“I’d love a waffle,” I reply and sit on the stool, settling in to watch her sashay around the kitchen. “If I’d known you were starving, we could have stopped somewhere on our way up here.”
“I wanted to get here,” she says with a shrug. “And it wasn’t too bad until about fifteen minutes ago. I just crossed the line to give me food or I’ll rip someone’s face off.”
“Since I’m the only other person here, I encourage you to make that waffle quickly.”
She laughs and gestures to the waffle maker that she set on the counter. “Can you please plug that in and heat it up?”
“Sure.” I do as she asks. When I turn around, she’s holding the bowl under her arm, stirring the batter quickly, watching me. “What?”
“Nothing.”
She shakes her head and turns away. I sit on my stool again and narrow my eyes at her.
“Really, what is it?”
“I like looking at you.” She dips a finger into the batter, tastes it, and then adds a touch more vanilla. “Do you want berries in yours? We have blueberries in the fridge.”
“No, thanks.”
“Me neither.”
I’m still stuck on I like looking at you. I can’t get enough of looking at her. I brace my chin in my hand and watch as she moves about the kitchen, fixing her waffles and humming to herself.
Now that the screenplay is finished, it’s like a weight has been lifted off her shoulders. Was working on this project with me that difficult for her? I know we had our tough moments, especially to start, but all in all, I thought it went well. Even if one or both of us got frustrated, we worked it out.
And the finished product is really great, if I do say so myself. I’m looking forward to sending it off to Luke.
“Here you go,” she says as she sets a piping-hot Belgian waffle before me. “Butter and syrup are here.”
“Thank you.”
Relaxing in the kitchen, eating our breakfast and enjoying each other, is the best way to start our weekend in the mountains.
“What do you want to do today?” she asks after she takes her first bite of waffle.
“I want to take the canoe out on a nearby lake and do some fishing.”
Her fork stops midway between her plate and her mouth and she stares at me. “Fishing?”
“Yes.”
“Like, with a pole?”
“Since I’m not a bear, that is my preferred way to fish, yes.”
“Huh. Well, okay.”
“Nothing’s biting my hook.”
I laugh and cast my line out on the calm water. “We’ve been out here for fifteen minutes, Lex. You have to be patient.”
“I don’t think I have patience,” she says with a sigh. She blows a raspberry through her lips and then looks around the lake. “Are we trespassing?”
“I own it.”
“You own what, the property we launched from?”
“The lake,” I reply.
“Hold on. You own the whole lake?”
I reel in my hook and then cast again. “After Kane bought the cabin, and I came up a couple of times, I decided that I’d like to build something up here someday. Don’t get me wrong, I love the ocean, and because it reminds me so much of Ireland, I’ll always be there. But a small place to get away that’s all mine and not something I bum off my brother sounds good to me, as well. So, when this property came up for sale, I bought it.”
She glances around again. “How many acres?”
“About one hundred. The lake takes up almost half of that, which leaves plenty of space to build a cabin nearby.”
She’s staring at me now, but I see her pole moving with something tugging on it.
“You have a fish.”
“I have a what? Oh!” She starts to reel it in, and when the fish is close to the canoe, I reach down with the net and help her bring it aboard. “Look at that! My first fish.”
“It’s a good size, too. Looks like a rainbow trout.”
“How do you know?”
I turn the fish on its side. “See? It has a rainbow in the scales.”
“Beautiful,” she murmurs. “So, I can hike and fish. I’m a regular outdoors enthusiast.”
“Says the woman who just, five minutes ago, was over it,” I reply with a laugh as I unhook the fish and let it go back into the water.
“What did you do that for?”
“You mean you wanted to gut it and cook it later?”
She scrunches up her nose. “No. I didn’t want to gut it. But I thought we’d eat whatever we caught.”
“We can’t eat them without gutting them.” I laugh at the look of horror on her beautiful face. “This is just for fun. We get the sport of catching them, and they get to live.”
She’s sitting two feet away, staring at me.
“What?”
“I need more bait. That fish ate it.”
“So bait your hook. You saw me do it.”
Lexi clears her throat. “Listen. I know I’m a pro at this whole outdoorsy thing and all, but I don’t touch worms. Not today or any other day. So, if you want me to toss this godforsaken line back into the water, you’re going to have to impale the worm yourself.”
“Now you’re just being dramatic.”
But I grab her hook and quickly stick a squirming worm on it, and she casts the line back out into the water.
“I can’t believe I didn’t know that you own a whole lake.”
“It’s not a very big lake.”
“It’s a lake.”
I shrug. “I suspect there’s plenty we still don’t know about each other. Like when did you get the tattoo on your shoulder?”
She smiles softly. “It was a stupid place to put it because I always forget it’s there. I got it after I published my first book. It says I Rise in French. I wanted to write for years. Actually, correction, I did write for years. I went to school to be a nurse, but creative writing really set my heart on fire. Anyway, I sent a couple of manuscripts off to agents and was told no a lot. Like, a lot. One agent told me I was a horrible writer, and I should stick to my day job.
“He was a complete dick.”
“And totally wrong, by the way,” I reply.
“Thank you. You have to have a thick skin in this business. And I do. But that one stung pretty bad. About a year later, I got up the nerve to attend a conference in New York, and I took some workshops from some incredible, very well-established authors. The thriller world is small, and it was awesome to network with those people. I made some friends, got some advice, and I was in the right place at the right time.”
“How so?”
“I was seated at a table with an agent. She started a conversation, and by the end of the evening, she was my agent. I’ve now published six novels, with a movie in the works. So, last year, after Luke approached me for the movie rights, I got this tattoo. Because I sure did fucking rise after that bastard basically told me I was nothing.”
“That’s the best story I’ve ever heard.” She looks up at me in surprise. “I hope your father knew you achieved this before he passed.”