“Well, you take your time, dear. You have all the time in the world to decide on a mating.”
“Like you and Dad did?”
Her mom smiled. “When the love bug bit, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.”
That was how Sierra was feeling about Adam. She kept telling herself she should wait and date him longer, but she realized she couldn’t.
She watched as her dad talked animatedly to Adam and his dad and Brad as if they were one big happy family already.
“Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to,” Sierra said to her mother, and then she and her mom caught up with the other ladies.
“We were talking about gardening,” Janice said.
“I can’t wait to build our home on the ranch so I can begin to grow flowers again,” Sierra’s mom said.
Sierra saw the yacht the guys were loading the stuff into. It was beautiful.
“It’s a West Bay Sonship West,” her dad said with pride, as if it was his boat. “Three state rooms, two heads, washer and dryer even, kitchen, dinette table with booth, tons of seating on the covered deck and lots more inside. It’s just beautiful.”
Sierra gave her dad a hug. “Remember you’re with Mom.”
Her mom laughed. “Kirk’s first love has always been a boat.”
“Aww, but he always named them after you,” Sierra said, loving her dad for that.
The guys had already carried all the supplies onto the boat, and Adam had given her dad the grand tour. Everyone else had been on the boat before, so once Sierra and her mom climbed aboard, her dad gave them a tour of the boat.
She loved the boat, from the spacious kitchen to the equally spacious living area. This was big enough to be a real party boat. Everything was decorated in blues and greens, her favorite colors—the upholstered seating for the dinette in the salon and the same kind of upholstered covering on the seating in the living area. She eyed the queen-size berth covered in a blue bedspread in the captain’s stateroom and had the sudden urge to pull the captain away from his duties and make wild and passionate love as the boat began to move out of its mooring. If they did that, their activity would be the talk of the pack for sure!
Now she wished she’d come boating with Adam before this. She had been so protective of her relationship with Richard when she could have just started over and enjoyed herself to the fullest. Like now.
The other staterooms were nice, the one with a double-size berth, covered in a green and blue floral bedspread, and the smallest stateroom with a double-decker twin-bed set. Six people could sleep comfortably in the staterooms, and actually, more could sleep on the bench-style seating in the living area.
She loved the seating at the stern of the boat too.
Sierra joined the rest of the “crew” up on deck. She saw cedar waxwings flying back and forth across the river catching flying insects, a bright-yellow band around their tails helping her to identify them. And closer to the water, a variety of swallows were zooming in to catch their own prey.
As they continued along the river while Adam captained the vessel, Sierra saw ducks and geese, seagulls, and then a hawk flying off in the distance. She was having so much fun watching fish jumping out of the water and the birds overhead and the wake the boat churned up and seeing other boaters at the early morning hour. She envisioned coming out here and watching the sunrise or the sunset someday.
Her dad joined her on the foredeck. “This is nice, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, Dad. I understood why you got rid of the boat. It was too much upkeep and trouble for just the two of you after we left home, but don’t you love it? Getting out on the water again?” She breathed in the fresh air.
“Yeah. You can’t let this one get away, honey.”
She laughed. “The boat or the wolf?”
He smiled down at her. “Both.”
“Can you pilot the boat without a boater education card?”
“Yeah. Adam has one, and so do both his parents and Josh. As long as one of them supervises us, we’re good.”
The air was cooler on the river, and some of them were wearing windbreakers as they motored toward the falls.
Brooke called out that she was serving pastries, coffee, tea, and hot chocolate in the galley. Sierra gave her dad a hug and then they made their way to the companionway to join the others in having a fun breakfast.
Josh had taken over piloting the boat, and Adam joined Sierra to grab some coffee and a chocolate-covered doughnut. Sierra smiled when she saw that Adam had gotten her favorite special coffee: hazelnut and chocolate caramel. He smiled and kissed her.
“I can’t believe I said no to going with you on a boat ride before.”
“I know. I can’t believe it either.”
She laughed. “This has been so much fun.” And they’d just started the day.
Adam set his coffee and doughnut down on the table and wrapped his arms around her waist while everyone else grabbed their treats and drinks and headed to the stern cockpit to lounge and enjoy their breakfast. She noticed her dad was going to the helm to talk to Josh instead, taking a coffee for both Josh and himself and a couple of doughnuts each. She knew before long, her father would be piloting the boat.
She would have loved to be with Adam and no one else, but it was special to be with her whole family too, bringing back all the happy memories of boating of her youth.
Sierra’s mom was talking to Adam’s mom about moving to the ranch and the location they had picked out. But then Josh handed over the helm to Janice and began talking to Adam about the case involving Sierra, and the conversation quickly switched to that. Adam’s parents were both retired civilian police officers; Sierra’s mother, a retired air police officer; and Sierra’s dad, an army military police officer before moving up in rank. With them, plus Josh, a retired police detective, and Adam currently working as a police detective, Sierra felt they had their own private investigative force onboard.
“Okay, so what is going on with this investigation?” Josh asked.
“We’re still trying to track down the rest of the people involved in this business with Sierra. At least we have enough evidence that we have a good chance of convicting them of several crimes. We just have to arrest them,” Adam said.
Sierra wanted to be part of the conversation, but she didn’t want Brooke and Janice to feel left out, and she was enjoying the day too much to want to talk about the ongoing police cases. But she was glad the others were trying to come up with solutions to take care of them.
She and Brooke joined Janice at the helm.
Brooke waved her cup of peppermint mocha at Sierra. “I hear the chocolate hazelnut coffee is your favorite, and Adam is always getting it for you.”