He wrapped his hands over hers and showed her how to lift the oars and rest them inside the boat.
“That was fun,” she said. She gripped the sides of the boat as he moved to the bench across from her. “Do you do this a lot? By yourself, I mean.”
“A couple times a week. I like to get my mind out of the trenches.” He opened the tackle box and withdrew a bottle of peach tea. “For you, madam.”
“You remembered…”
He winked and withdrew a plastic container with an array of cheese and crackers, setting it on the bench beside her. “In case you get hungry, since we’re catching our dinner.”
“We are?” Her eyes widened.
“Please tell me you like to eat fish.”
“I love it.” She unscrewed the top of her drink and took a sip. Her gaze rolled over his face as she screwed the top back on and set it on the floor of the boat. “And I like doing this, being here on the water with you. It’s different.”
“So are you, sweetheart.” He pulled the other tackle box out from beneath the bench. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever baited a line?”
“Ew.” Her nose wrinkled adorably.
He chuckled. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll bait the lines; you can be in charge of feeding me.”
“You’re pretty good at this dating thing, aren’t you? You have lots of ways to get a woman to do intimate things, like helping with rowing and feeding you, without coming across as too pushy. I like it.”
Good to know. As he baited their fishing lines, he said, “Tell me something, Harp. You said you pick things apart. Are bad experiences with guys a pattern for you?”
“No.” She put a piece of cheese on a cracker and lifted it to his lips. As he bit into it, she said, “I mean, I’ve had some bad dates, but not like the things that happened in LA.”
“What about long-term relationships? Have you had many?”
“A few months here and there, but there’s never been one great love of my life that I lost, if that’s what you’re getting at. What about you?”
“I’ll let you in on a secret, but if you ruin my rep, I’ll have to kill you.”
“Now you have to tell me.” She bit into a cracker.
He chuckled. “Nothing long-term since my first year of college. I date, and I’ve been with my share of women, but I’m not the player Chloe thinks I am. I come from a traditional family, and I want that someday. If anything, I’m careful. I think it takes a bigger man to pass up a one-night stand than it does to take advantage of it.”
She stared at him as she took a drink of her tea. As she recapped the bottle, she said, “We had a one-night stand.”
“Technically that’s not true. You’re here now.”
“Oh, Mr. Wheeler,” she said as she fed him another bite, “you have all the answers.”
“No, I don’t. How many guys would you guess you’ve gone out with over the past decade? Not slept with, just accepted a date from?”
“I don’t know. Maybe eight or ten?”
“And how many of those were bad?”
“Other than the ones in LA? None, really. They just weren’t particularly good.”
“Fair enough. Who decided who you’d go out with for all those years? Jana? Serena? Another friend? Who decided when you were ready to break things off?”
“Me, of course. Why?”
“Because it sounds to me like you’ve got a history of trusting your own instincts and they’ve never steered you wrong. That’s a pretty solid foundation, and yet you’re letting two bad experiences undermine it.” He cast a line into the water and handed Harper the fishing rod. “Two unusual or bad experiences, Harp, not ten or even five, but two.” He set a thoughtful gaze on her and said, “That seems a bit out of proportion and unfair to you.”
Chapter Five
GAVIN CAST ANOTHER line and said, “You dated a cheater, who we’ll call the asshole, and a guy who happened to prefer the sampler platter to the steak or seafood. Those things could have happened to anyone. Hell, I’ve been cheated on, and these days threesomes are commonplace.”
She nearly choked on that. “Commonplace? Have you had a threesome?”
“No. I told you, I’m more of a traditional guy. Nothing intrigues me about sharing someone I’m intimate with, but that’s not a hard limit for lots of people.” He reached over and reeled in her line a little. “If you have too much slack in the line, you won’t feel the fish when it bites. You know what? Fishing is a lot like dating. You throw more back than you keep.”
“That’s the truth. Do you want another cracker?”
“No, thanks. Some sugar would be good.” He winked, and her cheeks pinked up. He reached into the tackle box again, withdrawing two red lollipops. “Your favorite.”
“You really did remember everything.”
When they were in Romance, they’d wandered into a candy store. The retailer was out of red lollipops, and Gavin had insisted on walking several blocks to the grocery store, where he’d bought a bag of lollipops just to give her the red ones. It had touched her then as much as his thoughtfulness touched her now.
He took the wrapper off the lollipops and handed her one.
“Basically, you’re saying I’m being too hard on myself?” she asked.
“Exactly. You’re a smart woman. You followed your heart and made a career doing what you love. I don’t think it’s your instincts that are giving you trouble. You said your show was canceled?”
“After months of rewrites, casting, more rewrites based on the cast, and finally filming, the show wasn’t picked up. It really gutted me.”
“I can only imagine,” he said empathetically. “I’m so sorry you went through that, but you had nothing to do with the show not being picked up, Harp. I understand why it dragged you down. You worked your ass off to get there. You left your home with high hopes of becoming something bigger and better, or…?”
“Just becoming something,” she confessed.
“But it sounds like you had already achieved what most screenwriters pray for and never do. You wrote a cable show a few years ago. I looked it up, and it was funny and sexy, and it ran for two seasons.”
“Then it was dropped.”
“But that’s the world you chose to play in. If it were easy, everyone would do it. Do you realize how amazing it is that your first cable show ran for two seasons? I did some research, and only about twenty percent of sitcoms are renewed for a second season.”
“You researched it?”
“I did, and I looked into the show you were working on that didn’t get picked up. From what I read, it had to do with Hollywood politics, not the writing itself.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s what everyone said. I can’t believe you researched it.”
He shrugged one shoulder, like it wasn’t a big deal, when it felt huge to her.
“I wanted to know if you had a reason to worry about your career or not.”
“I do,” she said. “It’s not easy to sell a show, and I haven’t written anything but garbage since it all went down. I had to take a job writing current event articles for the newspaper just for a paycheck. Talk about going backward.”