Two Cabins, One Lake: An Alaskan Romance (12 page)

When he brought the fish up to the boat, I asked him to hold
it steady, and then I reached down, grabbed the steel leader, and hauled the
fish into the boat.  Gary’s first pike was medium-sized, about 18 inches long.

If Gary had been a client, I would have made noises about
how big it was, what a fighter it had been, how shiny its scales were, or some
other tip-inflating crap.  But he wasn’t, so I was all business as I asked him
to let the tension off the line.

“So that’s a Northern Pike?” he asked.

“Yup.”  I turned around in my seat and he watched with fascination
as I got a grip on the slimy thing and used my Leatherman pliers to pry the
hook out of its mouth.  I released his lure away from my face, and he seemed
conscientious enough to keep it there.  He continued to watch as I pulled the
knife out of the multi-tool and stabbed the fish through the brain and spinal
column.

Pike were insidious creatures.  You could hit them upside
the head with a bonker—the traditional method of killing fish—until you were
red in the face, and they’d still be flailing around trying to swim in the
bottom of the boat an hour later.  By stabbing them, you guaranteed that they
were dead and paralyzed while avoiding scaring off all of the other fish in a
hundred-foot radius with the racket.

I glanced up and realized that at some point Gary had
transferred his gaze to my chest. 
Yeah—not dry yet.
  I gave him a dirty
look.

He gave me a slow, sexy wink.

My body betrayed me, lower belly clenching with a sudden,
unexpected twist of arousal. 
Shit shit shit.
  I turned back around in a
hurry, trying to keep my breathing under control.  Gary being an ass should
come with a warning label.  Gary being charming…well, there weren’t really words.

And I couldn’t help but think he was some sort of weirdo.  Here
he was flirting with me over a canoe full of stinky fish I’d just stabbed to
death, as I clutched a bloody knife in my fish-slimed hands.  And I was
unfashionable, and unornamented, and I had a tongue as sharp as my knife.  So
why
was he flirting with me?

W
e
fished on into evening.  As the shadows lengthened, we began pulling them in
regularly.  Gary and I each got upwards of half a dozen.  The bottom of the
boat filled up, and my sandaled feet got splashed with blood and slime and
grit.

At one point, I stood up in the bow to look down into the
clear water and spot the fish.

“You’re not supposed to stand up in a canoe,” Gary pointed
out.

I shrugged, dragging my gaze over the weedy bottom.  Pike
were territorial—they liked to stake out an area and they’d just lie there in
the water.  They were colored and mottled to be camouflaged, but I had a lot of
experience spotting their slightly darker shapes.

“You’ll tip the boat,” Gary continued.

I pushed down with one foot, then the other, intentionally
rocking the canoe, and then glanced back at him.  “Does it look like the boat
is tipping?”  I mean, really, I was more likely to fall out than the boat was
to tip.  And even if it did tip, the water here at the edge was just two or
three feet deep, so it wasn’t like we’d be sucked into a black hole or
something.  Tipped canoes sucked—mostly because people laughed at you and took
pictures—but they weren’t the end of the world.

His expression was somewhere between disgruntled and
thoughtful.  I half-expected him to splash me again.  But he didn’t.

Instead, Gary paddled us slowly, gently forward.  I hadn’t
thought ‘slowly, gently’ was in his repertoire—he seemed more a hard-and-fast
kinda guy—but there it was.  Depraved creature that I was, I shivered.

“See anything?” he asked.

“Noooo—Ah!”  I stumbled, nearly falling backward into the
boat, and then scrambled back into place, peering cautiously over the bow.

“What?  What is it?”

It was…The Big One.  It was huge, so big I’d thought it was
a log.  My brain whirred, trying to calculate how much that thing must weigh. 
Thirty pounds?  At least. 
Holy hell…
This one was way, way bigger than
Ronnie’s.  This one right here was the reason I didn’t swim in the lake.  That
thing had a maw big enough to latch onto my calf.  And rows of teeth big and sharp
enough to shred it.  My heart started to race.

“Cast,” I whispered.  “Keep us right here—no sudden
movements—and cast forward and slightly to the left.”  I was frozen in place,
terrified I’d scare it.  I needed to keep an eye on it, needed to not let it
out of my sight.  We
needed
to catch it.

I didn’t know if his lure was big enough, if his line would
hold, if his rod would break.  But it’s what we had.  We
had
to try.

“Cast!”  My voice was a high, excited whisper-squeak.

He cast.

I held my breath as his lure arced through the air.  Then it
splashed down, and it was perfect.  He began to reel, and his lure came into
sight, in a perfect spin, headed right by the Beast.  I held my breath, leaning
forward. 
Yes.  Yessss.

The monstrous fish struck.  I watched it swallow the lure
whole.  For a moment there, I thought I might actually die of excitement.

Gary yanked on the rod, and then applied a constant
pressure.  We started to list toward the fish.

The fish didn’t move.  It just lay there in the water, its
fins moving gently as it stabilized itself, completely unfazed.  The fish
didn’t know yet.  The fish hadn’t started to fight.

“I think I got a log again,” Gary said.

“Keep tension on the line,” I instructed in a hushed tone. 
“And for the love of God, don’t jerk it.”

He chuckled.  “That’s what she said.”

I glanced back at him with fascinated disbelief.  I didn’t
think I’d ever seen this before.  Both he
and
the fish were clueless. 
Neither knew the fish was hooked.  Neither knew the Big One was on the line. 
Yet another example of the Newb catching the Honker. 
Goddammit.

“You have a fish on the line,” I said, slowly.  “It’s the
biggest pike I’ve ever seen.”

“You’re funnin’ me.”

“I am not
‘funnin’
you!”  The fish chose that moment
to shake its head, yanking the line and proving my point.

Gary’s mouth opened in a stunned, satisfying O.  He let the
rod dip.

“Tension!” I snapped.  I sat up a little straighter,
searching the bottom of the boat with my eyes.  A fish this size was gonna
require a net.  I couldn’t pull this one into the boat by hand, no way.  But we
didn’t have a net.

It was the biggest pike I’d ever seen, and we didn’t have a fucking
net.

The massive fish took off, line
scree
ing out as it
arrowed toward the middle of the lake.  The canoe did an ominous spin, and we were
dragged slowly but surely into deeper water.

“Shit,” I whispered.

The only option I could see for us landing the monster was to
paddle to shore and drag the fish up onto it.  To this end, I started paddling,
trying to drag us back toward shore even as the fish tried to pull us farther
out.

Gary was laughing, hooting and hollering as the fish
executed an aerial dive, flinging water with a heavy splash that would have
done a beaver proud.

I paddled harder, trying to figure out how we were gonna get
the beast ashore.  The shore wasn’t a nice, gentle slope, and it was lined with
a tangle of thigh-high brush right up to the very edge.

The fish suddenly turned around, and I watched it swim
lazily alongside the boat, allowing us to coast those last few feet.  We were
in three feet of water now, only a few feet from the shore.

That was when I glanced down, and realized the lure had come
mostly out of its mouth.  The treble was hanging on by one hook—and that hook was
bending.

We were gonna lose it.

“Fuck!”  I threw the paddle away from me and shoved to my
feet.

And, with a battle cry, I jumped from the boat.

I bitch about fishing a lot, but you gotta understand—I
became a guide for a reason.  I love to fish.  I love to throw a perfect cast,
pull the lure through the water at the perfect speed and depth, feel that yank
as the fish strikes, and then fight it, tire it out, drag it to the boat, and
bonk it to death.  I love to carry those slimy fuckers up from the boat at the
end of the day; I have a big, shit-eating grin plastered across my face every
time.  Half of my ceiling upstairs is filled with pictures of other people with
big shit-eating grins, holding their dead fish—fish I helped them catch.  I
have a soul-deep feeling of satisfaction when I cut the perfect fillet, and I
even love to eat them (weird, I know).

So you’ve gotta understand, when I say I jumped into the
lake after the biggest pike I’ve ever seen, it’s not an exaggeration.  And no,
I didn’t swan-dive, ‘cuz I’m not an idiot.

I jumped in feet-first right next to the behemoth pike, and
I scooped it up in my arms.  I have no idea how I caught it before it darted
away.  It defies the laws of physics and fishing, but there it was.  I scooped
it up into my arms, held onto it for dear life as it started to thrash, and I waded
toward the shore.

The weeds were thick, and the muck beneath them sucked at my
feet, but I wasn’t gonna let that stop me.  I carried that slimy, slippery,
flailing fucker to shore, and then clambered up somehow, while holding it, and
high-stepped it several feet into the brush.  Then I dumped the huge bastard
onto the ground and threw myself over it, so it had absolutely no hope of
flopping away.

It was only as I was lying atop its surprisingly strong body
that I resurfaced from my trophy-inspired fugue.  I glanced up, and Gary was
sitting in the canoe, staring at me with the kind of shock a genteel person
might reserve for a train wreck—if the rail cars had been full of dildos.

And I guess I knew what I looked like.  I was soaked from
the neck down, had body-slammed a fish, and could probably only have surprised
my new neighbor more if I’d caught it with my teeth.

The fish flailed again, slapping me in the face with its
tail. 
Ow
.

“Could you throw me my Leatherman?” I asked.  My voice was surprisingly
level.

He complied.

When I finally had the monster slain, I hefted it up off the
ground.

Gary’s beautiful green eyes grew wide.  He cleared his
throat.  “Does that count as your catch, or mine?” he asked.

It was a good question.  All means short of poison and
dynamite were legal when it came to pike.  So was it Gary’s lure or my arms
that caught the fish?  In my opinion, it was more a philosophical question than
a practical one.

“It’s yours.”  Never let it be said that I’m a selfish person.

He had pulled the canoe in to shore, and I watched him clamber
out of the boat.  I stood there, trying to figure out what he thought he was
doing.

He moved to me through the thigh-high bushes.  His eyes were
on the fish.  “Here, let me—”

“Mmph!” I said, because he lunged in, grabbed hold of my
face, and kissed me.  I was tight and stiff with shock, and I couldn’t do a
damn thing because I had a knife in one hand—
sooooo tempting
—and a
prize-winning fish in the other.

I was breathing hard through my nose, my eyes still open as
his lips seduced mine.  And his tongue—he licked at me, probed, seeking
entrance.  I went even tighter, and stiffer, and my mouth finally opened on a
gasp, as he put his hand between my legs.

He thrust his tongue into my mouth, and I heard his groan of
triumph, one of utter masculine delight, and my stupid pussy actually gushed in
response.  My body was pulsing, and my nipples shot hard from the slow,
delicious slide of his tongue against mine.

I wanted to hit him with his fish for wresting such a
response from me.  Stubbornly, I fought it.

I nipped his tongue, and squeaked, going up on my toes when
he applied pressure on my clit. 
Oh, God,
he didn’t fight fair.  My eyes
rolled back as he rubbed me through my wet shorts. 

His mouth left mine and traced a heated trail along my jaw. 
The man was probably gonna get beaver fever from licking the water droplets off
my skin, but I tilted my head to the side, inviting him.

With his hands and mouth, he made ripples of pleasure echo
through my body.  I just stood there, dripping, and let it happen.  Because it
felt wonderful.  Because he made me feel beautiful.  Wanted.  Fish slime and
all.

With a final pinch of my nipple through my soaked shirt and
bra, he slid his hands away, and stepped back.  I caught myself as I swayed
toward him.  I looked up into his eyes, momentarily lost.

“Are all Alaskan women like you?” he asked.

“No one’s like me.”

“That, I can believe,” he said.  “I’m gonna have it
stuffed.”

I blinked.

“The fish.”

I finally caught up with the conversation and sighed happily. 
Moneybags was gonna do something useful for a change.

G
ary
and I were pretty much done for the evening, and the terrible trio were out of
beer, so we headed back.  The shadows were deepening as the sun sank toward the
horizon, the day just starting to cool off.  On the first portage, it started
to rain.  It was a light sprinkle that got heavier as we made our way back.

I was already wet, so I just got a bit wetter.  And
everybody else, Gary and my three brothers, gradually got soaked right along
with me.  By the time we clambered back down over the beaver dam, we were all
shivering.

The temperature was now in the 50s, a normal and tolerable
Alaskan night, but the 50s got a whole helluva lot colder when you were
soaked.  My fingers were so cold, my grip on my paddle kept slipping, and I was
having fantasies about my wood stove.  I had a diesel stove that I usually used
for heating, but there was just something about a fire.  And hot chocolate.  I
shuddered, mentally zeroing in on the box of Swiss Miss on my shelf.