Page 15 of Fastlander Fealty

Her mouth watered. “Um, I freaking love roast beef,” she murmured as she opened up the packaging.

“We’ve got a good drive up the river, so you have plenty of time. You don’t have to rush it,” he told her.

She took a big bite and rolled her eyes closed at the explosion of flavor in her mouth. There was some kind of dressing on the sandwich that was to die for. “Oh my God,” she groaned.

When she opened her eyes, he was watching her face, with this soft smile plastered to his lips.

“I like your hat,” she said around the bite. Some of his blond hair was poking out of the hole of his backwards baseball cap, and she thought he just looked so handsome.

“Yours is pretty cute on you too,” he said, flicking the brim down.

She grinned around her mouth full of food and pulled it off, looked at the pink and brown logo. Kong’s Lumber. She put it on her head backwards, like he wore his. Okay, she thought she was going to be nervous around him today, like when she’d talked to him in the parking lot yesterday, but the text conversation last night had done her good. She just felt happy and excited—like she was going on an adventure with a friend, which was crazy, because again, she barely knew him.

The drive was long enough for them to finish their lunch in plenty of time. She made a mental note of the name on the sandwich wrapper, so she could go try more of their sandwiches while she was in town, and they were able to exit first off the bus.

Owen unloaded both of their innertubes and the cooler off to the side of the entry ramp to the river, but pulled some sunscreen out and told her to take off her cover-up.

Oooh here it went. Silver couldn’t help the nervousness as she struggled awkwardly out of the oversized white linen shirt and stuffed it into her waterproof bag.

When she stood back up, Owen was just staring at her.

“Holy. Shit,” he uttered.

She cleared her throat and wrapped her arms around her stomach. “I’ve never worn this one before.”

“You should wear it every day. This should be your entire wardrobe.”

A giggle escaped her. A giggle! From her! She hesitated a few more seconds, and then dropped her hands and struck a goofy little pose.

“Trust me, by the end of this float, you will feel perfectly at home in a swimsuit,” he assured her. “Look around. No one cares. Everyone is all shapes and sizes, we are here to have fun, not model on a runway.”

“You look like a model,” she pointed out, her voice dying off at the end.

Owen surprised her and flexed, and then struck another pose and flexed again. “I’ve been working out.”

“Really?”

“No. I just run around the forest a lot, and get in stupid fights with other shifters, and it somehow keeps me in shape. Wait here and I’ll get our cooler tied off to our floats.”

“Oh, okay,” she murmured, watching him drag a bunch of their gear into the water.

“That is a sight to see,” a woman murmured distractedly from about ten feet away as she stared at Owen. She wore a high waisted bikini set and a visor, and she had curves in all the right places, and a four-year-old in a life jacket clinging to her leg.

“Of course you would be looking at him, Muriel,” her husband groused from where he was preparing a large party raft he was blowing up with a battery-operated air pump. “You want to help?”

“No,” Muriel drawled out in a dreamy voice as she continued to stare at Owen. “You’ve got this, honey.”

Silver pursed her lips against a laugh. Indeed, Owen was attracting a lot of attention as he roped together their two innertubes, as well as the floating cooler that he’d somehow come up with a little floatie for from his pack. He looked up at her and grinned. “Ready?”

“I would tie my float to his,” she heard another woman say from the river’s edge.

Owen sure did attract attention, but he seemed unaffected by it.

He held the float steady for her as she sat into it, and then dragged them out into deeper waters where the current was stronger, and hopped up into his own. He nearly tipped, and she lurched forward to steady his and nearly dumped out right along with him.

Silver was still getting used to the sound of her own laughter. She’d missed it.

She was soaking wet by the time they were both loaded into their innertubes and floating at a crisp pace around the other families. They all started spreading out pretty quickly and giving each other space, and within ten minutes, she and Owen were laid back relaxing with nary a soul around them.

---