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Carly paused, still sitting firmly in the very center of her seat. The water sloshed in quiet rhythm around the sides of the boat, a slight breeze keeping the temperature cool but pleasant. After a minute, when they hadn’t capsized or run aground or been swallowed alive by the Loch Ness Monster, she shrugged out of her hoodie and slid a few inches closer to the side of the vessel, peering over the edge.
“It is pretty nice out here.” She turned her face up to the sun, the cotton of her snug white T-shirt emphasizing her curves, and Jackson barely missed running his finger through with the barb at the end of the lure. Christ, Carly even made sitting still look hot. He needed to distract himself, otherwise he wasn’t going to escape with all ten digits intact.
“So, fishing,” he said, clearing his throat. “There’s not a whole lot to the actual process. Casting’s the hardest part, and I can do that for you.” Her lips curved down in an I-don’t-think-so frown, and Jackson recanted. “Or I can teach you how to do it.” He handed over the fishing pole he’d just baited.
“So, how come you’re not using real worms?” She peered at the plastic lure on the end of the line.
“Don’t sound so disappointed. Different fish bite on different things. We’re going to try our luck with these first. If all else fails, there’s live bait in the cooler.”
Carly nodded. “Okay.”
Her casting skills were as rough as he’d expected them to be for someone just starting out, but he was able to walk her through it enough to get a line in the water. The lure landed just short of a bank of reeds, and she looked at him expectantly as soon as it hit the water.
“Okay. Now what?”
“Now just turn the reel slowly, like this.” Jackson stood behind her, reaching around her shoulders and covering her hands with his own to roll the handle of the reel in a slow draw. “If anything pulls back, holler.”
“I can do that.” Carly glanced up at him over her shoulder, her ear brushing against his chest as she turned her head. “Thank you.”
“Sure.” Reluctantly, he stepped back to bait his own line, standing next to her as he cast. The morning was nothing short of gorgeous, and after a while, Carly got the hang of casting well enough to manage with only a little help. They fished in comfortable quiet, lulled by the gentle sloshing of the water against the boat, and Carly’s face relaxed into a serene smile. Surely, there weren’t many things in life better than this.
“I’ll bet you don’t get this kind of quiet in New York.” He inhaled a deep breath of sunshine and fresh air. The handful of times he’d ventured into Philly, he’d made it all of six hours before the noise had driven him bat-shit crazy.
Carly’s happy expression disappeared, catching his full attention.
“No. You don’t.”
Jackson was silent for a minute that lapsed into several, casting and reeling in on a gradual draw before repeating the process once, then twice. “Still homesick,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but she answered him all the same.
“Yeah.” Carly stood, moving nothing but her gaze as she watched him cast, the monofilament whizzing in a tight, silence-slicing hiss over the boat. Her own line lay slack in the glassy lake, and after a minute, she slowly reeled it in.
A strange knot of tension squeezed Jackson’s rib cage. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but what’s keeping you here? I mean, if you miss New York that much, why not just go back?”
Carly’s laugh was a hard, humorless burst. “Go back to what? An ex who’ll stop at nothing to use to me further his career? Or maybe a rumor mill that sees me as second-rate in spite of all my talent and hard work? And don’t even get me started on my mother.” She raised her chin in a defiant jerk. “Everybody keeps saying I should go back, but they don’t understand. I don’t have anything I can go back to.”
He swept a long glance over her, the tranquil beauty of their surroundings so at odds with the sadness on her face.
“You want to talk about it?”
Ahhh, stupid question. Carly wasn’t the type to get lost in her feelings. She was too tough for spilling her guts. He opened his mouth to tell her to forget it when he caught the strangest expression on her face.
“You know what? I do.”
17
“Let me make sure I’ve got this right. Your husband is emotionally blackmailing you to make cooking videos on YouTube in order to further his career while also shitting on yours, and your mother wants you to reconcile with the guy?”
Jackson propped his sunglasses over the crown of his head to pin Carly with a shocked, sky-blue stare. It was the first thing he’d said in about twenty minutes, and she suddenly felt a lot lighter for having put the last seven months into words.
Even if those words had basically amounted to Jackson’s paraphrase.
“That about sums it up.” She moved her gaze back to the bottle-green water before sitting down in her seat and wrapping her arms around herself.
“So, you see why I’m stuck? My mother has already called me four times this week. We keep having the same conversation over and over again,” Carly sighed. “I don’t blame her, necessarily. She and my father were married for decades, and they were happy. My brothers are married, and they’re happy. I think underneath all this bickering, she only wantsmeto be happy. But Travis has her charmed just like everyone else. Despite any good intentions she might have, it’s impossible to get her to see my side of things.”
“That sounds familiar.” Jackson gave his reel a tight yank, and she wondered if maybe the line was tangled in the reeds.
“It does?”
