Maggie Moves On(111)

She braced for the impact, holding her nose in preparation for being tossed into the churning waters.

The impact was more of a bump, and the water, she realized as the kayak lazily turned with the current, was more meandering than churning.

Okay. So she wasn’t dead. The world didn’t end. But she was still mad.

The nerve of Silas Wright. To literally drag her away from work like she couldn’t take care of herself. Like she was some poor, fragile, stupid little girl who needed her hand held.

Comfortable in her grumpiness, Maggie flopped against the padded seat and looked up. There was a cloud above her, above the forest on both sides of the river, that looked distinctly like a white, fluffy penis.

It was hard to hold on to the mad while looking at a cloud penis. She reached for her phone, thinking she could send Dean a picture. Then she remembered it was somewhere back at the house that she’d been abducted from and got mad all over again.

“I can sit and float in my rage or I can learn how to use this thing and get back to work and murdering Silas faster,” she said to the yellow butterflies that silently flittered around a flowered shrub onshore.

It took her a few minutes, but she was pleased with how easily paddling came to her. She no longer felt like she was going to flip over every time she shifted her weight.

“Let’s do this,” she said with grim determination and dug one end of the paddle into the water and pulled.

She lasted ten minutes of hard paddling before she was sweating and in need of a break. Her arms and shoulders burned, and she made a note to search upper-body workouts online. If she ever got kidnapped and thrown in a kayak in a river again, she wanted to be able to last longer than ten minutes.

The water was a deeper green here. On whatever the right side of a kayak was called, the river cut around the base of jagged cliffs. To the left, lush forest blocked out any hint of civilization.

It was just her and the river. And that deer drinking from the shore, she noted. She held her breath as the current carried her past the doe. Its tail flickered white, and it watched her, waiting to see if Maggie revealed herself as a threat.

“I’m nice. I promise,” she whispered.

The deer seemed to believe her and went back to drinking.

“Oh my God. Is that a fucking bald eagle?” She watched the bird swoop low, talons dipping into the river less than fifty yards in front of her. When it rose again, there was a shimmering fish in its grasp.

“Okay. I get it, Nature. You’re awesome,” she said dryly. “That doesn’t mean that I have to drop everything to come out here and appreciate you.”

Her stomach growled. She’d probably burned through a lot of extra calories holding her rage inside, Maggie guessed. She remembered the cooler and hauled it out of the footwell.

There was a bottle of sunscreen in it, and grumbling about not knowing how long she was going to be in the sun, she slathered a layer on before poking through the rest of the contents in the cooler.

The man had packed her a sandwich, two bottles of water, a Pepsi, and a piece of cake left over from Dayana’s small but festive birthday celebration earlier that week. The napkin had a handwritten note on it.

Float. Think. Be. And if you still feel like hitting me with the paddle when you get to Jeb’s Pull Out (you can’t miss it), I’ll hold still while you swing.

Even when he wasn’t with her, the man was still trying to tell her what to do. She was going to have to fix that. It had been too easy to let him maneuver her into this accidental relationship. He’d distracted her with orgasms and hiking and his loud family. Then managed to weasel his way into her life.

Hell, they had conversations about things like what to make for dinner and choosing between college or a gap year for Cody. They took turns doing the laundry and swinging into town to run errands.

The man had tricked her into a full-blown relationship.

She reached for the sandwich but then reconsidered. Revelations like that made it an eat-the-cake-first kind of day.

Maggie ate her way downstream. She had to give him credit. Silas knew just how she liked her fluffernutter sandwiches. Cracking open the soda, she carefully propped her feet on top of the kayak’s body and leaned back.

The river meandered around another bend, and she spotted a cozy timber cabin on an emerald rise of grass. Near the shore, there was a couple sharing a lazy moment in a hammock, a wine bottle open next to them.

The man raised his glass to her, and Maggie held her Pepsi aloft.

They looked relaxed. Happy. Completely content to be doing nothing. When would she feel like she’d earned the pause? How many houses would it take? Subscribers? Dollars in the bank?

Would her very own show on a network make her happy? It was bigger than she’d ever dreamed. She’d read the basics of the offer about a dozen times so far. There was so much to it that it took her breath away. She and Dean hadn’t had a real discussion about it. Not since he’d been spending most of his free time with Michael.

Maybe it was smarter to stay the course. Decline the offer—politely, of course—and find her next property.

She glared down at the soda—because she was allowed to call it a soda in her own damn head—and wondered if Silas had managed to spike it with some of his philosophical leanings. She liked working hard. Liked accomplishing. Liked setting goals and marching after them single-mindedly.

But does it make me happy? asked a tiny voice that should have been easy to ignore.