinth, shimmering violet and looking as deceptively fragile as the heron’s spindly legs.Nymphaeaor water lilies floated in a green scattered disarray, their fluted white, salmon, and yellow blossoms atop green pads offered the tourists plenty of money shots. These birds were my favorites with their long arched necks tucked in, black beaks as straight and slender as a willow branch.
I had told myself it didn’t matter that he had moved on and built something with his own two hands outside the influence of my daddy. An accomplishment to be admired. Something wanted to break free there, but a barrier as strong as a force field blocked me from going deeper. It was all tied up with my ancestor, my daddy, expectations, legacy, duty to family, respect and pride.
I was choking on it all. Sky’s words had really hit me hard. Did I want to miss out on Chase’s life? The resounding answer wasno. That meant I had to talk to him. Listen to him. Get all this out in the open and work it out, work through it, or I would lose our connection completely. I didn’t think I could handle that.
“Jake?”
I started from my absorption of the view and turned toward my name. Chase stood in the sunlight, looking like an ad forOutdoorsmanin an orange crewneck, long-sleeved T-shirt, beneath a tan fisherman’s vest and faded, well-worn jeans, poised with a load of fishing equipment in his hands. He arched a brow, his shoulders suddenly stiff. I knew the reason for that, and I felt a twinge of guilt and remorse. He expected a fight. I locked my door and pocketed my keys. Taking a deep breath, I headed toward my brother. “Yeah, you said something about fishing?” He stared at me for a moment, and I didn’t want the hopeful cast to his features to affect me. I looked toward the gear on the dock. “Where you headed?”
His shoulders relaxed and that felt good. “To the Gulf and some bull reds.”Sciaenops ocellatusor red drum. Any Southern outdoorsman worth his salt knew that, channel bass, redfish, spottail bass or simply reds, were a popular game fish. “You want to come along? It means forty-five minutes of flying.”
“Yeah, you got the gear for me? I don’t usually drive around with bait and tackle.” I shrugged and looked toward my sleek car.
Chase grinned and nodded. “I got you covered. You’re not squeamish about flying in a twin are you?”
“Nah, I’m good. I’ll help you load up.”
The side panel of the plane is open. Let me go inside and get more gear.” I walked to the end of the dock and picked up the empty coolers, bait coolers and other equipment stowing everything neatly into the Cessna’s storage area.
“Hey, Jake,” a female voice said from behind me.
I turned around to find Samantha, looking fresh and pretty in a white sleeveless shirt and a pair of cutoff denim shorts, her dark hair free and falling over her shoulders and down her back, her feet bare. With a wide, beaming smile, she said, “So glad to see you here. It’s pretty impressive, huh?”
I turned and smiled warmly at her for what must have been the first time since I’d met her. It felt good and normal not to have to maintain that fucking barrier. I had always admired and liked Samantha. Her cooking was off the charts. “Hey, yourself. I’m not horning in on your time with Chase, am I?”
“Oh, no. I was going into Imogene’s as soon as he left, so no worries there. Although, I do love fishing with him.” She placed her hand warmly on my arm. “Have fun. The reds should really be huge and biting. Chase said there’s been a resurgence of them after all the conservation and the continuing decline of the marshes.”
I nodded as Chase stepped onto the dock with rods and a tackle box. She turned to him as he touched her on her lower back. “I’ll see you tonight, babe,” he said, kissing her soundly on the lips, and I noticed her engagement ring sparkling in the light. My chest got tight and my thoughts went immediately to Sky in her kitchen when that kiss we’d shared had gotten out of control. I could see her, hair mussed and her lips kiss-swollen, her body full and lush beneath my hands. I remembered how much I’d wanted to follow her right to her bed and do her so good. Tell her dirty and low how much I wanted to fuck her, overpower her and find her wet heat until I went out of my mind.
