Jackie Braun - He's the One - Winning a Groom in 10 Dates / Molly Cooper's Dream Date / Mr Right There All Along

Was he really that good an actor? No, he’d always had that gift. No matter who he had been with, it had always felt as if, when he focused on her, she was all that mattered to him.

He stopped in front of an art gallery, closed for the day.

“Like any of them?” he asked her of the paintings in the window. He crunched down the last of his cone, and licked some stray ice cream off the inside of his wrist.

It was so sexy she nearly fainted.

She studied the paintings with more intensity. “I like that one,” she decided, finally. It was safe to glance at him. No more ice-cream licking. “The one with the old red boat tied at the end of the dock.”

“What do you like about it?”

It took my mind off what you could do with that tongue if you set your mind to it. And she bet he had set his mind to it. Lots.

“The promise,” she stammered. “Long summer days that just unfold without a plan.”

Moments caught in time, she thought, moments like this one that somehow became profound without even trying.

“Somehow I have trouble imaging you without a plan,” he said.

“I’m not uptight!” Though a woman whose mind went in twisted directions over a lick of ice cream was probably, at the very least, repressed.

“Of course you aren’t,” he said soothingly, smiling at her in an annoying way, as if he was going to pat her on the head. Then he studied the painting.

“It’s been a long time since I spent a day like that,” he said, and something slipped by his guard. Wistfulness?

“You were never the type of guy who did things like that,” she reminded him. “A day fishing? Too quiet for you.”

“I know, I was the guy roaring down Main Street on my secondhand motorcycle with no muffler. Leaping from the cliff above Blue Rock, that outcrop that we called the Widow Maker. Jumping my bicycle over dirt-pile ramps at high speeds.”

“Which you have just proven you still are!”

He smiled, but the wistfulness was there. “After I wrecked my third bicycle my dad wouldn’t buy me another one. Everything seemed simple back then,” he said. With a certain longing?

Could she help him back to that? And also prove she could be spontaneous, not uptight? A girl who could surrender her plan?

“Want to try it?” she asked. “I could find a boat. Your dad has fishing rods. We could dig some worms.”

The new Sophie was appalled, of course, and her grandmother would be, too. What kind of romance plan was that? Digging worms? But the truth was she was suddenly way more anxious to see him enjoy himself, truly and deeply, than she was to manipulate his impressions of her.

Except for the impression that she had to have a plan.

“It’s not on the courtship list,” he teased her.

“I can adjust the list.”

He shrugged, amused. “You can?” he asked, with faked incredulousness. “It’s your courtship, Sophie. If you want to dig worms and go fishing, I’ll go along.”

Good. He’d be so much more amenable if he thought this was about her and not him.

“We can go tomorrow after work,” she decided. “I’ll track down a boat. Can you look after the worms?”

“Sorry, I’m not depriving you of the pure romance of digging worms with me.”

And then he was laughing at the look on her face, and that laughter was worth any price. Even digging worms!

Sophie was less certain when she stood beside him the next evening in his mother’s rose garden.

“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.