Chapter 1

“There’s no place like home.”

Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz

“Did you know there’s a town in Saskatchewan called Climax?”

Hope Seaver pulled a Wet-Nap out of her oversize tote bag and handed it across the narrow aisle to her camera guy, Kevin, as the small float plane banked a little to the right.

Kevin had spent most of the flight bent over his barf bag, and his already pale complexion seemed almost transparent as he sat up slowly, dragging the damp cloth over his mouth.

“It’s true.” Hope smirked, quirking her left eyebrow. “And as you drive out of town, their sign says, COME AGAIN.”

Instead of laughing—or even smiling—Kevin leaned his head back against the velvet-covered rest and groaned.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “That’s funny.”

He barely managed to roll his gaze her way before closing his eyes again.

“It’s better than the other stupid shit you’ve been spouting the whole flight,” he muttered. “I’ll give you that.”

“It’s not stupid shit,” she said, her laugh brittle and a little forced. “They’re quality bits of knowledge that help to enhance and enrich your life.”

Okay, the bit about Climax, Saskatchewan, might not have been all that enriching, but who didn’t like trivia? It was interesting, helped start conversations, and was a great distraction when she was worried or nervous.

And though she was trying to keep it in check, holy crap on a cracker, she was plenty of both just then. Thankfully, neither Kevin nor the other cameraman, Chuck, seemed to notice—Kevin because he’d been too sick, and Chuck because the second he’d buckled into his seat in front of Kevin, he stuck his earbuds in, closed his eyes, and started to snore.

The pilot hadn’t so much as acknowledged any of them since takeoff, so, sick or not, Kevin was the only one Hope had to talk to on the flight, and, honestly, it had been more of a running monologue than an actual conversation.

“If this is what you’re like even after you’re medicated,” she said, “how are you going to manage out on the boats? And why the hell would you even take a job like this?”

“Relax, Blondie, it only happens when I fly.” Kevin dragged his eyes open, inhaled a long slow breath, and then blew it out again—right in Hope’s direction. “Feeling better already.”

“Oh my guh.” Clamping one hand over her mouth and nose—too late to do any good—Hope reached the other hand deep into her bag again. “Here.”

The first thing she shoved at him were the rest of her wipes, then a pocket-sized package of tissues, a lunch container filled with plain crackers, a couple of Advil caplets, a bottle of Pepto, and the rest of her water. Somewhere in there…oh, come on…she was sure she’d packed some…yup, there it was: a travel-sized mouthwash.

Kevin stared down at the heap on his lap, then blinked hard and grunted. “Seriously?”

Still grimacing, Hope flicked her fingers toward the mouthwash. “Don’t be shy with that stuff. If a little’s good, a lot’s a whole lot better.”

Bypassing the mouthwash, he popped the lid off the cracker container and stuffed a couple of them into his mouth, a trail of crumbs falling from his fingers.

“Got any ginger ale in that drugstore you carry around?” he asked. “Spare toothbrush maybe?”

“No. And if you knew this was going to happen, why didn’t you come prepared?”

“I did.” He swallowed hard, then shoved in two more crackers before pulling an unopened pack of gum out of his pocket. “See? Ready for anything.”

“Yeah, you’re a regular Boy Scout,” she said, her voice dry and unamused. “After everything that’s happened, the last thing we need is for you to be smelling like…that…the first time we meet the O’Donnells face-to-face.”

“You worry too much.” Kevin dropped his gum on top of the pile on his lap and took a long swig of water. “I can’t wait to meet these guys, especially that one from the conference call—the one who told the network to go fuck itself. Pretty sure that dude’s my spirit animal.”

“Ronan,” Hope muttered.

She’d been sitting in on that call, staring down at a picture of the O’Donnell men, and had actually jumped in her chair when Ronan’s roar blasted through the speaker on Luka’s desk. It wasn’t just the shock of him yelling that made her jump, it was also because she never would have guessed the man in that particular picture could yell like that.

The photo was nothing more than a candid shot of the three brothers sitting around the fire pit in front of their lodge, Ronan in the middle, his arms curled around his brothers’ necks. And even though they all wore big bright smiles, there was something else in Ronan’s expression, something soft and tender, almost vulnerable.

He didn’t have that look in any of the pictures of him by himself, only the ones with his family. Clearly they were his weakness, and his roar made it crystal clear that he wasn’t going to let anyone do anything to exploit them or their business, which was exactly what he thought Luka and the network were trying to do.

Sitting there in Luka’s office, Hope had actually smoothed her finger over Ronan’s face in the picture, as if that would somehow soothe him, as if he could somehow feel her touch and know that his family was in safe hands, that she’d treat them as gently as she would her own family, if she had one.

Hope blinked the memory away and sighed.

“Yeah, well, spirit animal or not, you weren’t there for the whole conversation, so you don’t know how hard Luka had to work to keep the O’Donnells on board with this.”

Kevin snorted. “Gimme a break; Luka could sell salt to a slug.”

“Usually, yeah, and by the end of that call, she’d made it sound like we’re going to be the best thing to happen to this fishing lodge since the invention of the spinning reel, but we still need to convince them that they did the right thing.”

“We will.”

“Really?” Hope scoffed. “Because we’re about five minutes from deplaning, Kevin, and, so help me God, if you so much as dry-heave on their dock…”

“Trust me, I got nothin’ left to heave.”

He’d better be right on that, because she had beat out eight other people for this field-producer job with the TV show Hooked and she wasn’t going to let anyone screw it up.

The plane skimmed down over the water, its floats bouncing and wobbling a little before the pilot evened them out and pointed the plane toward the Buoys fishing lodge. Kevin took another quick sip of the water, then scrubbed a fresh wipe over his face.

Hope pulled an empty small plastic container out of her bag and used it to catch the cracker crumbs she brushed off his knee and armrest. Kevin stared at her, wide-eyed, as if she was some kind of nutter.

“Seriously—is there anything you don’t have in that bag?”

“Unlike you, I like to be prepared.” She pointed at his used wipes, then at the container, and waited for him to drop them in with the crumbs. “And you’re welcome. Let’s just hope they chalk up how pale you are to the fact you’re a ginger.”

While Kevin worked on making himself presentable, Hope pressed her forehead against her tiny window, watching their new part-time digs get closer and closer.

Part-time digs. Again. How many was that now? Somewhere along the line she’d lost count, lost track of how many hotels and B&Bs her job had taken her to. But the Buoys wasn’t just another hotel, and it certainly wasn’t just another West Coast fishing lodge. It was where the O’Donnell family had lived for thirty-five years.

It was their home.

As it always did, that simple word scraped over Hope’s heart, leaving another raw scratch in its wake, but she’d long since learned how to soothe that pain. No, she didn’t have a real home or a family of her own, but she did have a job she loved and a bunch of amazing friends who never failed to make her feel welcome. And that was just as good, right?

Right. And besides all that, she was getting to spend her summer at the Buoys, and how many people got to do that for free?

Tucked back into Strip Cove, an almost-perfect crescent-shaped beach on the south side of Welch Island, the Buoys consisted of a simple three-level timber-frame main building with three small log cabins that sat along the north edge of the cove and five tiny A-frames out back. From what Hope could see, the grounds looked to be well kept, with low-lying shrubs lining the gravel path that started at the end of the dock and wrapped around the whole cove to the front doors of the cabins.

Brilliant bursts of red and purple flowers streamed over the sides of hanging baskets on each porch and in buckets along the staircases. Each cabin’s door was painted a different color—green, white, and orange—and two flagpoles stood at the halfway point around the cove, one bearing the maple leaf and the other bearing the three-striped flag of Ireland.

The entire place was surrounded by towering old-growth cedars and pines that, if what Hope had read was true, were home to more wildlife than she even wanted to think about. Technically, Welch Island wasn’t an island at all but a peninsula, and that narrow strip of land on its northeast side connecting it to the mainland was what made it so easy for bears, cougars, and other creatures to wander in and around at will.

“Did you know a quarter of all North American grizzly bears live here in BC?” Hope didn’t look at Kevin for his reaction but instead kept her forehead pressed against the cool glass and tried not to think about how many grizzlies and black bears were probably wandering around the perimeter of the lodge right at that moment. “And did you know they can eat up to ninety pounds of food in a single day?”

As Kevin grunted, the front door of the Buoys opened. But before Hope could get a good look at who came out, the pilot turned the plane sharply to the right, so Hope’s window faced the open ocean.

“I hope you’re—” Turning to Kevin, she stopped and blinked hard. If she hadn’t seen the transformation with her own eyes, she never would have believed it, but, sure enough, Kevin had somehow managed to get back to his normal shade of pale and was looking almost human again. “Ready.”

“Right as rain,” he said, casually as can be, as if he hadn’t spent most of the last hour sick as a dog. “No sweat.”

Amazing.

Hope gathered up what was left of her tissues, wipes, and crackers and dropped them into her bag just as the plane’s float nudged the dock. Chuck blinked awake, stretched, then unbuckled and shifted to the edge of his seat, waiting for the pilot to open the door.

He and Kevin had both done jobs like this before and had experience and knowledge to pull from. But Hooked was Hope’s first solo project as field producer and the first time she really and truly needed to have her shit together. And she thought she had it together, she really did, thought everything was sunshine and rainbows, right up until the moment she looked out Kevin’s window and saw the O’Donnells walking down the dock.

And now…yeah…now it was cloudy with a good chance of vomit.

“Go ahead,” she said when Chuck tried to wave her out first. “I just have to…”

She didn’t finish, but that didn’t matter, because Chuck didn’t wait, and neither did Kevin. It only gave her an extra few seconds, but it was enough for one final deep breath before she climbed out of the plane into the soft misty rain.

The pilot had opened the back and was pulling out the gear when Chuck started the introductions, pointing to each person as he spoke.

“Kevin Lennox, Hope Seaver, this here’s Finn…that’s Liam…and the one taking the bags there is Ronan.”

Hope shook Finn’s and Liam’s hands, smiling all the while as she consciously focused on maintaining slow easy breaths. No problem.

You got this.

And then she turned to greet Ronan. From the photos in the Hooked files, she’d cataloged every detail about him—about all of them—so deep in her brain that she could have described him perfectly even with her eyes closed.

From the green eyes, to the single freckle in the middle of his left cheek, to the three lines creasing his forehead. From the way he wore his thick brown hair just short enough that he probably only combed it with his fingers, to the way he stood a good inch or so taller than both of his brothers, and the way he always wore his watch on his right wrist. And, yeah, okay, she’d noticed the way his shoulders and biceps stretched the fabric of his T-shirt. Like they were doing now. Whatever. The point was, none of this was new to her; she knew all of it and more.

And yet not a single one of those details, nor any of the others she’d stored up, prepared her for the real Ronan O’Donnell—for the way his eyes weren’t just green but a soft mossy color that looked at her with something more like surprise than the blatant anger she’d expected; for the way his strong handshake, hesitant as it was, somehow infused a bit of strength in her; and for how much actual space he took up.

Sure, she could have chalked up the crowding to the number of people on the dock or to the fact that the low-lying clouds made the whole cove feel socked in, but the fact was, Ronan James O’Donnell had a physical presence that was a little intimidating, a little daunting. Or at least it was right up until he spoke.

“Hope.” Ronan nodded slightly as he released her hand. “Good to meet you.”

It was silly to think he’d yell all the time, but it wasn’t until he spoke her name that she realized that’s exactly what she’d expected, exactly what she’d prepared herself for. It had to be why the deep warm timbre of his voice caught her off guard and sent crazy flutterings racing through her blood until she shivered them out as goosebumps.

Nerves, that’s all it was. Or maybe relief. She’d prepared herself to meet the loud, angry Ronan and she’d shored up her will to deal with that, to be on the defensive right from the get-go. But now…now she could relax a little, right?

Yeah, right. He might not be yelling, but suspicion lingered in his eyes, and if this was going to work, she’d need to find a way to get him to trust her. She needed all of them to trust her, to believe she was the one they could count on, the one who’d protect their interests while providing the network with a ratings winner. She needed to show the O’Donnells they had absolutely nothing to worry about.

Nothing except for the fact that she’d never been the one in charge before, she’d never done this on her own, and one wrong move would no doubt bring the whole show to a screeching halt, putting herself, Kevin, and Chuck out of work.

But other than that…yeah…no worries.

“Thanks,” she said, flashing what she hoped looked like a bright, confident smile. “Good to meet you, too.”

She tucked the straps of her bag high on up on her shoulder, then set in to help off-load the rest of the bags and equipment. Once everything was stacked on the dock, the pilot didn’t hang around; he just locked up the hold, climbed back inside the cockpit, and waved as Kevin untied the plane and shoved it away from the dock.

It took a bit of juggling, but once they’d stored some of the gear on Finn’s boat and everyone was loaded down with the rest of the bags, Liam led them all up the dock toward the lodge. Kevin walked next to him, followed by Finn and Chuck, which left Hope to pull up the rear with Ronan.

“Here.” Shifting the bags he already had, he reached for one of hers, but Hope shook her head.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I got it. Thanks.”

The bags were freakin’ heavy, and the drizzle was making the hard-plastic handles slippery, but she needed Ronan and everyone else at the Buoys to believe she was fully capable, not some ridiculous delicate flower who couldn’t handle things. And while the rational side of her brain knew that carrying bags had absolutely nothing to do with how well she did her job, it was the principle of the matter.

So onward she trudged, and even though the rest of them were already well ahead, Ronan stayed with her, walking in silence, and looking very much as if he’d rather be getting his chest waxed. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred meters from the dock to the stairs, but it felt like miles, especially with neither of them saying anything.

Come on, Hope. You’ve read everything there is to read on this place—you know its specs, you know its history, you even know how many fish they caught last season. Say something! Anything. Talk about the weather, for God’s sake.

“Did you know that Texas horned toads can shoot blood out of the corners of their eyes?”