Page 38 of Catch and Release

She laughed, still reeling in her own line.

“Sucks,” she giggled.

Carp were generally not eaten around the Bay. They weren’t all that populous, either, so Shawn couldn’t help feeling a little jilted as he tugged it onto the dock. Carp were known to have a high tolerance for pollution, so people didn’t typically eat them. But he couldn’t help marveling at how big it was.

“Damn,” he murmured to Willa as her line got closer to the wharf. “Gotta be 20 pounds, easy.”

She glanced over at him and grinned.

“Still wouldn’t be my biggest catch off this wharf,” she quipped.

He jolted in surprise, but didn’t press for more information as Willa grabbed a flashlight and expertly removed the hook from the fish’s mouth. He heard her fish flop onto the deck, and he turned around to see what it was.

“Trout,” she said. “Six or seven pounds, probably.”

He grinned at her and moved the flashlight in her direction. She’d already removed the hook and asked him to bring the cooler over for her to stick it in.

“How does it feel to be bested by a girl?” she asked.

“Well, first of all, you’re a woman, Greene,” he said. “And honestly, it feels pretty damn humbling to be bested by you, but if you keep grinning like that, I might just let you beat me at everything.”

Her cheeks turned a beautiful shade of scarlet before she looked away, busying herself by hooking another shrimp on her line.

“And second of all,” he said, tossing the carp he’d caught back in the water, “there’s no harm in a little catch and release.”

Willa begged her heartbeat to slow.

Shawn was flirting with her.

And quoting back to her what she’d said the night they met.

Either he’d learned how to use complete sentences or the caveman that was ruling his body up until tonight had taken some time off, because he’d not grunted once and he kept complimenting her.

Not to mention the way he kept staring at her mouth made her feel like he was silently begging to kiss her again.

And underneath the romantic moonlight and the way it shined over the Bay, she might just let herself kiss him again. She’d been doing everything she could to put that stupid kiss out of her mind all day.

Except for when she got home from the bait shop and spent some quality time with her vibrator.

But that was a momentary lapse of judgment, and she needed to stop thinking about the way it felt when his big, calloused hands wrapped around her hips and then grabbed her cheeks and pulled her closer to him. She was really trying to avoid remembering how the hardness of his erection pressed against her as she fisted her fingers against his chest and pressed her tongue into his mouth.

Because he was her neighbor.

Her friend.

And she might die from awkwardness if her cheeks kept flushing every time she was around him.

It would be a hell of a lot easier if he stopped saying things that made her want to crawl on his lap and beg him to say everything else he was thinking.

“So what’s the biggest fish you’ve caught off this wharf, Greene?” he asked her, his eyebrows raising expectantly in that cute way of his.

“My grandfather and I caught a 27-pound black drum out here once,” she said, grinning at him. “We didn’t keep it. Didn’t look like it’d be any good. But we had a good time reeling it in.”

He whistled. “Damn.”

They fell into easy silence, grabbing a new shrimp as needed and reeling in a few more trout and one flounder. Not much more passed between them other than the occasional checking in or offering to help unhook a fish. Willa lost herself in thought—about the summers she spent here growing up, how her grandfather would spend late nights on the wharf fishing with her, how she felt like she could finally hear herself think in the quiet of the nights here.

And she thought about how she’d misjudged Shawn.

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