Catch and Release

by Laura Drewry

  “But that—”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Finn half-groaned, half-cried. “Just do it!”

  Ro opened his mouth to argue more, then snapped it shut. His brothers had asked so little of him since the three of them decided to reopen the Buoys, the least he could do was give them this.

  “Fine,” he finally muttered. “I’ll apologize. Hell, if it’ll get you two off my case, I’ll even try to dig up a couple childhood stories that won’t make everyone want to slit their wrists.”

  “Attaboy!” With a nod, Liam slapped Ro on the shoulder, then pointed toward the door. “Come on, Finn, let’s get going before our paintbrushes harden.”

  Without another word, Finn followed Liam out to the lobby and headed upstairs, leaving Ro on his own with the dishes.

  Unlike his brothers, Ronan didn’t mind kitchen duty; in fact, he kind of liked it. Okay, he didn’t like washing the dishes, but he liked to cook, and he’d only get to do it for a couple of more days until their chef, Olivia, returned, so he was going to make the most of it. With his fresh-caught halibut cleaned and waiting in the fridge, he finished up the dishes, flung the towel over his shoulder, and headed back into the pub to find the orange liqueur he’d need for dessert.

  “Oh!” Hope came through the door from the lobby just as he came in from the kitchen, making them both stop abruptly. “Sorry, I, uh…”

  She still wouldn’t look at him. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Her gaze twitched from his forehead to his chin to his throat and back to his forehead, but she never looked directly at him. And what did he do? He stood there like a stupid lump, listening to her stammer.

  “I just…uh…I came to…to…I left my bag.”

  It took another second, but she lifted her chin a little and finally…finally…looked at him. He knew he wasn’t the easiest person in the world to like, and most of the time he couldn’t have cared less, so why the hell did it bug him so much if she looked at him or not? And why did he suddenly wish he could say something that would erase the unease from her eyes?

  Shaking his head clear, he tried to focus on two things: being as nice as he could and not talking about dildos. How difficult could that be?

  “Your bag? Yeah, it’s, uh, right here, I’ll just…”

  He reached for the bag, then nearly dropped the damn thing because he wasn’t expecting it to weigh that much.

  “Lord thunderin’,” he barked. “What the hell d’you have in there?”

  Did she flinch?

  “I like to be prepared.” She took the bag and swung it up on her shoulder as if it were nothing, even though Ronan fully expected it to knock her over. “Thanks.”

  She’d already turned around and was halfway through the lobby, her hips swaying slightly in those jeans, before Ronan blinked his brain clear and hurried after her.

  “Wait!” Shit, did she flinch again? Of course she did—he was practically yelling. Again.

  He stopped a good five or six feet away from her, waited for her to turn, then wound the dish towel around his hands and forced himself to speak in a tone less…flinch-inducing.

  “Listen…what I said before…outside…about, you know, Newfoundland. I don’t know where that came from.”

  Tucking her long blond hair behind her ear, Hope looked down at the floor and smiled. Wasn’t anything huge—hell, it scarcely tipped up the corners of her mouth—but it was something. And when she lifted her eyes back to his…well, holy flying shit, Batman, that soft, barely there smile brought out all kinds of stupid in him.

  Should he step closer to her or back the hell up? He had no clue. The second she looked up at him, every thought drained from his brain—every thought except for how much he liked it when she looked at him like that instead of as if she was getting ready to bolt. Should he just keep his mouth shut and focus more on tamping down the fire that suddenly flamed in his veins?

  What. The. Actual. Fuck.

  In all the times he’d ever apologized to a woman—and God knew he’d done it plenty—he’d never had one of them smile at him, at least not until he’d repeated it about half a dozen times. And even then those smiles always seemed to be saying something more like, “Whatever, asshole.” But Hope’s smile, small as it was, seemed real. Still nervous but real. Genuine.

  And cute as hell.

  “That’s okay,” she said finally. “I could tell you a thing or two about a town in Saskatchewan.”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to ask, but he didn’t. Instead, he dragged his gaze away from hers so he could think straight again, then blew out a breath and nodded.

  “And, uh, about that conference call. That was…the whole day, I mean…yeah, it wasn’t good. There was a bunch of shi—stuff that got me all riled up before I even looped into the call, but still…I shouldn’t have said what I did and I shouldn’t have yelled.”

  When he finally looked at her again, he was shocked to see she was still smiling. And that made him smile. Shit, he might even have blushed a little.

  “So, yeah,” he muttered, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck. “Sorry about that, too.”

  “All right, then.” Hope tipped her head a little to the left. “So no more yelling and no more mentions of anything Dildo. That’d be good, thank you. And can I count on you to keep the f-bombs to a minimum so editing won’t have to bleep too many out?”

  This time her smile made him blush all the way up his scalp.

  “Well…” He was pretty sure his attempt to smile back turned out more like a wince, so he gave up and lifted his shoulder in a half shrug. “I’m not making any promises on that, but I’ll try.”

  He didn’t know what, if anything, he was supposed to say after that, and the longer they just stood there not saying anything, the more she looked like a deer in the headlights, so Ro did the only thing he could think of: leave. By that time she was so busy looking at everything else in the room but him that she was probably happy to have him go, so he thumbed over his shoulder and took a step back.

  He’d half-turned away from her when her voice stopped him.

  “In the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, they drop the f-bomb five hundred and six times.” She blurted the words out so fast that Ronan had to wonder how long she’d been waiting to let them loose. And with her eyes as wide as they were, it was as if she couldn’t believe she’d finally spit it out.

  “That’s almost three times a minute,” she said. “World record.”

  “Is that right?” Ronan wasn’t sure if she was warning him or daring him, so he lifted his hands slightly and smirked. “So…what? You want to shoot for five hundred and seven? Seems like a lot, but get Finn and me in the same room for a couple hours and—”

  “What?” she cried, her eyes huge. “No, I didn’t mean…I just…oh!”

  Her whole face turned about six shades of pink, and holy jumpin’ Judas, Ronan had never seen anything as pretty as that.

  “You’re kidding.” Her quiet laugh only lasted a second before it faltered. “Oh God, you were kidding, right? Please tell me you weren’t serious. Were you?”

  The longer he hesitated, the wider her eyes got, until he finally gave in and chuckled.

  “I was kidding.”

  “Oh, thank God.” The words whooshed out of her on a laugh that still sounded a little unsure. She wrapped her hands around the straps of her bag and began backing toward the door. “I better go finish unpacking before you start working on that new record.”

  Why couldn’t he stop smiling at her? Even after she left, he just kept standing there, twisting that damn dish towel and smiling at the empty doorframe.

  Fuuuuuck.

  Chapter 3

  “Once you’re a parent, you’re the ghost of your children’s future.”

  Cooper, Interstellar

  There wasn’t a single thing in the specs, the photos, or any of the video Hope had seen that did the Buoys justice. Sure, it was on the small size, and, no, it would probably never make the co
ver of Architectural Digest, but that was part of what made it so charming. What it lacked in size and flash, it made up for in spades with its cozy warmth and personal touches.

  “Hand-hewn by Jimmy himself,” Jessie said, running her hand over the well-marked surface of the lobby desk. “Same with the bar in the restaurant.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Hope murmured, her brain whipping through the scant details she’d learned about the late patriarch of the O’Donnell family. He’d moved from Dublin to the West Coast of Canada over thirty-five years ago and built his fishing lodge piece by piece with nothing more than a strong back and stronger determination.

  “Every once in a while I think about sanding out all the marks and gouges, but…” A softness washed through Jessie’s brown eyes as she spoke, and a tiny smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. “I just can’t bring myself to do it.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Hope said. “I bet there’s a lot of history in those scratches.”

  “Yeah.” Jessie slid her middle finger along the edge of the desk slowly, then exhaled a quiet laugh and pointed toward the center beam in the ceiling. “You can’t read it from here, but if you look closely, you can see where Jimmy carved all their names.”

  It took Hope a second to see it, but sure enough, right up at the top were five different words cut into the wood. From that distance, she couldn’t make out which name was which, but one of them had to be Maggie, the wife and mother whose only mention in the notes Hope read was a scrawled Maggie O’D—wife in the margin of one of the pages.

  Before Hope could ask anything about Maggie, though, Jessie was already walking away.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll give you the tour.” She started toward the other side of the room, where two large brown leather sofas sat positioned around a giant stump of a table with a circular glass top.

  “Great table,” Hope said. “Did he make that, too?”

  “The base, yeah, and then he traded a forty-pounder of Jameson for the glass; that was usually how Jimmy did business.”

  “Nice.” Hope grinned as she toed the edge of the burgundy braided rug the table sat on. “Did someone make this, too?”

  “Oh hell no,” Jessie said, laughing. “We got that at Costco, but Jimmy and the boys hauled in and set every one of the rocks in the fireplace.”

  Hope already knew that from her notes, but standing next to it and being able to see the size of some of those rocks was—wow. It must have taken them forever, especially since the boys had all been so little when they’d built it. The back side of the fireplace opened up into what Jessie called the great room, and what a room it was.

  With no apparent rhyme or reason, the chairs and sofas sat at odd angles, some pushed close together, a few off by themselves, and not a single one of them matching another. A huge flat-screen hung on the far wall, a large card table sat under the west window with an unfinished game of Risk covering it (red was kicking ass, by the looks of it), and along the adjacent wall hung an enormous laminated map of the coast. A tall wooden bookcase stood against the east wall, all but sagging under the weight of the books, board games, and movies.

  “It looks like someone’s family room,” Hope said.

  “Yeah.” Jessie’s smile grew wider as she gazed around the room. “Great, isn’t it?”

  They made their way slowly through the rest of the main lodge, upstairs to the guest rooms, which were each named after a different county in Ireland, through the restaurant again, then into the kitchen and tiny back office. And even though Jessie must have had a bunch of other things to do, she gave Hope as much time as she needed to look around, take notes, and ask as many questions as she wanted.

  They’d already toured the four bedrooms and two bathrooms on the lower floor, which used to be for family only but were now where Hope and her crew would also be staying, so they headed out back to the five small A-frame cabins. The A-frames had once housed the Buoys’ employees; the O’Donnells had since converted the middle one into a workout area, Kate and Liam now lived in the one to its left, and the chef, Olivia, would move back into hers in a few days. The other two would be rented out to guests when needed.

  As the two women headed over the lawn, the radio on Jessie’s hip crackled to life.

  “Hey, Jess,” Finn said. “You got a second?”

  Jessie was already smiling before she even keyed the mic. “What’s up?”

  “I’ve got Sal Calegari on the phone, and he needs to change his res—”

  “Oh crap.”

  Finn continued to talk, but Jessie wasn’t listening.

  “Sorry, Hope,” she said, walking backward toward the lodge. “But if I don’t stop Finn right now, he’ll do something stupid like lock me out of my computer again.”

  “Okay, yeah, go ahead.”

  “Um…take your time, go have a look at the cabins, the dock—whatever. I’ll…uh…I’ll catch up with you.”

  Turning, Jessie sprinted toward the door, yelling as she pulled it open and dashed inside. “Don’t touch anything, Finn! I’m here! I’m…Oh my God, what the hell have you done now?”

  Smirking, Hope made her way around the side of the lodge and wandered down to the three guest cabins near the water. In a matter of days they’d be full of guests and all manner of fishing gear, but today they were empty, waiting. Leaving her wet boots on the porch of the first one, she pushed open the orange door and stepped inside a room she would gladly trade her city apartment for.

  She wandered through the cabin slowly, taking in the simple warmth of it, from the orange theme to the comfortable-looking furniture to the framed photos on the walls: a black bear and her two cubs grazing on what appeared to be some kind of berry bush, a stunning shot of a breaching orca with its entire body arched over the water, and one of an enormous moose peering out from a stand of trees with a clump of grass dangling from its velvety antlers.

  Funny, Hope mused. In everything she’d read about the Buoys, there’d been no mention of any of them being a photographer, but clearly one of them knew what he was doing. Might be a story there.

  The other two cabins were laid out pretty much the same as Orange, the only differences being the color schemes, types of chairs, and the photos hanging on the walls. It was all about the beauty of Ireland’s County Wicklow in Green, but in White the wall was covered with a collage of pictures of the Buoys and the O’Donnell family. She skimmed over each one, smiling as she connected each of the O’Donnells she’d just met with one of their younger versions. She stopped smiling, though, when her gaze landed on the picture of a woman in a large bibbed apron with her long red hair pulled back into a loose knot.

  Who else could that be except Maggie O’D—wife?

  Hope leaned in closer, fascinated by the fact that Maggie was the only person in any of the photos not smiling. In fact, unless Hope was misreading it, Maggie looked downright miserable. How could that be? How could anyone be miserable living in a place like this?

  Heavy footsteps sounded on the porch outside, but before Hope could step back from the photo, Ronan’s body filled the open doorway, his left hand wrapped around the handle of an old beaten-up wooden toolbox. His unblinking gaze immediately shot to the picture, and even though he didn’t say a word, his expression hardened, sending a wave of guilt crashing through Hope, making her feel as though she’d been caught rifling through his underwear drawer instead of looking at a picture on the wall.

  “Hey,” she said, hoping he didn’t notice the way her voice wavered. “I was just…Jessie told me to come and have a look around, so I…Is that your mom?”

  It took a couple of seconds for Ronan to finally blink away from the picture, but a quick nod was all he offered before lifting the toolbox a little and changing the subject.

  “Need to fix the chain in the toilet.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Not sure what to do, she waited until he’d crossed the room, then cleared her throat. “I’ll, uh…I’ll get out of your way, then.”

&
nbsp; “You’re not in my way,” he said, his voice low. “Unless you need to…”

  He stopped outside the bathroom and waved his finger between her and the toilet.

  “What? Oh…no. No, I’m fine.” Why was she blushing? “But thank you.”

  With one of those brief chin lifts men do, Ronan set the toolbox on the floor, then snapped on a pair of latex gloves and set to work inside the tank. Should she leave? If she did, it’d seem like she was trying to get away from him, wouldn’t it? Maybe, but she couldn’t very well just keep standing there, could she?

  Well…maybe she could. It was a great way to renew her appreciation for the wonder that was a well-fitting pair of Levi’s. Sure, there had to be millions of guys wandering around the planet in 501s like those, but watching Ronan move in that pair right there, Hope would have sworn they’d been tailored specifically for him. Maybe it was the way they curved around his butt so perfectly, or maybe it was the way the denim hugged his thighs, not too tight but…whew. Hell’s bells, even that fraying bottom corner of his back pocket fascinated her.

  Forcing herself to look away, she blinked hard and muttered a quiet curse.

  “What’s that?” Ronan’s voice made her jump. “Did you say something?”

  “Hmm? No. No, I was…” How the hell was she supposed to finish that sentence? By telling him she’d been staring at his ass? Yeah, brilliant idea. “Did you know the toilet gets flushed more times during the halftime show of the Super Bowl than at any other time of year?”

  “Is that right?” He laughed quietly, then bent over at the waist (have mercy!) to get something out of his toolbox. “Guess that makes sense.”

  “Yeah. Not for me, though. I only watch for the halftime show, so I have to make sure the ol’ bladder’s good and empty before—”

  Hope clamped her mouth shut so hard her teeth creaked. What the hell was wrong with her? No one wanted to know about her bathroom habits, least of all some guy who’d be happier if she’d get herself and crew on the first plane back to the mainland.