“This looks good,” she said of the rose garden, amazed at how the weed-choked beds and overgrown roses were beginning to look as good as they once had. “You’ve done a lot in a little amount of time.”
He handed her a jar with some dirt in it. “Enough small talk. Dig. Worms. Big ones. Wriggly ones. Juicy ones. Ones just like this!”
He dangled a worm in front of her face.
She screamed, and he chuckled. “Come on, Sweet Pea, you were never the kind of girl who was scared of creepy-crawly things.”
“I was. I just pretended not to be.”
“Really? Why?” He took the jar from her, dropped the worm into it without making her touch it.
“If I had let those boys know I had a weak spot, Brand, I would have been finding worms in my lunchbox, worms in my books and worms in my mittens.”
“There was a certain group of boys who picked on you,” he recalled affectionately. “Especially after ‘What Makes a Small Town Tick.’”
“I think they might have made my life unbearable except for the fact they knew my big, tough next-door neighbor had my back. Brand Sheridan. My hero.” She slid him a little look. He was on his hands and knees filling the worm jar, not even asking her to help.
“Actually, I think they probably liked you. You know, guys at a certain age give the girl they like a frog, so she won’t know, and so they can hear her scream. I probably prevented you from having a boyfriend for a lot of years when you could have. Or should have.”
“I felt like you had my back then,” she said, her voice soft with memory, “and here we are, eight years later. And you still have my back.”
He glanced up at her, smiled, looked back and snagged a wriggler from the freshly turned black soil and put it in his jar. “I’ll always have your back, Sophie.”
He said that so casually, but even the casualness of the statement resonated deeply with her, and made her heart stand still. The way he said it, it was as if caring about her was part of who he was, came as naturally to him as breathing.
Just as she was relaxing, he turned and tossed a worm at her and then laughed when she shrieked. A good reminder that for all his sterling qualities, Brand Sheridan was no saint!
“Are you trying to tell me you like me?” she demanded.
“Sure. That, and I wanted to hear you scream. Did those boys stop bugging you by high school, Sweet Pea?”
“By then they ignored me completely,” she admitted. “I was the invisible girl.”
And somehow, even though this fishing trip was supposed to be all about him, it was so easy to tell him about her. To talk about the lonely little geek she had once been, not with regret, but with affection.
And it became so easy to show him the life he had said such a firm “no” to eight years ago.
They went fishing at Glover’s Pond, but before they got there they had to go through the ritual of him chasing her around the garden with his jar of worms. And then they had to go to Bitsy’s house and load her long-dead husband’s old wooden rowboat onto the roof of Brand’s car—a sporty little number which was not made to carry old wooden rowboats.
After much cursing and sweating and laughing and yelling of orders, they finally made it out of Bitsy’s driveway.
And when they got to the pond they had to reverse getting that contraption on the roof, to get it back off.
“Get out of the way,” Brand panted at her, trying single-handedly to wrestle the rowboat off the roof of his car. “I don’t want you squished by a damn boat.”
“Shut up. You’re such a chauvinist.”
“Get out of the way!”
“Okay. Okay.”
“Was that sound my paint job getting scratched?” His voice from underneath the rowboat was muffled.
“You wanted to do it by yourself, Mr. Macho! Now you have a scratch. Live with it.”
“Mr. Macho. Are you kidding me? Who says things like that?” he muttered, wobbling his way down to the water with the rowboat on top of him. “How bad’s the scratch?”
“Small. About the same size as the worm you threw at me. Maybe worms make good Bondo. Have you ever thought of that?”
“Actually, no, I never have. Imagine that.”
He flipped the boat off, kicked off his shoes and hauled it into the water without rolling up his pants. The boat didn’t start to float until he was in nearly to his thighs.
“That painting, Sweet Pea? A big, fat lie! Don’t get wet, for God’s sake. One of us getting wet is enough.”
He shoved the boat around, waded back in, guiding it with a rope attached to the pointed bow. Then he stooped, moved his shoulder into her stomach, wrapped his arms around her knees and lifted. She found herself being carried like a sack of potatoes out to the boat. He lowered her in.
When the excitement of being manhandled by him, and having an intimate encounter with his shoulder subsided, she couldn’t help but notice her feet were getting wet. Already.
“Brand?”
“What?”
“The boat appears to be leaking.”
He peered in over the side. “It’s not like a leak. It’s a dribble. That’s what the coffee can is for.”
And then he nearly dumped the boat trying to scramble over the side to get in. Finally in and settled, he attached the oars while she bailed water from around their ankles. No matter how fast she bailed, the water level stayed about the same.
“Are you sure its just a dribble?”
“Hey, I’m a marine. If the boat goes down, I’ll save you.”
If that was anything like being manhandled by him, she’d better bail harder.
After a while, he set the fishing lines and handed her a pole, while he bailed and rowed. And swatted bugs.
“I’ve got a nibble,” she cried, rising unsteadily to her feet.
“No, you don’t. Sweet Pea. Sit down. You can’t stand up in boats. Sit down!”
He was quite masterful when he used that tone of voice. She sat down.
“I lost the fish,” she told him.
“I’m beginning to think fishing is overrated, anyway.” He rowed them in a big circle around the pond.
It was a ridiculous way to conduct a courtship, Sophie thought. No flowers, no wine, no fancy dinner, no dancing until dawn. But she was the one who never seemed to get anything right.
But if that was true, why did this feel so right? Probably because watching him pit his strength against a water-filled boat that was growing more uncooperative by the second was just about as sexy as watching him lick ice cream off his wrist.
“You know that painting?” he asked her.
“Uh-huh.”
“There’s a reason no one’s in the damn boat.”
And then they were laughing, and the sun was going down, and the water sloshing around her ankles felt wonderful, though not as wonderful as watching him pit his pure strength against the oars until it was so dark they could hardly see each other anymore.
As they exited the boat and wrestled it back up the slippery bank toward his vehicle, the evening seemed to be ringed with magic, suffused with a golden light.
“I’m picking the next date,”