PROLOGUE
Ten-year-old Damion Wells was content with being an outsider. The reason he felt that he stuck out from all the other ten-year-old kids that he knew wasn’t because he was the only black kid in the small town of Pelican Point, Florida. Or because he had a black mother and a half-white, half–American Indian father. It wasn’t even due to the fact that he lived in a massive house with his great-great-grandmother and both sets of his grandparents.
No, the real reason Damion Wells was an outsider was because, unlike all the other kids around him, he knew exactly what he wanted to do when he grew up.
While all the other kids were boasting about wanting to be pilots, astronauts, or doctors, and days later changing their minds, Damion was certain that someday he was going to be captain of his very own boat.
No matter how much he begged to go out in their small fishing boat, he was lucky if his dad or one of his grandpas took him out once a week. Twice if it was summer and his dad hadn’t been out on a military assignment.
To his family, fishing and boating were hobbies or something they did when they wanted to relax. To Damion, it was his life’s goal, all he ever wanted. He dreamed of it at night and daydreamed about it when he was awake. All of the time.
When he grew up, he planned on being a captain of his very own sailboat. That way he could spend every day out on the water where he couldn’t hear all the mean and hateful things that everyone said to him.
He would allow a few of his friends to come with him. After all, there were a handful of people who stood up for him. Some had even fought off a couple of older bullies that tried to drag him into the ditch where they swore that they had seen a ten-foot alligator the day before.
Aiden Stark and Brett Jewel were both just two years older than he was, but where Damion was skin and bones, both the older boys had muscles already, mainly due to the sports that they both played.
Not that Damion didn’t play sports. He liked soccer just fine. But there was far too much running. He couldn’t wait until he got into junior high, where he could join the basketball team. There was plenty of running in basketball, but it was inside instead of out in the Florida heat, so that didn’t really count.
Besides, he knew that Leif was far too short to play basketball. Leif Harris was one of the town’s biggest bullies and the star of the soccer team, along with his best friends Robbie Dixon Jr. and Larry Ryan, two other bullies. Damion made sure to avoid the trio at all costs.
Which is why he absolutely loved the water so much. Out there, the bullies couldn’t get to him. Out there, he was in command. Out there, he no longer felt like an outsider.
CHAPTERONE
There was a point in everyone’s life where you had to stand up for a completely different path than the one everyone else expected from you. Taking the job at River Camps was that break in stride that Damion had needed. Over five years later, he still didn’t regret breaking away.
Even though he’d attended college for the first few years out of high school like his parents had wanted him to, he’d still felt that strong pull to the water. He never felt that way taking the business classes that he’d signed up for because his parents had nagged him about college.
At first, his parents and his surviving grandparents—his grandmother on his dad’s side and his grandfather on his mother’s side—had tried to talk him out of working at the swanky adult summer camp.
But then he’d convinced Elle and the rest of her Wildflower gang to let his family spend a week at the resort before the doors officially opened. After their first day there, his family stopped complaining about his job. Now, they paid Elle and her friends yearly for access to the pools and the fun activities and events they held each week.
His parents had learned how to ballroom dance at the camp, along with zip lining and yoga, and his mother was even taking self-defense classes taught by Aubrey.
There wasn’t a week that went by where his parents didn’t have massages booked with the camp’s masseuse, Andrea, a woman his mother claimed he should marry right away. Damion was pretty sure his mother was saying that just so Andrea would give her free massages.
Still, the camp had a lot to offer him in the dating field. In the five years he’d worked there, he’d never been bored. The camp boasted plenty of local hotties to pick from. And over the five years, he had gone out on dates with most of them. All but one.
He was currently hanging out around the front desk, waiting for Julie—or as he called her, Jules—to get off the phone. Jules was by far the prettiest and smartest woman he’d ever met. She was funny to the point that even thinking about her had him busting a smile.
There wasn’t a day that went by when he didn’t enjoy being around her or think about asking her out.
The only problem?
She’d put him in the dreaded friend zone. Actually, in the five years they had both worked at the camp, she’d put every man he knew in that same zone.
That had never happened to him before and he wasn’t quite sure what to do to get out of it. Or if it was even possible.
At first, he hadn’t even known how to act around Jules. It had been going on so long now that he pushed it to the back of his mind whenever he was around her. He had grown so comfortable around her that their relationship had changed over the years, and he found himself starting to flirt more and more openly.
They had slid into a flirty-friend comfort zone that he had never experienced before. Nor had anyone else he knew.
Julie Kahala was a lot like him in many ways. Her Hawaiian descent made her a target for the haters that filled the backwoods zone they lived in. He knew that she lived with her parents and her grandmother. Her father’s mother wanted to be called Tutu, which he had found out was a Hawaiian thing that grandparents were called. The name suited the woman. She was as spunky and energetic as his own grandmother was.
The other thing they had in common was how much she loved her job. It was so obvious to everyone around her. She practically glowed each morning when she showed up for work.
He knew that she’d attended some online classes after graduating from high school in Panama City, which wasn’t too far from the camp.